#119: The stories of Les Claypool's Frogs, Bucket Brains, Delirium, and Fancy Bands
Going beyond Primus with alt-rock's singular weirdo.
Les Claypool isn’t hiding anything. The Primus frontman has spent literal decades playing music that defies easy categorization. It’s so defiant, in fact, that the nerds who created genre ID tags for MP3 files threw up their hands and gave Primus their own designation.
Over the years, Claypool has gone full caveat emptor with the names of his numerous side projects, foregrounding oddball whimsy in a way that practically shouts, “This is a weird Les Claypool project that’s not for everyone, or even most people.” Let’s review:
Les Claypool and the Holy Mackarel1
Colonel Les Claypool’s Fearless Flying Frog Brigade
Colonel Claypool’s Bucket of Bernie Brains
Les Claypool’s Fancy Band
Les Claypool’s Bastard Jazz
The Claypool Lennon Delirium
By helpfully appending his name to these projects, Claypool signals:
To fans: Lock in.
To non-fans: Don’t waste your time.
Spotify just dumps it all under Les Claypool to be done with it.
That’s not what we do at Band Name Bureau, where no rabbit hole is too deep. So let’s unpack one of the alternative era’s singular personalities as he heads out this summer for something called the Claypool Gold tour.
Collaboration is the thread connecting all of Claypool’s projects, which feel like hangouts that happened into semi-proper bands. As he told Grammy.com:
“For me, when I do a Claypool project, whether it’s called Frog Brigade, or Fancy Band, or whatever you want to call it, it’s a revolving cast of characters. I was talking to Tom Waits one time about some of the musicians he’s worked with over the years and he’s like [makes growly Waits voice] ‘You know, it’s like, a director doesn’t always work with the same actors.’ And I thought, Well, that’s true, you know, and that’s what this is. For me, it’s whoever I have available to do the particular slot of time. Or whatever I happened to fancy for what we’re recording.”
During a hiatus from Primus—Priatus?—in 2000, Claypool gathered friends to perform at a jam-band festival called Mountain Aire,2 held at the Calaveras County Fairgrounds in Angels Camp, California.
“I was gonna call it the Thunder Brigade because we had two drummers, and then it came back to us that we might not want to call it the Thunder Brigade,” Claypool told Relix in 2023. The promoter thought it may sound too heavy for the jam crowd just looking to vibe out or whatever. Maybe Claypool could “try something a little different that had to do with the event itself.”
He didn’t have to search for inspiration, because Calaveras County was immortalized in Mark Twain’s famous short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” The group became the Frog Brigade, then the Fearless Flying Frog Brigade.
While still going by Les Claypool’s Frog Brigade, the group played the inaugural Bonnaroo festival in 2002.3 Also on the bill was Praxis, a supergroup featuring renowned producer and bassist Bill Laswell, guitarist Buckethead, legendary Parliament-Funkadelic keyboardist Bernie Worrell, and former Primus drummer Bryan “Brain” Mantia.
But when Laswell was unable to perform, the group approached Claypool, who had played with all of them except Worrell. “The band just started as us going up onstage and cold improvising,” Claypool told Las Vegas Weekly. “No set list, no keys, no nothing.”
On paper, that’s the hardest of passes for me, but this kind of weird phenomenon is what’s great about festivals. Would I buy a ticket to see them specifically? No. But killing time between other artists I want to see? Sure, I’d watch for a few minutes. The full set is available on YouTube. I watched for a few minutes, because I’m a man of my word.
When Bonnaroo needed a name to put on the poster, Claypool apparently just looked around him: Bucket, Bernie, Brain → Les Claypool’s Bucket of Bernie Brains.
Although Claypool came up in the overlapping worlds of prog, metal, and funk, he clearly found a home in the jam scene—and, let’s be honest, the worlds of wanky prog rock and wanky jam bands have more similarities than differences.
When Les Claypool’s Fancy Band debuted at the High Sierra Music Festival in 2005,4 the instruments included a theremin, sitar, vibraphone, marimba, tabla, and others that could be classified as “fancy.” While I couldn’t find Claypool explaining the name anywhere, I think we can infer from the instrumentation and move on.
Not long after the Fancy Band debuted, Claypool made a mockumentary about a fictitious jam band, starring himself as one of the dudes in the group. Yet when the time came to name the band in his film, Claypool settled on…Electric Apricot. To quote the title of Primus’ greatest hits album, they can’t all be zingers.
Another project coalesced around Comedy Central’s Colossal Clusterfest5 in 2017: Les Claypool’s Bastard Jazz. He decided to do “an all-improv thing”—not the comedy kind—and enlisted some of his go-to collaborators. As he told the Coachella Valley Independent, the name flowed from that.
“People say, ‘Les, what the hell is this Bastard Jazz?’ It’s just two words that sound really fucking cool together. And then you stick my name on there to kind of throw it off a little bit… and that’s the Bastard Jazz.”
Bastard Jazz still performs, but many of Claypool’s flights of fancy take off and don’t return. Bernie Brains performed only a few times and released one album in 2004, The Big Eyeball in the Sky. The Frog Brigade performed a lot more and released one album, 2002’s Purple Onion, before reuniting for a tour in 2023. The Fancy Band did a few tours but only released a DVD called Fancy.
It wasn’t until he joined up with Sean Lennon in 2015 for the Claypool Lennon Delirium that a side project notched more than a tour or an album. The group recently released its third album, The Great Parrot-Ox and the Golden Egg of Empathy, seemingly inspired by the Chuck D School of Labored Puns.
While Claypool has never really explained the Delirium name, it’s thematically in line with his other projects, and the word appears in a song on their first album, “Cricket and the Genie - Movement I, the Delirium.”
The Claypool/Lennon partnership originated after a Primus tour supported by Lennon’s band, Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger. When the Most Famous Surname in Rock History joined forces with the Leading Surrealist Surname in Modern Rock, the results were predictably confounding.
“Equal parts Orwellian bedtime story and Monty Python hallucination,” declared their bio, adding that their music recalls “the likes of Frank Zappa, Syd Barrett, and Dr. Seuss on acid.”6 Whoa, on acid, you say? Was putting Frank Zappa, Syd Barrett, and Dr. Seuss in a blender too cliché of a construct?
For his part, Lennon describes the group as “progadelic,” a suitable portmanteau that veers too close to Austin Powers territory. Even setting aside its shagadelic proximity, it’s not to be taken seriously. Yet in an interview with Sean Lennon, Glide Magazine dug deep:
You’ve said the band is progadelic. What does prog mean to you? Are we talking about ’70s prog rock with Genesis, Yes, those kinds of things? Or are we talking about progressive in, I guess, the adjective sense, where you’re trying to progress music forward?
Lennon gave a thoughtful preamble about the meaninglessness of labels before saying, “When I say it’s prog, progadelic, I think it’s really because I just want to make sure we have an excuse to do, like, a fucking 12-minute song.”
That made me laugh. However, Les Claypool has clearly never needed an excuse to do whatever the hell he wants.
His extensive discography attests to that. It also has a few non-Les Claypool-branded bands, Beanpole, Sausage, and, most notable, Oysterhead. That one formed in 2000 when—wait for it—a festival approached Claypool about putting a band together for New Orleans Jazz Fest. He recruited Trey Anastasio of Phish and Stewart Copeland of the Police for an ostensible one-off, but they later released an album and have performed sporadically in the decades since.
“Oysterhead” is shockingly straightforward for Claypool. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t the first choice. He and Copeland liked the sound of “oyster,” but someone else claimed the Oyster Band. Variations followed, according to The Herald-Times:
“We had Bionic Oyster and Internal Combustion Oyster,” Claypool says.
There we go.
“And then one day Stewart called me up with his list of oyster-related items and he said, ‘What about Oysterfoot?’ I said, ‘Oysterfoot?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, you know, kind of like Oysterhead.’ So I said, ‘Well, why not Oysterhead?’”
Call it unreasonable, but I feel like we can blame the name Chickenfoot on this.
POST-SCRIPTS
Like a lot of dudes who came of age at the dawn of the alternative-rock era, I gave Sailing the Seas of Cheese a go, but it didn’t take. It was fun relistening to “Jerry Was a Race Car Driver” and “Tommy the Cat” for this, though. Maybe it’s obvious trivia, but I didn’t know Tom Waits did the voice of Tommy.
Speaking of Primus, there’s no interesting story behind the name. They were originally called the Primates, but another band who used that name threatened legal action. Supposedly Claypool discovered “Primus” while looking in the dictionary for similar words.
The story of Les Claypool auditioning to replace Cliff Burton in Metallica remains one of my favorite moments from Behind the Music.
Sorry this edition is also late. My plans to do a bunch of back-end stuff this month (hey-o) and run a “best of” edition changed at the last minute, so here we are.
This doesn’t really count. It was just the name Claypool used for his first solo album, not an actual band. But my pedantry insists I include it. Help me.
Headliners: Phil Lesh & Friends, Ani DiFranco.
Headliners: Widespread Panic, Trey Anastasio.
Headliners: Gov’t Mule, Michael Franti and Spearhead.
Wow, Comedy Central was a viable brand as recently as 2017!
Funny enough, Dr. Seuss is a type of LSD known for its purity. A guy was recently busted for trying to smuggle 80 hits of it into Australia.