Our Band Could Be Your Life

by Michael Azerrad

  “Gibby had star status,” says photographer Michael Macioce, who saw that show and soon befriended the band. “All of us that were around him were aware that this was a person who unfolded like a flower—but in his case, the flower that unfolded turned into this… creature.”

  In New York they met kindred spirits like Sonic Youth and Live Skull—arty bands who played the punk circuit because there was nowhere else to go. “We kind of understood each other,” said Thurston Moore, “because we were doing something apart from the two-second hardcore song.”

  The few years they had on the hardcore kids made all the difference, and it was tremendously exciting to come across a band that was on the same wavelength. “The Butthole Surfers were the hugest band in the world to us and a lot of people,” says Moore. “When the Butthole Surfers came to town, it was this huge event. People don’t realize that—a lot of what was going on in the indie scene, a lot of it’s been dissipated just by the way things have developed. You don’t really remember how heavy certain things were.”

  But there was a big difference between the cool, self-possessed New Yorkers and the wild-eyed Texans. “Whatever insanities we had, we tried to get out onstage,” says Lee Ranaldo. “When we came offstage, we weren’t drug-addled freaks. And those guys were. Onstage or offstage, there was no dividing line between the two.”

  The previous year the band had made a very important New York connection via Mark Kramer, bassist for the mega-bizarro East Village band Shockabilly. Kramer had been on tour with Shockabilly when he happened to use the dressing room toilet in a Dallas nightclub and began to laugh out loud.

  THE BUTTHOLE SURFERS IN A TOUCH & GO PROMO PHOTO. FRONT ROW, LEFT TO RIGHT: TERESA TAYLOR, MARK FARNER OF GRAND FUNK RAILROAD, KING COFFEY. BACK ROW, LEFT TO RIGHT: JEFF PINKUS, GIBBY HAYNES, PAUL LEARY.

  ANTHONY GERMAN

  “What the fuck is so funny in there?” demanded the club’s manager, who had dropped by to leave the band some beer and pretzels.

  “Well, there’s some graffiti in here that says BUTTHOLE SURFERS: WE SHIT WHERE WE WANT,” Kramer replied. (The Buttholes knew their rock history: the graffito was a paraphrase of something Mick Jagger had said when the Stones were busted in the mid-Sixties for urinating behind a gas station.)

  The Butthole Surfers, the manager explained, were a bunch of assholes who were a rock band.

  Kramer was intrigued. A few nights later Shockabilly played Austin. “And, sure enough, I’m introduced to a guy named Paul, who I’m told is the guitarist for this band of assholes,” Kramer recalls. Leary was clearly in sweet-talking mode: “He says he washes dishes at some foul dive in a bad part of town,” Kramer continues, “and that the only decent thing about it is that he can listen to anything he wants to listen to in the kitchen, and he always listens to Shockabilly.”

  Early the next year Shockabilly did a brief tour of Texas. The opening act arrived in a desecrated little Nova, “a car that seemed to have just been dragged ass-first out of some junkyard,” in Kramer’s words, containing “five acid-drenched band members” and a pit bull. “In the eyes of this dog,” Kramer says, “rests all the peace and serenity I would be deprived of while crossing Texas with these psychopaths.”

  The next time Kramer met up with the Buttholes, they were all crashing at the East Village apartment of inveterate indie scenester and former Touch & Go employee Terry Tolkin. “They had no money whatsoever, not a single penny amongst them,” Kramer recalls. “Gibby was a wholly unmanageable drunk twenty-four hours a day, awake or asleep. Coupled with the enormous amounts of acid he was taking, I was constantly in fear for my life, his life, and the life of anyone we passed on the street who was unlucky enough to cast him a sidelong glance. I imagined myself his champion—his protector in the big city. I imagined that he couldn’t possibly get out alive without my stewardship. But these kinds of people never get a scratch. He’d have walked away from a fifty-car pileup, I’m sure. He was untouchable. Communicating with him was not unlike being trapped in a very small cage with a gorilla.

  “ ‘What???!!! What the FUCK did you just say to me? You fucking homosexual!!! You goddamned dick smoker!!! I heard you!!!! I heard what you said!!! I will fucking cut your throat!!!! Speak, asshole! SPEAK NOW or be dead in ten seconds!!!!’

  “ ‘I didn’t say anything, Gibby. I swear it. I mean, I did say something maybe five or ten minutes ago, but you didn’t seem to hear me, so I—’

  “ ‘What???!!! Don’t you ever fucking call me that again or I’ll skull-fuck you with my tiny Texas cock!!! OK??? OK!!!??? Do you fucking understand me now, you little New York City motherfucker?!!! Or do you wanna die right here and now with your fucking face nailed to my lap??!!’ ”

  The rest of the band was no less curious. “Looking into King’s eyes, I spied what seemed like a streak of intelligence, but somehow, for some reason, he could barely speak,” Kramer recalls. “Teresa was equally mute in both words and facial expressions. Yet these two came alive onstage, side by side, drumming on their feet with a musical precision that, for me, redefined the term ‘reckless.’

  “I was constantly in awe of what was happening around me,” Kramer says. “I loved these people. They were, well, family.”

  Every night they parked the Nova, now covered in graffiti, on a dingy street on the Lower East Side, where it acquired a fresh layer of graffiti by morning. Eventually they got rid of it and bought a van from what Leary calls “a gypsy” for a very hard-earned $900. Naturally, it was a lemon—the engine ran on only two cylinders and gobbled gallons of oil.

  Now almost penniless, the band practically starved between gigs. Coffey recalls Smart reaching the breaking point one day and suddenly screaming, “I NEED MILK! MY BODY NEEDS MILK!” They explained to him that they only had $5, which had to last for another couple of days—milk for one person was out of the question. “And then he said—quite sanely—‘Why are you doing this? This is insane!’ ” says Coffey, who replied, “I’m doing it, Terence, because I’d much rather be in New York, playing in a kick-ass band full-time than washing somebody’s dishes for a living. This is what I want to do. This is it.”

  But it wasn’t easy. “I remember Gibby getting the flu, and six months later he’s still got the flu,” Leary says. “That kind of stuff. It was bad.

  “I can’t believe we lived through that,” Leary continues. “Man, I’ll tell you what, I’m glad to be alive—it kind of seemed like we were in a constant state of suicide the whole time. It wasn’t like, ‘Gee, we’re going to become successful and make a lot of money.’ It was more like, ‘Man, we’re going to have a lot of fun before the end comes and we all hit the can.’ I didn’t think there was any way out.”

  They were eventually reduced to scavenging for cans and bottles so they could turn them in for the nickel deposit. It was quite a come-down for Haynes, who was all set to be a successful accountant just a couple of years before. One day some prankster ran up and kicked all the bottles out of Haynes’s bag. “Gibby and the rest of us were on our knees, scurrying to collect the bottles again,” says Coffey. “And I looked in Gibby’s eyes, and he was about to cry. It was just so pitiful—this big, strong guy like Gibby being reduced to tears because here he was on the streets of New York, groveling for bottles. But good god, we needed those bottles.”

  Touch & Go released the band’s debut album the final week of 1984. Haynes had wanted to call it Psychic… Powerless and Leary had wanted Another Man’s Sac. So they compromised and simply put the two phrases together: Psychic… Powerless… Another Man’s Sac. The title is nonsensical, and yet it does conjure up something. “Yeah,” Leary agrees in his Texas drawl, “and it’s kind of bad.”

  Like the best Butthole Surfers albums, Psychic… Powerless… makes it impossible to concentrate on anything else while the record is playing. The troglodytic rhythms crowned with tortured guitar, various rude noises, and Haynes’s horrific vocals are a grotesque echo of the mediocre music of the Seventies and early Eighties. �
�We… come from the same place of just hating what we heard, and wanting to make something that was even worse that people would hate even more and somehow get paid for it,” said Leary. “That’s what we were trying to do; make the worst records possible.”

  This approach extended even to the album cover: a pair of photos from an old book about skin diseases overlaid with crude fluorescent pink, orange, and green doodling courtesy of Haynes and Leary; one horribly disfigured face is made to throw a skeleton-handed peace sign.

  The influences were clear: the cacophonous jungle howl of the Birthday Party; the Fall’s caustic chants; Pere Ubu’s art-punk; the synthetic mystique of the Residents; the eerie, bleak side of Public Image, Ltd.; and the turgid, rambling assault of Flipper. But Psychic… Powerless… found the band synthesizing it all into a singular, relentlessly squalid vision. On the lumbering “Lady Sniff,” Leary’s elemental twang momentarily parts for the sounds of farting, vomiting, bird calls, belching, Japanese television, and hawking up phlegm. “Pass me some of that dumb-ass over there, hey boy, I tell ya,” Haynes hollers, redneck-style.

  Haynes had taken to making his stage entrance with a dummy duct-taped to his body so it looked like he was dancing with it—then he’d tear it off and start attacking it. He’d sing through a megaphone, an idea that was stolen ad infinitum over the next ten years. Often he’d wear several layers of dresses and peel them off one by one until by the end of the show he was down to his skivvies. He’d stuff his clothes with condoms filled with fake blood so that when he’d fall on the floor, he’d turn into a gory mess; he’d hurl reams of photocopied pictures of cockroaches into the crowd; he’d pour a flammable liquid into an inverted cymbal, then whack it, sending up a geyser of flame; he’d usually set his hands on fire, too. There was the time he made his entrance through a hole he’d cut in a mattress covered in fake blood. Often the whole band would rip apart stuffed animals onstage, like a frenzied pack of psychotic cannibals. “It was just madness,” says Coffey. “It was just the more the merrier.”

  Once the band began to make a little more money, the special effects began to get fancier. It all began when Coffey joined the band—he had put a strobe light under his clear plastic drum, lighting it up brilliantly. A few months later the band met a guy with a bunch of stolen strobes, and they got several thousand dollars’ worth of lights for a few hundred bucks. The show snowballed from there. “It just seemed like what we wanted out of a rock show ourselves, so we were willing to try to deliver it,” says Leary.

  The visual chatter and tandem thunder of two stand-up drummers flailing at their instruments added yet more to the chaos, and the strobe lights flashed almost constantly, giving the proceedings the air of a traumatic nightmare. “It was just a mind-fuck of a show,” says Coffey. “In some ways it was like the Mickey Rooney–Judy Garland movies, like, ‘Hey, kids, let’s put on a show!’ But that got horribly confused in the land of psychedelics and punk rock.”

  The Buttholes were hardcore, but in the original sense—being hardcore wasn’t necessarily about playing really fast or having militant lyrics. It was about being extreme. “We’d try anything to get attention,” says Coffey. “But it wasn’t attention for attention’s sake; we were trying anything that would be as much of a spectacle as humanly possible.” The stage show grew gradually until one day they realized that all the props and special effects took up more space in the van than the instruments.

  They had recorded most of a second album in San Antonio before they set off for Detroit and parts unknown, then carried the tapes around the country for months, recording and mixing tracks whenever they could scrape up enough money.

  The back cover was a photograph of the straining crotch of a female bodybuilder in a thong bikini, her inner thighs bulging with veins. As usual, the artwork bore no credits or pictures of the band, which they felt would only distract from the purity of the package. The album’s title—Rembrandt Pussyhorse—stemmed from Haynes’s and Leary’s penchant for stringing together three-word nonsense phrases (a device they’d use on at least two more records). Even the rest of the band didn’t understand what it meant. “It’s a Gib thing,” Coffey says with a shrug.

  The opening dirge “Creep in the Cellar” is seemingly a paean from Haynes to his own darkest impulses. “There’s a creep in the cellar that I’m gonna let in,” Haynes intones in slow-motion singsong, “and he really freaks me out when he peels off his skin.” During playback of the song’s rough tracks, the sound of a backward fiddle appeared out of nowhere. It turned out that a country band hadn’t paid their bill, so the studio simply recorded over their multitrack tape. Amazingly, the manic sawing fit the Buttholes track perfectly. “By the time we figured out how to turn it off,” says Leary, “we didn’t want to turn it off.”

  With goth, industrial, and even techno overtones, the music was not punk in the already established sense; several songs eschewed punk’s typical 4/4 time and were in 6/8, like sea chanteys from hell. The tracks were crammed with nearly subliminal sounds and low-rent versions of the high-tech digital effects—stuttering quasi-scratch tricks; huge, booming drums; pitch shifting—then ruling the Top 40 and dance charts. A prime example was the bizarre, almost cubist deconstruction of the Guess Who’s 1970 hit “American Woman,” a song that managed to be both misogynistic and antiwar.

  Haynes barely sang at all, preferring instead to wail, mutter, howl, and shriek, funneling it through various electronic devices. When an interviewer asked why Haynes electronically manipulated his voice so much, Leary explained, “It’s just because, y’know, he’s got knobs and he can do it. It’s like, why does a dog lick its balls?” Haynes added, with alarming plausibility, “It’s probably just my need to express my multiple personalities.”

  There was a very creepy Gibby on “Perry”—the Perry Mason theme recast as nightmarish carnival music while Haynes, ad-libbing in a repulsively haughty English accent, encapsulates the band’s raison d’être: “It’s about coming of age, it’s about learning how to do it, it’s about learning how to experience things the way they ought to be experienced, it’s about growing up, it’s about licking the shit off the floors, it’s about doing the things that you ought to do. It’s about being a Butthole Surfer.”

  In a Playboy review of the album, ex-Monkee Mickey Dolenz said he’d love to direct a Butthole Surfers video. Sadly, they failed to call his bluff. In his Seattle Rocket “Sub Pop” column, Bruce Pavitt called Rembrandt Pussyhorse “the coolest record ever made. This unbridled, surreal burst of imagination is enough to erase years of indoctrination by schools and television viewing. It’s finally OK to do whatever the fuck you want. We can only go up from here.”

  The band wandered all over the country—Chicago, Detroit (where “people would throw animal parts at us,” Leary says. “It was a real cool town for us”), Seattle (where they stayed for a month and made a big impact on local musicians such as future Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil), Atlanta, New Orleans—winding up in San Francisco in the summer of ’85.

  Once they’d grown tired of San Francisco, the band wondered, Where to next? They were all tripping one day when someone jokingly suggested moving to R.E.M.’s home base of Athens, Georgia (which also happened to have been a notorious drug mecca). “We thought it would be a trip to, for no apparent reason other than it seemed funny, move to Athens,” says Coffey. “And stalk R.E.M.”

  They wound up a few miles outside of Athens, in tiny Winterville, where they stayed about seven months, working up new material and playing gigs. And stalking R.E.M.

  Their first night there, Coffey spotted R.E.M.’s Mike Mills at a club and invited him to a barbecue in Winterville. Mills smoothly put him off by suggesting that Coffey contact R.E.M.’s management with the particulars, which Coffey dutifully did. “And of course the next day was spent waiting for Mike Mills to show up,” says Coffey. Not surprisingly, Mills never came.

  The Butthole Surfers’ obsession with a pop band like R.E.M. is a bit surprising.
“I think we were fascinated by the amount of fame they were getting,” says Coffey. “And they were easy subjects for ridicule. But by the same token, we also had a certain fondness for some of their songs, like their radio hit songs. We’d say, ‘Aw, this is horrible!’ And then of course it would be in our heads for two weeks.” (By 1987 they often ended shows with a demonic version of R.E.M.’s hit “One I Love.”)

  And of course, R.E.M. were already wealthy men by this time, unlike the Butthole Surfers. “I think we were jealous of them,” Coffey says. “Hell yeah,” Leary agrees. “Jealous as shit.”

  In Georgia their rickety van called it quits in spectacular fashion—as Haynes and Leary were pulling into a parking lot, the engine started smoking and quickly burst into flame. The two men bailed out of the van, Mark Farner in hand, and watched it burn.

  After an Atlanta show that August, they stayed at the home of a friend whose younger sibling knew Amy Carter, daughter of ex-President Jimmy Carter. Amy happened to be over at the house that night, but she avoided the unsavory activities in the living room and stayed in her friend’s bedroom, waiting for her parents, who were due to pick her up at 4:00 A.M. Naturally, the Buttholes were excited to witness the arrival of the former president. At about 3:30 Amy came out and deposited her suitcase in the living room, briefly introduced herself, smiled, and retreated back to the bedroom.