So when Leary saw a tall, crazed-looking guy walking around campus with spiked hair and a black leather jacket, he knew he’d found a kindred spirit. “Gibby was the weirdest guy at school, so we fell in real well,” said Leary. “We both liked horrible music.”
Leary and Haynes published a fanzine called Strange V.D., which featured the most horrendous medical photographs they could find accompained by captions describing fictitious diseases like “taco leg” and “pine cone butt.” Haynes surreptitiously printed the zine on the photocopier at work but got caught by one of Peat, Marwick’s partners after he accidentally left a photograph of some mutilated genitalia in the machine. Shortly thereafter he left the firm.
Haynes headed to Southern California in the summer of ’81; having dropped out a semester short of an MBA, Leary joined him in Venice and together they eked out a living making Lee Harvey Oswald T-shirts, pillowcases, and bedspreads and selling them on the beach. “Then we just decided that was too much work and thought maybe music would be easier,” said Leary. “So we started a band.”
They returned to San Antonio and began playing dire art noise in various underground venues, including their debut at an art gallery. “It was more of a performance piece than a musical piece,” Leary said. “It involved lots of stuffed dummies and toasters and Big Mac hamburgers and things. We played music while Gibby ran around with a piece of meat hanging out of his mouth.”
The band changed its name for every show—at various times they were called: Ashtray Babyheads, Nine Inch Worm Makes Own Food, Vodka Family Winstons, and the Inalienable Right to Eat Fred Astaire’s Asshole—until one fateful night. “We had a song called ‘Butthole Surfers,’ ” says Leary, “and the guy who was introducing us that night forgot what we were called and so he just called us the Butthole Surfers.” Since that was their first paying show, they decided to let the name stick. At the time—and for years afterward—one could barely utter the band’s name in public, and their name was often abbreviated in advertisements as “B.H. Surfers.”
San Antonio didn’t exactly warm to the Butthole Surfers. “They hated us there” was Haynes’s succinct assessment, and besides, the town was not exactly a rock mecca, so they sold all their possessions, bought a cranky old van, and went back out to California in the summer of ’82 with drummer Quinn Matthews and his bassist brother Scott. Almost immediately they got on a bill with the Minutemen, the Descendents, and fellow Texans the Big Boys at the Grandia Room and cut a short demo tape with Spot. But L.A. was crawling with musicians trying to make it, and though most of them were far from well-off, they still had more money than the Butthole Surfers—according to Leary, the penurious band was reduced to scavenging from garbage cans for their dinner.
Still, Leary and Haynes somehow managed to land a show at the Tool and Die in San Francisco. But on the way up from L.A. their van began breaking down; by the time they reached the Bay Bridge into San Francisco, the engine was about to die. They barely made it up the slight incline to the crest of the bridge, coasted down the rest, took the first exit simply to get out of traffic, then limped into town until the engine finally gave out completely—right in front of the Tool and Die. They had just begun unloading their equipment when a woman came out of the club and asked what they were doing. “We told her and she said we weren’t playing,” Leary says. “And we cried.”
It’s hard to imagine this band of reprobates weeping, but the situation was desperate. “We were hoping to get like twenty-five bucks or something,” Leary says. “We didn’t even have gas money to get out or anything.” The club eventually took pity on the band and let them play three songs. Luckily, Jello Biafra happened to catch the set and invited the Butthole Surfers to open for the Dead Kennedys at the Whiskey in L.A. on the Fourth of July.
It was a crucial break. The Buttholes schmoozed Biafra assiduously, with Leary’s and Haynes’s formidable sweet-talking skills very much in play. Knowing Biafra’s fascination with obscure regional scenes, they enthusiastically bent his ear about countless Texas bands—none of which really existed. The Buttholes fit in perfectly with Alternative Tentacles’ cavalcade of punky weirdos, and Biafra offered to release a record by the band.
They found a place in a grimy, industrial neighborhood at the south end of downtown L.A. Leary’s job at a lumberyard lasted only a couple of weeks—“Everybody I was working with was missing hands and fingers and stuff,” he says. “I just didn’t want to do that.” Desperate to avoid a day job, Scott Matthews decided he would try to get on the game show The Joker’s Wild instead, but after trying for a week or so, he gave up and headed back to Texas along with his brother.
Haynes and Leary soon retreated back to San Antonio (“with our legs between our tails,” quips Leary). The band almost immediately re-formed in order to open for the Dead Kennedys in Dallas, but later that night Haynes broke his hand punching Scott Matthews’s face. The Matthews brothers soon elected to leave the Butthole Surfers.
King Coffey’s band the Hugh Beaumont Experience had been on the bill that night, and he and the Buttholes hit it off. “We kind of shared a similar aesthetic,” says Coffey, “as far as being punk rockers but also being into drugs and arty kind of aspects of music.”
As it happened, the Hugh Beaumont Experience was about to break up. According to Coffey, a couple of the members found themselves in legal difficulty and left town. So the Buttholes needed a drummer and Coffey needed a band. Neither situation lasted long.
Haynes and Leary liked Coffey’s style—he used just two drums and a cymbal and played standing up. “I would just be jumping up and flailing at the drums like this trained monkey,” says Coffey. “I guess it was hysterical to look at.” In turn, Coffey looked up to the slightly older Haynes and Leary. “They had gone to college and studied art,” says Coffey, “and they obviously were really intelligent.” He joined in the spring of ’83.
The band had already started recording their first EP at a San Antonio studio called the Boss. Haynes and Leary knew the owner, who not only let them sleep there at night, but also let them record at bargain-basement rates.
Coffey was the last of several drummers on the recordings and appears on “Barbecue Pope” and the Beefheartian rockabilly of “Wichita Cathedral.” The opening number is “The Shah Sleeps in Lee Harvey’s Grave,” basically frenetic bursts of hardcore noise alternating with Haynes shouting, in his best Yosemite Sam voice, couplets such as “There’s a time to shit and a time for God / The last shit I took was pretty fuckin’ odd!” Elsewhere are walloping, almost mechanistic grooves topped by Haynes’s hysterical shrieking; songs like “The Revenge of Anus Presley” are a somehow blissful wallow in an absurdist, scatological mire.
In fact, the absurdist, scatological part was a major aspect of the band’s aesthetic, especially Haynes’s, as a 1986 interview in Brave Ear fanzine so clearly revealed:
GIBBY: Remember the perfect pencil?
PAUL: One time he took a shit in the ladies room and he wanted someone to go look at it. He tells me someone drew a pencil in the toilet and I had to check it out.
GIBBY: I told him it had to be seen to be believed. A perfectly drawn pencil in the toilet. I mean, how do you get someone to look in the toilet? You got to tell them there’s a drawing of a perfect pencil on the bottom.
The resulting Brown Reason to Live EP was released on Alternative Tentacles. The notes listed no musicians, and all the band’s bio contained were enigmatic jokes like “As their sound developed, so did their ability to judge between right and wrong.”
All their recording had been done on credit and the band had run up quite a bill, but Alternative Tentacles didn’t have enough money to pay to get the tapes for the band’s first album out of hock. So as a stopgap they released the cheaply recorded Live PCPPEP EP (a classic Butthole Surfers title: part potty joke and part drug reference)—mostly concert versions of material on the first EP—on Alternative Tentacles. Although they weren’t very pleased with the record, the band liv
ed off the exceedingly modest royalties for the better part of a year.
The band now included bassist Bill Jolly and soon added another member. Figuring they could beef up the sound with another drummer, they drafted Austin art-punk musician Teresa Taylor (aka Teresa Nervosa) that fall. She and Coffey bore a strong resemblance, and they often told interviewers they were brother and sister. Visually and sonically, the effect was striking. “It did sound a world better to have communal drums playing,” Coffey says, “like a tribe.”
In the early Eighties, a sprawling underground tape-swapping network had sprung up as home-duplicated tapes of hardcore bands criss-crossed the country through the mails. The Butthole Surfers’ demo was a popular item. After a Dead Kennedys/Necros show in Detroit, Jello Biafra had stayed at the home of Necros bassist Corey Rusk and given him a Butthole Surfers tape. Rusk loved the tape, but it soon got stolen. Some time later, Rusk’s friend Ian MacKaye stayed over while on tour with Minor Threat. MacKaye had a tape of some weird new band called… the Butthole Surfers. Rusk eagerly made a copy.
The Necros were probably the only punk band in Toledo, Ohio, in the late Seventies. They had hooked up with Tesco Vee and Dave Stimson, who published Touch & Go fanzine in Lansing, Michigan. Stimson and Vee liked the band so much that they created Touch & Go Rekords just to release a Necros four-song 45 in the spring of ’81. “We didn’t even know what a record label was,” says Rusk. “It was just something you put on the piece of paper on the vinyl.”
They pressed a hundred copies of the Necros record (titles included “Sex Drive” and “Police Brutality”) and sold fifty, mostly to friends, when Systematic Distribution in California called. They wanted seventy-five copies. “It blew our mind, like, who are these people that would want seventy-five of these and we don’t even know who they are?” says Rusk. The Necros began touring the country, opening for bands like D.O.A., the Misfits, and Black Flag.
Rusk was so excited about the prospect of recording that he started working at a lumberyard his senior year of high school, loading boards on trucks to finance a Necros EP produced by MacKaye later in ’81. Touch & Go started releasing records by tasteless provocateurs the Meatmen and noisy hardcore outfit Negative Approach, with Rusk doing sales and distribution while the more outgoing Vee did the promotional work.
Then Vee moved to D.C. in late 1982, leaving the operation to Rusk and Lisa Pfahler, Rusk’s girlfriend. The couple ran a strictly bare-bones operation, doing everything themselves just to save money. Rusk even saved up for a reel-to-reel four-track recorder and installed it in his grandmother’s basement so he could record bands himself. “We worked just nonstop,” says Rusk. “You couldn’t have done it if you didn’t love it. It was a twenty-four-hour-a-day job.”
In January ’84 Pfahler and Rusk moved into a house in a down-at-heel neighborhood of Detroit, next door to a Chrysler factory. They ran the label there until the fall of ’85, when they moved to an apartment above an all-ages club on Detroit’s bustling Michigan Avenue called the Graystone, which they ran.
The Graystone was a logical step: since he was seventeen, Rusk had been promoting all-ages shows by countless bands, including the Minutemen, Black Flag, and the Misfits, and even though he delivered pizzas for a living, he never took a penny for his efforts—all he asked was to get reimbursed for expenses. It was a great deal for the bands—where the local rock club might have paid the bands about $300, they might walk away with nearly triple that at one of Rusk’s shows.
Partly because they worked without contracts and partly because they felt the low-powered label couldn’t do bigger bands justice, Touch & Go had released only records by friends. But in 1984, after various key distributors picked up several releases, Rusk and Pfahler started to think about approaching bands they didn’t know personally. The first was explosive Milwaukee band Die Kreuzen. “We got to know them a little bit at a time from playing with them and talking to them and felt comfortable that they were people we could be friends with,” says Rusk. Rusk and Pfahler also dreamed that someday maybe they would put out a record by the Butthole Surfers. And then it happened.
“One day, it was the summer of ’84, they called us out of the blue,” says Rusk. “I remember being in bed, it was in the morning and Lisa and I were still in bed and the phone rang and it was Gibby from the Buttholes and we were both peeing our pants.”
Alternative Tentacles didn’t have enough money to release the band’s first album, so the Buttholes were interested in talking with Touch & Go even though the label was far from established. But Pfahler and Rusk, who were now married, wanted to meet the band first and see them play so that, as they had with Die Kreuzen, they could see if they could become friends before they became business partners. The Rusks soon set up a show for the Butthole Surfers at a tiny club in nearby Hamtramck and invited the band to stay at their home.
At the time, Haynes and Leary were crashing at friends’ places or at the Boss. The whole band was washing dishes for a living. Then they all decided they were better musicians than dishwashers, so why not make Rusk’s show the first stop of a national tour?
But their only vehicle was their new bassist (Bill Jolly had left, having “forgotten he was in the band,” says Leary) Terence Smart’s compact ’71 Chevy Nova. Even pulling a U-Haul trailer, how to fit five people, two drum sets, two amps, two guitars, two Radio Shack strobe lights, and a female pit bull named Mark Farner of Grand Funk Railroad? “Well, you saw out the barrier between the trunk and backseat,” Leary explains. “You take out the backseat. And you cut a shape out of a piece of plywood to fit in so that three people can lay down horizontally with the dog. It was two people in the front seat and three people and the dog in the trunk.”
They stowed their few possessions in a friend’s garage, painted the Nova in wild fluorescent colors, with “Ladykiller” scrawled on the sides and “69” on the hood and trunk, installed a roll of barbed wire on the front bumper, painted teeth onto the front grille, and took off for Detroit. “Screw you, Texas,” Coffey remembers thinking, “we’re never coming home again.” It was the beginning of a two-year odyssey.
For five freaks traveling through deepest, darkest redneck country, the trip up to Michigan, as Coffey puts it with some understatement, “was a real eye-opener.”
On the way, Taylor and Coffey walked into a fast-food joint outside Dallas. Coffey had a nose ring and an outgrown purple mohawk that was lapsing into dreads; these were the days before MTV had spread the punk look far and wide, and virtually everyone in the restaurant stared at the pair like they were from Mars.
No sooner had they placed their orders than two rednecks walked up to Coffey. One of them said simply, “I don’t like it,” and punched Coffey in the head, knocking him to the floor. The two men laughed as they walked away. “And everybody in the restaurant was just looking at me like, ‘Yeah, you got what you deserved,’ ” says Coffey. “All I did was order a filet of fish and fries.”
After that they made sure to travel in a group if possible. Still, the band started looking freakier and freakier—Leary began sporting a sideways mohawk done in cornrows and dyed hot pink; Taylor let her hair grow into dreads, although she eventually shaved off all the dreads except for three that popped out of her head at random spots, and those were dyed brilliant red. “Our bass player then basically did his hair like Bozo the Clown,” says Coffey. “And Gibby had a fucked-up geometric haircut that was just… fucked up.”
At the Hamtramck show, Rusk decided the Butthole Surfers were one of the most amazing bands he’d ever seen. “They were just outrageous,” Rusk recalls. “They were just so over the top. With the two stand-up drummers, they all just seemed like they were out of their minds.” Rusk even took a shine to Mark Farner, and the Butthole Surfers had a new label.
For the Butthole Surfers, Touch & Go wasn’t only a label. “If we needed a loan, [they] would wire it to us,” said Coffey. “If we needed to go into a studio, Touch & Go would write us a check. It was all
recoupable, but Corey and Lisa were always there for us.” On one tour the state police confiscated the band’s van in Massachusetts and deposited the band, their equipment, and Mark Farner in a parking lot by the side of the highway. They called the Rusks, who happened to be in New York, and the couple drove all the way up to Boston to pick up the band and take them to the next show.
And as they spent the next couple of years roaming the country in search of sex, drugs, and shows, the Rusks’ place was home base, where they’d sometimes stay for weeks while Haynes plotted the next leg of the tour.
The best Haynes could do was line up perhaps a week of shows, a month in advance. So the band was never sure what the next few months would hold. They’d simply aim for parts of the country where they hadn’t been and hope for the best. “We’d pull into a town,” Haynes said, “and we didn’t know where the clubs were. We’d literally pull over somebody and say, ‘Hey, where do the queers hang out? Where’s the college area?’ ”
They lived like gypsies, blowing into town, taking up residence, and (barely) scratching out an existence. “When I think about it now, it’s so laughable because we were literally living from hand to mouth,” says Coffey. “We had this really cocky attitude, like, ‘We’re the best band in the world and every other band is so inferior so ha-ha-ha, fuck you, world.’ But looking back on it, we were punks living out of a van.”
The band usually found places to play, but sometimes their outrageous stage show would burn some bridges. “It seems like everywhere we play we insult people and make them regret having us there,” Haynes told Forced Exposure.
“Takes ’em about six months to forget about it,” Leary chipped in. “Then we come back.”
“Where do they get most pissed off?” the interviewer asked.
“Between the ears,” replied Haynes.
On their first trip to New York, they played the East Village’s notorious Pyramid club. The club’s gender-bending regulars stayed out of the small performance space in the back, but a small crowd of underground cognoscenti who gathered for the show saw something they’ll never forget. Once the band had cranked up a surging, demonic whirlwind, a scantily clad Haynes skulked onto the stage with his back to the audience, then slowly turned around to reveal his face, which was distorted by a transparent plastic mask of a woman’s face. It was an unbelievably simple trick, but the effect was horrific. His hair was full of clothespins, which he shook off in an impressive spray.
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