There's plenty of mutual admiration to go around The Claypool Lennon Delirium, but the band's two namesakes might never have bonded were it not for Les Claypool's son, Cage.
While Les and Sean Ono Lennon first met while Lennon's band, The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger, was opening for Primus, the two didn't really become close until Cage befriended Lennon.
"We're cut from a similar thread, Cage and I," Lennon tells Q104.3's Out of the Box with Jonathan Clarke. "He's a science enthusiast."
"My son likes to just throw out little random bits of knowledge to impress us all, and [Sean] does the same thing," Les adds. "So they're like two Encyclopedia Brown's throwing random facts at each other."
Mutual curiosity is more or less what progressive rock is all about, and The Claypool Lennon Delirium presents plenty of mind-bending premises on its second studio album, South of Reality.
The album indulges Les and Lennon's mutual fascination with science, history and of course the golden age of prog rock. Lennon describes reveling in Les's characteristic embrace of the weird, wild and whimsical.
The second track on the album "Blood And Rockets" is based on the story of rocket engineer Jack Parsons., who founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which was later absorbed by NASA.
"So he was this influential rocket scientist, like with field technology, but he also happened to be the Magister Templi of Aleister Crowley's cult, the Ordo Templi Orientis," Lennon explains. "And that just blew my mind. Like, 'Whoa, how can you be both of those things.' He was doing weird sex magic rituals at night and then during the day going to make the rocket engines that got us to the moon. I always thought it was a crazy story. Like Les thought with the Bukowski line ['Easily Charmed By Fools'], I always wanted to do something with that idea.
"This band is the first project I had that it totally made sense to sing about something whacky like that."
Check out the full interview with Sean Lennon and Les Claypool above!
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Here's the official video for The Claypool Lennon Delirium's "Blood And Rockets"!