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Butthole Surfers

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The cover of the album Locust Abortion Technician
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The cover of the album Locust Abortion Technician

Butthole Surfers is an American alternative rock band. The band was founded by Gibby Haynes and Paul Leary in San Antonio, Texas in 1982; the pair met while students at Trinity University. Incorporating elements of hardcore, psychedelia, and performance art, their live shows also made heavy use of strobe lights, background films (of note, footage of penis reconstruction surgery) and naked dancers.

While their line-up has changed frequently over the years, they have maintained a core membership of Haynes (vocals), Leary (guitar), and King Coffey (drums). For much of their career the band also included Teresa Taylor as a second drummer. The band has been through numerous bass players, including Jeff Pinkus and Mark Kramer (of Bongwater and Shimmy Disc).

Contents

Early years

The first Surfers song "100 Million People Dead" was included on the RRadical Records International War/Peace Compilation. This led to their self titled live debut EP on Alternative Tentacles replete with thought-provoking titles like The Shah Sleeps in Lee Harvey's Grave and The Revenge of Anus Presley, before moving to Touch & Go to release their debut album Psychic... Powerless... Another Man's Sac which featured such cult classics as Cherub, Negro Observer and Mexican Caravan, to which Kurt Cobain wrote Mexican Seafood in tribute. Guitarist Paul Leary made a much larger lyrical contribution in these early albums, singing almost as much as Gibby Haynes. Along with The Teardrop Explodes in the UK this album might be said to have begun the psychedelic revival (psychedelia having been extremely unfashionable in the five years since punk). It also showed the influence of heavy metal (especially Black Sabbath), again, many years before this sound became fashionable: in marrying punk and heavy metal it might be seen as one of the first precursors of grunge. Their second album Rembrandt Pussyhorse was as much a nod to the modern avant-garde; Throbbing Gristle, Einsturzende Neubauten, Frank Zappa and The Residents, as it was a revival of musique concrete founders, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Edgard Varese original tenants. Though the brevity of "Pussyhorse", with its heavy experimentation of traditional song structure (other than a cover of The Guess Who's American Woman), did not garner much national attention, this recording ranks highly among critics for its synthesis of musique concrete, psychedlic and pop song elements. It was their third album Locust Abortion Technician (Touch & Go - US/ Blast First - UK), that really brought them to the attention of the music press and public, and some critics still argue this is their best album. It is certainly their most extreme, making full use of tape loops, backward instrumentation, and other features. (The story of the creation of this album is told in Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azerrad (Little, Brown) amidst other tales from the American underground in the 1980s). Their increasingly outrageous live shows were also starting to attract attention. The band's rampant drug consumption (especially of LSD) also raised some eyebrows in the days of straight edge. The band's next album Hairway to Steven was powerful, but schizophrenic: half the album contained material as extreme as their previous work, but there were also a few pieces that might be considered conventional songs. Some of them were even vaguely tuneful. (Pioughd) for Rough Trade Records continued their move toward the mainstream, and featured an increasing use of electronic instrumentation. In 1991 they were part of the first Lollapalooza tour. Soon afterwards the inevitable happened, when they were signed by William Howell of Capitol Records and their increasingly conventional modern rock songs began to be played on radio and Beavis and Butt-head. The 1993 debut for Capitol "Independent Worm Saloon" was produced by John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin. Their songs also began to turn up on the soundtrack of major Hollywood movies, such as Baz Luhrman's Romeo + Juliet and Mission Impossible around this time.

Later success

The band finally 'crossed over' into the mainstream with its radio breakthrough "Pepper" from the album Electriclarryland in 1996, which recounted the somewhat sordid stories of several high school students in Texas. In 1996 the band brought a legal action to recover rights from Touch and Go to their back catalogue, a case they eventually won in 1999. Those records are now in print on their own Latino Buggerveil record label. At the same time a huge legal battle with Capitol records began which ended up with the band being kicked off the label and signing to Hollywood Records (a subsidiary of Disney).

In the early nineties Gibby Haynes and Jeff Pinkus released a side project (The Jackofficers) which produced a highly psychedelic take on House music. As the nineties went on, the band became increasingly influenced by electronica, with Gibby namechecking Massive Attack, Tricky, and The Chemical Brothers as influences. This culminated in The Weird Revolution (a reworking of an aborted album recorded for Capitol called After the Astronaut) their most electronic album to date. This produced the hit Dracula From Houston which is featured on the soundtrack of the TV series Scrubs.

Some newspapers refuse to print the band's full name, opting instead for altered forms such as BH Surfers or B-Hole Surfers.

Performance

Butthole Surfers' legendary performances would draw fans of punk rock, performance art, and curiosity seekers as well as fans of more typical rock concerts.

Often without speaking to or even acknowledging the audience, sometimes playing in darkness, the band would assault the attendees aurally with four channels of sound placed throughout the venue. This allowed the band the opportunity to "swim" the sound in a circular pattern which, when combined with the visual stimuli would occasionally evoke nausea from those in attendance. With racks of equipment at their disposal on stage, the sound could be sped up, slowed down, distorted or otherwise affected.

Combined with this aural onslaught, a screen (or sometimes a natural surface) would light up with various projected movies composed of stock footage of penis surgery, automobile-accident carnage, pastoral Jacques Cousteau footage, slaughterhouse scenes, and the band's beloved color negative print of a Charlie's Angels episode. Any of this footage might be played backwards or upside-down if the mood struck. Rider-view footage of a roller coaster ride would also be inserted and the combined effect with the swirling sound and the sudden, lengthy strobe-light barrage is said to have caused panic and even seizure in some participants.

Other common elements of the stage show included Gibby's fascination with singing through a bullhorn or smashing a cymbal mounted upside-down and filled with flaming rubbing alcohol, causing flames to shoot up with each rhythmic beat. Gibby had a predilection for taking the stage with a dozen or more clothespins attached to his hair, face and/or body, apparently presenting a dadaist/absurdist depiction of the rock star. For daylight shows, Gibby instead would occupy instrumental passages with shotgun blasts over the audience's heads.

While on tour in Times Square, the band met a woman whose control over reversal of her digestive tract had given her the stage name 'Ta-Da the Shit Lady'. She was brought along and became a fixture of several tours in which, unannounced, she would leap onto the stage and perform a frantic, gyrating dance in the strobe lights after disrobing (it was not a libidinous presentation). Combined with smoke machines, the dual tribal beat of drummers Teresa Taylor and King Coffey, a clear sound system and the off-kilter style of their music, the total effect of the live presentation was unique in popular music. Entertainer Sandra Bernhard was also occasionally part of the touring stage show, which also saw the support of Johnny Depp who, with Gibby, formed the musical project 'P'. Sandra Bernhard also recorded a cover song with the Butthole Surfers which she refuses to allow the band to release. [[Citing sources citation needed]] It was a cover of Heart's "Barracuda" in English and Spanish with the Butthole Surfers as backing.

Samples

Discography

External links

 

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