The Claypool Lennon Delirium Are Tripping on Reality

All photos by Derek Scancarelli

Les Claypool and Sean Lennon are self-proclaimed kindred spirits. They may have known each other for less than a year, but their chemistry, rooted in their contrasting approaches to creating music, was instantly recognized. Their respective styles of songwriting mirror the age-old philosophical ponderings of Aristotle and Oscar Wilde: Does art imitate life? Or does life imitate art? For The Claypool Lennon Delirium, both must be true.

The duo first met when Lennon’s band, The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger, went on tour with the Claypool-fronted Primus this past summer. When Primus decided to take a year off and Lennon’s girlfriend and musical partner Charlotte Kemp Muhl decided to pursue a side project, it only made sense for the guys to expand on their backstage jam sessions and create an original recorded work. The fruit of their labor is their recently released 11-track psychedelic album, The Monolith of Phobos.

To say opposites attract is too lazy to describe how the pair ended up spending six weeks together at Claypool’s home in Sonoma, California. While 40-year-old Lennon still lives in the hustle of New York City, 52-year-old Claypool resides where Alfred Hitchcock’s classic horror The Birds took place; he makes his own Pinot Noir, and loves relaxing on his fishing boat. But there’s a compatibility between Lennon and Claypool that’s instantly apparent when I meet the pair at Lennon’s SoHo studio. Inside, one wall is entirely decorated with a collection of small pieces of art, pen-drawn by his mother, Yoko Ono; upstairs houses an impressive line up of guitars. As they prep for the shoot Claypool suits up in some of Lennon’s garb—a couple of men playing dress-up, entirely at ease.

“For lack of a better term, I think we’re both a bit a nuts,” Claypool says laughing. After over 25-years of recording and touring with Primus, not to mention side projects like Oysterhead, and releasing as solo artist, Claypool is no longer interested in creating products for commerce; he craves new life experiences. He’s been fortunate enough to play with plenty of great musicians, and now it’s come to the point that if it doesn’t gel, why bother? It’s all about the quality of the hang. Claypool sees Lennon as someone with a thirst for knowledge, someone who approaches life zealously. “He faces the world with this wide-eyed wonderment,” he says. “I find that very endearing.”

The best time to start hunting Porcini mushrooms is roughly 21-days after the first autumn rainfall. The meaty, gloriously rare mushrooms can be found under trees and are some of the most sought after in the world. This is one of the things Lennon learned in the isolated forestry that is the world of Claypool—far removed from the white noise of the internet. At this stage in the game, Lennon is aware of the cognitive dissonance between someone’s art and who they are as a person, but that’s not to say that he wasn’t unsure of what to expect of his time spent living with the formidable bassist. A fan since his teens, Lennon was anticipating the experience with well-managed awe.

“If I had only gone by his music and videos, I might’ve been more nervous because I may have imagined this man who rides dragons at night and is surrounded by Oompa Loompas,” he says laughing. “But he’s not crazy. He’s just really imaginative and creative and talented. I don’t know if that’s a boring story, but it’s the truth, he doesn’t live off of mushrooms and caterpillar juice.” Well, except for the Porcinis.

The synchronicity in the guys’ schedule gave them the opportunity to truly scratch their psychedelic itch. When Lennon wasn’t sampling wine, searching for fungus, or staring in amazement at giant barking seals, he was clicking with Claypool’s dark and perverse sense of humor. He admires his weird, funny, and provocative take on music and life. Claypool, who says he’s no good at being pretentious, has always written observationally. He likens musical collaborations to a conversation and Lennon is a great conversationalist. “Sean is very interested in elements of sciences and mysticism, and I tend to write from a more human element,” Claypool says, citing his history of writing from a blue-collar place, his songs narrating the stories of meth-head tweakers, firemen, and race car drivers. Coupling Claypool’s ability to create characters in alternative dimensions with Lennon’s skill set, The Monolith of Phobos began to take shape, each pushing the other out of their comfort zone. The result is a record that brings you on a far-out narrative journey while maintaining the technical proficiency and musicianship the two hold so highly. Luckily for Lennon, who admits he’s prone to labor over records for years, the process was quick.

Featuring the pair’s dueling vocals, the record includes stories about everything from drug abuse to politics. On the one hand there’s “Mr. Wright,” about an upstanding citizen who’s a sly voyeur, and then there’s “Boomerang Baby,” about millennials’ smart phone addiction. The title track was written after one of their goof-off sessions, when Lennon pulled up a clip of Buzz Aldrin claiming there’s a structure on one of Mars’ moons. If writing independently, Lennon probably would’ve focused on the moon and the monolith, but Claypool made it a character study of the astronaut’s fixation with this mysterious claim. He brought in the author-director type standpoint and Lennon saw this approach of having a protagonist as much more compelling than writing abstractly about rocks floating in space.

“I live for shit like that,” Lennon says, clearly amused by the concept of the debated conspiracy. On the most basic level, he’s like a little kid enthralled by the notion that someone who’s part of the establishment would talk about architecture on Martian moons. (Or that the Canadian Minister of Defense would claim that there are aliens living in America—“that was super legendary,” he adds.)

“You don’t really know what Aldrin is saying, but just imagine what his life must’ve been like, the access he’s had to different echelons of a secretive world,” says Lennon. “It’s very stimulating for the imagination.”

But above the chuckling level of classic internet trolling, he does find it interesting what the media will or won’t spin. Viral or offensive articles are the ones that lower the consciousness of our society. “What’s remarkable is kind of disregarded, and things that are divisive and superficial are elevated to primetime,” adds Lennon.

Outside the extraterrestrial, “Oxycontin Girl”—written by Claypool—is a darker cautionary tale of a silver-spoon-fed daddy’s girl whose pill problem snowballs into a heroin addiction. For Claypool addiction and substance abuse is simply part of the fabric of his family. His uncle died at the age of 50 after abusing speed his entire life, meanwhile his cousin (and best friend as a child) has been in and out of prison for 30 years. He’s currently in jail for drug related offenses. In junior high, Claypool had a friend die after suffocating in a garbage bag filled with nitrous oxide. America’s opiate problem is very real and a constant reminder of the danger that prescription drugs can pose to anyone.

As a father, Claypool emphasizes the importance of balance and restraint. Too much television, coffee, sugar, or cocaine, well those can fuck you up too. He continues to be concerned for his daughter and his son, hoping they make responsible decisions when it comes to drugs and alcohol. That’s not to say he hasn’t partied in his own right, but he’s the guy who opts out of that last tequila shot (or five). He makes his own wine, but tries not to drink it every day. “Lord knows I’ve done plenty of nitrous in my day,” he admits with a chuckle. “So it’s not like it’s stopped me! But, moderation is key! I’ve been very careful. The innocent and benign can turn on you.”

Another Claypool track, far less based in reality, is the upbeat and quirky “Captain Lariat,” a tale of a faux sea captain who’s a dentist by day, has a tattoo of Sean Penn and is “sexually-ambiguous.” Actually, Claypool says, “That can mean whatever you want it to.” Is it about a guy who’s gay on the weekends? Lennon responds, laughing, “You know, I don’t know the answer to that. But I was laughing so hard when I heard the line that takes a puff of amyl-nitrate before he goes out on his boat.”



Similar to the tragedy of the “Oxycontin Girl,” Lennon uses the two-part “Cricket and the Genie” to explore the enslavement of kids by big pharmaceutical companies—the corporations he calls legal drug dealers. “I had this vision of a little boy rubbing a pill bottle and a genie coming out and making everything better,” he says. “But it’s kind of the devil’s bargain.” Having the song tracked in two movements was a hat-tip to the old school discipline of psychedelic prog-rock records.

In truth, the album as a whole seems to discourage drug use more than support it—the complete opposite of the cliché typically associated with psychedelic music. But for Lennon, psych-rock is more about the feelings it inspires, rather than the hallucinogens you might imbibe while enjoying it. “For me, psychedelic music means it takes you on a trip,” says Lennon. “It’s about the dream state it follows, the vibes throughout and how epic it feels. That’s psychedelic to me.”

In retrospect, he realizes that most of his favorite psych records weren’t about some crazy clown filled land of make believe; they were actually more about real life than most people care to remember. What his father, John Lennon, and The Beatles did with “A Day in the Life”—a song about newspaper headlines and the madness of the world—quickly comes to mind. “I’ve been writing more and more about the real world, because that’s psychedelic to me,” he says. “I don’t think writing about topical stuff takes it off the path of what I imagined it to be, psychedelic music is a paradigm that can encompass a lot more than the clichés that people think about it.”

You only have to look at America’s impending election to see how warped reality’s become. Real life has become surreal to the point of satire, and Lennon found the landscape of American politics and society’s very modern malaise hard to ignore. “America is slipping into the sea and we’re all just kind of taking selfies on this sinking continent,” he says. Claypool generally swerves the over-politicization of his music, but went with the theme after some re-working. “Ohmerica” was the result of their efforts. “It seemed a little too overt,” Claypool says. “So we put a twist on it so it wasn’t so ‘Rally round the family with a pocket full of shells’ type of thing. That’s not really my zone.”

If obvious politicization wasn’t what the guys were trying to tap into with a track like “Ohmerica,” what does it mean? Well, they dug their own rabbit hole, exploring the truly trippy nature of the real world. When Lennon looks at the television or picks up a magazine, life is starting to feel like a comic book where Donald Trump will ride into The White House on a giant penguin. It’s a different fucking dimension. “It’s an argument that we’re really in a matrix,” he says. He’s laughing, but he’s sort of serious too. “It’s possible that this is all a cosmic joke, some aliens are controlling a video game that’s us.”

Lennon would sound batshit crazy if he wasn’t witty and self-aware. He’s also a voracious nerd: Lennon reads science journals and pays close attention to the speeches of theoretical physicists, scientists, and futurists. For example, he was recently enthralled watching Neil deGrasse Tyson and Dr. S. James Gates discuss Simulation Theory, and the potential that our entire lives are just the creation of other living beings. In layman’s terms (and probably flubbed) the concept goes like this: if some form of beings could ever create another reality, they would. So if some advanced civilizations are making simulations of worlds in order to understand human history, they’d presumably create a lot of them, thousands even. Following that logic, the probability is far higher that our existence on Earth is actually a simulation, rather than the one true reality. It sounds ridiculous, but wouldn’t we all feel better if we knew this was all scripted, that someone somewhere has a plan? Regardless, it’s really just a fancy fishbowl scenario. This is the same concept that recently garnered hundreds of headlines for Elon Musk.

“It’s like a smarter and nerdier way of saying, ‘What if we’re like the dream of some giant?’” Lennon says cracking up. “Yeah, I know. But, do I have time to think about stupid shit like that? Of course I do. That’s all I really do other than trying to get songs together.”

When he’s not playing with cameras and lenses in his own photography area or jamming upstairs in his purple-padded soundproof practice room, he’s just thinking about stuff. Going off the deep end with Lennon is probably easier than making small talk about the weather. He sometimes wonders whether the technological singularity, Ray Kurzweil’s prediction of the blurring of biological man and artificial intelligence, is inching closer by the minute.

Lennon mentions Neil Harbisson, the world’s first person to be recognized as a cyborg. Yes, he literally has an antenna in his head. He brings up scientists in Japan trying to use a heartbeat to generate electrical power. He brings up Roko’s Basilisk—a concept of an AI overlord that scares some thinkers so deeply they’re afraid to even discuss it.

“We’re on the verge of some kind of symbiosis between man and machine,” he says. “But I’m not that scared of the whole artificial intelligence thing either.” Ideally, AI would be designed with safety features to prevent human domination, but isn’t the point of it all so they can learn on their own? “If it does awaken and become superior to humans, that’s the smartest thing that’s ever been and it knows more about everything than anyone has before, I would trust it to make the right decisions,” says Lennon. “If this thing is the closest to a living God that’s possible, then whatever it wants is probably right.”

That’s a big leap for anyone, but why should he be scared? It’s the way the world is going, isn’t’ it? The Technological Revolution is taking a fraction of a millisecond of the Neolithic Revolution. Lennon has friends from all backgrounds, and even the most educated people in the world have no fucking clue where we’re going. We already live in the Orwellian future, where our big brother monitoring and military technology is far more extreme, although slightly less draconian than the predictions in 1984. Plus, in Lennon’s eyes, the distinction between biology and technology being natural and unnatural really comes down to bullshit religious superstition anyway. “Anything that happens has to be natural, because you can’t exist unnaturally,” he says. “That would be supernatural, which is the definition of not real. Who’s to say that biology as we know it is not some mechanism that was designed by some other civilization? We have no fucking idea. It’s all just semantics.”

This semantics game seems to take place in his consciousness, too. Sometimes, he wonders if the world is really spinning off the rails. “Am I just older and therefore more aware, so does the world seem more complex and fucked up because of my awareness? Was it always that way?” he asks sincerely. The truth is that doesn’t really matter anyway. The idea that anything, whether you achieved something great or died in a ditch, would matter in the vastness of space is ridiculous to Lennon.

“On some level, no, nothing matters,” he says. “That is terrifying. It’s existentially terrifying. Something mattering itself is a total projection of our own ego onto the universe, but on the other hand that doesn’t make it any less significant. The vastness, the cold emptiness of space is no more the universe than your desire to graduate college and win a Nobel Prize. Your feelings are just as real as a galaxy. They’re not less than the universe. But just because the universe doesn’t give a shit about what you do, it shouldn’t feel bad. You are the universe as much as the emptiness of space. Whatever you care about matters in that way just as much as anything else does: a supernova or two galaxies colliding and destroying thousands of stars and planets. Well, it all matters equally in that way, to me.”

And while The Monolith of Phobos might not matter from the perspective of our puppet masters, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t enjoy the trip.

Derek Scancarelli is a journalist based in New York. Follow him on Twitter.