Primus frontman Les Claypool on climate change, Colorado and Cygnus X-1

If you’ve ever wanted to hear Les Claypool play one of his favorite songs, Friday and Saturday is your chance in Vail.

Primus is bringing its “Tribute to Kings” tour to Vail, the band will honor Canadian prog-rockers Rush by playing the classic 1977 album “A Farewell to Kings” in its entirety.

Claypool says the complicated Rush track “Cygnus X-1” is his favorite Rush song. The track is about an explorer piloting a spaceship named after Don Quixote’s horse into a black hole in the constellation Cygnus.

Primus will play some of its own music as well; the band is most recognized by its platinum-selling albums from the ’90s, which brought a new sound to the mainstream due to Claypool’s ability to use a bass guitar and a countrified funk rock style to lead a band.

James Hetfield, the Metallica frontman who is also a well-known Vail resident, is rumored to have predicted that success when he passed on Claypool for Metallica, saying Claypool was too good of a bass guitarist not to be doing his own thing.

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“James was being very kind when he said that,” Claypool told the Vail Daily. “Basically, I came to the Metallica thing, and I did not fit in … I should not have gotten the gig, and I did not get the gig, because they were smart enough to go ‘this guy will not fit in.’ And the thing is, the guy they have now, Robert Trujillo, is one of the greatest guys I’ve ever met in the music world, he’s a monster bass player.”

Claypool said he has kept in touch with Hetfield a bit over the years and is glad to hear he has become a part of the community in Vail.

Claypool himself is no stranger to the area, having played WinterWonderGrass when it was in Eagle County. He said he enjoys playing areas which have access to fishing, one of his favorite pastimes. In recent years, Claypool has been to able to enjoy that pastime in various areas across the West, and some of those areas have seen similar restrictions to those Eagle County is facing currently.

“I’ve been to a couple places where they have regulated by the day, basically at midday you have to stop by a certain time, they don’t want you fishing midday when the waters are warm,” he said.

Currently in Eagle County, anglers are being asked to be off the water by noon for all areas of the Eagle River below Wolcott, and the Colorado below Burns is seeing all-day closures.

“It’s good that you guys are looking out for that,” Claypool said.

“The effects of climate change are hitting us pretty much everywhere,” he added. “I live in California where our homeowner’s insurance is being canceled because of fires. It’s crazy.”

Claypool says he doesn’t mind debate when it comes to issues like climate change, as long as the dialogue is civil.

“If I chose my friends or my relatives by their political viewpoints, I wouldn’t have a lot of my fishing friends and construction friends and my relatives, so I don’t do that,” he said. “I have no problem with a viewpoint that’s either way left of me or way right of me, I just have a problem with the lack of rational thought, and rational dialogue. When people are spouting nonsensical, inflammatory (things), it’s counterproductive.”

While the band isn’t known for being extremely political, it has provided the theme intro for one of the shows that has taken on a lot of the political issues of the 2000s in South Park, which is set in the Fairplay area of Colorado.

Claypool said Parker and Stone were in college when they approached him to record the intro song for South Park, and he’s blown away by what the show has become.

“We didn’t think it was going to get on television, we just thought it was cool,” Claypool said. “So we made the song, and it’s actually the song that you hear on the outro of the show, and Comedy Central came back and said it’s too slow, we need something peppier … so I said look, just speed it up. So they sped it up, and they needed me to rerecord the vocals, and a couple of their buddies came to one of our shows, I think it was at Fiddler’s Green, and we rerecorded the vocals in the dressing room of that show.”

Claypool celebrated 25 years of South Park in Colorado on Wednesday and Thursday with Ween and South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

“It’s a wonderful thing, it’s a prime example of incredible edge art breaking through and finding a strong foothold in the mainstream, and in fact changing the world, especially the creative world,” he said. “And when that happens, that’s a wonderful thing, and we’ve got to celebrate it.”

Primus will play back-to-back shows at the Ford Amphitheater in Vail on Friday and Saturday starting at 8 p.m.