It's long been argued that Texas boasts more psychos per capita than any other state in the union. A short roll call of Texas rockers goes a long way toward proving that claim. First off, there's the Sir Douglas Quintet, a partly Hispanic San Antonio act that pretended to be British during the height of Beatlemania and actually scored a semihit ("She's About a Mover") before being exposed. A contemporary of the Quintet was future ZZ Topper Billy Gibbons' first band the Moving Sidewalks, a group that used to get high on Listerine. And then there's the most beloved of all Lone Star loons, Roky Erickson, front man of the Texadelic 13th Floor Elevators and self-professed Martian emigre.
Add to this illustrious list Austin's Butthole Surfers. The depravity and dementia of this band--responsible for songs like "I Saw an X-Ray of a Girl Passing Gas"--are even more awe-inspiring than that of its Texas-rock forefathers. One critic went so far as to opine, "There are few experiences in life that leave one as sullied as a spin through the grooves of a Butthole Surfers record."
This band's unequaled perversity isn't confined to its records either. Over the course of a ten-year career, the Buttholes have shown films of penis reconstruction surgery at their concerts, taken an ax to several record company offices and performed impromptu sex acts onstage. But guitarist Paul Leary--the Butthole who favors long, platinum-blond Lady Godiva wigs--insists that, really, they're just a regular bunch of guys.
"We're nice guys, although a lot of people don't believe that," Leary chuckles in a telephone interview from his Austin home. "A lot of what happened happened not because of us so much as the scene where it all came down. It was a big conduit for that kind of activity."
The "scene" Leary's referring to existed in the halcyon days of the hard-core club circuit in the early-to-mid-Eighties. The band spent nearly the entire period from 1983 to 1986 on the road. This arduous, euphoric, acid-fueled trek took the Buttholes to nearly every hard-core dive in the country. During the tour's first year, the band rarely even stopped for sleep.
"After a year or so we got sleeping bags," Leary recalls. "This was a big day in the life of the Butthole Surfers. We all went into a sporting goods store and walked out with a thousand bucks' worth of sleeping bags. Our disease rate went down after that."
The frenzied peak of this touring period came during a gig at New York's Danceteria club in 1986. The show started out predictably enough. Lead singer-guitarist Gibby Haynes--with economy-size bottle of lighter fluid in hand--was up to his usual pyrotechnics. But then the onstage shenanigans got out of hand--even by Butthole standards.
"I walked around with a screwdriver and started playing samurai with every single speaker," Leary says without a note of either pride or regret. "And then Cabbage, our drummer at the time, and our dancer Kathleen were taking turns peeing into the tiny hole at the end of this plastic Fred Flintstone baseball bat. They filled it with piss and were shaking it around everywhere."
By the end of the gig, almost all of the Buttholes were naked, including Gibby and Kathleen, who were fornicating at the foot of the stage with the casualness of X-rated movie actors. Maybe more went on, says Leary, but time--and overconsumption of acid--has blurred his memory of many of these seamier shows.
It would be a crying shame, though, if the band's sordid escapades overshadowed its music. Since their debut EP in 1983, the Buttholes have unleashed a string of inventive, quasi- hard-core records on listeners. It's true the band's gone more high-tech on its latest disc Piouhgd. (Another cool title in the tradition of Locust Abortion Technician and Hairway to Steven.) These new songs are crammed with tape manipulations, synthesized instruments and other state-of-the-art effects, all performed in the comfort of the band's Driftwood, Texas, ranch/commune/recording studio.
This group has never had the anticomputer bias of many hard-core bands. The tired argument that synth-based music lacks honesty and heart doesn't hold any weight with the Buttholes. "We rely on computers to do things we're much too slow and stupid to perform," admits Leary.
Recently the band moved all its studio toys out of the Driftwood house and put it up for sale. Besides moving back to "civilization"--if downtown Austin counts as such--there've been other changes in the lives of the Buttholes. Leary, for instance, recently got himself hitched. "Some of us are old coots in our thirties," he notes. "We want to make the transition to being normal people."
The Buttholes are taking their careers more seriously too, even shopping around for a major label deal. "We're talking to the bigwigs," Leary admits. "We're always following on the tail of the Meat Puppets, you know. Whatever they do, we gotta do," he says in reference to the Puppets' recent long-in-coming major label contract.
There's always been one small obstacle in the way of the Butthole Surfers' leap into the majors: the name. The band's moniker has scared off not only several record labels but also the more genteel media. Here in the Valley, the band's name has offended the fragile sensibilities of the Arizona Republic as well as the ostensibly alternative radio station KUKQ, both of which have chosen to refer to the Buttholes as the "B.H. Surfers." (The Benihana Surfers? The Buddy Hackett Surfers?)
In an interview with Option magazine a year or so ago, Leary said even his own mother couldn't bring herself to utter the band's name. But apparently all that's changed. "She actually said it once," Leary says proudly. "I heard her say it about a year ago. It was right after I bought her a real nice camera."
The Butthole Surfers will perform with Jane's Addiction, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Living Colour, Nine Inch Nails, Ice-T, and the Rollins Band at Compton Terrace on Thursday, July 18. Showtime is 3 p.m.
The depravity and dementia of this band are even more awe-inspiring than that of its Texas-rock forefathers.
This band's unequaled perversity isn't confined to its records either.
Here in the Valley, both the Arizona Republic and the ostensibly alternative KUKQ refer to the Buttholes as the "B.H. Surfers."
"We want to make the transition to being normal people.
