In early ’86 they drove from Los Angeles all the way to New York just to play two lucrative weekend shows at the Danceteria club, only to arrive to find that the second night had been canceled. The band was livid; Haynes got quite drunk just before show time. “During that show it was just complete bedlam,” says Leary, a man who knows from bedlam.
After only a song or two, Haynes picked up a beer bottle and viciously smashed Leary over the head with it. Leary’s eyes rolled back in his head as he crumpled to the floor. Then he quickly got up and resumed playing. It was a stunt bottle, made out of sugar. Then Haynes picked up a real bottle and heaved it the length of the room, where it exploded above the exit sign. Soon Haynes had set fire to a pile of trash in the middle of the stage. “And you’re really thinking, ‘Should I get out of here?’ ” says Michael Macioce. “That was the type of feeling you had—you were in danger at one of their shows.”
Then Lynch jumped onto the stage from the audience and began dancing. Macioce then left—it was about three in the morning by this point—but he called his friend Kramer the next day to see how the rest of the gig had gone. “That girl, she pulled down her pants and Gibby started sticking his thumb up her ass!” Kramer told Macioce. He was fucking her with his thumb just back and forth and this went on for like a half hour or forty-five minutes, just like that!”
And that was only the beginning. The band had played only five shambolic songs before Leary leaned his guitar against his amplifier, producing ear-splitting feedback; the strobes were flickering, sirens were flashing, the films were rolling, and through the dry-ice fog a couple of open fires burned brightly.
“Gibby filled up a plastic whiffleball bat full of urine—he managed to pee in the little hole in the end of the bat,” says Leary, “and made this ‘piss wand.’ ” Haynes then began swinging the bat, spraying urine all over the crowd. But it didn’t stop there—Lynch, now completely naked, lay down on the stage and Haynes, in Leary’s words, started “mounting” her. Later Leary saw video footage of the scene. “Her legs are up in the air and there’s Gibby’s pumping butt in the strobe lights and the smoke,” says Leary, chuckling. “It’s really fuckin’ hideous, man.”
In the midst of the chaos, Leary went around discreetly poking screw-driver holes in every PA and monitor speaker in the place.
After the show there was a tense confrontation between the Danceteria management and the band. The Buttholes got paid, but they literally walked out of the place backward as the club’s hired goons not so subtly showed them the door. “You’ll never play New York again!” the club’s manager screamed after them. “And we were playing at CBGB within two weeks,” Leary crows, “for more money!”
Afterward the band invited Lynch to become a part of the stage show; she wound up dancing with the Butthole Surfers for years. By the Buttholes’ next New York visit, she’d become an integral part of the show. “She had a shaved head… her body was painted, the show was just wild,” remembers Kim Gordon. “Gibby was swinging her between his legs and blowing fire. It was, like, the most insane thing.”
Gordon had attended the show with her bandmate Steve Shelley. “I remember standing kind of toward the back with Steve, and somehow he ended up getting his glasses broken,” says Gordon. “I don’t know exactly what happened….”
Lynch quickly became nicknamed “Tah-dah, the Shit Lady.” According to Leary, the story around was: “She got a job in New York City at some sort of Sex World place, and the first night on the job they were telling her the routine, like, ‘OK, if a guy looks at you, you take off your clothes and you do this and do that.’ So she gets in there and the first thing she does is bend over and sprays a wall of diarrhea. And then she stands up and goes, ‘Tah-dah!’ So everybody is running out screaming. Of course, they didn’t fire her—the next night they were out there advertising, ‘We got black pussy, we got white pussy, and we got the Shit Lady!’ She became a featured attraction.”
Lynch was never a formal member of the Butthole Surfers, though. “We would begin a tour and out of nowhere Kathleen would show up,” says Coffey. “And then kind of disappear again. She was like the wind.”
Nobody in the band really had a conversation with Lynch until years after she left—in fact, she didn’t speak for an entire year, a practice Coffey believes had a spiritual basis, like fasting. The silence posed constant practical problems, however, like the time they stopped at a roadside restaurant in Louisiana. “Kathleen jumps out of the van and is the first one to rush into the restaurant,” Coffey recalls, “and greets the hostess by kind of half squatting and making gesturing motions toward her crotch and somehow getting across, ‘I need to pee, where is the bathroom?’ ” The hostess waved vaguely toward the bathrooms, with one eye on the band of freaks who had just walked in the door.
“She loved the human body, smells of the human body, dirty socks, urine, things of the body were really beautiful to her, BO was beautiful, and we had a hard time making her bathe,” Taylor recalled. “I remember once we pretty much had to hold her down and do her laundry and she was yelling, ‘No, no!’ ”
The live show was reaching new heights. That March at San Francisco’s I-Beam, Leary stripped naked and dived into the crowd while Haynes leaped on Lynch and the two rolled around the stage like fighting cats, knocking equipment and mike stands around the stage like bowling pins. The audience looked on, aghast. By the end Haynes was alone onstage howling, “No! No! No!” like a wounded animal through the megaphone and bashing a flaming cymbal, sending up towering mushroom clouds of fire. Then a stuffed lion dropped onto the stage, and the rest of the band madly tore it to bits, hurling the stuffing into the crowd.
THE BUTTHOLE SURFERS IN PERFORMANCE AT CBGB, CIRCA 1986.
CHRIS BUCK
That fall Rusk booked the Butthole Surfers for Halloween weekend at the Graystone, with Big Black and Scratch Acid opening one night and Die Kreuzen and Killdozer opening the next. All five bands stayed at the Rusks’ apartment, and after both shows they went up to the building’s big, flat roof and barbecued and set off fireworks all night, as was the Graystone tradition. Another tradition was watching the nightlife on the street below. There was a redneck bar on one corner and a lesbian bar on the other. “And when the bars would let out at night,” says Rusk, “we’d all get up on the roof and watch the lesbians beat up the rednecks.”
The second night of the Butthole Surfers’ visit, the bands partied on the roof as usual. Then they all watched as a convenience store across the street went up in flames. “And as soon as the fire trucks pulled away, Gibby and Paul said, ‘Let’s go!’ ” says Steve Albini, then of Big Black. “And they bolted down the stairs, out the front door, ran across the street, and looted this liquor store. They came back with six smoky, damp cases of beer.”
Unfortunately, Cabbage never improved her percussive skills. “We figured she’d catch on eventually—just a little bit of rhythm is all it takes,” says Leary. “And she just got worse and worse. We finally reduced her to one drum and then with no microphone at all.” The band knew she came from Tennessee, so when they passed through there in April ’86, “We kind of dropped her at her family’s place,” says Coffey, “and said, ‘See ya!’ ”
In the fall of ’86, they settled in Austin. In the Sixties Austin hosted a thriving hippie scene and became known as a home for renegade music of all kinds: psychedelic pioneers the 13th Floor Elevators, Janis Joplin and the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, whose titular singer sported Day-Glo robes and face paint and highlighted performances by shooting flames from his headpiece. Thanks to locals like Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, the town was also the headquarters for country music’s famed “outlaw” movement. It was a fitting home base for the Butthole Surfers.
The Buttholes moved into a rental home in a no-man’s-land just off the highway at what was then the northern edge of Austin. They painted the walls silver and slept on pieces of plywood suspended from the ceiling. They’d also gotten hold of a device th
at shot foam insulation between walls, and the house was filled with sculptures they’d made with the machine. Much of the house became a recording studio; when the parts for a new mixing board came, everyone smoked lots of pot and sat around soldering hundreds of connections.
The band missed Taylor and asked her back. Since the band was determined not to tour so much anymore, she accepted and moved into the house; they finished their third album there.
According to Pinkus, one of the advantages of recording the album at home was that “we could take hour-long breaks to do bong hits,” and there was more than just a bit of stoner humor in the statement—not paying for recording time meant they could work at a more relaxed pace and really explore the possibilities of the studio. This was something most bands on indie labels couldn’t afford to do.
Unlimited studio access allowed the Butthole Surfers to confront an interesting problem—how to replicate the polymorphous perversity of their performances on record. They couldn’t include a strobe light and a smoke machine with every record, so they threw in all the studio tricks they could muster in a vain but admirable effort to make a sonic analogue of their live show.
But Leary has a low opinion of the music. “I always thought we were the band without talent at all—it’s just all a bunch of schlock,” he says. “God, it’s music to drool into a bucket to.” So perhaps the overwhelming studio gimmickry and the riotous showmanship were just a way of making up for lackluster music? “Yeah,” Leary says with a little laugh. “That’s probably one reason.” Another reason for the outrageous shows was to justify the band’s large performance fee. “We wanted to be able to charge a lot of money for the tickets,” Leary says, “so we felt obliged to kind of give something back.”
Despite the nearly universal disapproval of the indie community, the Buttholes resolutely refused to feel bad about wanting to make money. “Whatever weed we were smoking, we wanted it to be more plentiful and of better quality,” says Leary. “And we wanted better-quality food, we wanted better quality accommodations, we wanted better-quality vehicles to travel around in, we wanted better equipment to play on, and all those wants far outstripped what we were bringing in.”
The individual members didn’t directly make any money from the band. Instead, Haynes, the former accountant, controlled the funds and disbursed them as necessary. “There was so little resources that all the money was in one pocket and we all stuck together,” says Leary. “If one person bought sunglasses, all five of us bought sunglasses; if one person bought shoes, we all bought shoes. We were just never apart, not for any meals, not anything. We were just always together. If we got a motel room, we all stayed in the same room.”
Many shows ended with Haynes walking offstage with the petite Taylor tucked under his arm, while she continued banging a drum. It almost looked like something a dad would do. And perhaps the Butthole Surfers were like a family—or maybe more like a cult—with Leary and Haynes as the dysfunctional parents, Taylor and Coffey as the quiet, odd twins, and whoever was playing bass as the sullen teen who inevitably ran away.
A review of their 1987 album Locust Abortion Technician in the zine Puncture noted, “Most of the LP is either totally random blather and white noise or disconnected rock jams sinking in a sea of blood and puke.” And yet, the review continued, “they manage to exude brilliance.”
“Sweat Loaf” was a rewrite of Black Sabbath’s ganja anthem “Sweet Leaf” and contains yet another potential band motto: “It’s better to regret something you have done than to regret something you haven’t done.” “U.S.S.A.” surely features some of the most hideous sounds ever recorded—the rhythm track sounds like an idling garbage truck as Leary’s guitar imitates a dying cow, while Haynes desperately shrieks “U.S.S.A.” over and over… and over and over. “The O-Men,” with its relentless, hyperactive pounding and satanic vocal prefigures the advent of industrial speed-metal by several years; on “Kuntz” the band electronically manipulates a Thai pop recording so that the singer repeatedly says a certain naughty word.
“Twenty Two, Going on Twenty Three” features a tape of an actual radio call-in show in which a woman described being sexually assaulted—it’s a terrifying listen, although as it turns out, the woman was a pathological liar who called the show every night.
After two albums and three EPs, by early ’87 the band was earning a decent living from royalties and touring, but they continually reinvested the money in their studio and toys for the live show. They could now command up to $6,000 a show, an astronomical amount for a band on an indie label. But for many months the road-weary Buttholes restricted their live shows to Texas, with occasional trips to other cities if the offers included round-trip airfare.
Then the highway department told them they’d have to move because they were widening the road and offered them $600 for their trouble. The silver-tongued Leary, arguing that he was running a business out of the home, wrangled them up to $15,000.
They used the money to put a down payment on a home in Driftwood, in the hill country outside Austin. Surrounded by miles of scrubby ranch land, the place provided a welcome respite from the hurly-burly of the road, as well as from the constant stream of friends and admirers who would otherwise be dropping by their place with a bag of pot or a case of beer, expecting to get wasted with the band.
But Coffey, who didn’t have a driver’s license, recalled the way he had always wound up stranded back in Winterville and asked for his share of the band fund so he could get a place in town. The band’s communal lifestyle was coming to an end.
After recording Rembrandt Pussyhorse in a hodgepodge of cheap studios and doing Locust Abortion Technician on an obsolete eight-track machine at home, the band wanted to record their next album in a real studio, and wound up at one of the first digital facilities in Texas. They had been playing most of the material on the road for some time, so recording went quickly, finished in about a week.
Hairway to Steven was more sparse, but just as strange as ever. There were no song titles, just crude little pictograms for each track, forcing radio programmers to identify songs by phrases like “Defecating Deer” and “Two Naked Women Bending Over.” The album’s heightened production values are hardly evident in the surging, distorted nightmare of “Defecating Pitcher Throws to Urinating Batter,” but things tend more toward the folk rock of “Syringe” or the downright pastoral instrumental “Urinating Horse,” with its acoustic guitar and nature sounds or the jumpin’ jive of “Rabbit Defecates on Fish.”
The anarchic presentation of the band had very little to do with its business dealings. “As a band they were grossly manipulative and demanding,” says Steve Albini. “If it was possible to take advantage of someone, they would—gladly—and they would feel justified in it because they saw it as their livelihood.” Even their former benefactor had a similar take: “As far as business goes, ‘sharp’ is one way of putting it,” said Jello Biafra. “I’ve heard the term ‘cutthroat’ bandied about quite a bit. Let’s put it this way: They’ve definitely got the Texas wildcatter mentality down.”
“We always fought for ourselves—that’s why we have such a trail of enemies behind us,” Leary counters bitterly. “I have no vast memories of cool people from my indie days. That’s where I learned how to get ripped off.” But that attitude sometimes left even their friends feeling a bit ripped off. Michael Macioce recalls the band choosing one of his photographs for the cover of Rembrandt Pussyhorse and then getting rebuked by Haynes and Leary when he dared to ask $300 for it.
Even as the band was committing mayhem, they kept one eye on the bottom line. When Macioce caught a Butthole Surfers show in Leeds, England, he stopped by the dressing room afterward, proudly displaying a show poster he’d torn off the wall. Coffey thought that was a great idea and ran out and brought back as many posters as he could find. Naturally, Haynes set them on fire, creating a roaring blaze right there in the dressing room. Leary looked on impassively as he kicked back on the couch, practi
cing scales on the guitar, pausing only to drawl, “Hey, somebody put out that fire before they decide not to pay us.”
“And then he goes back to playing his guitar,” says Macioce. “That was so Paul.”
Although they were the flagship band of Touch & Go, the Butthole Surfers were not part of the interconnected indie tribe that had sprung up around SST, Dischord, Touch & Go, and other labels. “We never did feel like a part of that community, really, not at all,” says Leary. “We played to their crowd, but we were not really a part of the scene or anything.” Part of the reason they weren’t part of “the scene” was the simple fact that they moved around too much to get settled anywhere, but their political incorrectness was a much bigger alienating factor.
The band was thoroughly do-it-yourself, but not for the political ends professed by indie culture—empowering the individual and staying out of the corporate loop. “Our goal was to become part of the corporate loop, which we eventually did,” says Leary. “I just never understood any of that ethics crap—you know, being self-righteous, this way or that way is the right way to do it. Nah, fuck all that crap—if people started throwing that stuff at us, we’d just immediately do the opposite. We’d start eating meat.”
At the urging of both Steve Albini and Sonic Youth, the Buttholes had signed with Blast First for U.K. releases. Blast First had released both Locust and Hairway, and Paul Smith’s hard work on the former was paying off. They did a celebrated European tour in 1988, selling out venues like London’s 4,000-seat Brixton Academy and appearing on the cover of Melody Maker (with their eyes clearly dilated).
With a little prompting from Smith, the U.K. press perceived the connections between the American Blast First bands and pronounced that a movement was in effect. Which is precisely the kind of thing that sells papers.
The Buttholes held other charms for the British music press, too. For one, Haynes was quite the irreverent wild man. When Melody Maker interviewed him, Thurston Moore, and Dinosaur’s J Mascis for a cover story about a Blast First compilation, Haynes teased Moore, already something of an indie-world Brahmin, relentlessly. “Hey Thurston, have you ever fucked Lydia Lunch?” he asked. The usually witty Moore could mumble only a half-baked comeback. “What did you say?” Haynes replied. “Fucking Lydia Lunch is like rubbing a dog?” The razzing didn’t let up there. “Thurston Moore? Is that your real name?” Haynes drawled. “I mean, give me a break. You made that up. That’s a good one. Did you have a mom and shit like that?”
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