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Nudity, raging fires, belching smoke, blinding strobes, nightmare-inducing surgical movies, fights and firearms: these are among the issues you could have encountered at a Butthole Surfers present whereas being pummelled by a squealing cacophony of acid-fried psychedelic noise-rock, as a person tripping wildly in his underpants screams at you thru a megaphone.
“Individuals can be working out of our exhibits throwing up,” says Paul Leary, the band’s guitarist. “We had been punishing these poor souls.”
The dormant Texas band’s first two albums and a dwell EP are being reissued this month, with extra LPs due later this yr, bringing again to life the feral power of a band who nonetheless sound like no different. Fusing noise rock with British post-punk sensibilities, tape manipulations, mangled vocals and warped psychedelia, the band – liked by everybody from Kurt Cobain to Orbital and the Pink Sizzling Chilli Peppers – had been distinctive from the off. “We had been completely different from most punk bands,” says drummer King Coffey, who made up a primal and hypnotic twin drumming partnership with the late Teresa Nervosa. “We got here out of the hardcore scene, however at that time bands had been simply going quicker and quicker and getting extra macho. It was a extremely close-minded scene, musically and socially. We had been taking part in for punks however not taking part in punk music – we had been extra knowledgeable by fashionable artwork.” And for a second, within the post-Nirvana gold rush of the early Nineties, they virtually made it massive.
The band was shaped in San Antonio in 1981 by college college students Leary and Gibby Haynes. Haynes was captain of the basketball group and voted accountant of the yr, whereas Leary had wishes to be a stockbroker. Regardless of this, the pair additionally had a style for the bizarre. They created their very own journal, Unusual VD, which featured images of irregular medical illnesses with made up descriptions and fictitious ailments. Leaving one in all these within the photocopier at work hastened the top of Haynes’s short-lived accountancy profession.
Music was one thing they virtually fell into. “Our first couple of exhibits had been efficiency artwork with music as a background,” says Leary. “We had been extra into the artwork facet of it, after which music form of took over.” Something that may resemble a method was nonexistent. “We had no plan in anyway,” says Leary. “We had been into dadaism and liked the random nature of how issues prove.” Trying again on their motivations within the band’s early days, Haynes merely says: “The entire thing was an try and get consideration. We made artwork for cash and a focus.”
Fuelled by beer, pot and LSD, together with a darkish sense of humour and a propensity for the obscene, the band ended up in a years-long state of endless motion, turning up in cities with nowhere to dwell, no exhibits to play, and hoping to choose one thing up alongside the way in which. “We lived in a van for years and none of us had a life exterior the band,” says Coffey. “It was like we’d signed up for this cult and there was no turning again. We burned our bridges so far as having any hope of residing a traditional life.”
The band had been desperately poor. They scraped round on the ground for unfastened change and ate out of dumpsters. At one level all the band had scabies. It was brutal and never everybody may endure it. Earlier than touchdown on long-term member Jeff Pinkus, the band burned by bass gamers at virtually the identical charge they went by lighter fluid on stage – which Haynes would pour over a cymbal earlier than bashing away, making a percussion fireball. One bass participant’s ultimate straw was when he begged for milk as a result of his physique was craving sustenance, solely to be informed there was no funds to accommodate such a luxurious. “We ran ourselves like a commune,” says Coffey. “We had one communal fund and we put all of it again into the band.”
Their wonky information and travelling freakshow-like dwell performances earned them a gentle stream of hardcore followers eager to expertise the chaos. Many would flip up after listening to phrase of mouth tales of those LSD-soaked crazies, hoping for their very own psychedelic expertise, however would come out extra in a state of shell-shock than a better state of consciousness. The band turned venues into scenes of horror, exhibiting movies of autopsies, explosions, and penis reconstruction surgical procedure as noise wailed, fires burned, smoke churned and lights popped. “We had an entire wall of airport grade strobe lights,” recollects Leary. “After they began flashing you couldn’t block the flash. You can put your fingers over your eyes and you’d see your veins and thru to your skeleton. We’d must cease the present as a result of any individual within the viewers was having an epileptic seizure – that occurred a number of instances.”
Between 1986 and 1989, the efficiency artist Kathleen Lynch joined the band as a unadorned dancer, and a few concert events – together with an all-ages present that didn’t maintain again on nudity – led to a riot. Whereas a few of their antics had been mere shock ways and puerile gross-out behaviour, the band had been additionally making an attempt to faucet into one thing extra important and transcendent. They unlocked and harnessed a uncooked and brutalising sonic depth to match their visible hellscape, which few bands may match. “It was like scream remedy for me,” says Coffey. “It was so primal. To really feel the ache, stress and pleasure of all of it, and to be in that second, was one thing else.”
“I don’t know some other technique to describe it than psychedelic,” says Haynes, reflecting on the chaos of the exhibits. He’s onerous to get a lot out of that’s coherent. The 66-year-old gives up a number of elongated pauses, silences and murmurs, as if continually attempting to kickstart his mind into motion, and goes off on tangents about US rapper Post Malone, nation act the Chicks and synth pop, whereas one query is met with him merely singing a Speaking Heads music at me. “It’s as a result of I smoked pot earlier,” he explains later, after he forgets the punchline to an extended story about assembly Shane MacGowan. “Oh shit! God dammit! I blew the entire fucking story!” he yelps, berating himself, earlier than descending right into a cackle. “I’m completely dropping it. It’s not even the early onset. It’s the onset.”
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That Haynes and the band made it out alive is a miracle, so the truth that the singer – recognized for firing shotguns into the air at exhibits, getting bare and combating safety guards, and unintentionally setting fireplace to himself – is a bit scatty in his mid-60s is comprehensible.
Maybe the strangest factor to have occurred, in a profession filled with strangeness, is that the Butthole Surfers virtually crossed over. Within the post-grunge alt-rock growth of the 90s, even this travelling circus of perma-high maniacs had been deemed worthy of throwing cash at. They signed with Capitol for 1993’s Unbiased Worm Saloon, with John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin as producer. They’d successful with the considerably MTV-friendly monitor Pepper in 1996, the accompanying album Electriclarryland reached the US Prime 40, they usually discovered themselves on the multimillion-selling soundtrack to Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet. However the the rest of the last decade, as alt-rock waned in reputation and the band reached their 40s, was stuffed with administration bust-ups, lawsuits with their previous label, and an aborted album. The underwhelming Bizarre Revolution, from 2001, stays their ultimate launch. They performed dwell in sporadic bursts within the ensuing years however haven’t performed now for one of the best a part of a decade.
After all the Butthole Surfers had been by no means going to have a neat, cohesive trajectory and age gracefully into being a legacy act. Whereas bands such because the Flaming Lips fell in love with them, and knocked up a extra polished, palatable and festival-friendly model of their nightmare carnival exhibits, the Butthole Surfers contained too many uncontainable parts to drag such a factor off. “We’re not so good as we could possibly be at the moment, and that’s as a result of I misplaced my shit,” displays Haynes. “I did too many medicine. I completely screwed up the deal. It’s my dangerous. It’s on me.” Leary provides: “We had been some genuinely fucked up folks. We’re good folks, however we’re fucked up – we’re broken.”
It appears the band are OK with how issues turned out nevertheless. “It’s approach higher to be underrated than overrated,” Haynes says. “And I can let you know this: the Butthole Surfers are usually not overrated.” Coffey additionally appears content material with this state of affairs. “I hope to be misunderstood,” he says. “When it’s a must to justify your artwork, you’re lowering it. So I hope folks get their very own impressions about what we had been or weren’t doing. Anyone as soon as mentioned our music was a entrance for us to fabricate and distribute LSD throughout the nation. It’s like [adopts sarcastic voice]: ‘Certain, yeah, it was all a convoluted approach to try this.’ However I’d reasonably encourage that than attempt to clarify the affect of Yves Klein in our music.”
So will this group of sexagenarians ever reload the shotguns, stoke up the fires and hit the highway once more? “We’ve been getting six-figure gives to play dwell,” says Leary. “However I simply don’t need to do it. We’re actually fortunate to not be in jail and I don’t need to push that any extra. I don’t need to be sending a bandmate dwelling in a physique bag or for a venue to burn down.” And for Haynes? “I’ve a 13-year-old son, who’s the fucking gentle of my life,” he says, with a sudden burst of lucidity and with real sentiment. “I’ve bought an precise household and it’s superior. Little league baseball and center college basketball? Dude, it’s the shit.”
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Reissues of Psychic… Powerless… One other Man’s Sac, Rembrandt Pussyhorse, and Dwell PCPPEP are out now on Matador Data
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