COURTESY OF DAVID LEFKOWITZ BASSIST LES CLAYPOOL stretches out his hand as he poses with his band, the Frog Brigade, a hodgepodge of like-minded musicians that has been known to spontaneously cover an entire Pink Floyd album.

Versatility is a rare commodity these days, but bassist Les Claypool has enough of it to go around. Known mainly for his work with Primus, he also heads his Flying Frog Brigade. That band is currently on the Sno-Core Icicle Ball tour with Galactic, Lake Trout, and Drums & Tuba. It will be playing at the Harrow East in Rochester tomorrow and The Landmark Theater in Syracuse on Friday. Claypool took some time out to talk to Senior Writer Jeff Miller about musical experimentation, pot brownies and mosh pit etiquette.

JM: I saw Primus in 1994 and there was a huge mosh pit, but at the Sno-Core show this past week, no one was moshing. What do you think of the crowd difference?

LC: I like the moshing, that’s always been a good thing. The Primus moshers have always been a bit different, too. When you go to a straight Primus show, it’s not such a bonehead mosh — it’s a pretty respectful mosh pit. When a pit starts up at one of these shows, I usually say, “Hey, have a good time in the pit there, but be respectful of other people’s space, blah blah,” you know. Because there are a lot of people there who are trying to be up front and see what’s going on, and don’t want to get slammed in the back of the head by somebody not controlling themselves.

This audience is a combination of both worlds. It’s the Primus world and the sort of jam-band community. I sort of think that the jam-band community is a growing, broad audience. I think it’s sort of an undefined thing. The jam-band thing is sort of becoming more of a hub than an actual umbrella.

Do you find it challenging to work with a keyboardist and saxophonist and to find space for those kinds of instruments?

To an extent. That was kind of the concept of Frog Brigade — to get guys that could pull stuff off at the spur of the moment. We could go out, and not even have a solid set list, and just do stuff and it would happen. That’s kind of what we did when we did [before the] Rat Brigade in New York, which was me and Jay Lane and Jeff Kementi — we were just jammin’.

Those guys are really strong, and just able to leap in and play to anything. I would say the trickier part is the amount of people playing just got a bit cluttered.

How do you approach playing with all these different bands?

Obviously with six people you’ve got to mellow out a little bit. With six people you have to leave space for different things to go on, but then again there’s such a support — such strong support behind me — that when it does come time to cut loose, I can really cut loose and not worry about everything falling apart. I can do like the most craziest solo I ever wanted to do and there’s still going to be that pulse and that rhythm and that backbone behind me, whereas with Primus, I was the rhythm. I couldn’t completely cut loose, but the rhythms themselves were very intricate and loose.

Do you have any road stories you can tell?

That moe.down show you saw me at, I almost died the night before because I ate this damn brownie — this pot brownie. I was gonna die! I was just gone, completely gone! I was pretty toasted that night.

Our drummer had eaten five of them! He was barely even playing — I don’t even think he knew where he was. Yeah, I mean, I couldn’t even hardly talk to the moe. guys. I was just like, “eh …” They probably thought I was a dud.

Do you think the music industry that allowed something like Lollapalooza to happen is gone?

No. I think that this whole jam band scene is very, very much like the old scene — the true alternative scene, that was coming up back in those days before “alternative” became a tag word for everything.

In fact, I’ve done some shows recently with Banyan, Steve Perkin’s band, and we’ve been talking about that — how this scene has this feel, like the old days, of the early Lollapaloozas. There’s this sense of camaraderie, this vibrance, and you look out at the audience and it’s that type of audience. It’s college students, out there bopping around, not wanting to listen to Limp Bizkit, things like that. They’re looking for something different, something unique. This whole scene — it’s like jam bands, you think of hippie bands, but it’s become more to me a hub for people to play any type of music and just have it be open-ended. It’s a very vibrant and expanding community.