Reborn and baptized by Buttholes 40 years ago
Like recovering alcoholics, I have a second birthday and it's today
There’s nothing like the first stroll in your new town, which for me and Austin was Sunday, April 1, 1984. I was walking down South Congress (which wasn’t nearly as seedy as developers will have you believe), when I happened upon the grand opening of the costume store Lucy in Disguise with Diamonds. The party spilled out onto the sidewalk, while zydeco music pumped out of the speakers. What a cool town!
Next stop was the Continental Club, where the sign said, “Butthole Surfers $3.” I was the first one in the door at 9 p.m., and it was just me and owner Mark Pratz for awhile. Cheryl Newlin, a bartender on her day off, was the second person in. My first friend in Austin!
They didn’t have opening acts in Hawaii clubs, so when Happy Death came onstage at about 10:00 p.m. I thought they were the Butthole Surfers. I was surprised to see another band set up afterwards.
And wonderfully unprepared for the strangeness that would follow. Not many people have seen the Butthole Surfers without knowing a thing about them. This was before all the visual insanity—the penis re-attachment films and the flaming cymbals and the stripper who covered her teeth in aluminum foil. It was just the music, and it was both abrasive and hypnotic. As Gibby yelped and howled his brilliant gibberish, my brain was locked in on the primal stand-up rhythms of Teresa Taylor and King Coffey, and I’ve been chasing that beat ever since.
“This guy just moved here from Hawaii,” Cheryl introduced me around after the show.
“Why the hell would you leave Hawaii to come here, man?” growled Xalapeno Charlie Duggan, who owned a legendarily spicy Mexican restaurant on Barton Springs Road.
“I’m into bands, not beaches,” I answered.
“Well, then, welcome to Austin,” he said with a handshake.
Seeing the Butthole Surfers at the Continental Club on a Sunday night: oh, man was I in the right town! The next time I saw the band was at Uncle Sue-Sue’s, directly behind the Hole In the Wall. With two opening acts playing full hour sets, the Surfers didn’t take the stage until 1:45 a.m., and the owner pulled the plug right in the middle of second song “Dum Dum,” which was kinda like your parents busting in while you were having sex. To quell a riot, Gibby announced that the Butthole Surfers would play a free show the next night at a West Campus party house on 28th and Salado. It’s where Melissa and Laurie from Inner Sanctum lived.
Hundreds showed up and the band set up on the tiny porch. To add to the chaos, a big party was raging at the Greek house across the street. Frats and punks hated each other (“I was punk rock when it was called ‘Hey, Faggot’!”), so there were various skirmishes on 28th Street, until the cop cars came, with Gibby hilariously describing the action through his megaphone. After the Buttholes were shut down, while the disco got louder from the frat house, punks set fire to their dumpster and pushed it towards the entrance, but 28th went downhill and it started drifting towards the OAF House and was intercepted. It was a good night to take LSD.
The Surfers’ first show in a club was in 1981 at the Vulcan Gas Company, which by then was called Duke’s Royal Coach Inn. It was a punk/new wave venue at 316 Congress Avenue, but the Butthole Surfers were more a psychedelic band like the 13th Floor Elevators, and horror rockers like Roky Erickson’s post-Rusk groups. They brought back the Vulcan, and took what the Elevators and Conqueroo and Shiva’s and Bubble Puppy started, as far as it could go.
It was pretty historic when the Surfers opened for Roky at the Ritz in Feb. 1987, when Austin’s golden child was way gone and in need of a benefit. The Butts were in quite a mood because they agreed to play for free with the understanding that they would be minimally advertised, but when they pulled up at the Ritz, their name was the biggest one on the marquee. The angry Surfers responded by playing one droning song for 30 minutes, with the only lyrics being “Lou Reed.” High on the requisite psychedelics, I wasn’t ready to go home so I went with the band to the rat motel they shared on Anderson Lane. I had recently cranked out a BHS feature story for Thrasher magazine, so I was in good favor. I would drink beer until 6 a.m. then catch a bus back to Baylor Street, where I lived with Suzee, my girlfriend of two years. We met at that party at 28th and Salado.
But Gibby and Paul had a big yelling argument and I had to leave at about 3 a.m. I borrowed the phone to call Su, and woke her up. About an hour later she came screeching up to the house (tires and voice) and when I got in the car, she really gave it to me. “You motherfucking asshole,” she greeted. She had a big test that day and needed her sleep.
“I didn’t know you were still in college,” I said. Oh, boy! You ever see Mike Tyson working a speed bag? That was my arm at every red light the rest of the way home.
How can you live with someone who’s a junior at UT and not know where she goes every day? I never saw her do homework, never met a fellow student, never a word about grades or study groups. She left around 10 a.m. every day and came home at night in her waitress outfit and I thought maybe she dropped out or flunked out and didn’t want to tell me. There might also have been a level of self-absorption on my part. After a dozen years of toiling in the word mines, my writing career was finally taking off!
Following is an excerpt of my Butthole Surfers article which originated at the Austin Chronicle, so you know it was written on speed. It was self-syndicated to alternative weeklies in Dallas, Phoenix, San Francisco and Seattle, with a “don’t ask/don’t tell” attitude on whether it had been published elsewhere. Ah, the golden days of freelancing, before the internet.
Austin 1986.
It is of friendly face, short brown hair and plump body. “This is not a fat dog,” Paul Leary contradicts the visual testimony. “She’s just got big bones.” Four years ago she resided on Death Row at the San Antonio dog pound, with fractional hope of having her sentence commuted in the midst of all more desirable breeds. This pit bull mix was special, as the future would bear, but the untended doggie business and non-stop squealing had a way of rushing the inspections right past her subtle charms. A pair of Trinity University buddies didn’t mind the smell. And the noise was actually kinda nice. They took their time and saw something in the mutt who would never save the lives of children, never jump from Ed McMahon’s lap and never make paw prints in Hollywood cement. On the way home they named her Mark Farner. The Butthole Surfers love their dog. She’s a tail-wagger in a watchdog world.
Mark Farner is unaware that she is one of the Five Most Famous Dogs in America. Perhaps her masters have shown her the color photo of them holding her above their heads in Spin and have read the passages mentioning her in the countless Hunter Thompson daydreams which pop up in publications that put typesetting in a category with caviar, lynx jackets and butlers. But media are invisible to dogs. Farner just wants something to chase, something to chew or someone to run a hand over her veloured finish like a girl back home feels the crewcut of a beau just back from basic training. Dogs just wanna have fun. And the Butthole Surfers know it. That’s who and what. They’re fascinated with the wheres, whens and hows. And if they knew why dogs just wanna have fun they wouldn’t be the Butthole Surfers.
Questions of nature being unanswerable in the complete sense, the Butthole Surfers are perhaps the most popular underground band in the world today. Their recorded product — two albums three EPs — is annoying, radical, distorted, ugly and unflinching. They sell enough of it that they could live off their royalties if they didn’t keep buying recording equipment. But they’ve always invested the past into the future, and now have their own $30,000 recording studio. Even with such freedom and facilities, their records will never match their live show, which is one of mankind’s strangest gifts. If a Butthole Surfer show was to be described in a sandlot football huddle it would be, “Go out to Captain Beefheart, cut left to Pere Ubu, wrap them in toilet paper, then zig-zag through the Living Theatre, rip off Howlin’ Wolf, go in the alley with a Mexican guy with an afro, come out 20 minutes later and go long.” They splatter sounds and stance all over the rock concert decorum like Jackson Pollock threw paint on canvas. They don’t know why, but why not?
Since re-settling in Austin six months ago the Scat Pack has restricted the airing of their spectacle to the Houston/Dallas/Austin/San Antonio circuit and one-shot gigs in cities like Chicago, New York and San Francisco, which they fly to, do the show and then fly back to Austin. “Before we moved into this house we spent almost three straight years touring in our van with no place to come home to,” Paul said from the front yard, between throws at the tall glass sign naming the drive-in theatre which used to be next door. “It’s kinda nice, you know, living somewhere,” he said and then apologized for the scarcity of good throwing rocks. “There used to be a lot more here.”
When punk rock spat its way out of graffiti-ed dives in the late ’70s, it was uncertain where it would lead. The parade moved forward on the pavement of its intentions, but still, marchers dropped out due to boredom, value-shift or disillusionment at the shrinking number of watchers. When the fatigued congregation reached the intersection of Fiorucci and Disco Revival their numbers shrank like a Pakistani t-shirt in hot water. Bandwagons enroute to “The Next Big Thing” became so crowded that mass transit studies were initiated.
On the other hand you had Sonic Youth, Big Black, Scratch Acid, Live Skull and the Butthole Surfers. The new underground sound owes as much to jazz as it does to rock. It comes out at a frequency that most people can’t hear, but it twitches the ears and souls of those that can. It tells you that everything you know is wrong, and everything you feel is right, but you don’t really know what you feel. It doesn’t accept Jimi’s death. It wants you to police yourself, starting inside and working your way out. It takes the hole and leaves the donut. It tells you that one minute of feedback is worth a thousand words. It’s white people twisting wormy hair and thinking black thoughts. It’s the sound of things being put together against their will. It’s not a good place to meet chicks.
The Butthole Surfers are free. Freedom is destroying the nets that hold the past and making sure the lines to the future are well above your head. Their minds work as if they’ve been sequestered from taboos. If you can think it but can’t say it you’re not free. If it comes out of your body you shouldn’t be afraid to hold it in your hand.
(Note: Now you see why we called crank “talent.”)
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“It tells you that everything you know is wrong, and everything you feel is right, but you don’t really know what you feel.”
On the rare occasion when someone hits a baseball this hard and this far in Taiwan the broadcast announcer exclaims: “Like the girlfriend who is not coming back, that ball is gone.”
Well done, Sir. Well done.
And Thank You.
No mention of Gibby's radio show. It was special.