Just a 20-minute drive from where Alfred Hitchcock filmed his classic thriller The Birds and a short amble across the small Northern California town of Sebastopol, where Charles Schulz penned his iconic Peanuts comic strip, is Les Claypool’s caboose. You read right, caboose.

So, one naturally wonders: How did this platinum-selling artist – master of the slap bass, author, actor, mockumentarian, band leader and, most recently, vintner – come to end up conducting business in a railroad car?

It’s not as bad as it sounds – he’s hardly living like a hobo on the wrong side of the tracks. It’s pretty nice. Enviable, even. This restored 1855 Southern Pacific railroad car is the headquarters for Claypool Cellars, a small winery that only produces pinot noir.

Claypool and his wife Chaney sell their Purple Pachyderm Russian River Pinot Noir and Pink Platypus Pinot Noir Rose out of this little red caboose. The wine comes with endorsements from the likes of South Park co-creator Matt Stone: “If I could buy only one bottle of wine by a bass player this year, Purple Pachyderm would be it.”

Claypool Cellars is an elegant space, with pale yellow walls, furnished simply with a small, fine-oak desk which is left open to reveal its neat little cubbies, a small, perfect antique lamp that throws a warm light over the room and an oversized bar.

There’s also a few turn-of-the-century straight back bar chairs and a painting of what looks like beautiful Siamese twins – a paean that makes one thinks of his wife who is a twin – next to a chalkboard with prices of the various vintages. A deep glass case displays antique model trains that belonged to Claypool’s late father-in-law and oversized crystal wine goblets etched with the Claypool Cellars logo in frosty white. “We gotta get smaller glasses,” Claypool laughs. “When people come for a tasting, they glare at me if I don’t pour half a bottle into the glass.”

Across a drafty hallway is Claypool’s Prawn Song Records. It’s here that the auteur has been hatching the next incarnation of his legendary trio Primus – this time with stalwart sidekick and guitar maestro Larry “Ler” LaLonde and original drummer Jay Lane. They’ve been busy recording a yet-to-be-titled album due in May, which will be the band’s first release since 1999’s Antipop.

“I started just looking for a weekend vacation property, some place where I could retire,” recalls the Primus progenitor of how his base of operations ended up in this rather remote Northern California town. "I just stumbled across this amazing place, for an amazing price. I went home that day – Chaney and I weren’t married yet but we were living together – and I said, ‘I’ve found an amazing place and it’s up in a place that I’ve never even heard of before, but I have to buy it and hopefully you’ll come with me.’ So she came up, looked at it and fell in love with it. We both thought, ‘All of our friends are going to come up on the weekends.’
“All our friends have come up – on the average of once,” Claypool laughs – a maniacal cartoon cackle, caught somewhere between Heckle and Jeckle. "Once!

So we came up here and ended up starting a whole new life," he says matter-of-factly. “New house. New friends. New everything.”

The changes weren’t matter of fact – at all.

Claypool’s new life did not include Primus, the trashy, thrashy, funk-art project he founded back in 1984. Combining cartoonish voices with social anthropology set to discordant strains of manipulated noise and strangely threatening rhythms, Primus provided a bass-centric soundtrack to disaffected outsiders and a funhouse mirror for those in the know. The trio was nominated for Grammy Awards and racked up gold and platinum records like hubcaps from Claypool’s former life as a car mechanic. But by late 2000, Claypool had lost much of his creative luster for Primus. He decided it was time to put his rock behemoth in storage.

“Hiatus is an excuse for not calling it a day,” Claypool explained to me in 2000 about pulling the plug on Primus. “Because I don’t think any of us feel passionately one way or another, as far as: ‘We want to stop. We’re definitely tired of it. We’re done with this torture.’ It’s not like that at all. It’s just become a bit of a struggle and it got to the point of where it just wasn’t fun doing it anymore.”

Today, he affirms this. “Yeah, that’s what I said,” he says of the musing. “I have always said that I would only do Primus as long as it was fun. And it wasn’t fun anymore,” he says resolutely. In fact, it stopped being fun in 1996, when drummer Tim “Herb” Alexander left the band.

“We decided to go on because we were all fired up because we had a new drummer – Brain [Brian “Brain” Mantia]. We were re-invigorated for a brief period," Claypool says quietly.

The reconstituted Primus went on to record 1997’s Brown album, which, more than anything, showed Claypool that he shouldn’t second-guess himself.

“After that, I gave up having goals for myself,” he says now. "I got to a point, creatively, where I was thinking about it way too much. I look at that stuff and it’s the worst stuff I’ve ever done. I’m not trying to imply that [Primus label] Interscope ever gave us a lot of pressure. They really didn’t. I just felt like [then-Interscope president] Tom Whalley was disappointed. And it just kind of bummed me out.
“I was just in this panic,” he continues. "Here we are, going to do something that we really think is cool and people kept saying: ‘Well, where’s Tim?’ and ‘How come it doesn’t sound like Primus?’ Then sales went down, which is a normal thing. It’s going happen if you change a member, unless you make the album of your life. And we hadn’t.
“Before that time, we didn’t care if people took us seriously or not,” he further reveals. “But when we were making the Brown album, we did. And it just ruined us. It wasn’t so much pressure from the record company, it was more pressure that I was inflicting on myself, in anticipation of what people would say. It was just a terrible time. Second-guessing everything I did. I hated it. I didn’t like the Brown album at all – not one bit.”

Primus 2.0 went on to make one more album, 1999’s Antipop, a record full of braggadocio and wit. It restored the group’s sense of irreverence, if only because Claypool hired seven of his most tetchy friends – Stewart Copeland, Tom Waits, James Hetfield, Tom Morello, Jim Martin, Matt Stone, Fred Durst and Martina Topley Bird – to each produce a track, without regard to coherence or taste. What emerged was a masterful interpretation of what Primus meant to all these high-profile pals with an unexpected mission statement on the title track: “I am Antipop; I’ll run against the grain till the day I drop/ I am the Antipop; the man you cannot stop.”

But most of all, Antipop restored Primus to its position as devil-may-care outcasts who had little concern about anyone’s opinion. It said more about Claypool than it did about Primus. However, shortly into the millennium, Primus was on ice again.

Joining Claypool, who stands for the entire two hours and 12-minute duration of the interview, is a rather taciturn LaLonde, who’s main comments are of the comedic peanut gallery variety and, when he eventually spills into the room toward the end of the conversation, a boisterous Lane who a former bandmate described as “a force of nature with no manners.”

The bassist pushes up the sleeves of his black Levi’s jacket and wipes an imaginary speck of dust off the fine-grained wooden bar that is the centerpiece of Claypool Cellars tasting room, girding himself for a grilling.

The question as to why Claypool Cellars only produces one varietal – pinot noir – is easy: Because that’s what Les Claypool likes to drink. And as with everything else in a Claypoolian universe, he doesn’t care what anyone thinks.

But why wine?

“What, you think I don’t look like a wine guy?” he sneers. He’s only half-kidding, pausing an awkward second too long. “Oh, you think just because I’m from El Sobrante, California, I should be drinking beer?” He peers from behind oversized black-rimmed glasses at the great height of 6’2" .

My thought-balloon response: Whatever you say, boss. After all, I am 150 miles from home, in a near-abandoned shopping center, with a man who likes to put on pig masks just for the fun of it.

“Oh no, I would never take you for a beer drinker,” I protest. My thought balloon pops up again: Just because you fish, drive a tractor and like to make penis jokes, the thought never occurred to me.

I know Claypool can read my mind because he gives me a funny look and continues. “Beer makes you turn into a fat guy, and I’ve hit that part of my metabolism where I have to worry about that stuff,” he says.

This is where I’m supposed to say: Are you kidding?! You’re as thin as one of your Whamolas! But I don’t say that, because I have seen Les Claypool dressed in only a black bowler hat and a bathroom plunger and his man-boy supermodel body is rather manly. Not fat, mind you. More like Eric Clapton when he stopped believing that he was God and started making records with blues guys.

“I’ve just never been a big beer guy,” he insists. “It’s just not my thing. Instead, I’m making fancy booze for semi-fancy folks.”

Which is not too different than what he does in his other job as Primus’ past and present majordomo, leading the band in making fancy music for semi-fancy folks.

“I think a big portion of what our fans are looking for is similar to what I was looking for when I was experiencing music in the early days for the first time and whatnot, and still, to an extent am,” he begins. "I always looked for things off the beaten path. I didn’t wear the same clothes everybody else wore, I didn’t watch the same films or read the same books or listen to the same music. I always wanted that special thing that was unique. For me now, what gets me going is things where I go, ‘How the hell did that person think of that? ’

“The Primus audience has always been very diverse, so it’s really hard to put your finger on who they are and what they’re like because you get such a broad spectrum of folks,” Claypool suggests. “I think that’s why, over the years, we’ve been able to do things in these different worlds – from the jam world to Ozzfest world to H.O.R.D.E. because we don’t really fit in anywhere but sort of fit in everywhere.”

The winery is just one of the multitude of projects that the renaissance man-cum-bassmangler undertook after putting Primus on blocks in 2000. And while you might be tempted to refer to his pinot making as a hobby, there is little in Claypool’s life that would qualify as such. He puts as much thought and effort into winemaking as he does songwriting. Or, for that matter, into inventing a new bass, crafting a screenplay or finding the best cache of wild porcini mushrooms around town (which he insists are more properly called bolets ).

“I find them in my neighborhood – I can’t say where, because they’re very valuable,” he says furtively with such a deadpan expression that it would be hard to know whether he’s telling the truth or not, had it not been for photographic evidence on Facebook. “Me and my kids go every year and find bolets. People envy us.”
“You’re not afraid you’ll pick a poisonous mushroom?” I ask.
“I don’t go for anything else,” he says quickly. “I don’t go for morels or button mushrooms – I don’t go for any of that stuff, because I don’t eat those. To be honest, I’m not even a big mushroom fan but there’s something mystical about finding the big bolets. And they smell good.”

Mushroom aficionado or not – he’s been known to ingest the psychedelic variety only on New Year’s Eve – they have played a big part in Claypool’s recent history. Not only was his last solo album titled Of Fungi and Foe, but one of the tracks, “Mushroom Men” became the theme for a video game: Mushroom Men: The Spore Wars. It’s a dire, dirge-y sound collage – tribal-sounding even – that’s meant to accompany a nightmarish romp by three-inch-high mushroom creatures who fashion weapons and tools out of common household objects and wage a nocturnal kitchen war while we sleep.

He thinks Of Fungi and Foe might be his favorite among all of his albums. “I love that record, because it wasn’t like, ‘Well, I’ve got all this stuff, let’s make a record out of it,’” he says. “It was like cooking – finding things that were buried in the back of the cupboards and making something like a casserole out of it.”

But for this one-time culinary student who studied cooking at a Northern California junior college and is fond of using food and piscine allusions for song and album titles, he found his musical cupboard rather bare after he finished cooking Fungi_. It was time to put Primus back on high boil.

Staring in 2003, Claypool began intermittently reforming Primus with longtime guitarist Larry LaLonde and drummer Tim “Herb” Alexander, though not with any real enthusiasm.

That same year, the group released a five-track EP along with a DVD called Animals Should Not Try to Act Like People that contained some live performance footage and videos. The trio toured for two months, doing two sets per show with the second set consisting of 1991’s Sailing the Seas of Cheese in its entirety. In 2004, it did the same thing with 1990’s Frizzle Fry. Despite playing Lollapalooza and Vegoose, Claypool once again put Primus on the backburner at the end of 2005 to focus on Les Claypool’s Fancy Band. In 2006, Primus released its first greatest hits CD, They Can’t All Be Zingers, and a DVD called Blame It on the Fish followed by month-long tour. But this wasn’t a proper resurrection.

“In ‘03, it was really fun to get everybody back together; it was this nostalgic thing.” Claypool says. “But after five weeks, once the nostalgia was over, it was like, ‘OK, where are the new doors to open?’ We didn’t have that feeling of new doors with Tim [Alexander], unfortunately. Tim’s a great guy; he’s probably one of the most un-malicious people on the planet – or is it nonmalicious? Anyway, we never really clicked. The clicking that we had in the ‘90s – we [had] clicked it all out. That was our well that we had drawn from. I think we would have been going through the motions if we tried to do it with Tim again.”

When Claypool and LaLonde got the urge to tour again and knew it wouldn’t work with Alexander, they turned to original drummer Jay Lane who, as Claypool notes, “missed [the boat] because he left Primus before we released our first album.” It was LaLonde who made it clear that he didn’t want to tour for a quick money grab. He was only interested if he and Claypool could make it fun again and take Primus a step forward.

For years, Lane had played in Bob Weir’s band RatDog. “It’s funny that he’s playing this music again,” says Claypool. “It was funnier to me that he was playing that music because it was so different than anything he ever even knew about.”

When his old Primus compatriots came calling, Lane was actually playing in Furthur, the Dead-based project led by Weir and Phil Lesh.

“There’s a big difference between Jay playing with Furthur and Jay playing with RatDog,” Claypool says. “I have a lot of respect for Bob Weir. I like Bob; he’s a good guy. But when Jay was doing the Furthur thing, I just didn’t get it. Jay Lane is one of my two favorite drummers on the planet. Anybody that knows me knows when someone asks me, ‘What drummers do you want to play with?’ I always say Stewart Copeland and Jay. Whenever I could get him on my records, I would. I tried to get him on tours, but I felt bad pulling him away from Bob because Bob is a good guy. If Bob was a dick, I would have pulled him out of there as quickly as I could – but he’s not.”

Lane wasn’t even playing drums with Furthur but rather assuming the percussionist role a la Mickey Hart to Joe Russo’s Bill Kreutzmann, who is the band’s drummer.

“For one of the greatest drummers that I think exists, to not be playing drums – to be playing an egg shaker – that’s unthinkable,” Claypool huffs.
“To be fair, he probably had a tambourine, too,” interjects LaLonde.
“Jay should be playing drums not an egg shaker,” Claypool repeats, refusing to let it go. “And he should be playing drums to the extent of his capabilities. He wasn’t being utilized, so I didn’t feel awkward asking him to come do this. I haven’t talked to Phil [Lesh], but I’d hope Phil doesn’t feel bad. When Jayski came and played with us, it was amazing. It was like the missing link.”
“So I’m sure you’re wondering how I got back after 23 years?” Lane says, running a restless hand through his mop of black curls. “I begged for my gig, that’s how it happened. I was begging and pleading. I would still have been in [Furthur], probably. But old Claypool called me up.”

But not everyone was happy about the Primus grab. Lane began to get missives from the Dead faithful.

“I’ve gotten a few comments like, “Jay, your true tribe misses you,” he says solemnly. “But this is where I grew up and this is where I stayed in my heart.”

“I did it for a couple of reasons,” Claypool says about reconvening the early Primus lineup which, up until last year, had never toured though it did record the band’s first music. “First, I told the guys I would, and second, I started getting offers for some festivals,” he explains.

Although Primus has been recording since October, and claims to be nearly finished, Claypool is reluctant to share any of the tracks this February afternoon. He describes a few of the songs that he’s proud of including “Jilly’s on Smack,” that brings to mind some of his covert anti-drug songs that he recorded during the ‘90s.

“It’s such a beautiful song,” he says. “Ler brought that one in. Chaney listened to it, and said, ‘I really like this song, then you put those sad lyrics on it.’”

“Can you tell me a little about the lyrics?” I ask.

“Eh. I don’t want to,” says Claypool, setting his mouth in a resolute line. “My only real superstition is I don’t like talking about things before they actually come to fruition because I always feel like I’d jinx it. That’s probably just my own self-fulfilling prophecy. And ever since I watched Drugstore Cowboy, I don’t put hats on beds.”

Finally, after much cajoling, haggling, handwringing and promising never to toss my own chapeaux on any four-posters, Claypool’s able assistant finally consents to give me a stream of three songs for 24 hours.

The music that comes out of the computer speakers is Primus at its apex. There’s a lucidity of vision and clarity of sound that the trio hasn’t ever achieved before. This is not long silly boy music for outsiders; this is high art, big thoughts and impeccable, but not overwrought performances.

“Last Salmon Man” channels all the unease of the economic tumult of the past four years into a six-minute anxiety attack about Johnny Mack, a man getting old in a dying profession. It has the wit and pathos and dramatic arc of a New Yorker short story, with none of the wink-wink novelty appeal of past Primus songs.
“Jilly’s on Smack” is another anxiety attack, fraught with found sounds and the kind of guitar manipulation that one hasn’t seen since the close of the equally anxious ‘70s. The final song, “Lee Van Cleef,” is more classic Primus and could almost be a companion piece to “Tommy the Cat.”

The reunion couldn’t come soon enough for guitarist Larry LaLonde – except for the first few post-Primus years, he felt like a man without a country. “Primus is the main thing I’ve always done my whole life,” LaLonde explains. “It’s one of those things, where when you’re doing it after a year or two, you’re like, ‘Oh, I could use a break,’ and when you have a break, you’re like, ‘I want to do it again.’”

As for those apres-Primus years between 2000 and 2003, “I don’t even know what I was doing then,” LaLonde says. “I moved to LA in 2001, so I think I was just surfing. That little period of time, I didn’t really do anything except for surf and hang out on the beach. Turns out it doesn’t really get you too far, though,” he says, failing to mention his two years in the band No Forcefield along with former Primus drummer Brian Mantia. Or his marriage to the stunning Shane Stirling, who was one of “Barker’s Beauties” on The Price Is Right game show from 2002-2008.

A reticent man with a dry sense of humor – he resembles a better-put-together Eddie Vedder – LaLonde doesn’t seem to mind playing the straight man to Claypool’s absurd comic/cosmic profundities.

“One thing I’d change about Larry? I’d make him taller,” quips Claypool, characteristically.
“That I’m the guitarist in Primus is probably the only thing that’s worth knowing about me,” LaLonde self-deprecatingly told an Australian news service late last year. “I’m pretty boring otherwise.”

This isn’t so. “But while we’re on the subject, can you give me some significant moments in Primus history?” I ask.

“This is it right here,” says Claypool.
“Yeah, this is the biggest one,” affirms LaLonde.

Was there any awkwardness when you three came together?

“No,” effuses LaLonde. “To be honest, since the moment Jay got in the band and we started going – for me – it’s been the best, most fun period of this band, ever. We’ve done a ton of cool things over our whole career, but from that moment on – to me – it’s been the easiest, most natural, most fun thing ever. I’ve had the greatest time, there’s never been any awkwardness or growing pains or anything. Part of that is probably that we’ve known each other forever. Jay is the easiest guy in the world to get along with. You ask him to try something and he’s like, ‘OK, cool.’”
“You don’t have to tiptoe around his ego. I’m not pointing any fingers, but…” Claypool trails off.
“I’ll leave now,” jokes LaLonde.
“This is definitely Primus,” assures Claypool. "But we’re Primus guys that are older guys now, too. It’s surprisingly the same. The new stuff sounds more like Primus than I thought it was going to, to be honest with you. I thought, ‘Oh, it’s going to be different,’ but it’s really not – it’s almost like Frizzle Fry-era Primus. But we also go off into some dark, moody stuff, and there are a lot of textures to it. I think everybody’s pushing themselves, which is great.
“Yes, this has really been the easiest period for being in Primus,” says LaLonde. “There’s something about making this record that has just been easier than anything we’ve ever done.”

Which is a good sign, pointing to a future for Primus reborn.

“Yeah, when I came back, Les promised me 20 years,” says Lane.
“Did I say that?” Claypool counters. “All I know is we’re booked with shows through the next year.”