If the funny thing about regret is that it’s better to regret something you have done than something you haven’t, then The Butthole Surfers must surely have the best kind of regrets. Throughout the 1980s there was very little that was within their reach that they didn’t try at least once. Although extreme poverty and a largely itinerant lifestyle may have limited their choices, they furiously pursued an unstinting agenda of wild experimentation in their music, their stage performances and their personal existences. Embracing chaos, depravity and extremes for extremes sake, they channelled all of the resulting pain, horror, insight and ecstasy into their art, creating some of the most unhinged, out-there and brutally adventurous so-called rock music ever made.
The high watermark of The Butthole Surfers’ recorded body of work is undoubtedly 1987’s Locust Abortion Technician. The band had achieved enough success to be able to afford a home and their own primitive recording studio, but was not yet tied into the compromising structures of a major label record deal. Creatively they were at the peak of their powers, with enough toys at their disposal to let their imaginations run riot, and still with enough youthful energy and enthusiasm to follow through on their wildest urges and ideas.
But Locust Abortion Technician is also the sound of a band operating on the edge of madness. The years of punishing themselves and their audiences in the name of art were taking their toll. The Butthole Surfers had been touring non-stop through the no-hope heartlands of Reagan’s America since the beginning of the decade, basically living in their van or on promoter’s floors while surviving on drugs and garbage, a hand-to-mouth existence that would send most of today’s indie musicians weeping back to their parents’ suburban homes within a week. By the time of their fourth studio album, the Texas band had honed screaming absurdist noise catharsis down to a fine art. It wasn’t pretty, and it certainly wasn’t easy listening, but it was a disturbingly honest reflection of 80s America at the end of its tether, with no scab left unpicked. And of course, it also remains exhilarating, ridiculously good fun: "music for people like us," as an old friend of my girlfriend’s used to memorably describe it. Oh, and by the way, if you see mom, tell her: SATAN! SATAN!! SATAN!!!
Guitarist Paul Leary met singer Gibby Haynes at Trinity University in San Antonio at the end of the seventies. Although both were business students, Leary was also an art major, and it’s within the university’s art department that The Butthole Surfers’ true origins lie. Along with their original rhythm section of drummer Scott Mathews and bassist Scott Stevens, Leary and Haynes were also early adopters of punk rock, having seen The Sex Pistols’ San Antonio date on the English group’s ill-fated American tour. Punk gave them the impetus to form a band, as well as a circuit to play on, but it was the more extreme expressions of 20th century art- Dada, the Vienna Actionists, the Fluxus movement- that inspired much of the content of their performances. Although the media was often happy to accept their caricatured, insane Texas redneck personas at face value, there was a high level of intelligence and awareness to The Butthole Surfers that they admittedly went to great pains to conceal.
"I’ve always been a fan of Dada and nihilism, and I tend to not try to analyse things too much," Leary says now, down the phone from his home in Austin, Texas. "It seems like the more I analyse things the more trouble I get into. But yeah, I think we were at our best when we were about nothing and everything."
Leary, Haynes, Mathews and Stevens played their first shows in 1981, going through a variety of ridiculous names before settling on The Butthole Surfers. By this time they were already going through bassists at an alarming rate, while Mathews was eventually replaced by permanent drummer King Coffey in 1983, midway through the recording of their self-titled debut album. Shortly afterwards, The Buttholes were joined by a second drummer, Teresa Taylor AKA Teresa Nervosa, and the two young punk kids soon locked together as a powerfully tribal double-drumming unit, displaying a physical and psychic empathy that made their claims to be brother and sister all too plausible.
While their debut had been released on Alternative Tentacles thanks to the early support of The Dead Kennedys’ Jello Biafra, The Buttholes’ second studio album, Psychic, Powerless, Another Man’s Sac, was released at the end of 1984 on Chicago indie label Touch & Go. Another album, provisionally titled Rembrandt Pussy Horse, had been recorded previously for Alternative Tentacles but the label had refused to release it, or even acknowledge its existence. Several of the intended tracks were released as the Cream Corn From The Socket Of Davis EP in 1985, while a remixed, partly re-recorded and subtly renamed Rembrandt Pussyhorse finally emerged on Touch & Go in April 1986.
Throughout this period the band were basically living on the road, the five members cramped together in a succession of disintegrating vehicles, living and sleeping between the amplifiers, instruments and various theatrical props and equipment. These included a battery of strobe lights, smoke machines and their notorious collection of films, including road accidents and gruesome surgical operations, often run backwards while the band were playing for maximum disturbing effect.
Paul Leary: "It was nuts. We were punishing."
You seem to have been punishing yourselves as much as your audiences.
Leary: "Yeah; it’s a little easier to dish out than it is to take, though. We were the ones making the horrible noise and showing the penis reconstruction movies and stuff."
Eventually the never-ending tour got too much even for The Butthole Surfers. They decided that they needed a home base where they could live, and record in their own time. The sessions for what would become Locust Abortion Technician began on the outskirts of Athens, Georgia in early 1985.
Leary: "My memories of 30 years ago get a little bit hazy, but we were living on the road. At that point we were kind of homeless for a while and we decided one night that we needed to settle down somewhere and get off the road and try to restore what little sanity we might have had left. We needed to record a record and we didn’t have a budget. So we pulled out a map and threw a dart at it from across the room and it landed in Athens, Georgia. So we drove from California to Athens, Georgia and rented a house and bought a one-inch, eight-track tape machine and a microphone, and we just plugged the microphone into the back of the tape machine. It stood about seven feet tall and weighed about three tons: it was a really wonderful thing. So we just started recording things: cows in the field or playing guitar or one drum at a time, that kind of thing, and it just kind of came together. It was fun to be off the road."
Gibby, Paul, King and Teresa all moved in together, but bassist Terence Smart chose this moment to quit. Touch & Go found the band a replacement in the shape of a Canadian high school student and tuba player named Trevor Malcolm.
Leary: "We got a guy named Trevor from Canada who came down with a tuba and played with us until the bandmaster from the high school in Canada he stole the tuba from tracked us down and got the tuba back. His favourite thing to do was to go play the tuba out in the middle of the field late at night, and sometimes they called the police on him."
Malcolm lasted roughly six months before he too quit.
Leary: "He couldn’t take it. It’s not an easy life. He showed up, and all of a sudden he was living with The Butthole Surfers. I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy."
Nevertheless, Malcolm played on several of the songs that would eventually feature on Locust Abortion Technician. These included ‘Pittsburgh To Lebanon’, AKA ‘Shotgun’, Gibby’s warped blues parody on which Malcolm supplies the eerie, high-pitched backing vocals that recall ‘The Green Manalishi’, the demon-haunted opus recorded by Peter Green’s original Fleetwood Mac.
Leary: "When we moved to Athens we couldn’t actually afford to live in Athens, so we moved about ten miles out of town to a little nothing town called Winterville. We rented a two-bedroom house and we didn’t have a lawnmower. I think King spent his days with a pair of scissors trying to keep the lawn mown for the landlord. Our van broke down and we had one bicycle, and sometimes we’d walk to town which would take us all day, to try to get food, and then all day to try to get back home. It was a weird existence. But there was a slaughterhouse a couple of blocks away, and we could hear the cows mooing at night. So we got ourselves a tape recorder and would go over there to record the cows mooing. That made it onto a couple of songs on that album. I love those cows."
Was that when you were stalking Michael Stipe for a while as well?
Leary: "We were claiming to more than we actually did. He lives in Athens and we were always hoping to run into him. I think he was probably happy just to avoid us. It was right about then that they started hitting really big. They were too big for Athens."
You started covering the REM song ‘The One I Love’ live around then, too.
Leary: "Yeah, I like that song. So long as I don’t have to listen to it. But I like the idea of it."
In autumn 1985, The Buttholes toured Europe and the UK for the first time, with ex-Shockabilly member and future Shimmy Disc label founder and ubiquitous indie-rock producer Kramer filling in on bass.
Leary: "Yeah, he did our first European tour, which we did by train, and that was a wild one. We’d pull up to the train stop and have to dump guitars and amps out the window onto the sidewalk, and then get off before the train would leave. Occasionally we’d pass out and end up in some train yard in some country not knowing where the hell we were."
Kramer left after the tour, as did drummer Teresa Taylor, suffering from stress. Returning to Georgia, The Butthole Surfers found their replacements in nearby Atlanta, where they were playing regularly. 18-year-old bassist Jeff Pinkus was previously a member of Atlanta band Drowning In The Fountain, while drummer Kabbage played regularly on the city’s wild underground club scene where experimental music, drag acts and performance art were all mixed up together. This was also where the band first met Kathleen, who would eventually join The Butthole Surfers as a naked onstage dancer.
Leary: "We’d played Atlanta, and Atlanta had one of the crazier scenes, especially at this place that we would play called the Celebrity Club, where we met Kathleen and Kabbage, and RuPaul and people like that. Those shows were crazy. You’d look out in the moshpit and there’d be somebody waving a machete, and then after the show we’d have to take turns standing by our van with a two by four to protect our gear. It was nuts. There were drag queens dancing on the tables in lingerie with tampon strings coming out of their butts."
Kathleen would move to New York, where she found work as a stripper in a Times Square sex club. It was here that an unfortunate incident of diarrhoea while on the job earned her the nickname of Ta-Dah The Shit Lady- "Ta-Dah!" being the only thing she could think of to say as the brown stuff suddenly and violently exited her bare behind before a paying audience. She was of course a natural to join The Butthole Surfers, and her first onstage appearance with the band was at their notorious New York Danceteria show of February 7, 1986. This also featured the debut of The Buttholes’ infamous "piss wands"- toy plastic baseball bats filled with urine and swung around so as to anoint the audience- plus simulated sex, onstage arson and a climax of general wanton destruction.
Leary: "We got worked up for that one because we were in California and the Danceteria called and they booked two shows. We drove from Los Angeles to New York, which is a pretty fucking long drive, to play two shows, and we showed up and they told us they were cancelling our second show, and so we were only going to play one show. We were really pissed off. And we played our show and at the end of the show I remember taking a screwdriver and going out punching out every speaker in the PA and the monitors. They almost killed us. I thought they were going to kill us before we left. They told Gibby that we’d never play in New York again. And a week later a kid fell down the elevator shaft in that place and died or something, and they were out of business and we were playing at CBGBs for twice as much money."
Kathleen didn’t join the band full-time till later on, and Kabbage left in April of that year, before The Butthole Surfers returned to Europe as a four-piece. Meanwhile, work on Locust Abortion Technician continued sporadically. One song that Leary recalls as definitely dating from the Winterville era is album closer, and one of the Buttholes’ most enduring songs, ’22 Going On 23′.
Leary: "That was when we were in Georgia. I think that was before Jeff joined the band. I took acid one night, and everybody else went to sleep, and I wanted to record really bad but I didn’t want to wake anybody else up. I had this little transistor radio so I put a microphone on it and turned it on, and all of a sudden there was this talk show that came through, so I just hit the record button on the eight-track tape machine and got those people talking. And then I recorded a bassline to it and guitar, and then when King woke up the next morning I got him to play drums on it."
The track is based around a radio phone-in show in which a woman talks about being sexually abused, and could easily be seen as exploitative if the musical setting wasn’t just as harrowing as the spoken content. The band later claimed that the account was faked; that the woman speaking was a regular caller who made up a different story each time.
Leary: "That’s what I would assume. I was not a listener of the show, but just listening to her talk, she sounds like she’s 80 years old, and just the fact that she came up with that line, ‘I’m 22 going on 23,’ it seemed like it was made up. So I assumed that was somebody who would just call regularly with a new story every time. That was just something we assumed."
It’s still uncomfortable listening, whether it’s someone who’s genuinely been sexually abused, or whether it’s someone who just makes up these stories, which probably means they’re mentally disturbed anyway.
Leary: "It’s disturbing either way, and we are equally disturbed. We were just in our element. We were experiencing the pain, too. Those were tough times for us. We were struggling. We struggled for years. We were depraved people, always scrounging for our next meal and our next six-pack, that kind of thing. We were just trying to have a roof over our heads, which we didn’t always have. So it wasn’t a joke."
Your guitar playing on that song has the same feel as Eddie Hazel’s amazing solo on Funkadelic’s ‘Maggot Brain’ or even Jimi Hendrix playing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. There’s an incredible emotional pain and expressiveness to the playing that seems to empathise and weep along with what the caller is saying.
Leary: "I don’t really know how to say it, except at that particular moment I remember playing and then I got to thinking about the movie The Spy Who Loved Me. I don’t know if there’s music in there that sounds like that or not, but then I was trying to play that song and that’s just what kind of came out. It was just a Dada approach to everything."
Following the European tour, the band left Georgia and moved back to Texas, setting up their own studio with cramped living quarters for the whole band on the outskirts of Austin, a place they named The Compound.
Leary: "We moved to some house that was stuck on the side of the road somewhere; moved into it and turned it into a recording studio and recorded there until the Texas Highway Department dropped by one day and told us we would have to leave. I think we left and then they bulldozed that studio down, including the tape machine."
One of the tracks that Leary thinks was recorded at The Compound is ‘Sweat Loaf’, The Butthole Surfers’ cover/pastiche of Black Sabbath’s ‘Sweet Leaf’. It’s worth remembering that although Sabbath would be held up as the godfathers of grunge following Nirvana’s success a few years later, and their reputation as rock gods rightly restored to the status they enjoy today, in 1986 they were still considered deeply uncool dinosaur music for rednecks.
Leary: "I don’t know if they were uncool or not at that point, but I fucking loved them to death. We were pretty hip to Black Sabbath, and we were some of the first in Texas to get into NWA and stuff like that. I remember we were listening to them when we got back to Texas, and that was before they really hit it real big. So it wasn’t just like we were hicks or anything, we actually did listen to music a bit."
The song ‘Sweat Loaf’ is probably as well known for its dream-like spoken intro, rudely interrupted by shouts of "Satan! Satan! Satan!" as sampled by Orbital for their 1990 track of the same name. A live version, released in 1996, reached number three in the UK charts.
Leary: "We should’ve hit them up for some money."
What was the story behind that intro? Was it just something you made up on the spot or was there more to it?
Leary: "We got a little money in our hands and so we bought a Prophet 2000 keyboard, and we were just playing around with that, and Gibby came up with this wonderful orchestral sound and we just recorded it. And then we had a pitchshifter we ended up running the vocals through and just playing around. It just happened. We could afford toys, and every time we got a toy, we’d use it."
I guess the fact that you’re recording in your own studio means you can experiment a bit more.
Leary: "Yeah, basically when we wrote a song we’d just turn on the tape machine and start playing and that was it. So whatever came out was our song."
The song ‘Graveyard’ is on the album twice. The first version is really warped and slowed down, and then the second version is more straightforward.
Leary: "That first version is the better one, of course. I tried to get Gibby to play the guitar part and he wasn’t into it or something, so basically I set up a guitar amp and plugged the guitar into it and miked it up and left it sitting there, and waited for him to come pick it up and start playing. And I just recorded it. So he did the guitar on that song without even hearing the song. I could hear the song in my headphones, but Gibby didn’t even know we were recording."
Side one of Locust Abortion Technician closes with the brilliant punk-pop song, ‘Human Cannonball’. Its presence amidst such cacophonous company only emphasises its simple, melodic brilliance.
Leary: "It’s such a horrible recording too. It just sounds like crap, doesn’t it? But we try to encompass all the spectrum of human emotions. So we can have punk rock and blues and dirge and then pop songs. We started doing that with our very first record."
A near-bubblegum, garage rock classic in the tradition of The Shadows of Knight or The Ramones, it should have given The Buttholes their first hit single. In fact, it very nearly was released as a seven-inch: the B-side was intended to be every single Butthole Surfers song the band had recorded at that point, all playing simultaneously. Tragically, this never happened.
Leary: "Funny you should talk about that, I was thinking about that just this morning. The plan was just to take all of our songs and play them back together at the same time. I made a version of it but I don’t know what happened to it. It was one of those ideas that never got off the ground."
Side two opens with two of the band’s craziest numbers, ‘USSA’ and ‘The O-Men’. The former finds Gibby screaming the title repeatedly over a barrage of noise, including what could be massed marching jackboots and sounds of torture. Given that this was the era of Ronald Reagan and the Iran-Contra scandal, was the track intended to make a political statement?
Leary: "I guess it was kind of anti-political. It’s more of an exasperation expression. I’m trying to play the guitar as badly as humanly possible."
‘The O-Men’ sounds with hindsight like a precursor to what Gibby later did with Ministry on ‘Jesus Built My Hot Rod’.
Leary: "A couple of years earlier we were in San Antonio and we were listening to the radio one day and they were giving away tickets to an outdoor Motorhead concert. So we called in and won tickets to go see Motorhead, and the band that was opening for Motorhead was called Omen. They played this one song and it was so ridiculous, I can still hear it in my head. It had [the lyrics] ‘Cyborg lust!’ and ‘Terminate, terminate!’ and we were just laughing hysterically at this song. So we just kind of made our own song that had that same kind of thing. I remember it was Christmas Eve, and the rest of the band went into Houston to score a bag of pot or something, and I stayed behind by myself and recorded 64 tracks of kick drums, and then put a snare on top of it and the music, and then when Gibby got home we did that Omen thing, ‘Cyborg lust, terminate!’ and that was it."
The next track, ‘Kuntz’ is one of the most controversial entries in the band’s canon. The Butthole Surfers basically sampled an entire song, uncredited- ‘Klua Duang’, a Thai country (Luk Thung) track written by Kong Katkamngae and performed by Phloen Phromdaen- and tampered with it in order to highlight what sounds like a very rude word in the chorus. The actual word is "Khan" which translates as "itch".
Leary: "Yeah, Gibby didn’t want that on the record, but I insisted."
Where did you find the original recording?
Leary: "Somebody had given us some cassette tapes of music from different countries, and that song was on a cassette tape of Thai folk songs. It just cracked me up, because there he was on the chorus going ‘Cunts, cunts, cunts’."
So you didn’t even know what it was or who it was, it was just this anonymous track on a tape?
Leary: "No, I didn’t, and it’s funny because years later here in Austin I was sitting in my favourite Thai restaurant, and the owner of the restaurant came out to say hi, and he asked me about that song, because he didn’t really understand what it was, and I explained to him what the word cunts meant in English, and that cracked him up. He was the one that explained to me that it was a traditional Thai song."
Locust Abortion Technician was the first Butthole Surfers album to be licensed to UK label Blast First, and coupled with the fact that ’22 Going On 23′ made John Peel’s Festive 50 at the end of 1987, it meant that the record was something of a breakthrough for the band in the UK, alerting many discerning British listeners to their existence for the first time. A memorable European tour, with Jeff Pinkus on bass, the reunited King-Teresa double drumming team and a naked, entirely shaved but body-painted Kathleen dancing with the band, also helped.
Leary: "I wish I’d been paying attention more when things were going down. It’s kind of hard to talk about these things because I get confused about what songs are on what album and what we were thinking or trying to do, because it just wasn’t like that. We were just a train wreck."
The perception of the band then, here in the UK, was that you were part of a loose movement of noisy American bands along with Sonic Youth, Big Black and Dinosaur Jr., many of whom were also putting out records via Blast First. Did you feel any kinship with any of those bands?
Leary: "No, I never listened to any of those bands. I might have listened to a Sonic Youth song once or twice. Early on when we were in New York they would let us use their practise space from time to time, which was real nice of them, and we’re still friends with them and stuff, but I never considered ourselves to be part of anybody’s scene."
You mentioned NWA and Black Sabbath, but what else were you listening to around that time?
Leary: "Glenn Campbell, Marty Robbins, Surgical Penis Klinik. Pretty varied stuff, until it got to the point where I couldn’t listen to music of any kind at all. I mean, I fucking hate music. Jesus. The last thing I’d ever want to do is listen to it. If I want to hear a song I’ll just listen to it in my head. I’ve got all my favourite songs in my head and I can just dial them up on command and listen to them, or the parts that I like, and ignore the parts I don’t like. And then I’ve got my home studio, so I’m always dicking around in the studio. It’s fun to work on stuff but out in the car or something I don’t listen to music. I don’t even know what’s current or what’s going on in music."
Kathleen left The Butthole Surfers at the end of 1988 to front her own band, Beme Seed, while Teresa’s second stint on drums lasted until the summer of 1989, when she developed a crippling fear of flying that meant she was unable to join The Buttholes for their set at that year’s Reading Festival. She later suffered from seizures and depression, and had an operation for a brain aneurysm believed to be related to constant exposure to The Butthole Surfers’ punishing barrage of strobes. She eventually recovered enough to re-join the band for their 2008-2009 reunion tour.
Leary: "Teresa was a trooper. She hung in there for a while, but she got ill. She played with us again about five years ago, and that went on for a while. But it’s a tough life, especially for a girl, and God bless her but she’s a trooper. As for Kathleen, she was a trip. She was the true artist in the band. She would do things like stop talking for two months at a time and that kind of thing. And then she turned out to be a pretty normal person, with a normal kind of job, which made me real happy. I saw her about seven or eight years ago, and she was doing great."
The remaining core band of Gibby, Paul, King and Pinkus have released a further five albums to date, but Locust Abortion Technician remains a fan favourite. The record is generally considered to represent a crazed high watermark that The Butthole Surfers never bettered, and few others have even dared to approach.
Leary: "Of all of our records it’s one of the ones I’m actually somewhat proud of. I think a lot of people probably wish we’d never lost that style. We kind of went into different directions after that. I kind of miss that way of making records. It got to the point where we were on a major label and they wanted the radio songs, and as soon as we started to have any commercial success, all of a sudden there was a shitload of people telling us how to do things and what to do and that kind of crap. And now we’ve kind of got away from all that to where nobody gives a shit anymore, so we can get back to doing things our way again. We’ve all been busy with our own separate things, and I’ve done a lot of producing in the past few years, and I’ve got to the point now where I feel like I’ve done doing that for a while, so it’s time to make a new Butthole Surfers album. Especially now that Trump is president, jeez! If there was ever a time for a Butthole Surfers album it’s fucking now. It just doesn’t get any weirder than that."
I guess in some ways, without you even realising it, that period was as good as it got. You’d got off the road, you’d sort of got stable homes to live in, but you still had the freedom to do whatever you wanted. Then on a major label they give you money but you lose that freedom.
Leary: "To me, being on a major label was almost the punchline to a joke. I grew up listening to The Beatles and Grand Funk Railroad and Dean Martin, and the thought of being on the same record label that they were on was too fucking weird, really weird. A lot of people gave us grief for doing that, but fuck: I wasn’t going to turn that down."
As you say, as well as loving all of that noise music you also always loved pop music, so why not?
Leary: "It’s all pop music."
SPK, Gordon Lightfoot, whatever.
Leary: "Same thing. I say I hate music or whatever, but guys: it’s still fun to listen to Whitehouse."
The Butthole Surfers play Safe As Milk festival, April 21 – 13, Prestatyn, Wales
