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Tales from the Punchbowl is the fourth studio album by Primus, released on May 23, 1995. Stylistically, the album saw the band breaking away from the thrash metal roots that had been prevalent on their first 4 full length albums and was very close to psychedelic music, dominated by lengthy, jam oriented songs. Although the band had been drifting more in this direction recently with their previous album Pork Soda, this album did it more and had a much more psychedelic feel to it. It featured some of guitarist Larry LaLonde's most prolific guitar work, features more of him all together due to all the jamming. Critics have described it as "bass/drum grooves reminiscent of King Crimson gone horribly, horribly wrong" *. Though some fans were turned off by the new style, the album was overall well received by fans and critics, and debuted in the Billboard top 10. Wynona's Big Brown Beaver became the band's most popular song to date. Also breaking airwaves was the African poaching protest song Southbound Pachyderm. A good portion of the songs, fitting the psycedelic mood of the album, are about drugs. "Over The Electric Grapevine", for an example, is about a roadtrip on LSD. The album's title is inspired by the infamous Barrington Hall, a Berkeley dorm where LSD was put into the drinks during parties (the band used the dormitory as an inspiration for the title track off their 1990 studio debut Frizzle Fry as well). Claypool also wrote a song about Barrington Hall for the Frog Brigade album "Purple Onion". This would be the bands last album with Tim Alexander before he rejoined 7 years later. Alexander is said to have grown tired of the direction the song's lyrics were taking. He left shortly after the 1996 tour in which he and Claypool apparently were speaking very little to one another throughout. Punchbowl was certified Gold shortly after its release.
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