Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991

by Michael Azerrad

With vocals hollered incomprehensibly through bullhorns, wild jungle drumming summoning up an unholy blend of violence and lust, gory films, dry-ice foggers, strobes, and a naked dancer short-circuiting every last brain cell of every last member of the audience, the Butthole Surfers were the real deal: while many underground bands tried to express insanity by making meticulously insane music, the Butthole Surfers allowed their genuine perversity to dismantle their music completely.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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??!!’ ”

“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.”

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.”

And then it happened: former United States president James Earl Carter picked up the suitcase to which Butthole Surfers singer Gibson Jerome Haynes had applied his genitals. The president then put the suitcase in the trunk, got in the car, and they sped off into the humid Georgia night.

The EP also features “Moving to Florida,” in which Haynes plays a crazy old coot intent on nuking the Sunshine State. “I’m going to hold time hostage down in Florida, child,” Haynes drawls in an extended monologue. “I’m going to explode the whole town of Tampa Bay.”

“It is firstly most important to state that, on this night, Gibby had eaten an entire handful of four-way acid tabs and drank an entire bottle of Jim Beam before the sound check had even begun,” Kramer notes.

Kramer eventually found Haynes at a Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds show. As Kramer tells it, Haynes was completely naked, repeatedly fighting his way onto the stage and charging at Cave as hulking security guards punched and kicked him off the ten-foot-high stage and back into the audience, where he would remain for a few seconds before trying to claw his way back onstage again. Finally, guitarist Blixa Bargeld came forward and kicked Haynes in the groin with a pointed German boot. This time Haynes did not get up.

Or so it seemed. Actually, Haynes was only pretending he’d been knocked out, and as the hired thugs walked away, he rose to his feet and began screaming at them, “DUTCH FAGGOTS!!! GODDAMN FUCKING DUTCH FAGGOTS!!! A WHOLE FUCKING COUNTRY FILLED WITH NOTHING BUT FUCKING TURD BURGLING FAGGOTS!!!! I FUCK YOUR ASS IN HEAVEN AND HELL!!!!! FUUUUUUUUCK YOOOOOOOOU!!” “The ensuing chase and capture was the stuff dreams are made of,” Kramer says. “Stark naked like the day he was born, beaten, bruised, bloody, and tripping, this icon of modern music ran like Jesse Owens through the entire complex, down the halls, up the stairs, grabbing beer bottles from people’s hands as he went and throwing them down on the concertgoers below.

“At this time there were perhaps twenty hands upon him, holding him down, and although Gibby is completely crazy, he is not stupid. ‘I’M SORRY!!!! I’M FUCKING SORRY!!!! PLEASE DON’T BEAT ME ANYMORE! I HAVE A BRAIN TUMOR!!! I CAN’T HELP THE WAY I AM!!!! PLEASE DON’T HIT ME AGAIN!!! IT’S AGAINST MY RELIGION!!!!’ ” Haynes then made a successful run for the dressing room and slammed the door behind him. Kramer could hear Leary and Haynes screaming at each other inside, and when he finally worked up the courage to open the door, he found the two of them smashing guitars, bottles, and chairs in what Kramer calls “the most potent example of bad behavior I have ever seen. To this day, more than fifteen years later, I have no more vivid memory of the effect a life in music can have on a human being.”

Just before they went onstage, Haynes chugged an entire bottle of red wine; moments into the set he dived straight into the horrified crowd, which parted like the Red Sea. Haynes knocked himself unconscious on the floor, to warm applause from the theater’s security team. “I look down at Gibby,” recalls Kramer. “He tries to move, but then collapses as vomit begins pouring from his mouth.”

“FUCKING DUTCH FAGGOTS!!! A WHOLE FUCKING COUNTRY OF COCK-SUCKING QUEENS!!!! YOU FUCKING BEAT ME UP AND THEN YOU RIP US OFF!!!! WHICH ONE OF YOU FAGGOTS STOLE OUR MONEY??!!!! FUCKING DUTCH FAGGOTS!!!!” Yet another chase scene ensued, and yet another pack of Dutch goons wrestled Haynes to the ground, and yet again he profusely apologized. “After which he is released once again,” Kramer says, “and once again dashes through the halls screaming obscenities while grabbing beer bottles from people’s hands as he runs and hurling them against the brick wall.” “Those fuckin’ Dutch,” Leary explains, “they kind of get you pissed off after a while, man.” “We thought we had just ruined our careers by botching this show,” Coffey says. “Of course, the Dutch loved it—‘The mayhem it is beautiful, it is wonderful, every song erupted into chaos!’ ” The next day the local paper ran an article about how the Butthole Surfers were the sensation of the festival.

Haynes proceeded to verbally and physically abuse the audience, heaving beer bottles at the walls until he forced literally everybody but the band out of the club. The band resumed playing to the now empty house. People started to creep back into the room, but Haynes bullied them right back out again. And then the band played some more. “That was pretty fun,” Coffey says, smiling at the fond memory, “literally forcing people out of the room during a show.”

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.”

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.

“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.