Behind the Scenes 
Music
The Hole Story
Austin’s most profane, sonically violent, scandalously named purveyors of psychedelia and punk rock are now mainstream darlings (sort of)? Even the Butthole Surfers can’t believe it.
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Coffey, for his part, was born in Midland but spent his formative years in Fort Worth. After his parents divorced, he went to live with his dad, who worked as a paint salesman. “It was like The Courtship of Eddie’s Father,” he allows. As an acolyte, Coffey had but a single epiphany, which turned out to be more than enough: While flinging the incense at a church service one Sunday, he looked straight into the eyes of Christ and thought, “Wow, I don’t even believe in God!” Graduating early from high school, he fled to Austin, the only town in Texas where heretics and heathens roam freely. He has lived there ever since, though he spends some time at the Zen Center in San Francisco, where he mops floors, chops vegetables, and enjoys the psychic distance from the world of rock and roll.
Coffey, who is 31, was a late addition to the group. At first it was just Haynes and Leary, who went from schoolmates to creative partners by manufacturing a line of T-shirts and pillowcases featuring the graven image of Lee Harvey Oswald. They wandered out to California, sold their products in Venice Beach, and soaked up the seminal punk rock of the time, notably the music of Black Flag. It was the early eighties, a time when punk was truly for the disenfranchised, when bands toured in broken-down vans and played for no money in front of small but passionate audiences.
Thus inspired, Haynes and Leary moved to Austin and started gigging around town under a variety of names. One night, on a whim, they were announced as the Butthole Surfers, and for the first time there was $125 waiting for them at the end of the set. They took it as an omen. Unfortunately, Haynes recalls, “it was six years before we got paid $125 again,” but an odyssey had begun. The band made two records (Butthole Surfers and Live PCPPEP) for the Alternative Tentacles label. Along the way they picked up Coffey and co-drummer Teresa Taylor (better known as the purveyor of Madonna’s pap smear in Slacker). They hit the road and didn’t come back. “We lived out of the van for, gosh, a good number of years,” Coffey says. “We’d eat at Taco Bell. We’d go through other people’s cigarette butts to try and make one complete cigarette, and find empty beer bottles to get the deposits back on them so we could get our own beer.”
Eventually, they began to draw crowds. From 1985 to 1990 the Butthole Surfers were a rare breed—an independent, uncommercial band that could actually make a living on tour. Working with the small Chicago label Touch and Go, they got to the point where they could sell 100,000 records, which is better than gold in the indie world. Their musical sensibility continued to expand, incorporating any number of idioms: folk, heavy metal, art rock. And while that was happening, the money got good enough that the band was able to put life-in-the-van behind and get a house in Driftwood, a tiny town half an hour from Austin. “We had a strange existence,” Leary says. “We boarded up the place to where no light would get in, and we slept on pieces of plywood hanging from the ceiling.” And the Driftwood house doubled as a recording studio—particularly the most acoustically desirable spot, the bathroom. “We took what we did very seriously from the beginning, as far as trying to do something creative,” Coffey says. “Even if it’s the most retarded piece of s— in the world, there’s an element of creativity.”
Obviously, Capitol Records agreed, though practical considerations really drove the deal for both sides. When an independent band sells 100,000 copies of a record, it’s difficult to go any further without the muscle of a major label, which can physically put CDs in stores and exercise greater clout with radio stations, the press, and MTV. At the same time, a major label looks at six-figure record sales and sees a band that already has an audience to build on. And regardless of their commercial potential, the Butthole Surfers were a prestige signing. Along with Sonic Youth and Minutemen founder Mike Watt, the Buttholes were granddaddies of the punk scene. They outlived everyone and sounded like no one. They weren’t a band that came along in the wake of Nirvana—they were a band that influenced Nirvana.
At the same time that they struck the deal with Capitol, the Buttholes inaugurated the Lollapalooza Tour, sharing the stage with Jane’s Addiction, punk icon Henry Rollins, and the then relatively unknown Nine Inch Nails. As if all that mainstream success weren’t weird enough, the producer they landed for Independent Worm Saloon was John Paul Jones, formerly of Led Zeppelin. Once again they hit the road, but by this time they had an actual tour bus, and for much of the trip they shared a bill with those college-rock darlings, the Stone Temple Pilots.
Now, finally, comes Electric larryland, a record that brought the Buttholes back to basics. When formal recording sessions in Woodstock, New York, left them unsatisfied, they headed back to Austin and started making things up on the spot again—only this time they camped out in a couple of studios instead of searching for the nearest lavatory. By the time they got it right, they’d struck a balance of focus, imagination, and accident. They even stumbled on a single, “Pepper,” a bit of bluesy hip-hop that is infectious enough to have real hit potential, though the band is too smart and too experienced to care if it does; they know that in today’s world, everything is popular and everything is evanescent. “I turn on my cable box and I do not see one person who does not become, instantly, a fool when shown on MTV,” Haynes says.
If the Buttholes happen to get big, fine, but if they don’t, they could probably go on forever just the way they always have. Or they could pack it in. These days, each member of the band has crafted a life apart from the others. Coffey runs the flourishing independent label Trance Syndicate (home to Austin legend Roky Erickson and up-and-comers Sixteen Deluxe and Starfish), while Leary is a hot producer who helped Arizona’s Meat Puppets score a gold record. And Gibby is always busy being Gibby, whether he’s doing his share of substance-fueled cavorting, painting, playing with pal Johnny Depp in his side band P, or working as a disc jockey, as he did last year at Austin’s 101-X, where he routinely referred to the station’s playlist on the air as “puke chunks.”
Leary, for one, sounds pretty close to the end. Having done enough touring for several lifetimes, he’d be happy if he never saw the inside of a tour bus again. “Don’t get me wrong—I love the Butthole Surfers. I love everything we did. But I’m tired of the band,” he says in an emphatic tone only partly blunted by a guffaw. “I always used to kid that I was in it for the money. But now, I really am only in it for the money.”
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