(A RANDOM SAMPLING OF) THE BUTTHOLE SURFERS
Been listening to everything the Surfers ever released on shuffle for a couple hours straight and have all kinds of thoughts. (Stolen-music reference playlist via tech-giant paid subscription here.) First of all, just to say it up front, I deeply love this weird, awful, hilarious, terrifying, and very heavy band, and I love them a little more every single time I listen to them. That’s the main thought. For more thoughts and various rabbitholes, I’m just going to keep playing all their albums on shuffle and write about random tracks as I hear ‘em. First one up being…
“In the Cellar” from Rembrandt Pussyhorse (Touch & Go, 1986). This 1986 LP made a Jamaican-style move where it opened with a vocal tune and closed with its dub/instrumental/remix, like the A-side and B-side of a 45RPM single, “Creep in the Cellar” b/w “In the Cellar,” but with a whole album of songs in between.
“Just a Boy” from Humpty Dumpty LSD (Latino Buggerveil, 2002). Playing it straight in 1982, almost like a regular punk band, a song that could be a Wipers or Descendents song from the same year, delivered with relatively little irony as part of the sessions for the self-titled 1983 debut 12” EP aka Brown Reason to Live. I can see why they left this one off the debut (or maybe it was recorded for a 7” they decided not to release) because it really is one of the more normal and straight-faced “punk” things they ever did, and they were already more cosmically/comically weird than that. Still a really good song, because the Surfers are a great band. Paul Leary’s guitar playing is just insanely great throughout, and Gibby’s vocals and lyrics have real emotional heft, especially on the lines “I’m just a boy/I look like a girl/in this fucking two-tone world aaaaagh!!!!”
“Tongue” from Independent Worm Saloon (Capitol Records, 1993). With a stirring and anthemic song like this one, the whole Surfers-on-a-major-label thing seems like it should work. I even have a personal populist Great Plains/Midwestern anecdote about this song: when I attended a Butthole Surfers/Stone Temple Pilots/Flaming Lips (major label arena rock!) concert in Omaha, Nebraska (not entirely convincing internet research places the date as July 14 of 1993 when I was a wee 22 years old), the Buttholes memorably played this song during their night-closing set, and just afterwards as we filed out of the concert hall in a daze one of my alt-hippie companions was singing the opening lines softly to herself, “I can’t believe it/talking to people here,” and I’ll never forget it. But the Surfers had already been doing this ‘anthemic and relatively straight folk ballad’ move, well before they signed to the majors, for example “Rocky” from Hairway to Steven (Touch & Go, 1988).
“Space I” from Humpty Dumpty LSD (Latino Buggerveil, 1982). First of all “Space I” reminds me of how 13th Floor Elevators have a song called “Splash 1,” and this is one of my running themes, that the Surfers are a true Texas band with all kinds of references back and forth across the Texas music continuum, which is one of the heaviest such continuums on Earth. Like, I think Stacy Sutherland would fit right in with Paul Leary. “Space I” is an all-instrumental “home 8-track recording” from 1987, the year Locust Abortion Technician came out, weird minimalist trance-psych rock jamming, as weird as (or weirder than) (and yeah, probably just a little more inept than) anything any our favorite German proto-electro-punks did back in the 1970s. There’s also a “Space II” on Humpty Dumpty LSD with the same “ca. 1987 home” recording credit, and it’s weirder and more amorphous still, basically 5 minutes of harsh synth noise.
“Mexico” from Weird Revolution (Hollywood/Surfdog, 2001). Okay, this is it, the moment where the shuffle takes us out of the classic Touch & Go period and into “Pepper”-era Surfers, where they went techno/rave and/or Dust Brothers/Beck, on this track the techno/rave former with some sort of dark-Ibiza vibe, while Gibby continues his late-period penchant for lyrical simplicity and directness: “God, Zeus, Allah, Buddha/Bob Dylan on a motor scooter/Buddha, God, Zeus, Allah/Mexico in a low Impala.” This 2001 album Weird Revolution remains their most recent (and I might guess last ever) full length release. I find it very listenable.
“Jimi” from Hairway to Steven (Touch & Go, 1988). “What do you know about reality?/I AM REALITY/What do you know about death?/I AM DEATH!/HAAAAAAHH.” To be honest, if I could only play someone one Butthole Surfers track, it would probably be this one, maybe because it’s a 13-minute prog-punk nightmare epic that shows the band in many of their guises, from demonic noise to plaintive psychedelia, with perhaps the definitive Nervosa/Coffey double-drum stomp. Already wrote a bunch of intentional nonsense about “Jimi” on a previous newsletter if you’d like to read that here. Questionable typography experiments aside, that piece goes further into the Texas music tradition theme with an inevitable comparison of the tape-speed production madness of “Jimi” to the music of DJ Screw.
“Sea Ferring” from Rembrandt Pussyhorse (Touch & Go, 1986). One of the best examples of how this band can purposely play a song, live in a room, and make it sound like it was mastered wrong and/or there’s a problem with your own stereo.
“TV Star” from Electriclarryland (Capitol Records, 1996). Back to the tradition, here we have late-period Surfers playing a very Texan brand of mature outlaw country rock, in the fine tradition of Waylon & Willie & the boys, with a mostly straight lament about falling in love with a TV star. Something about the line “Been watchin' TV as the years go by/Seen ‘em born and I seen them die” hits me emotionally. Gibby & Paul (not necessarily in that order) have been a legitimately talented singer/songwriter team throughout their entire career, it’s just that it gets buried by all the antics, weirdness, exploded song-forms, and poop (?) jokes.
“Lady Sniff” from Psychic... Powerless... Another Man's Sac (Touch & Go, 1984). One of the all-time legendary cult-fave weird-high-school-parking-lot Surfers songs, probably just because of the real-time hawk/spit loogie action, let’s be honest. Another common Surfers move is a parody of deep blues that dovetails with parody of Texas redneck culture. (See also “Movin’ to Florida” from one year later on the Cream Corn from the Socket of Davis EP.) Black southern culture and white southern culture blending, which is also how actual society works in certain specific regional American peripheries. “Pass me some of that dumbass over there, yeah boy.” But it’s not all smart-redneck nod/wink either as these secret Beatles-lovers also slip a Wonderwall Music reference into the lyrics, 11 years before Oasis more famously did it.
“Goofy’s Concern” from Independent Worm Saloon (Capitol Records, 1993). Surfers in straight(er) punk mode, and it’s about time a punk band finally wrote a song that goes “I don’t give a fuck about the FBI/I don’t give a fuck about the CIA/I don’t give fuck about [unintelligible]/ I don’t give a fuck about anything/(screams),” major label or not.
“Night of the Day” from Humpty Dumpty LSD (Latino Buggerveil, 1982). OMG improvised Surfers ridiculousness of the highest order. Gibby (I think) portrays some sort of lounge singer in a dollhouse blabbering on in circles about “the night of the day/the rings, the rings in the forest/the wooden leg that you left me/when I ate the chocolate pudding . . . everything together in gestalt/the forest and the trees/the night of the day/the apple custard . . . the night of the day/the wooden leg/the sisters/the mounds, the apple pies, the custards, the Iranians all around.” (Part of the aforementioned redneck parody is dropping rupturing sprinkles of good ole U.S. of A xenophobia into their lyrics, such as this casual weird mention of “Iranians all around.”)
“Pepper - Karaoke Version” (year unknown, Sp****y only?) Trip hop, rave culture, MTV’s 120 Minutes, it’s amazing how at-home with all of it the Surfers were in the 1990s, just sliding right in while still being very weird. This is an instrumental remix of their biggest ever hit by none other than Mario Caldato Jr., 90s cred for days.
“Sinister Crayon” from Humpty Dumpty LSD (2LP version only, Latino Buggerveil, 2002). From the same 1983 session as the self-titled debut EP. I’m almost always struck and restruck by how clean this band played. For such a crazy band that gave such an impression of distortion, they so often played with dry tones and razor-sharp clarity, nothing lo-fi or noisy or inept about it. It’s another parallel with the Grateful Dead (beside one I’ve tweeted about twice, four years apart and quite a while ago, the expired link intended to be a live clip I can no longer find or explain), a band that had previously mastered the delivery of clean and clear instrumental tones, no matter where they were on the soft-to-loud spectrum, all the way to the back row of arenas, and what the Dead did for arenas, I believe Paul Leary did some 10-15 years later for the trash/salvaged post-punk DIY recording console.
“Dadgad” from Humpty Dumpty LSD (Latino Buggerveil, 2002). I’m telling you, Humpty Dumpty LSD is just a treasure-trove. The best track on it, and one of the best Surfers extendo-jams period, is “All Day” featuring haunting playful guest vocals by Daniel Johnston. This one “Dadgad” is a galloping psychedelic instrumental drone/raga jam from 1994, maybe one of the last things they recorded before an unofficial hiatus for the group, perhaps precipitated by the departure of Jeff Pinkus. Side projects and other gigs started taking precedent, such as Leary’s career as a record producer, Gibby’s band with Johnny Depp, Gibby’s heroin habit, King Coffey’s record label Trance Syndicate, etc.
“They Came In” from Weird Revolution (Hollywood/Surfdog, 2001). More of that post-Pepper rave/trip-hop style, here shot through (entirely by Leary I’m sure) with tonal grandeur right out of Zep/“Kashmir.” Another from the as-of-now final studio album, 22 years gone.
“The Revenge of Anus Presley” from Butthole Surfers aka Brown Reason to Live (Touch & Go, 1983). Closing song on the self-titled debut EP, another one of their ongoing revenge/destruction God-complex rants. Also with ‘low budget 1980s teen comedy surfer bully character’ vibes I hadn’t really noticed before. Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982, d. Amy Heckerling) came out the year before, just sayin’.
“Ulcer Breakout” from Electriclarryland (Capitol Records, 1996). And here they are in 1996, at the height of their infamy for being Touch & Go-suing major label sellouts, still playing very credible straight-up punk rock.
“Weber” from Locust Abortion Technician (Touch & Go, 1987). Leary’s insane guitar tone and concept fully on display, even if for only 35 seconds.
“Dog Inside Your Body” from Independent Worm Saloon (Capitol Records, 1993). More #TexasTradition, here evoking Roky & the Aliens’ horror rock right down to a title that evokes “Red Temple Prayer (Two-Headed Dog).”
“Moving to Florida” from Cream Corn from the Socket of Davis (Touch & Go, 1985). See “Lady Sniff.”
“Dancing Fool” from Independent Worm Saloon (Capitol Records, 1993). Jeff Pinkus’s bass sounds like Melvins “Night Goat” from the same year. Both bands seem to have the exact same revolving-door noise-rock bassist policy, so it’s funny that Pinkus in fact also played bass for the Melvins, and even funnier that it was 20 entire years later in 2013.
“Revolution Part 2” from Pioughed (1991, Rough Trade). Heard this one from fIREHOSE first, on the Live Totem Pole EP. “Hope I don’t fuck it up, Gibby.” In fact, the fIREHOSE version is better. Pioughed remains a dull experience, and seems to be the only album that Gibby & Paul have said negative things about.
“22 Going On 23” from Locust Abortion Technician (Touch & Go, 1987). Not trying to use hyperbole, but I think this is one of the most powerful pieces of rock music that has ever been recorded. It certainly had a huge effect on me when I first heard it, probably when I was about 21 myself. Not just that it’s one of the genius sludge-metal productions of all time, but for its insight into the trauma that women undergo disproportionately. It feels like a very empathetic song to me (until those damn mooing cow overdubs, but that’s still not enough to change my mind), one that speaks just as powerfully against male-on-female violence as Fugazi’s “Suggestion,” which came out one year later.
“Strangers Die Everyday” from Rembrandt Pussyhorse (Touch & Go, 1986). Another song in the vein of “22 Going On 23,” meaning a heavy funereal dirge that deals bravely and empathetically, if somewhat abstractly, with difficult subject matter. “22 Going On 23” deals with sexual assault, male-on-female violence, and post-traumatic stress disorder, and “Strangers Die Everyday” deals with mortality, loneliness, disconnection, separation, and the intimation that we are at all times surrounded by latent threats to our safety. A difference between the two songs is that “22 Going On 23” is arranged for the traditional heavy guitar/bass/drums combo, where “Strangers Die Everyday” is a somber piece for solo organ. I wonder who played it. Gibby? Paul? Someone else?
“Concubine Solo” from Humpty Dumpty LSD (Latino Buggerveil, 2002). Oh man, speaking of “I wonder who played it” . . . this is a “ca. ‘83 4-track” demo for the full-band track that kicked off the Psychic Powerless LP the following year, and judging from the count-off, it really sounds like Gibby solo. Makes me think that’s gotta be him playing bass through this same rig on “22 Going On 23” while Leary plays lead guitar. Coffey and/or Nervosa are on drums, and Pinkus wasn’t around. But the Surfers never did have credits on their albums.
“The Hurdy Gurdy Man” from Pioughed (1991, Rough Trade). It says a lot for how enervating of a listen Pioughed is that one of the best tracks on it is a one-joke cover song that is itself a drag to listen to. (The one joke is the tremelo effect on the vocal. Maybe a second joke is “Hey look, we’re covering Donovan” for 5 minutes.)
“The Shah Sleeps in Lee Harvey Oswald’s Grave” from Butthole Surfers aka Brown Reason to Live (1983, Alternative Tentacles). Oh yeah, this little ditty. Not all that long ago, maybe even in the 2010s, I had my mind blown watching a live clip of this on YouTube and realizing Paul Leary did a lot of lead vocals for the band. I always assumed everything was Gibby, but of course the voices do sound recognizably different. When I saw them live in 1988 I was too far away from the stage to really tell, but this is Leary’s band as much as Gibby’s. They were very much co-leaders, and Leary might be the true leader considering how he’s always been the band’s de facto producer and truest sonic architect. But something like “Shah” shows that he was also a songwriter. I’m sure he’s the one who brought the idea/riff to rehearsal, and I’ll bet he’s the one who wrote that perennial couplet, “There’s a time to fuck and a time to crave/but the Shah sleeps in Lee Harvey Oswald’s grave!,” not to mention what is actually my second favorite rock couplet of all time, “There’s a time to shit and a time for God/The last shit I took was pretty fucking odd!!” (For the record, my favorite rock couplet is by the New York Dolls: “I’ve got a rock’n’roll nurse/She’s making it worse.”) I seem to remember from YouTube how Leary’s vocals allowed Gibby to take a breather and just stand back with a megaphone or a minimialist rhythm guitar while wearing a dress decorated with mousetraps or something. And then I think how many of the great bands are driven by two friends (says here in this interview that Gibby was best man at Paul’s relatively recent wedding) just trying to freak each other out and/or make each other laugh, and they happen to be really good at it, both as performer for each other and as audience for each other, and hence for the world. Essentially, they create a really hot internal feedback loop that an audience can listen in on, and the Surfers definitely had one going for awhile in the 1980s. Pioughd sounds like the feedback loop heat is cooling, the fire down to embers, but I think they rebounded for the next (and so far final) three: Independent Worm Saloon (Capitol Records, 1993), Electriclarryland (Capitol Records, 1996), and Weird Revolution (Surfdog/Hollywood, 2001). In retrospect, they must’ve gotten a pretty good deal with their record label, which just might’ve completely underwritten the extremely econo lifestyle they’d learned and pioneered as part of the American Hardcore movement (another red hot feedback loop). Therefore in the 1990s the Surfers were able to relax a little, not tour too much, and put albums together slowly. So slowly that, as of 2001 at least, they stopped completely.
Oh yeah one of the interview things that surprised me even though it probably shouldn't have, (like I also didn't realize Paul sang too til I first saw Blind Eye Sees All video) he says he learned about surrealism and Dada in college and that was the main band inspiration.
Also Paul Leary has done a bunch of interviews lately and he's at the point where the band doesn't have to be mysterious so he'll just answer everything the best he can remember. I recommend the Quietus one about Locust, him on Turned Out a Punk podcast (hosted by guy from Fucked Up, a band I don't like but he's a great interviewer) and there was another one I can't remember now because he's been doing so many to promote his newish solo album (which is pretty good, I should listen to more)!