Oysterhead offers up three pearls November 2, 2001 - The Plain Dealer By John Soeder Claypool, Anastasio, Copeland - Veteran musicians from the Police, Primus and Phish cut loose with a new trio Oysterhead is a side project with a stellar pedigree. It features Phish's Trey Anastasio on guitar, Les Claypool of Primus on bass and former Police man Stewart Copeland on drums. Just don't call their new jam-loving trio a supergroup, please. "What the hell is a supergroup?" Claypool wonders. "When you say supergroup, I think Damn Yankees, which scares me. . . . We're more of a stupor-group, going around the planet in a drunken haze." They're due to stumble into town Tuesday for a sold-out show at Playhouse Square's State Theatre. Oysterhead's debut album, a rock-jazz-funk amalgam titled "The Grand Pecking Order," came out last month. To hear band members tell it in separate phone interviews, they're very much enjoying each other's company. "We're going down this road that should theoretically be so familiar," says Claypool, 38. "But it has these interesting twists and turns that I don't think any of us has experienced with our other projects." "I hardly knew anything about these guys until they called up and said, 'Hey, how about it?' " the 49-year-old Copeland confesses. "They turned out to be such monster musicians that one thing led to another." "There's great chemistry going on," says Anastasio, 37. "I'm knocked out by these guys, playing and hanging out with them. They're really interesting and cool." This mutual admiration society in the guise of a band came together when Claypool was asked to put together a musical dream team to perform as part of the SuperJam concert series in New Orleans. He immediately thought of Anastasio. "I was thinking, 'Well, who's proficient at just shooting from the hip?' " Claypool recalls. "I had a band called Sausage in the '90s and we played a festival with Phish. I jammed with 'em. . . . We kept bumping into each other on the road and we stayed in touch." Anastasio in turn suggested asking Copeland - who had produced a track on the last Primus album, "Antipop" - to play drums. "He's probably my favorite drummer on the planet," Anastasio says. "I was kind of joking. I didn't think he would actually do it." They decided to call themselves Oysterhead because . . . well, just because. "We were stuck for a name, like every group," Copeland says. "I can't say there's any meaning in it." After a handful of hastily scheduled rehearsals at Anastasio's barn in Burlington, Vt., the threesome did a one-night show last year in New Orleans. "We concocted about five minutes worth of material, which we stretched out into a 2 -hour train wreck," Copeland says. He later sent CDs of edited concert highlights to Anastasio and Claypool. All three musicians were sufficiently encouraged by what they heard to reconvene for a proper album. On "The Grand Pecking Order," Oysterhead's free-wheeling sound exceeds the sum of its Phish-Primus-Police parts. Anastasio and Claypool split lead-vocal duties. "The common ground among the three of us is we all like to do a lot of different kinds of music," Anastasio says. "For the most part, it was just the three of us sitting around, throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what stuck," Claypool says. "But there's a lot more melody going on here than in Primus." "That's what was so rewarding about this - these guys were so creative and so receptive to ideas," Copeland says. "If you had a cool idea, they'd run with it with cheerful enthusiasm, unlike the atmosphere in the Police, where it was a war zone." At the moment, Copeland is having too much fun with Oysterhead to consider getting back together with ex-bandmates Sting and Andy Summers. "This is not good news for Police fans," says Copeland, who has found success as a soundtrack composer after the members of the Police went their separate ways in 1985. "I'd love to do another Police tour at some point," he says. "But I'm busy now." Getting back together with their respective other groups isn't a priority for Anastasio or Claypool, either. Both of them are working on solo albums. Phish is on hiatus indefinitely, according to Anastasio. "After 17 years of having every single thing in your life revolve around one unit, it was important for us to do other things in order to grow," he says. "We just kind of shook hands with each other and said, 'Man, that was incredibly cool. I'll see you later.' The four guys in Phish . . . were really happy to get away from it for awhile." A couple of early Primus albums will be reissued next year, although Claypool feels "no urgency" to pursue a new Primus project. "I guess without being a big [Frank] Zappa fan, I'm kind of going down the Zappa path," he says. As for the future of Oysterhead, the trio is weighing offers to tour overseas and to make another album. "The hazy long-term plan is that we'll convene every three years or 10 years or three weeks - whatever we feel like doing," Copeland says. "Oysterhead is a hobby, but it's much more intense. We have no responsibilities to the marketplace or to anyone, other than doing what turns us on. It's utterly and unapologetically indulgent - which is cool."