Partly because of copy like that, the U.K. press was smitten with the band and conveyed its unbridled enthusiasm in their own inimitable way. “The Butthole Surfers are masturbatory in the best sense of the word,” wrote one overheated Melody Maker scribe. “But their ‘play’ is not light fingered, frisky or merely mischievous—rather, it takes the form of gratuitous devastation. Plunging in at the anus and excavating, tunneling a giant point of exit at the sockets, they are one giant surge of flesh, one part holy revelation.”
Melody Maker’s writing team the Stud Brothers breathlessly proclaimed, “The Butthole Surfers stand blood-stained, shit-caked and semen-sodden among the last unrecognizable avatars of romance, situated between the rational and the marvelous, stranded between this world and the next, this world and the last. They draw their power from those abandoned clearings across which higher and lower worlds once passed. All they desire is all you can do.”
Melody Maker critic Simon Reynolds astutely noted that the Buttholes were “shaping up to be the post-punk equivalent of the Grateful Dead—massive success built up slowly outside the conventional networks, a cult reputation built on impressionistic, trippy shows.”
And similarities to the Grateful Dead went even further than that. As the Grateful Dead were then doing for a huge second wave of new fans, the Butthole Surfers offered a glimpse of a freedom that had evaporated before their youthful audience had gotten a chance to drink from its cup. Haynes and Leary had been born in the late Fifties, too young to have participated in the Sixties counterculture but just old enough to have gotten a vivid impression of it. “Hell yes,” Leary said, “I wanna sound like Hendrix, I wanna be all those motherfuckers. I grew up wanting to be those motherfuckers. I think every fan wants to pretend that he’s the person that he respects and that’s what we’re doing, probably.”
The band’s sound cut a direct path to psychedelic-era freaks like the 13th Floor Elevators and Captain Beefheart. Live, they’d cover Sixties bands like Blue Cheer, Iron Butterfly, and Donovan, while the stage show recalled Sixties “happenings” like Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable and Pink Floyd’s early multimedia freakouts. So the Butthole Surfers actually came out of a tradition—“Yeah,” Leary cracks, “probably a tradition of taking LSD!”
Taylor quit for good in April ’89, after touring Hairway to Steven. “It just must have gotten to be too tough for her,” says Leary, clearly sympathetic. “She was a cute young girl and really sweet and here she was hanging out with the Butthole Surfers. She was a damn good trouper. I can’t blame her for it being too much after a while.”
After leaving the band, Taylor suffered what seemed to be an aneurysm, although it was later determined she was suffering from strobe light-induced seizures. “When the neurologist asked me if I had ever been exposed to flashing lights,” said Taylor, “I had to laugh and say, ‘You’ll never even imagine, in your wildest dreams, the shit I’ve flashed.’ ”
Although the early shows were exciting, anything-can-happen affairs, by the end of the decade they were becoming all but routine. At various predetermined points in the show, they would do the fire cymbal or tear up a stuffed animal or Haynes would twist knobs and dials and make weird noises for twenty minutes. The band seemed to be merely going through the motions.
Same goes for all the drugs and booze the band was consuming. “It was nuts, it was fun,” says Leary. “But then you think, ‘What do I do if I get off the hamster wheel? What’s out there? I don’t know.’ ”
Careerwise, the band was in a tough position. As early as Locust Abortion Technician, they were playing the largest rock clubs in town—and then kept playing those same clubs to the same faces for three years. “We’d sold as many records as we could ever hope to sell through indie distribution, we’d been exposed as well as we could ever hope to be exposed in the indie realm,” says Coffey.
Although major labels had come calling, none of them offered a satisfactory contract until Rough Trade offered a one-album deal for “some stupid-ass money,” as Coffey puts it, so stupid-ass that even Rusk reportedly admitted they should probably go for it. So in 1989 they signed with Rough Trade, whom they felt had superior distribution to Touch & Go. “We needed to sell more units,” says Leary, “in order to maintain a lifestyle that would be somewhat human.”
The band looked at the break with Rusk, their greatest supporter, strictly as a matter of survival. “If you look at punk rock bands from 1981, their success rate is not good,” Leary told the Chicago Reader in 1999. “It’s basically poverty, misery, and death. We had to claw and fight for everything. The ones that made it are the ones that fight. That’s what punk rock was about anyway. It’s not about causes or right and wrong. It’s about fighting.”
The title track of 1990’s Hurdy Gurdy Man EP is a cover of Donovan’s hippy-dippy-trippy Sixties classic; the video got airplay on MTV’s 120 Minutes, then a crucial outlet for underground rock, and the song became a modest college radio hit. The band even did a jingle for MTV.
The parting with their old label had been amicable, but by the time of their 1991 Rough Trade album Pioughd, the band was beginning to snipe at Touch & Go. “Touch & Go were smart,” said Pinkus. “They never showed us anything until it was too late.” But if Touch & Go were smart, Rough Trade was not: after releasing Pioughd, Pinkus and Haynes’s (as the Jack Officers) techno-house album Digital Dump, and Leary’s solo album The History of Dogs, the label went under. Unlike many other Rough Trade bands, the Buttholes came out of the disaster unscathed—not only had they already collected on their advance and been paid royalties, but since they had recorded themselves, they avoided the fate of many other bands on the label, who found themselves at the bankruptcy auction, bidding on their own master tapes.
The Buttholes made a small fortune playing the first Lollapalooza tour that summer. It was the first tour they’d ever done where they didn’t have to drive their own van, set up their own equipment, tune their own guitars, or collect their own money at the end of the night.
The following year they signed with the major Capitol Records. “As long as we have control over the music and the packaging,” Coffey says, “if the label wants to slap their label on it and distribute it better, let’s give it a shot—we’ve done everything else at this point.” Five years later the president of their label still wouldn’t say their name in public.
Back when Coffey was playing in the Hugh Beaumont Experience, he might have been repulsed by the idea of signing to a major label. And when he joined the Butthole Surfers, the prospect of signing to a major was so remote that it wasn’t even worth thinking about. “It would be like me saying, ‘I am not going to live on Pluto—Pluto sucks,’ ” says Coffey. “It’s just not going to happen.”
Leary had no problem being on a major label. “I always wanted to be on one,” he says, “and especially the one that Grand Funk Railroad had been on.” Still, indie purists accused the band of selling out. “If ever I got grief from those people, I would just tell them to kiss my ass,” says Leary. “You go live in a fuckin’ van, you asshole. You go home to your nice mommy-and-daddy little bed there and think about what a sellout I am. I had lots of good answers for those fucks.”
Another answer Leary used to have was this: “Eat shit and die.”
“To me, it was just a matter of, if you want to do something, the only thing that’s going to keep you from doing it is giving up,” Leary says. “Because we were proof of that. If you just don’t quit, you will succeed—that is the bottom line.”
CHAPTER 9
BIG BLACK
HOW MANY BOYS WANT TO BE WHIPPED BY STEVE ALBINI’S GUITAR?
—KIM GORDON, VILLAGE VOICE (FALL 1988)
As early as 1983, hardcore’s hyperthyroid tempos and free-flowing aggression were beginning to lose favor with punk-generation people entering their twenties. Those folks were in college or just out; they’d outgrown hardcore’s slam dancing, skateboarding, and strict moralizing, but they weren’
t quite ready to abandon aggressive, cutting-edge music. There had to be a new way to be intense. Arty U.K. bands like the Fall and Gang of Four as well as Australia’s Birthday Party showed the way, and a new music began to take shape, filtered through some of the precepts and aesthetics of hardcore. And while so many indie bands were trying to outdo each other’s sincerity, this new breed substituted a seething brand of irony—or was it contempt?
No band exemplified this new approach better than Big Black. Instead of resting on emotional vulnerability and familiar rock tropes, the band’s music—jagged, brutal, loud, and nasty—was original to a downright confrontational degree. Big Black distilled years of post-punk and hardcore down to a sound resembling a singing saw blade mercilessly tearing through sheet metal. No one had made records that sounded so harsh. No wonder they called one of their records Headache.
Like their fellow negationists Sonic Youth and the Butthole Surfers, Big Black explored the less-than-flattering aspects of American culture, but at much further length and in far closer, far less forgiving detail than ever before. While it may not have been a direct swipe at a nation obsessed with a show like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, it sure was a turd in its silver punchbowl.
And Big Black introduced one of the indie world’s foremost characters, a person who would help define not just the sound of underground music through the next two decades, but also its discourse—the irascible, outspoken, intelligent, and relentlessly ethical Steve Albini.
Virtually nothing could live up to the standards Albini so brutally outlined in his constant screeds—except Big Black. This was a band with policies. Their principles, outlined in the band’s live album Pigpile, were “Treat everyone with as much respect as he deserves (and no more). Avoid people who appeal to our vanity or ambition…. Operate as much as possible apart from the ‘music scene.’… Take no shit from anyone in the process.” Albini put those beliefs into action literally with a vengeance. He had few sacred cows and would unhesitatingly take on the indie community itself, little of which met his stringent criteria, judging by his frequently voiced disdain for various labels, bands, producers, club owners, and so on.
Musically, Big Black’s insistent drum machine rhythms, abrasive textures, and obsessively repeated riffs provided a major part of the blueprint for so-called industrial rock. Their bracingly intense music aside, the saving grace of the band’s often obnoxious approach was that it was thought-provoking. Big Black set a standard for freedom of expression and forthrightness that has been emulated to varying degrees ever since.
Steve Albini’s father was literally a rocket scientist, which meant moving his family all over the country before settling in Missoula, Montana, for Albini’s formative years. Scrawny, bespectacled, and too smart for his own good, Albini had no luck with women in high school, and few friends. Instead, he got his kicks doing things like setting off M-80s in the bathroom of the local drive-in.
Having read about punk rock in Rolling Stone and Creem, he discovered Suicide, the Ramones, and the Stooges, whose music, as he later put it, “got me through high school.” Albini saw punk rock as a haven for difficult people such as himself, and he took to it with open arms. “The status quo was about fitting in and about being allowed into a preexisting environment,” says Albini. “The greatest thing about punk rock for me, as an outsider, was that the concept that you had to be allowed in was no longer valid. You could be operating in a vacuum, you could be as fucked up an individual as you cared to be, and if you did something of worth, all these external conditions were immaterial.”
In the fall of ’79, his senior year of high school, he was struck by a car while riding his motorcycle and broke his leg badly. Such was Albini’s unpopularity that he got several phone calls on his hospital bed from anonymous “jocks and rednecks” expressing delight at his pain. While he recuperated, he taught himself how to play bass.
The following year he left Missoula and enrolled at Northwestern University, in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, to pursue a journalism degree. Albini arrived as “a total dillweed who didn’t know jack shit,” as he put it, and had trouble even locating Chicago’s fledgling punk scene.
He eventually discovered the Chicago Reader, the fanzine The Coolest Retard, and the progressive station WZRD, and began catching sparsely attended shows by the Replacements, Hüsker Dü, Dead Kennedys, Flipper, and others. Then Albini found a local band he could love, Naked Raygun. “I was convinced that I had seen the best band that had ever been,” says Albini. “I went to their shows religiously.”
Santiago Durango and Marco Pezzati had started the post-punk powerhouse in the summer of ’80, with Pezzati’s brother Jeff eventually joining on lead vocals. In Naked Raygun’s dawning days, “it was like a space age rockabilly band,” Albini said, “with this bizarre jungle drumming going on.”
At Northwestern Albini was also pursuing a minor in fine art. For a project on “process sculpture” and performance art, he planned to stand behind a Plexiglas wall and taunt people while inviting them to throw things at him; the wall and the objects would then become the sculpture. “People could be as destructive as they were inclined to be, as long as I was the object of their destruction,” says Albini. “I sort of liked the idea.” Unfortunately, Albini’s first customer, his friend John Bohnen, threw a bowling pin right through the barrier, cutting short the performance.
Albini’s confrontational streak ran deep: he’d continually get fired from his DJ spot on Northwestern’s radio station for playing loud, abrasive records in his morning time slot, which the station had reserved for quieter music. “The patsies that were the student administrators of that radio station were fuckin’ mainstream radio wanna-bes,” Albini scoffs, adding, “I got a kick out of just being a thorn in their side.”
Albini also began writing the instantly controversial monthly column “Tired of Ugly Fat?” for the excellent Chicago zine Matter in which he ranted about the local music scene, often singling out specific people for very harsh and graphic castigation. On the rumor that Al Jourgensen, the leader of a wimpy dance-pop unit called Ministry, might be producing a Chicago art-noise band, he wrote, “If you do, and you make them one-tenth as wimpy as Ministry, I’ll cut your balls off and sew them shut in your mouth.”
Just as Albini’s fanzine writings were deliberately ugly in a provocative way, so was the music he championed: loud, aggressive bands like Scratch Acid, Meatmen, and the Swans. According to his friend former Killdozer singer Michael Gerald, Albini’s outspoken opinions quickly divided the Chicago underground scene into two distinct camps: “people who thought he was a genius and people who just thought he was an asshole.”
His confrontational aspects—his every Matter column implicitly screamed, “Hate me, please!”—were the preemptive instincts of someone who’s been routinely picked on. Choosing the reason you get your ass kicked is a way of exercising at least some control over the situation. It harks back not just to the earliest inklings of punk rock, but to the origin of the term “punk” itself, which referred to someone at the bottom of the jailhouse pecking order who realized that self-abasement was his only means of survival.
One of Albini’s first college bands was a short-lived “arty new wave band” called Stations, unremarkable except for the fact that it featured the novel addition of a drum machine. Albini had become enamored of the idea and got the cheapest drum machine he could find—a Roland TR-606. He’d walk around campus all day with the device pumping the same unvarying beat into his headphones. “It was a really great soundtrack to your life,” says Albini. “And that’s how I worked up a lot of the ideas that were on the first Big Black record.”
There were big advantages to a drum machine: it could play really fast for a long time without getting tired, it would always keep a steady beat no matter what chaos was erupting around it, and it always did exactly what it was told. “Since then I’ve gotten an awful lot better at communicating with people,” says Albini, “so I’ve never b
een tempted to use a drum machine since.”
Albini had begun writing some songs but didn’t know any musicians who could play them the way he wanted—or as he put it in a Forced Exposure piece, “I couldn’t find anybody who didn’t blow out of a pig’s asshole.” So he simply decided to do it himself, even though home recording was practically unheard of. In the spring of his sophomore year, 1981, he bought a guitar on a Wednesday, then called a friend who owned a four-track recorder and obtained its use in exchange for a case of beer. That Friday, the beginning of spring break, he began recording the Lungs EP in his living room while his peers were off in Florida catching rays, hangovers, and STDs. Most of it was done in a week.
It wasn’t a very auspicious debut. The vocals on Lungs aren’t aggro enough to get over; the lyrics are self-conscious and pretentious; the music is merely sketchy, mostly derivative of Albini favorites like Cabaret Voltaire, Killing Joke, and the Cure. If it sounds like a demo tape by the angry nerd down the hall of your dorm, it’s because that’s exactly what it was.
Lungs is one of Albini’s few artistic regrets: “It just makes my flesh crawl,” he said. “I can’t listen to that record anymore.” But he’d forged a unique style, using the drum machine as well as a determination to avoid the “standard rock stud guitar sound.” Until then Chicago pop-punk bands like the Effigies and Naked Raygun were as far out as local rock got; the cold, dark, and resolutely unlistenable Lungs redefined the town’s ideas about what was radical.
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