Sound Chaser

Few bands are as, shall we say, onomatopoetic as The Claypool Lennon Delirium. The Delirium is the umbrella under which bassist/vocalist Les Claypool (Primus, Fearless Flying Frog Brigade) and guitarist/vocalist Sean Ono Lennon (The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger) gather occasionally and combine their creative forces to make some of the weirdest, wildest, wackiest soundscapes imaginable. Their latest—The Great Parrot-Ox and the Golden Egg of Empathy (Prawn Song/Chimera Music/ATO), a double album three-plus years in the making—includes 14 songs that hammer home the artists' preference for people-made sonics over AI-created glop. (A 24-page Parrot-Ox comic book included with the album illustrates their "humans aren't mere meat machines" beliefs quite literally.)

"We're not religious about it, but Les and I both come from a generation where playing actual instruments was the thing to do," Lennon said during a recent Zoom call with the two musicians. "Obviously I prefer playing instruments, but I don't want to come across that I'm against technology. I think it's interesting. Both Les and I dig weird shit made by drum machines, and I love a lot of electronic music. I mean, Aphex Twin is a total genius."

Claypool and Lennon both say it wasn't easy to get 62 minutes of Parrot-Ox soundfield exactly right. "I could remix it again," Claypool said. "And I geek hard on mixing. Some songs I've mixed 20, 30 times. But once we agree on it, and by 'we,' I mean me and Shiner"—that's Claypool's nickname for Lennon, who in turn calls Claypool Colonel if he doesn't call him Les—"it's pretty much done. But when I go back and listen, I always go, 'Ahh, I wish I'd have done this.' I can do that with every record—but once you feel it, it's done; it has to go out into the world." Then Lennon added, "I'm always surprised that a tiny little thing I didn't fix or change but wanted to is something I never forget for the rest of my life. It's happened on every record I've ever done. At the time you're doing it, a producer will say, 'Don't worry; you won't even remember this in a week.' But it's 30 years later, and I still remember."

Recorded at Claypool's Rancho Relaxo studio in Sonoma County, California, and at Lennon's studio The Farm in upstate New York, Parrot-Ox makes full use of a mixing board. "I enjoy hard panning whenever I can get away with it," Claypool said. "If you listen to 'Mantra of the Manatee,' it starts wide and then it goes mono, and then it goes back to wide. It keeps going back and forth." True dat—and when the time comes for the screeching guitar solo, it's placed about as far left as can be.

Vocal manipulation is another Parrot-Ox trait. "I learned this the hard way," Lennon explained. "On every record I've made where my voice is pretty dry, I just can't listen to it. Someone told me when I was working on one of my solo records, 'Don't double everything. You just got to do a single vocal'—and now I can't listen to my solo records because of that. So I definitely have to double it, or do something with it, to make it listenable to my ear." Here, Claypool interjected to amend the point. "Shiner, you never double anything! You triple and quadruple it." Lennon conceded, "Yeah, Colonel, it's more like sextuple," to which Claypool added, "Octuple."

"The record came out spectacular. I'm very proud of it," Claypool then volunteered. "You get to the point when you're mixing where you start chasing your tail, and then you go, 'Holy shit—it sounded better 10 mixes ago,' and you want to go back and rebuild it from there. That's what people like Stephen Marcussen (footnote 1) are there for, to keep that from happening."

Now it was Lennon's turn to jump in and clarify. "As a producer, Les is very good at paying attention to the human aspect of playing and the performance, whereas I tend to want to clean stuff up too much," Lennon said. "Les is always referencing having worked with Tom Waits (footnote 2) and how Tom is so sensitive about the spontaneity of the first take, and that there's just a magic to it. They also say that about film actors who have this performance on the first take that they can never catch again. Les is really great at understanding that spontaneity, which I definitely think is something I'm learning more from him than when I just work on my own."

Claypool has masterminded some bodacious surround-sound mixes for several Primus releases. I asked him if an Atmos mix was in Parrot-Ox's future. "Ah, I don't know," he replied—then Lennon chimed in. "I actually got to be around for the Atmos mixes Giles Martin did for The Beatles' Revolver, and it was a completely mind-blowing experience," he said. "I've heard some home Atmos systems that are pretty cool, but none of them are as good as the one I heard at Abbey Road Studios. If Les was given the opportunity to do the Delirium in Atmos in a studio like that, we'd love to try it."

Given that Lennon's father John wrote, played, and sang on a certain seminal 1966 album, I had to ask which Revolver songs stood out differently after he heard them in Atmos than they did before. "That's putting me on the spot, but 'Tomorrow Never Knows' in Atmos totally blew my mind. 'I'm Only Sleeping' is another one that was amazing. It's a very, very strong record."

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Footnote 1: Claypool and Matt Winegar mixed Parrot-Ox; Stephen Marcussen mastered it.

Footnote 2: Waits turned in a signature guest vocal on "Tommy the Cat" on Primus's 1991 breakthrough Sailing the Seas of Cheese (Interscope). He also appeared on—and was one of the many producers of—Primus's 1999 release Antipop (Prawn Song/Interscope).