By Scott McLennan

The Claypool Gold tour turns Leader Bank Pavilion into a shifting laboratory of psychedelia, satire, and virtuosic groove.

Les Claypool on stage at Boston’s Leader Bank Pavilion. Photo: Sam McLennan

Les Claypool has been such a fixture in modern rock for so long that it’s easy to take him for granted. So, it’s an opportune time for the Claypool Gold tour to be trekking around the country this summer, offering a neat career summary that showcases the breadth of work by this free-spirited, free-thinking, highly accomplished, bass-wielding prankster.

Claypool Gold brought the bands Primus, The Claypool Lennon Delirium, and The Frog Brigade to the Leader Bank Pavilion in Boston on Wednesday (June 10) for a two-set, three-hour show that still wasn’t big enough to touch on every single aspect of Claypool’s career to this point.

Still, the concert did rotate through the facets of Claypool’s work, first contrasting the different ways The Frog Brigade and Claypool Lennon Delirium adventure their ways into and through the fields of psychedelia before turning to the Primus method of pushing out a heavy blend of alt-funk jam metal wrapped in high-minded playing and lowbrow humor.

Claypool Gold starts with the six-piece Frog Brigade, then moves to the four-piece Delirium, and ends with the trio of Primus. Impressively, there was no diminishment in force as the bands shrunk in size.

Les Claypool faces off with Sherik in The Frog Brigade at Boston’s Leader Bank Pavilion. Photo: Sam McLennan

The Frog Brigade opened the night with “One Better” from the Claypool solo album Of Whales and Woe. The solo that sax player Sherik (who missed the Brigade’s last visit to Boston) offered up, followed by a dueling jam between bassist Claypool and vibes player Mike Dillon, underscored the influence jazz plays in the Brigade’s musical approach. Guitarist Sean Ono Lennon, keyboard player Harry Waters, and drummer Paulo Baldi fleshed out the Brigade’s sound. The band excels at turning matter-of-fact storytelling into absurdist epics. “The Rumble of the Diesel” is drawn from the experiences of a commercial fisherman; “David Makalaster” pierces a TV newscaster’s veil of phoniness; and “Precipitation” is about…rain (and its deleterious effects on the mind).

This half hour from the Brigade was rife with musical ingenuity, especially when Dillon and Sherik contributed parts that significantly distinguish this troupe from the others on the bill. Claypool’s Primus mates joined the Brigade set at points as well. Guitarist Larry LaLonde tag-teamed with Lennon on “David Makalaster” and drummer John Hoffman added more thunder to “Precipitation,” which had Claypool contributing a devious brand of upright bass.

The Claypool Lennon Delirium kicked off the second segment of the night with “Blood and Rockets,” an epic chronicle of rocket scientist Jack Parsons’s connections to the occult. Space and magic are comfortable places for the Delirium; cosmic imagery was screened behind the musicians as they worked through the elaborately composed psychedelic rock selections.

Sean Ono Lennon at Boston’s Leader Bank Pavilion. Photo: Sam McLennan

Lennon’s lead vocal turns and the Delirium’s more intentionally structured mind games set these songs apart from the Brigade’s material, even though Waters and Baldi were held over from one set to the next.

Claypool took lead vocal duties on the thrashing “South of Reality” and “Troll Bait,” one of three songs from The Delirium’s new concept album The Great Parrot-Ox and the Golden Egg of Empathy, a morality fable for the A.I. age (Arts Fuse review). With the other two Golden Egg offerings, Lennon led the way through the gorgeous sprawl of “What a Predicament” and the yearning “Meat Machines,” songs that are less guarded and more glinty than the material offered by the night’s other Claypool projects.

The first half of the concert ended with all of the musicians taking the stage to pay homage to the architects of psych rock, via Pink Floyd’s “Astronomy Domine,” a song that keyboard player Waters’s father—Roger Waters—recorded in 1967.

Intermission ended with a short film of testimonials from a wide range of musicians, including heavies from the Brotherhood of Bassists– Rush’s Geddy Lee, Tool’s Justin Chancellor, and Fishbone’s Norwood Fisher among them — who described the importance and impact of Primus.

Claypool, LaLonde, and Hoffman supplied a devastating set that dug up a few songs that had been lost to time over Primus’ decades of active duty, adding them to brand new material and a number of concert staples.

Claypool and LaLonde, who have been playing together in Primus since 1989, expertly twist up the music with knotty tension-and-release passages that allow for exploratory solos and jams while never departing from a driving, focused groove. Hoffman joined the band a year ago and fits right in, making this distinctive, immediately recognizable sound an effective fit following the departure of longtime drummer Tim Alexander.

Primus opened its set with “Those Damned Blue-Collar Tweekers” a bit of nervous squall evoking the amphetamine-fed paranoia of the tune’s subject. Primus then moved right into a new song, “The Ol’ Grizz,” a punk-funk fusion about Forty-Niners that reflected the tour’s theme of “gold.”

Primus pulled “Seven” from its musical fable about color-devouring goblins and revived the prickly “The Heckler” from the Pork Soda album, which earned the band wide acclaim in 1993.

Les Claypool on stage at Boston’s Leader Bank Pavilion. Photo: Sam McLennan

The musical peak of the set came when Claypool, wearing a pig mask, took to upright bass to lead the band through the drift of “Seas of Cheese” that segued into the more menacing “Mr. Krinkle.”

The hits “My Name is Mud” and “Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver” were given solid turns, but Primus really went wild with the set-closing “Over the Electric Grapevine,” its three musicians interlocking into one last defiant, muscular groove.

Primus started its encore with the whimsical “Duchess and the Proverbial Mind Spread” before bringing all of the night’s musicians back on stage for one more trip back to the sacred texts of psychedelia, playing the John Lennon-penned Beatles tune “Tomorrow Never Knows,” with Sean Ono Lennon, the son of Lennon and Yoko Ono, stepping into a role created by his father.

On the one hand, Claypool Gold is a raucous celebration of a mind-boggling artistic journey. But it also underscores how well Claypool collaborates with others to achieve remarkable and varied musical results from project to project. The bassist’s name may be on the marquee, but this expansive-to-the-max show was no ego trip.

Scott McLennan covered music for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette from 1993 to 2008. He then contributed music reviews and features to The Boston Globe, Providence Journal, Portland Press Herald, and WGBH, as well as to The Arts Fuse. He also operated the NE Metal blog to provide in-depth coverage of the region’s heavy metal scene.