Les Claypool News

Last summer I stood in a crowd of thousands with my then 15-year-old daughter Avalon at 2 in the morning listening to the powerful thrum and thump coming out of the bass of Les Claypool.

Les Claypool is decadent and depraved. This is not necessarily a criticism. Not content to simply fill the role of pre-eminent rock bassist for his generation - a position he already firmly occupied by the time Nirvana made the cover of Rolling Stone for the first time - Claypool and Primus sought to redefine Caucasian funk with a series of ...

For those of us who remember the dawn of Primus - the freakishly askew funk/rock/experimental power trio that first brought rubber-limbed bass virtuoso Les Claypool into the public eye - nothing seemed quite so unlikely as the prospect of this loopy little band and its delightfully demented svengali becoming fixtures in pop culture.

It would be easy to say that there is nothing normal about Les Claypool. You could look at his time with Primus, pig costumes, "Winona's Big Brown Beaver" and all.

First things first, Les Claypool, because we need to clear up a very important safety matter: Is swine flu transferable by someone wearing a pig mask? "That's a very good question.

If he'd never done anything else - the frenetic and funky music with Primus, or Oysterhead, or the electric bass wizardry that thrills and chills the jam-band crowd to this day - Les Claypool assured his place in history when he wrote and recorded the theme to South Park in 1997.