Recent obituaries of the successful festival promoter Vince Power were right to highlight his tendency to make decisions based on instinct rather than careful financial forecasting. After being founded in 1971, the Reading Festival rode successive waves of heavy and progressive rock, later successfully negotiating punk and new wave as well, before an attempt to steer it towards a more mainstream audience in 1988 backfired and names such as Bonnie Tyler, Meat Loaf and Starship failed to attract enough punters. Power, fresh from the proving ground of his London venue, the Mean Fiddler, was drafted in to turn things around and the 1989 line-up assembled on his watch – and the three that followed – remains a salutary lesson in how it is actually possible to have the best of both worlds when it comes to introducing large crowds to relatively wild and untested innovations in pop and rock while also giving them exactly what they want.
I’m sure some people in attendance must have hated it but a very unscientific, fifteen-minute trawl of social media has just revealed nothing but good times being remembered by people who bought tickets to see Sugarcubes, the Wedding Present, the Mission, the Pogues and New Order, who then left having had their DNA rearranged by Spacemen 3, Loop, Tackhead>>, My Bloody Valentine, Swans and World Domination Enterprises. (And all of this happened on the main stage: no one seems to have any recollection of the dull, NME-approved schmindie infesting the Mean Fiddler tent.) All festivals are different and those differences become ever more magnified as you approach the granular, but the big picture is obvious: quit the binary thinking, create a gulf between the bean counters and the curators, stop treating artificial systems as if they are “natural”… Once we do this, friends, the gates to the Elysian Fields will swing open.
Rose tinted glasses about Reading 89 and teenage drunkenness notwithstanding, the most thrilling outlier on a bill already stuffed with glorious outliers, was the Butthole Surfers. My friends and I only had ludicrous daydream notions about what might happen. We’d heard that singer Gibby Haynes was going to set himself on fire. We’d heard he would have a shotgun on stage. We’d heard he’d hang himself with a guitar string. The reality of a fairly regular looking band, for the 1980s, sluicing out tar-thick space echo and loop addled vocals, then the sheet metal hardcore of ‘The Shah Sleeps In Lee Harvey’s Grave’ before destroying their instruments, all within five minutes of walking out on stage, was far more thrilling than any torrid prognostication could have prepared us for. And after the baptism, the binary-dismantling duality was proved by a beautiful, 15-minute long version of ‘To Parter’ segueing into the as yet unreleased ‘P.S.Y.’
The Butthole Surfers were still successfully resisting reterritorialisation at the end of the 1980s. The fight between deeply ingrained classic rock, rock & roll and punk impulses and a genuinely cavalier spirit of experimentation and an open ear for the full width and depth of underground music of the decade was the dynamo still powering them at this point, and it remained a thrilling battle to observe a few more years into the 90s as well. That they eventually started ceding more and more ground to antediluvian rockist tendencies – and in the process releasing music that was often resolutely mediocre by their own very high standards – and getting bogged down in legal action was as depressing as it was understandable. After a decade and a half of such profound extremity the hankering after a hit single and some money in the bank probably didn’t seem that unreasonable at the time, although it’s a feeling that’s harder to connect with now when sifting through the evidence of their later MTV-friendly trip hop, rockabilly and alt rock videos.
That the output of the Butthole Surfers during their white hot first decade, now gets reduced to a breathless litany of shocking signifiers – LSD! Elective mutes! Sex on stage! Penile surgery films! Satan! Satan! Satan! – is understandable given how consistently and bewilderingly and radically heterodox their music was. The main job tackled by Matador’s first tranche of fine sounding remastered reissues – Live PCPPEP, Psychic… Powerless… Another Man’s Sac, Rembrandt Pussyhorse with more from the 84 to 92 date range to follow later this year – is to draw attention to just how sui generis the Buttholes were and to remind us that, somewhere, underneath it all, there were some serious minds at work.
It looks like Matador may be reissuing the self-titled Alternative Tentacles debut later in this series (along with the astounding Locust Abortion Technician) but many of the tracks are repeated on the Live PCPPEP anyway. And for a band who are rarely written about without an unexamined mention of 13th Floor Elevators or Grateful Dead, from the get go, it’s surprising how much they sound like post punks, RIO-types or no wavers rather than purveyors of acid rock or loose stoner jams. This can be heard specifically in the art rock/jazz skronk of ‘Dance Of The Cobras’ and the saxed-up amphetamine swing of ‘Cowboy Bob’. But just how serious the Buttholes were can be heard on this stupendous version of ‘Something’, as it clearly takes presence of mind to make music that sounds this unhinged. That said if you want a version of ‘The Shah Sleeps In Lee Harvey’s Grave’ that will inspire you to smash your belongings up, maybe hold on for the reissue of Brown Reason To Live.
It’s clearer on Psychic… Powerless… that beyond a ramshackle hardcore punk chassis with gonzo vocalisations there are more unusual influences at play: has any other bunch of Texan long hairs ever sounded more in tune with Bauhaus at their most experimental, more in tune with the classic Hex Enduction Hour line-up of the Fall, more in tune with the Pop Group, more in tune with the Residents? Admittedly, the artier end of European post punk isn’t the first thing that comes to mind during the barrage of vomiting, burping, farting and animal noises, vying for prominence with Gibby Haynes, vocal setting jammed on redneck in Hell mode, during ‘Lady Sniff’. But this is only the crassest example of their growing interest in tape experimentation on the album; its scatalogical, PTSD-summoning imagining of the Magic Band trapped on the set of Texas Chainsaw Massacre is only one tone in a rainbow of retina-searing colours. It’s much easier elsewhere to look past the overwhelming (but nearly always evenly balanced) duel between Paul Leary’s churning guitar magic and Haynes’ demonic range of voices, and on ‘Cherub’ more than any other track here it’s easier to discern the favours that the dual drummer line-up of Teresa Nervosa and King Coffey were beginning to do in anchoring the foot of the tornado.
Not all that noticeably, ‘Negro Observer’, the most traditional sounding song musically on the album, has been quietly dropped, seemingly answering a question that surfaces on message boards from time to time, namely, ‘Is this song racist?’ Or perhaps, more fairly, ‘Can this track be reasonably interpreted as being racist?’ You don’t hear any complaints from tQ for what it’s worth, as some of the “rip off the Band Aid and let the id breathe; we’re only needling your liberal beliefs” aspects of post hardcore/noise rock culture have aged less well than others.
The Butthole Surfers truly hit their stride however on the deeply weird and lysergic Rembrandt Pussyhorse, an album for the ages. The country death song ‘Creep In The Cellar’ momentarily summons the intense presence of Nick Cave, gathering to itself unusual levels of gothic singalongability, augmented with some straightforwardly lovely piano (provided by Bob O’Neill, the owner of the Austin, TX, studio in which it was recorded, who waived the hire charge in return for a spot on the record). But all of this is tempered to a certain degree by an unhinged violin solo that only bears a fleeting resemblance to the actual song. The story goes that the cash strapped band bought a secondhand 16 track tape on which to record the session and its previous owners were a Texan country & western band who’d had it confiscated when they failed to pay a studio bill. The atemporal fiddle work left on the tape was an unexpected gift to the Buttholes; their decision to leave it on the track and foreground it, a masterstroke.
One of the big differences with this album – alongside a much clearer mix and a more systematic approach to studio experimentation – is that Haynes and Leary have now started acting in accord rather than jockeying for position, in order to serve the needs of the track. The space created allows the sonic links to post punk, (and now krautrock as well) to stand out clearly, with the punishing, airless, chitinous drums bolstered by gated reverb being a nod to PiL’s Flowers Of Romance, over work by Phil Collins or Peter Gabriel (one might fairly assume).
We’re (temporarily) free of juvenile humour and even the stuff that might have seemed goofy in the studio, such as a cover of The Guess Who’s ‘American Woman’, is more funny peculiar than funny ha ha. Gibby Haynes’ lysergic lyrical connectivity hits an occasionally beautiful and poetic stride on ‘Sea Ferring’ and chimes deeply with other unusual moments on the album that have little or nothing to do with the popular perception of this band… the sombre organ piece ‘Strangers Die Every Day’, the rattling and rabid hypnopompic maze of ‘Mark Says Alright’, the Doors-ian swagger of ‘Hall Of Whirling Knives’… There isn’t a misstep on this slick, fiercely inventive, cool as fuck, horizon expanding, genuinely disconcerting and utterly unique album. The bravura flourish of a band who dared to play every Oblique Strategy card simultaneously.
