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.
“I USED TO SAY that as soon as we have a gold record, that’s certainly one of the signs of the Apocalypse that David Koresh was looking for.” King Coffey, the drummer for Austin’s Butthole Surfers, is pondering his band’s unlikely success. “Something is definitely wrong with society when the Butthole Surfers become popular.”
Before you take cover from the fire and brimstone, be assured that the Butthole Surfers have not yet snagged a gold record, a certification that requires a band to sell 500,000 copies of an album. But their 1993 release, Independent Worm Saloon, did sell in the neighborhood of 300,000 copies, and they’ve just released the long-awaited follow-up, Electric larryland, which by all rights should improve on that figure. So, yeah, it would seem that something is definitely wrong with society.
Need more evidence? In 1983 the Butthole Surfers were a cult act whose songs were profane, sonically violent, charmingly titled ditties like “The Shah Sleeps in Lee Harvey’s Grave” and “Bar-B-Q Pope.” Thirteen years later, they’ve actually achieved a sort of elder statesmen status in the underground rock scene, complete with critical approval, respect from bigger-name bands, and the requisite major-label deal. Once, it would have been inconceivable for an obscure, transgressively noisy band like the Butthole Surfers to sign a deal with Capitol Records, best known as the home of the Beatles and Ol’ Blue Eyes. Nowadays, in the post-Nirvana era, it would be inconceivable for a popular, cutting-edge band like the Buttholes not to merit major-label attention.
Then, if you haven’t already noticed, there’s the matter of the name. When the Butthole Surfers started out, club promoters refused to put the words “Butthole Surfers” on their marquees, and newspaper ads plugged concerts by a group called “the BH Surfers.” Now the Butthole Surfers’ name appears everywhere, from MTV to Vanity Fair. In fact, you’ve already encountered the offending word couplet three times in this very paragraph about the Butthole Surfers. (Whoops, make that four.) “I don’t know what we were thinking,” guitarist Paul Leary says of the name. “I don’t think we were thinking—that was the problem.” On the other hand, one thing the Butthole Surfers have always been known for is the impressive collection of would-be tags that were just as off-putting as the one they chose, among them Nine Foot Worm Makes Own Food, Ashtray Babyheads, and Ed Asner’s Gay.
Have we mentioned that something is definitely wrong with society? Of course, that’s what everyone said when Elvis got big. But in the eighties, it took more than R&B influences and a suggestive hip shake to violate pop culture’s shock threshold, and the Butthole Surfers were up to the task. With grating, incomprehensible vocals, slicing guitar screeches, and unforgiving rhythmic bludgeons, the band brought together punk, Texas psychedelia, and just about everything but—well, actually, everything including the kitchen sink. “[The] Buttholes don’t descend into the depths of squalor to make a point about the human condition,” observes The Trouser Press Record Guide, the bible of alternative rock. “They just like it down there.”
Beyond the mind-expanding sound, there were the live shows, which packaged the noise as the soundtrack to an acid-fried sideshow featuring a dancing naked woman, drums set aflame with lighter fluid, and bloody car-wreck movies. For good measure, singer Gibby Haynes would fire off the occasional shotgun blast.
The aural and visual theatrics—as well as, admittedly, the novelty value of its name—won the band a sizable following, but in the bigger picture the Buttholes were still Ulysses in a sea of Jonathan Livingston Seagulls. Then, as the nineties began, the commercial imperatives of the music business changed. With the success of alternative acts like R.E.M. and Jane’s Addiction, the big record companies started paying attention to bands they wouldn’t have before. And the Buttholes changed too. It’s a fact of life that no matter how deliberately bizarre a band might be, funny things happen if its members stay together long enough: They learn to play their instruments, figure out how to use the recording studio more advantageously, and acquire an appreciation for more finely delineated song structures. Just before signing with Capitol in 1991, the Buttholes did a suitably swirly but palatable cover of Donovan’s “The Hurdy Gurdy Man.” On Independent Worm Saloon there are pretty fair impressions of streamlined rock riffing and jaunty acoustic folk. And Electric larryland is surely their most accessible record—loose and wickedly whimsical but with a satisfying surplus of memorable hooks and solid grooves. “That’s what happens when you get old and tired,” says Leary, who is 38 and the only married Butthole.
Although it would be nice to think that the Butthole Surfers began in an alley or sewer somewhere, the seeds of the group were actually planted at Trinity University in San Antonio, where Leary was majoring in finance and Haynes studied accounting and economics. Leary, a San Antonio native whose parents were schoolteachers (to spare them the embarrassment, he doesn’t use their last name), remembers Haynes as the school freak. But at the same time, the tall, manic rock-star-to-be was something of a big man on campus, a fact of life he has grown tired of recalling—especially to interviewers. “Yeah, I was the captain of the basketball team, president of the fraternity, president of the student art committee, and accounting student of the year my senior year,” 38-year-old Haynes says impatiently. “All of that stuff is true.” It’s also true that his father, Jerry, is Mr. Peppermint, the popular Dallas-area children’s TV host; Gibby often appeared on the show as a tyke.
My Library
