I’d heard the stories before I saw the show in Hollywood, of course. How could I not? I was only twenty years old in spring 1991, but ever since I’d picked up Musician magazine three years prior for its Pink Floyd cover story, I was thoroughly bemused by its lead album review being about some band called Butthole Surfers, how could I not have heard the stories? Accounts regarding two wild drummers and projected films showing penis removal surgeries and the like had circulated. One friend told me earnestly he’d heard from some people in Texas, who had asked to attend some sort of gathering they were having, who said they were told by one of them: “You can’t come to that, there’s going to be RAW MEAT there!” The show I saw, I should add, did have various bizarre films and strange noises and an air of weird chaos and more besides, which a suitably crazed crowd loved in turn. The T-shirt I picked up featured a photo of a stillborn baby with a disfigured face.
The Buttholes have been formally on pause for a decade, enough time for even more legends to emerge, not to mention reissues and the inevitable documentary film struggling its way towards general release. Now, here’s the latest in an irregular series of live albums called Live At The Leather Fly. This release has caused some confusion during its formal announcement, with the supposed titular venue at which it was recorded actually being Gibby Haynes’ Platonic ideal of a nightclub. Those trying to find out more information on the venue have their work cut out for them as it doesn’t exist. Even if it’s not immediately clear where it was actually recorded, more prosaically, the when is pretty clearly a quieter public year for them, 1992, somewhere in between their turn on the first Lollapalooza tour in 1991 and the 1993 major label debut <I>Independent Worm Saloon</I>. Plenty of tracks from that album such as ‘Dust Devil’, ‘The Annoying Song’ and ‘Dancing Fool’, get early airings alongside already established favourites such as ‘Graveyard’ and ‘Human Cannonball’.
So with all that said, if you believed the myth – and there was plenty to establish this myth, including Haynes shooting off shotgun blanks on stage during the 1991 Lollapalooza tour – you’d expect this album to essentially be constantly punctuated with orgiastic noises of, let’s say, copulating animals of the non-human variety (then again…), an old white-coat exploitation film talking about the effects of stress on the human body and the sounds of the band members eating their instruments or raving about aliens while being on more drugs than most countries could safely put away. And perhaps the latter is true, I’m not here to measure it, but it obscures what the Buttholes were about, and why they were so great. If they just fucked around the whole time, who would really care?
Haynes, of course, was arguably a big reason why people tended to come to them with preconceptions, and his famed approach to singing – often semi-comprehensible and usually delivered courtesy of a loudspeaker then projected through a microphone, a drop-kicking of the old Rudy Vallee technique into a more squelching scenario all around – certainly defines things at many points. But it’s no less a studied approach than Mark E. Smith‘s way around meter and interjections, say, and various songs, ‘Gary Floyd’ perhaps most notably, are as clear as they need to be. Something like ‘Hey’, where his repetition of the title makes up a good chunk of the lyrics, is vibes just so, suiting the aural trip everyone’s on – and of course he starts ‘Bong Song’ by just coughing a lot.
Yet that song – and many others – also confirms something key too: this wasn’t a band whose musicians were stumbling over themselves, they were sharp on their own particular terms. No, it wasn’t power pop or anything and would never claim to be; their audible fondness for extremities and happy embrace of chaos as desired made that much clear. But these are songs that have, indeed, hooks, melodies, breakdowns and jams. They’re a band doing their damn thing, and at twenty one songs total they have the chance to prove that over and over again here. They can be pure ZZ Top-meets-Can charging down a freeway yelling their brains out when they want to be, they can be halfway to a friendly hoedown if you squint perhaps, and they can be halfway to Mars too. Usually simultaneously.
Paul Leary was of course a big reason why, being one of those guitarists who somehow sounds like two people at once near constantly; you almost swear that there’s both insane acid-fried solos and layers of queasy texture constantly intertwining. He’s almost the most stereotypically ‘Texas’ element of the whole shebang, a wild American twang/feedback interweave constantly in motion. Something like ‘Some Dispute Over T-Shirt Sales’ has riff heavy madness in full effect, feedback thick enough to lean against. At the same time, Jeff Pinkus and King Coffey are a sharp rhythm section throughout, able to do the quick gallop of something like ‘You Don’t Know Me’ and the slower, Led Zeppelin-nodding groove of songs like ‘Blind Man’ and almost earnestly psych jam of ‘Nee Nee’. If they can’t hold the songs together for Haynes and Leary’s flights of shaggy fancy, it simply doesn’t work, and they are clearly, constantly working, almost exultantly so.
An illustrative point might be the version of ‘P.S.Y.’ towards the end. Notably, nearly every other song on here is fairly crisp in length, between two to four minutes (okay, maybe it’s some kind of power pop), but ‘P.S.Y.’ had evolved into a lengthy jam well before it finally surfaced on Piouhgd in 1991. Haynes chants “Here we go!” a few times towards its start, and it has the feeling of a proper trip, speeding up its stirring chug of a groove and heading out into the beyond happily from there. There’s sudden tempo and mood changes, Haynes drops in with vocals without hesitation just so, sometimes with others in the band happily adding in, and without whatever visual madness might be on display, not to mention whatever you yourself might be on, it’s all something that aims for pleasure in performance in sync like a good band – a great band indeed – ought to.
Referenced artists
Led Zeppelin
30 Years On: Pixies’ Surfer Rosa Revisited
Can
Three Album Run: How Krautrock Never Bettered Can’s Tago Mago, Ege Bamyasi & Future Days
ZZ Top
Getting To Grips With Roky Erickson: A Dr Rock Interview
Mark E. Smith
Prole Art Threat: Cynthia Cruz On The Melancholia Of Class
So sure, let all the stories circulate and may they forever do, honestly; ‘print the legend’ is not a bad dictum. But Live At The Leather Fly is a fine new document demonstrating how a group can blow your mind several ways to Sunday while never losing sight of why they were doing everything to start with, no matter how many explosions, onstage fires, naked people and car crash victim movies or more were at play. In the words of Haynes, “YEARRRRGH.”
