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Today we’re talking about one of the weirdest acts in Rock N’ Roll - the Butthole Surfers
and I've had a few people ask me to do this topic and today we are finally going to tackle
it.
The Butthole Surfers started out as a drug-fueled
post-punk band from Texas.
After all they really had nothing to lose to lose.
They were
like the bradley cooper of rock n’ roll.
What do I mean?
Well they both found major
success much later on in their career.
Their live shows were an assault on the senses
- rumored on-stage sexual antics and disturbing images projecting above the stage were all
standard.
There was also an instance when full-frontal nudity happened at an all-ages
show.
Bassist Jeff Pinkus would tell Classic Rock Magazine “I think we inspired other
people to be more debauched,” In an interview with Kerrang online, Guitarist
Paul Leary talked about how frontman Gibby Hanes went on a bender onstage in Rotterdam
in the Netherlands at a show where the Cult had just played - he ended up in a dress and
threw chairs at the audience.
Ironically though, this was when the band really started to take
off in Europe!
Leary couldn’t take all the sound equipment back himself so he hid it
under the bushes overnight.
At a February 1986 show in New York’s the band used “piss
wands” which were - plastic baseball bats filled with, well you know, that were waved
around the crowd.
From the get go the band was single minded
in their mission.
They wanted to do something other bands hadn’t with guitarist Paul Leary
explaining to Classic Rock “We’d asked ourselves what we wanted to see from a rock
band, something that nobody else was doing,”.
“We were influenced by psychedelic bands
so we wanted strobes.
Soon we had shotguns, walls of strobe lights and movies showing
penis reconstruction.
It just seemed like a kick in the ass to do.
It helped that there
was no message we were trying to convey.
It was all kinda nihilistic.”
Their onstage behavior soon crossed over to offstage antics.
Leary would explain “It
was just a party every night,” “Gibby was definitely our ringleader.
We would go
into a new town every day, raise as much hell as we wanted, get to drink beer for free,
act like lunatics, make a big mess and then move on to the next town" he'd remember
One of their most ridiculous offstage antics was touching their, uh hmmm, manhood to a
briefcase used by President Jimmy Carter.
And for a band that could be so visceral,
they
were actually inspired by some pretty intellectual philosophies.
Dadism also known as the art of the absurd) and
Fredrick Nietzche’s Nihilism both influenced the group.
Frontman Gibby Haynes and Paul Leary formed The Butthole Surfers in 1981 in San Antonio,
Texas.
Ironically, the band members had pretty
wholesome backgrounds.
Hayne’s father hosted a children’s program in Dallas called Mr.
Peppermint and Leary’s father was the business school Dean at Trinity College in Dallas.
They were influenced by punk rock bands like Black Flag, and the Dead Kennedys,
In what should have been a clue for what lay ahead the pair created a humorous magazine
called Strange V.D., which looked at bizarre medical problems.
Haynes was working at an
accounting firm at the time when he was fired when his superiors after they found pages
from the magazine
in the company printer.
And it didn’t really matter since the Butthole Surfers had already
formed.
Leary would paint a funny picture of what the band’s early rehearsals looked
like saying “We’d go over to our drummer’s house
in the evening and start rehearsing,.
“Gibby would usually get off work late at the accountancy
firm, stumble into practice in his suit and tie, and immediately start stripping down
to his boxer shorts while we were playing.
That’s how it got incorporated into our
live show.
We’d play until the police came and turned the power off."
The early to mid eighties were formative years for the band.
In San Francisco in 1981, the
Surfers met the Dead Kennedys’ Jello Biafra , who signed them to his Alternative
Tentacles label.
King Coffey and Teresa Nervosa joined the band as percussionists in 1983.
Jeff Pinkus joined in 1986 as bassist.
There was no one label to fit the band’s
music.
The band blended elements of punk, metal,
psychedelic rock and just strange noises.
Shortly before Jeff Pinkus joined the band, they released what many call their weirdest
album and that’s saying a lot when you’re talking about the Butthole Surfers.
1985’s Rembrandt Pussyhorse was a bizarre soundscape featuring both drones, middle eastern
instrumentation and farts.
There were Satanic undertones and freaky lyrics throughout the
album.
And the band’s label at the time refused
to publish the record.
Considered one of the band’s finer moments, Locust Abortion Technician would be released
in 1987 and recorded in Wintergreen, just outside Athens, Georgia.
It’s rumoured
that the band stalked Michael Stipe of R.E.M. during this time, even pulling up in front
of his house.
The album featured the spoken word Black Sabbath cover called Sweat Loaf.
And the album is sometimes seen as a precursor to grunge music that followed over the next
several years.The album featured two sinister looking clowns
playing with a puppy, so it’s no surprise that the album is just as unsettling.
Former Melody Maker journalist David Stubbs said in a 2012 “The Quietus Online” article
that “Locus Abortion Technician impacted like a whale on a beach, exploded by the deadly
build up of its internal gases.
This, right here, in every right head, was the state of
rock.”
Before the album came out, the band spent
6 years living out of a van with a pit bull, surviving on beer, LSD and small change from
bottle refunds.
And Leary says in a 2017 interview with The
Quietus
online that “We were depraved people, always scrounging for our next meal and our next
six-pack, that kind of thing.”
In an interview with Kerrang online, Leary
says that they were still so broke while living in Wintergreen, Georgia and recording Locus
Abortion Technician in a rented house, that they would ride their bikes to Athens to get
food just so that they could stop walking 4 hours each way to stock up.
The band lived near a meat processing plant, and they would go and record the sound of
the cows moo-ing at night.
And Locus Abortion Technician explored some
pretty
bizarre corners of pop culture.
The last track of the album, ‘22 going on
‘23 might be the most unsettling of them all.
It features a voice clip of young women
calling into a talk radio show talking about how she’s been assaulted.
Another woman
calls in to complain about a loveless marriage.
Then it fades out to the sound of cows mooing.
And the track “Cherub” got the video treatment.
The first minute features a bored looking
suburban business man wandering around his kitchen, and then starting deep into a bowl
of fruit loops.
By the early 90’s the band signed with Capitol
Records after their label filed bankruptcy.
The label was insistent that the group’s
first major label debut 1993’s independent worm saloon be produced by led zeppelin’s
john paul jones to improve the chances that a mainstream audience would take a liking
to the band.
According to Leary the band’s corporate
overlords did little to sway the band’s working style with him remembering to Classic
Rock Magzine “I’d been messing around in the back room
of my house and recorded a lot of guitar that ended up on that album,” “So our working
methods didn’t really change a whole lot, other than the fact we had a budget and the
bass player from Led Zeppelin.
He was a lot of fun.
We showed up at the
studio and John Paul Jones and I discovered we liked the same brand of whisky, The next
day they brought two bottles and we drank those.
They kept doubling the number of bottles.
We ended up drinking until six o’clock every morning.
I believe he quit drinking altogether
after that.”
The album would prove to be more straight forward for the band and it
would produce a modest radio hit with the song "Who
Was in My Room Last Night?".
The Butthole surfers were a big influence for Kurt Cobain
and it's even rumored he met Courtney Love at one of their shows.
In 1996 the band released
their biggest commercial record with 1996' Electric Larryland and the single
Pepper topped the modern rock charts and was the band’s biggest hit to date.
But the
success was almost a curse as Leary would reveal
“When we signed to Capitol, they didn’t have a clue what to suggest or demand, That
was until we had a gold record and a hit.
All of sudden people were lining up around
the block, telling us what to do.
Having a hit single was not a whole lot of fun.”
With all the band’s success came troubles with their label as their planned album in
1998 After the Astronaut was shelved temporarily.
During the same time the band split with their
manager and 5 years after Electric larryland came out the band released their follow up
record in 2001's Weird Revolution.
It was a difficult time in the early 2000's
for the band leading
to the band with them splitting up with the members
pursuing other musical projects until they
had sporadic reunions in the years that followed.
While it seemed like the band was done putting
out new music fans were happy to hear Leary admit .
“We’ve got a couple of interested labels, and the goal is to record a new album,”
Leary reveals.
“I realize that we’re middle-aged men now, but we’re gonna do it, because
that’s what we gotta do.
Making Weird Revolution was a gut-wrenching process, and it put us
out of commission for a long time.
"It was such a painful thing to go through
that it’s taken years to get over it.
Now I figure we have a shot at going back and
doing things the way we want.
It’s time to try it again."
he'd say recently.
That
does it for today's video guys.
Thanks for watching.
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Take care.