15 June 18 - 24, 2026 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER | CONTENTS | UNFAIR PARK | SCHUTZE | FEATURE | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | MOVIES | DISH | MUSIC | CLASSIFIED | Going for Gold Ahead of his June 25 show at Toyota Music Factory, legendary Primus bassist Les Claypool talks blur, danger and his new tour. BY PRESTON BARTA A sk Les Claypool what makes North Texas special, and you’ll get the most disarming answer in rock ’n’ roll: a shrug. “I don’t know that it is different,” he said, sitting in a parked bus outside a Chicago venue he’s played more times than he can count. “Once I get in tour mode, it all becomes one big blur, to be honest with you.” He went further, cheerfully filing himself under unreliable narrator. “You should do this in- terview with [guitarist Larry LaLonde], be- cause I am literally the worst.” He hadn’t even gone inside the venue yet. He didn’t remember what it looked like in there. Most artists would smooth that over with a polite line about how the crowds out here just hit different. Claypool won’t bother. And somehow that honesty is exactly why you trust the guy. He’s not here to flatter your ZIP code. He’s here, June 25 at the Pa- vilion at Toyota Music Factory in Irving, to do something far more interesting. One Night,Three Worlds In a single evening, Claypool drags three wildly different corners of his catalog onto the same stage for the Claypool Gold Tour: the tightly wound mania of Primus, the psy- chedelic concept-building of the Claypool Lennon Delirium and the loose, improvisa- tional sprawl of Colonel Les Claypool’s Fearless Flying Frog Brigade. The whole thing started, fittingly, as a problem to solve. Longtime Primus drum- mer Tim “Herb” Alexander left unexpect- edly with a committed New Year’s show on the books. “It was like, well, shit, what are we going to do?” Claypool recalled. His manager floated the obvious fix: “Just put a few of your bands together.” They did. They called it Claypool Gold. “It was a hoot. It was amazingly fun.” Promoters caught wind. Now it’s a tour. For Claypool, the appeal is simple. It lets him travel with friends he calls monsters and dip into his entire body of work rather than living inside one project at a time. “Just to go out and try and sell the same pair of shoes over and over, it’s just not what I want to do,” he said. “I think I would get bored easily. And I think that would translate into the audience not necessarily being as excited. “You want to go out and enjoy yourself. And if you’re enjoying yourself, then theo- retically that should spill over to the crowd.” The Element of Danger Here’s the thing that separates Claypool Gold from a tidy nostalgia package: It might fall apart at any moment, and that’s the point. Three sets. Mountains of material. Con- stant setlist shuffling. A keyboardist learning the Delirium catalog for the first time, a rel- atively new drummer playing catch-up on tunes. “No matter how you slice it, one of us is fucking it up that evening,” Claypool said, “which I find kind of cool.” He means it. “Some of my favorite bits I’ve ever seen is going to see bands and when they fall off the edge, seeing how they recover from that.” When someone drops the ball, there’s “a strong team behind it to pick up the ball and keep going.” So, how does he know when a jam has found its destination versus when it still wants to wander? “I don’t think you do,” he said. “It just kind of does its thing, and you feel it and you move with it.” Of course, free- dom has its referees. Curfews exist. Clocks tick. His stage manager points at a watch while the drummers stretch an encore to- ward a fine. There are always, as he put it, “some hoops of fire to jump through.” The Erosion of Empathy The newest piece of the puzzle is the Deliri- um’s third album, “The Great Parrot-Ox and the Golden Egg of Empathy.” The band wanted record No. 3 to feel special. They kicked around an animated film and a stage production, all of it expensive. Then Sean Ono Lennon — a self-described Neil deGrasse Ty- son type, always “pontificating about ele- ments of science” — brought up the paperclip conundrum, the thought experiment about an AI optimizing toward a goal until it con- sumes everything human in the process. “I thought, wow, that’s a really interesting notion,” Claypool said. But he was quick to clarify the record’s target. “It’s not so much an indictment of AI as much as it is using the notion of AI as a conduit to point out the no- tion of eroding empathy that we’ve been see- ing for quite a while now.” The robots are just a metaphor. The worry is us. The Visual Mind Claypool thinks in pictures. Back when Pri- mus signed to Interscope, he wanted a video for every single song, only to be handed half the budget and told to make magic anyway. He pulled it off more than once. His heroes aren’t bassists; they’re film- makers — Frank Capra, Elia Kazan, Stanley Kubrick, Terry Gil- liam. His tastes run gleefully off-center: Rush, the Residents, old Peter Gabriel, Public Image Ltd., Tom Waits, Captain Beefheart. What unites them is a sin- gle reaction. “Whenever I see something, I go, how the fuck did they think of that?” That question, he said, is what gets his juices flowing. The new Delirium proj- ect is so thoroughly storyboarded that it doubles as a blueprint for a film he could make if the money ever shows up. Beauty and barnacles Then there’s Lennon, who appears in both the Delirium and the Frog Brigade and is, by Claypool’s account, family. In the stu- dio they pull in opposite directions and somehow meet in the middle. Lennon wants layers, glockenspiels, endless polish. “He brings the beauty, and I bring the barnacles.” Meanwhile, Primus is opening a fresh chapter with drummer John Hoffman, a re- minder that none of these projects are mu- seum pieces. That’s the real reason for the significance of this show in Irving. Not because Claypool will wax poetic about Texas. It’s because you’ll watch an absurdist ringmaster who’s dead serious about curiosity, momentum and surprise, daring himself to fall off the edge just to show you how he climbs back on. Claypool Gold performs June 25 at the Pavil- ion at Toyota Music Factory in Irving (300 W. Las Colinas Blvd.). Doors open at 6:30 p.m.. and the show begins at 8 p.m. Tickets start at $53. Preston Barta t Music “IF YOU’RE ENJOYING YOURSELF, THEN ... THAT SHOULD SPILL OVER TO THE CROWD.” Fucking up is kind of cool, Les Claypool says. SCAN HERE TO ENTER TO WIN A PAIR OF TICKETS
