Butthole Surfers - The rock of degeneration

…like your hopes: nothing

like your paradise: nothing

like your idols: nothing

like your political leaders: nothing

like your heroes: nothing

like your artists: nothing

like your religions: nothing

(Francis Picabia, Cannibal Manifesto in the Dark)  

Among the bands that emerged from the American underground scene of the Eighties, the Butthole Surfers – underrated by a critical establishment too busy touting the supposed virtues of whatever ephemeral next big thing was in fashion to bother with them – were among the most important, brilliant and innovative. While they were certainly not the first to lend cultural prestige to a certain kind of music usually dismissed as "demented", they were without doubt the only ones to give it something like a spiritual, philosophical yearning. The absolute centrality of the Texan quintet in rock history is confirmed, first and foremost, by the iconoclastic, irreverent and fascinatingly repulsive nature of their aesthetic: the Butthole Surfers were the last worthy heirs of rock's degeneration, and at the same time they remain, to this day, the fathers of music's postmodern catastrophe.

Their rock is the offspring of the modern dances of Pere Ubu, the grotesque chaos of Captain Beefheart, the absurdist assemblages of the Mothers Of Invention, the symphonies of alienation of the Residents, the urban bacchanals of the Cramps. Not only that: their brain-damaged hardcore is also tied to the drunken folk of the legendary Holy Modal Rounders, the apocalyptic visions of Chrome, and the noise rituals of Red Crayola. On the other hand, generations of musicians ranging from the little-known Ed Hall to Ween, by way of Shit & Shine and Human Eye, show through their own work that the Texan surfers' lineage has been of the highest quality.

What the Butthole Surfers staged is a musical parody of human tragedy, and it definitively marks the death of man in the Pirandellian sense, who at last sheds his masks of composure, modesty and do-gooding, and reveals himself in all his repulsiveness. For the Butthole Surfers, stupidity and vulgarity seem to be the only possibilities for existence – but also for redemption – that man possesses. The humanity they depict, like that of Devo, is in irreversible agony yet happy in its own ineptitude. The difference is that the mongoloid man sung about by Devo is dehumanized, whereas the man described by the Butthole Surfers is more human than ever: regressed mentally to a childlike stage and historically all the way back to Homo erectus. For this reason, the music of the Butthole Surfers can be described with a single adjective: free, from every moral or social constraint.

Making poetry out of concrete, organic noise is far harder than making it out of lofty language: the immense musical poetry of the likes of Bob Dylan or Nick Cave can never philosophically hold a candle to the anti-art of the Butthole Surfers: if reality is so deceptive and fallacious, then so too are the values on which it is founded; so one might as well celebrate their funeral rites and let oneself be overcome by nothingness. In truth, this stance is anything but defeatist: it's as if, by blaspheming, one hoped to reach God; as if, by denying beauty, one hoped to attain it. A gigantic paradox: that's the Butthole Surfers.

This paradox is made of tragic poetry: the final epiphany of the childlike gaze, which tries to answer, through delirium, the impossible search for meaning. Stupidity, spontaneity, irrationality are nothing but tools for evading human solitude and sadness. To put it in André Gide's words: one pretends to be happy, since one cannot actually be happy, freeing one's spirit from the heavy chains of logic.

The Butthole Surfers don't voice laments of suffering or rage, as blues musicians do, for instance, or hardcore bands, or certain more intimate singer-songwriters; aware of the inevitability of pain, they laugh at it instead. But the comic, entertaining side of their music is so thoroughly fused with its emotional and philosophical side that it's hard to tell when they're being serious and when they're simply taking the piss out of the entire world.

From a stylistic standpoint, on the other hand, the Butthole Surfers are generally filed under a strain of hardcore bastardized by acid guitars descended from the earliest Californian psychedelic experiments, and by rhythmic elements (on some records there are as many as two drummers in the line-up) that emphasize a tribal quality rather than the breakneck speed typical of the genre.

The band formed in San Antonio, the work of two then economics undergraduates (a discipline ill-suited to their lifestyle of booze, drugs and obscene behavior), Gibby Haynes (voice, guitar and saxophone) and Paul Leary (guitar), soon joined by drummer Paul Coffey under the alias King Koffee. This would become the core of the Butthole Surfers, to which new members would be added over time, replacing previous ones, in an exhausting revolving door.

The choice of their name came from an anecdote as legendary as their music, true to the Dadaist poetics of chance: when Haynes, Leary and then-drummer Scott Stevens started playing together, the band was called Dick Clark Five, but as fate would have it, during one of their early shows, the announcer, instead of using their actual name, introduced them with the title of the first track listed on their demo tape. That track, which would later end up on their debut album, was called "Butthole Surfer". After this episode, the trio decided to outrageously call themselves "Butthole Surfers". The obscene name, incidentally, would earn them more than a few instances of ostracism, if not outright censorship.

Throughout the Eighties, the Butthole Surfers branded rock history with a hot iron, piece by piece, album by album. This was the period in which they quietly laid the groundwork for much of the American independent music to come, recording for some of the most storied labels of the US underground.

A Time For Drugs: the indie years (1983-1991) 

"Genius is nothing more than childhood recovered at will"  

(Charles Baudelaire) 

The Butthole Surfers' debut in short form came with a seminal, self-titled Ep, also known by the title Brown Reason To Live, released in 1983 by the independent label Alternative Tentacles on the recommendation of Jello Biafra, the legendary leader of the Dead Kennedys. 

The EP's tracks number seven in total, and they show how the band's line-up at the time was still taking shape: there were Leary and Haynes, joined just before by Koffee, who only had time to record two of the tracks that ended up on Butthole Surfers ("Bar-B-Q Pope" and "Wichita Cathedral"). Koffee played "drums" (the quotation marks are necessary, since it was really an assemblage of two drums, a bass drum and a cymbal!) while standing up, just like Moe Tucker of the Velvet Underground; it's no coincidence that his beastly, tribal rhythmic patterns seem to be the offspring of "Sister Ray" and "European Son".

The other musicians who took part in the recordings were the recently departed Matthews brothers, drummer Brad Johnson, and bassists Quinn and Bill Jolly.

The EP's eighteen-odd minutes unfold in a spirit of the most unwholesome delirium that rock history can recall: mostly short tracks that often take on the shape of stray shrapnel (the hardcore-noise pandemonium of the opener "The Shah Sleeps In Lee Harvey's Grave"; the brutal goofing-around of "Suicide"). Despite the band's evident demented verve, Haynes and Leary turn out to be anything but teenagers indulging in sterile avant-garde itches: the musique concrète of Edgar Varèse and Pierre Schaeffer, even if a loftier, more "aristocratic" expression of it, isn't really that far removed from the noisy undercurrents swarming through the Surfers' tracks, just as the alienating guitar symphonies of Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca are never far away. Leary, for his part, is a true master at mutilating his guitar's timbre and tonality; his repertoire of distortions, dissonances and disharmonies reaches an exhausting apotheosis in the vulcanized funk of "Something".

In a couple of tracks ("Hey" and "Bar-B-Q Pope"), however, these sick surfers allow themselves an excursion - naturally a deranged one - into the late-Sixties lands of psychedelic folk, updating it to the neurasthenic rhythms of the Feelies' post-punk.

The record's two masterpieces are called "Witchita Cathedral" and "The Revenge Of Anus Presley", the latter brilliant right from its title. "Witchita Cathedral" is a track built on the depraved boogie of the rhythm section, over which Haynes intones (pardon: mangles) a grand guignol blues, while Leary's guitar churns out sonic debris of every kind. "The Revenge Of Anus Presley" is a tragicomic cabaret piece, dressed in hard-blues cadences and disfigured by every means possible (monstrous is the guttural vocal of Keith Rumbo, frontman of fellow San Antonio outfit Marching Plague, just as monstrous are the noise-laden reiterations of Leary's strings).

The philosophy of Butthole Surfers can be summed up in a few extracts from the lyrics of "The Shah Sleeps In Lee Harvey's Grave": “There’s a time to shit and time for God/ There’s a time for drugs and time to be sane/ There’s a time to live and time to die/ There’s a time to fuck and time to crave”

After the self-titled EP, the band moved from Alternative Tentacles to Touch & Go, and for this essential American underground label, in 1985, Butthole Surfers released their epoch-making debut album: Psychic Powerless… Another Man's Sac.

"Concubine", the opening track, kicks off with the murderous distortions of Leary's guitar, Haynes' hysterical screams and a scorching rhythm section, handled by two drummers (besides Koffee, there was Teresa Taylor, nicknamed "Nervosa", who played topless live!) and bassist Mark Kramer. The track's two and a half minutes feel like the last moments before the end of the world, which indeed seems about to arrive in the following "Eye Of The Chicken" - which, however, turns out to be nothing but a bluff: the supersonic attack is cut off abruptly, then picked back up and choked off again, and so on until the end. After all, this is music for unstable minds.

"Dum Dum" is a collective dance of idiocy, driven by feral polyrhythms underpinning Leary's abrasive guitar and Haynes' unsteady vocals. It's followed by "Woly Boly", another postmodern ritual pushed along by Leary's masterful dissonances; a savage hymn to the joy of being dimwitted.

Compared to the first four songs, "Negro Observer" is more considered, as far as this music can be: clean arpeggios, an accommodating rhythm section, deliciously raucous vocals and a vaguely anemic sax. Pop played in an asylum.

Hardcore still reigns in the propulsive bursts of "Butthole Surfer", but even here the result seems closer to some improbable post-urban aboriginal ceremony than to the ferocious hardcore played by contemporary bands from Washington or Los Angeles. The gruesome, disharmonic opening of "Lady Sniff" gives way to a heavy-funk rhythm stuffed with "concrete" disturbances (burps, spit, farts, retching and a flushing toilet!): it's the unreachable peak of their cabaret of disgust.

"Cherub", the longest track of the bunch, opens with a guitar evoking Pink Floyd-like astronomical sounds, and a funereal bass. It's a track of futurist pessimism which, through music, describes regression beyond progress: even if humanity were to conquer the entire universe, it would still remain crude and base. The burps, once again heard amid the intergalactic distortions, could be an emblematic sign of this. Madness regains its dominant position in the psychologically unstable gallop of "Mexican Caravan" and in the anarchic jubilation of "Cowboy Bob". It all closes with the tragicomic, unwholesome and ramshackle country-rock of "Gary Floyd" (a track dedicated to the Dicks singer of the same name, whom Koffee considered the greatest blues voice that ever existed).

At the end of 1985 Teresa Taylor temporarily left the group (she would return two years later), and so, with a reshuffled line-up, in 1986 the obscene surfers released Rembrandt Pussyhorse (Touch & Go), an album that still shows a goofy side of the Surfers, but a decidedly less existentialist one. The record marked the band's definitive break from that hardcore sound which they themselves had made less spartan through stylistic contamination (avant-garde and psychedelia) and conceptual contamination (the arty slant, so far removed from the austerity flaunted by bands like Minor Threat and Black Flag) that they'd brought to the genre on previous records. And it's precisely this ability to be profoundly hardcore while disregarding the conventions and schemas the genre had codified that has made Butthole Surfers an almost unique case of its kind (with the exception of the mighty Minutemen, who were likewise able to transcend the hardcore they started from and land on some other genre entirely, and the excellent Flipper).

The opening track, "Creep In The Cellar", is disorienting: a brief "chamber" sonata for piano and violin that conjures up the drunken ghost of Peter Stampfel (Holy Modal Rounders, Fugs). Elsewhere ("Sea Ferring" and "Waiting For Jimmy To Kick"), aided by a rhythm section with murky pulses, the San Antonio band reveals a surprising kinship with the darkwave cabaret of Tuxedomoon. The peak of this darker, more serious music is represented by the track "Strangers Die Everyday": a harrowing organ requiem for anonymous deaths.

Psychic impotence demands a chance at redemption ("Perry" is a creative pandemonium built on gangrenous punk), but it is once again muted by the psychedelic chant of "Whirling Hall Of Knives" and by Killing Joke steeped in acid on "Mark Says Alright". Unconvincing, finally, is the lobotomized version of the Guess Who's famous "American Woman", which retains only the appearance of Dadaist mockery (Leary, while not giving up his arsenal of distortion, seems to flounder among softened riffs and solos that are, all things considered, rather "polite").

Rembrandt Pussyhorse is undoubtedly a fine display of stylistic eclecticism, but it doesn't match the band's first two masterpieces: the album feels like it's aping new wave well past its sell-by date.

In 1987, with Teresa Taylor back in the fold and having gone through at least three bassists (Kramer, Trevor Malcom and Jeff Pinkus), Butthole Surfers put together their most ambitious record: Locust Abortion Technician (Touch & Go). Even though the production budget was, as usual, modest, the Texan band worked hard to try to recapture the sonic power of their early days while avoiding repeating themselves. The result was a single-minded parody album which, despite the band's cut-rate technical gear, boasts unprecedented electronic effects, including the manipulations of Haynes's voice, dubbed "gibbytronics" in homage to (or as a jab at) Robert Fripp's famous Robert Fripp's "frippertronics".

After an intro made of celestial strings, a tipsy voice announces the performance of a satanic song; crackling guitar riffs kick in, but of course it's all a mockery of certain doom-laden metal clichés: the vocals are so dark they become grotesque, the solos are the stereotyped ones of 1980s "metal" bands, the rhythm section is swollen and bony. But it's all a farce (the track is called "Sweat Loaf", a mangling of Sabbath's "Sweet Leaf"), as is their style. Already from this opening track, then, one can sense these irreverent surfers' intentions: to crucify (for once!) heavy metal. The following tracks confirm this with dogged persistence: on "Graveyard 1" the rhythm section grinds through impetuous doom metal tempos while Leary flays his guitar with fuzz, detuning and filthy slide effects; "Pittsburg To Lebanon", on the other hand, is a terrifying blues of darkness à la Black Sabbath.

Leary, with his dissonant mini-concerts ("Weber" and "22 Going On 23"), is the absolute protagonist of the record, also because, compared to previous albums, the rhythm section appears, for "narrative" reasons, more monolithic and less pliant. "Human Cannonball", with its maniacal guitar-hero solos over a "motorik" rhythmic framework worthy of Neu!, is thus the record's masterpiece. The electronic digressions ("Hay", "U.S.S.A.") are playful moments that give the album some breathing room, but the exoticism of "Kuntz", a track that sees Butthole Surfers playing reckless DJs, beggars belief: a traditional Thai song is shamelessly mangled through manipulation and remixing.

Despite the heavy-metal parody theme and the use of electronics, Locust Abortion Technician can be considered Butthole Surfers' noise album (just citing the sonic holocaust of "The O-Men" is enough to support this claim). The original stylistic mix offered by Butthole Surfers on this record, in fact, cast them as a band pointing toward an alternative language to the branca-style noise of Sonic Youth, the melodic noise of Dinosaur Jr, and the mechanomorphic noise of Big Black.

But the promises the band made in that direction would not be kept, because the following Hairway To Steven (Touch & Go, 1987) would be a journey, as usual ramshackle and clownish, into late-Sixties psychedelic rock and early-Seventies hard rock.

Locust Abortion Technician, meanwhile, won over American critics (who still consider it the band's masterpiece), a solid chunk of the audience (a video was even made to promote the album, and it managed to get airplay on MTV), and a new generation of American indie musicians (chief among them Kurt Cobain, who considered this album the chief precursor of Seattle grunge). The cover art is also gorgeous, a splendid example of Arthur Sarnoff's "anthropomorphic art", the artist who created for Haynes and co. the enigmatic image of two clowns training a dog.

The following year Butthole Surfers released a record that was bizarre starting with its title, Hairway To Steven (which took aim, via a sort of anagram, at the immortal Led Zeppelin song "Stairway To Heaven"), and with its back cover, which listed each song not by its actual title but with grotesque, irreverent little drawings. For example: track one was represented by a naked man and woman defecating and urinating while playing baseball; tracks four and five, meanwhile, were represented respectively by a cigarette and a syringe, and so on. The real song titles were only revealed a few years later.

These goliardic games, as usual, also show up in the music itself, but this time they seem less complex and more an end in themselves. It's fair to say that, for all its likeability (indeed, that very likeability is its main flaw), Hairway To Steven is an album of out-and-out messing around, whereas the band's previous work had a clearly defined poetic and aesthetic unity. With this album the Surfers went rummaging through the scraps of Sixties Californian music and used them to disinfect the noise-punk-hardcore scrapes inflicted by their anarchic nature. The results, though, can be hilarious ("Ricky", that is: Kevin Coyne as reread by Lux Interior backed by the Grateful Dead!), but also lame (the drab, droning western of "I Saw An X-Ray Of A Girl Passing Gas"), and between a wicked rock'n'roll number ("Julio Iglesias") and a sleazy Byrds-like ballad ("Rocky"), our heroes found a way to play the triple ace you don't expect: "Jimi", "John E. Smoke" and "Backass".

"Jimi" is the opening track, as well as the longest song on the record: over a destructive rhythmic base, Leary's guitar engages in Hendrix-like couplings, punctuated by monstrous altered voices babbling within the electric storm; electronic hurricanes interrupt this sonic torture to make way for a more reassuring folk-rock. "John E. Smoke", on the other hand, is a psychedelic litany that speeds up into a skittish cow-core à la Meat Puppets, while "Backass" hurls a disharmonic guitar chrysalis against an imposing rhythmic monolith.

Hairway To Steven is without doubt the first Butthole Surfers record in which one can detect the early symptoms of the creative ailment that Haynes and co. would contract a few years down the line: although it's a good record, the ideas feel decidedly less inspired, and not even the use of more professional electronic solutions and unusually elegant acoustic arrangements will stop the germ from taking root.

In 1989 Butthole Surfers celebrated six years of their career by releasing a double live album pleonastically titled Double Live (Latino Buggerveil): it's a bootleg, downloadable today from their official website, whose poor sound quality ends up ruining the music as well. This live record, which also includes two curious covers of R.E.M. ("The One I Love") and Grand Funk Railroad ("Paranoid"), remains nonetheless an important document of the band's live activity in the late Eighties.

Among other things, Butthole Surfers shows retain an aura of legend revered by fans of crossovers between rock and other art forms: their absurd performances featured naked dancers, often engaged in provocative erotic play, dancing in front of surreal anatomical films (for instance, one depicting the cartilaginous reconstruction of a penis), while all around the musicians a chaos of strobe lights, fire and smoke erupted.

In 1991 Butthole Surfers released the album Pioughd on another major independent label, Rough Trade, before signing with Capitol the following year. With Teresa Nervosa having left the band for good, rhythm was now King Coffee's solitary responsibility, and he shaped fuller, less feral tones. The record opens with "Revolution", split into two parts, which, aside from the title, has little that's revolutionary about it: the delirium is only simulated. Indeed, behind Haynes's shaky, neglected vocals, behind Leary's acidic but impeccable solos, there emerged a need to somehow rationalize the chaos.

With Pioughd, Butthole Surfers effectively moved from the cabaret of disgust to cabaret, full stop. The cracks at the bottom of their art were starting to show, the toy was broken and it wasn't fun to play with anymore. If we had to find a metaphor to capture what Butthole Surfers became from 1991 onward, we could say that with Pioughd Butthole Surfers definitively lost the rediscovered childhood they'd once had. Only this can explain songs that would have been unthinkable for the Texan band just a few years earlier: "Lonesome Bulldog", village-fair country sung with a Sinatra-like vocal timbre; "Something", which sets the lyrics of their own 1983 song of the same name to the music of "Never Understand" by Jesus & Mary Chain.

In other tracks, "Golden Showers" and "Blindman", the surfers try to reignite the dying flame: the first moves between psychedelic hard-blues and insanely mottled jazz-soul, driven by an energetic organ, an euphoric sax and a scratchy guitar; the second, meanwhile, unleashes a telluric hard-rock that brushes up against the then-nascent stoner-rock.

The album, in substance, isn't a disaster, and even the long, chaotic jam "P.S.Y" makes for an interesting listen, but it lacks the anarchic fury, the existentialist yearning and the Dadaist spirit that had made the previous records, to varying degrees, worthy of praise.

In 1992, as mentioned, Butthole Surfers signed to major label Capitol, and afterwards came significant recognition in terms of audience and popularity, to the point that the song "Dracula From Huston" (from Wired Revolution) ended up on the soundtrack of the famous TV show "Scrubs", while "Who Was In My Room Last Night?" (from Independent Worm Saloon) was chosen by Activision for the music video game "Guitar Hero II".

A Time To Be Sane: the major-label years (1992-2002)

"A pile of shit, that's what art is"

(Kurt Schwitters)

The lesson of Butthole Surfers was to prove that shit can become music, can become art, and the constant scatological references in their songs are the obvious mark of their conceptual intentions, which clearly paid off. Having achieved their goal, the Texan band became, if not famous, at least more popular, helped also by the greater visibility that came with signing to Capitol.

It might seem reckless, today, that a record-industry giant would take on the burden and responsibility of releasing music by a band like this, but by then the Surfers were already normalizing their sound into a harmless blend of melodic hardcore, "formulaic" hard-rock and sanitized rap, falling in line with the musical trends of the moment: crossover and grunge. That's why Capitol decided to bet on them: they could have hit it big like Nirvana or Red Hot Chili Peppers; they didn't, but at least, if not here in Italy, in their home country a few more people remember them (take Matt Groening, creator of the Simpsons, who in one episode of the show has Ned Flanders' ultra-devout son wearing a t-shirt of the legendary surfers!).

Deep down, it's nice to see a great band given this kind of recognition too. That said, it was only natural that the band's dip in inspiration, already noticeable on Pioughd, would fully manifest itself on their subsequent albums. It would therefore be disingenuous to claim that the Butthole Surfers of the Nineties sold out to the big music industry. The fact remains that the Texan artists, while almost never dipping below a decent level, would never again release an album worthy of their reputation as musical terrorists.

The new era opened with Independent Worm Saloon, a 1993 album produced by John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin, and the opening track, "Who Was In My Room Last Night?", immediately reveals the effects that choice had on the band's sound, which was now wandering into territory close to canonical hard-rock and standardized metal. Even Leary's solos now sounded as impeccable and pyrotechnic as they did vain, and an electro-acoustic ballad like "The Wooden Song" confirmed that Butthole Surfers had turned the corner once and for all.

Independent Worm Saloon, enjoyable in a few spots, in fact flows by without any particular spark, somewhere between tamed delirium ("Tongue", "Alcohol", "Some Dispute Over T-Shirt Sales"), winks at grunge ("Goofy's Concern", "Dancing Fool") and at heavy metal ("Dog Inside Your Body", "Dust Devil", "Edgar"). So the most interesting track ends up being the one that steers clear of such clichés: "The Ballad Of Naked Man", with its rustic cadences in the arrangement for banjo, acoustic guitar and percussion. The counterweight to a track like that can only be the parade of banalities packed into "Clean It Up" (second-hand guitar noise over third-rate metallic trivia).

Sixty-three minutes: that's how long the album runs, decidedly too long for a band that was running out of ideas and tricks. Boredom often lurks around the corner, and the unprecedented pseudo-metalhead suit the Surfers were trying to tailor for themselves fit awkwardly on a band that once had the nerve to choose that name and flaunt it at the rock world like a raised middle finger.

The Capitol-era Butthole Surfers returned in 1996 with Electriclarryland, an album that kept riding across heavy metal plains thanks to tracks that were fierce in rhythm and scratchy in guitars, like "Birds", "Ulcer Breakout" and "Space". Since it's still a Butthole Surfers record after all, there was no shortage of hallucinated acid-folk-rock ballads, even if less jarring than their usual standard ("Cough Syrup", "Jingle Of A Dog's Collar"). Not satisfied with that, our heroes also try their hand at crossover, the more conventional kind heard on "Thermador" and "The Lord Is A Monkey", and the more personal kind on "Pepper" (rap, metal and ethnic touches).

The most disconcerting track, however, is "Tv Star", the lowest point of the album and one of the lowest in the entire Butthole Surfers saga: a jarring (yes, jarring, but in the negative sense of the word) folk ballad drenched in the most sickening pop honey; basically a cross between an uninspired Neil Young and a boy band for horny fourteen-year-old girls.

It's safe to say that by 1996 Butthole Surfers were a spent force, caught up in an eclecticism so vacuous that it produced sonic experiments, like "My Brother's Wife", utterly devoid of interest and completely inexpressive. A shame, because Electriclarryland, thanks to a handful of songs that were, if not revolutionary, at least decent, could have redeemed the misstep of Independent Worm Saloon; instead it only comes across as slightly less irritating.

After the release of Electriclarryland, in 1998 Capitol rejected the surfers' upcoming project, which was supposed to be titled "After The Astronaut", and the band, feeling slighted, turned three years later to the Surf Dog label, which released what still stands today as the last studio album by Butthole Surfers: Weird Revolution, made up largely of songs that had originally been intended for "After The Astronaut".

This is how Butthole Surfers made their way into the new millennium, doing so with an album boasting an impeccable production able to disguise, through flashy studio trickery, songs that often don't really hold together, making palatable episodes that would otherwise be hard to digest (the sensual hip-hop of "The Shame Of Life", the adolescent punk-pop of "Dracula From Huston" and the unusually melancholic ballad "Jet Fighter").

In Weird Revolution, aside from the postmodern collage of "After The Astronaut", there's nothing of particular note, but overall it's a consistent, solid work, free of the embarrassing missteps that had undermined the band's credibility on the previous two albums. After all, fans of the old-school surfers might even find something to enjoy in the deranged rap of "Shit Like That", the ethno-disco of "Mexico" or the danceable electro-funk of "Get Down".

In 2002, Butthole Surfers finally went back to being the anarchic pranksters of old, though only thanks to a commendable archival effort by Latino Buggerveil, which released seventeen lost fragments (outtakes, bonus tracks, b-sides, unreleased material) recorded between 1982 and 1994.

Humpty Dumpty Lsd, as the compilation is titled, is a fascinating mosaic portraying an extraordinary band at its peak - most of the material, in fact, comes from recording sessions between 1983 and 1985 - through fragments of old songs ("Perry Intro", "Concubine Solo"), terroristic free-form experiments ("One Hundred Million People Dead", "Hetero Skeleton"), electro-noise maelstroms ("Space I", "Day Of The Dying Alive"), the obligatory acid-soaked rides ("I Love You Peggy", "Ghandi") and a bona fide post-punk anthem in "Just A Boy". A record definitely worth owning, at least for anyone who loved the early albums by the least cool surfers in the whole United States.

After seven years, Butthole Surfers are returning to the stage for a single Italian date. They'll play on April 25th at the Estragon in Bologna, with the very lineup that made them famous in the '80s: Gibby Haynes, Paul Leary, Jeff Pinkus, King Coffey and Teresa Taylor. On stage they'll only perform material from the 1980-1991 period, accompanied by visuals and a dancer.

References:

Mark Paytress, Mark Paytress Unravels the Career of the Cult American Band

Bob Gulla, Austin‘s BUTTHOLE SURFERS host a theater of the Absurd

Steven Blush, Tex-ass in American Punk Hardcore (Shake edizioni)

Andrea Prevignano, Trance Syndicate in Noise (Castelvecchi editore)

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