All bets were off in the Texas punk of the early 1980s. In Austin, the Dicks played drunk punk blues, and were led by Gary Floyd, a fiery queer man and vitriolic Communist. Meanwhile, San Antonio‘s own Fearless Iranians From Hell provoked audiences who were still stung by the 1980 hostage crisis in Tehran, baiting crowds hilariously with songs such as “Blow Up the Embassy.“
But no one was wilder or woolier than the Butthole Surfers. The band started in San Antonio, then invaded Austin. They blended shock rock riffs with art—punk experimentalism and junk food culture, like Black Sabbath arguing with Black Flag about Blacula.
The group chose their name because they were certain no radio DJ would ever dare to utter it on the air. This was one of the only things the Buttholes were ever wrong about. Most other Texas punk bands stood little chance of getting on the radio, or even out of the state. So they devoted themselves to masterclass shenanigans, which many of them detail in our oral history, Someday All The Adults Will Die! (publishing on Sept. 2).
The Butthole Surfers were the exception that proved the rule—they were the hardest-working redneck weirdo band in show business. For years without pause, they took Texas punk out on the road and across the wide oceans. Some of them barely survived it.
The year is 1984 AD, and a strange ripple is moving across Manhattan. Bleary-eyed New Yorkers who turn on their TVs and see a cable-access program called The Scott and Gary Show witness something weirder than anything they’ve ever encountered on the Bowery. Two slack-jawed, bare- foot drummers are wailing a caveman beat in unison—their syncopation and their short, efficient haircuts mark them as obvious members of a cult. The bass player is twitchy, and the show credits identify him only as “Teheran.” The half-naked singer smears lipstick on his cheeks, then grabs a roll of toilet paper and sings through it, “Take me, Mexican caravan! / Teach this white boy to be Mexican!” But for NYC viewers, the most repellent and fascinating creature is playing guitar. His haircut is a bizarre purple accident, and he alternates power chords with scribbles and scratches he makes across the lower frets. He lurches center stage, and the camera zooms into his lolling tongue, his crossed eyes.
“Ah,” the New Yorkers think, “hillbillies.”
The show host introduces them as the Butthole Surfers “from way down in Texas.” And for many people, that explained everything. These were Texans, the folks who shot JFK, marry their sisters, and can’t forget the Alamo. But if anything, the truth was stranger. The Buttholes were artists—well familiar with Andy Warhol’s ideas about reproduction and representation—and knew exactly how to play the role of yokels, even when they were tripping their brains out, as they were on The Scott and Gary Show. Just months before, in a sweltering recording studio in San Antonio, I had watched them meticulously record and rerecord the songs that would become Rembrandt Pussyhorse, their most surreal and spooky album to date. The Butthole Surfers—their name, high jinks, and toilet paper stagecraft aside—were a rigorous, conceptual band.
Back in 1981, San Antonio native Paul Leary Walthall and Dallas boy Gibson “Gibby” Haynes were wide-eyed fans of the Big Boys and the Dicks. Their first project together was a fanzine called Strange VD. They began the Buttholes by choosing a name they thought would be unspeakable for TV news anchors and radio DJs, and they did not start compromising after that. In short order, they diagnosed and defanged a central drive of punk rock: authenticity. Instead, the Buttholes embraced artifice. For them, nothing was really real. From that perch, they were free to explore and replicate a black universe of sound, emitting everything from nightmarish psychedelia to warped country, Asian folk music, and horror film soundtrack vibes.
For the next decade, they practiced and recorded exhaustively. They toured like animals with a U-Haul. In performance, by accident or design, they refracted all the horrible, juicy reality of Texas: its wealth of music, its white-knuckle violence and murderous bigotry, its self-awareness, worldliness, and oblivion. Understandably, audiences couldn’t believe what they were seeing. By 1986, I was certain they were the best band on the planet.
Gibby Haynes: I want one of those jackets like the country and western stars wear. With embroidery on the back of a big pot leaf, a yellow brick road leading to your high school, skulls, needles. Those jackets can tell your whole life story.
Paul Leary: I’ve known Gibby since 1977, I guess. We met at Trinity University in San Antonio. Gibby was an accounting student, and I went on to fall a semester short of getting a master’s degree in finance. I once saw him cut a fart into his cupped hand and then put it up to his nose for a big whiff. Then he looked at me, and he said, “I like my own.” Did I think, “This is someone I want to hang out with?” Sadly enough, I did.
Scott Stevens: I was the first bass player of the Butthole Surfers. I met Paul [Leary] Walthall in 1978 in a life drawing class at Trinity University. “Life drawing” equaled “nude models”—hooray! Paul introduced me to Gibby, the accounting student in the black leather jacket. They were such a contrast to the vast majority of the students at Trinity. Those were people who grew up afraid of anything or anyone different from them. The majority of the other students were going to graduate, live in a gated community, and spray-starch their genitalia every day before going to work.
Gibby Haynes: I lived with Paul for a while in an apartment there in 1979. I remember one Sunday afternoon, he and his girlfriend and I were sitting by the pool. We’d been drinking beer a lot, and I was in my bathing suit, sitting in one of those slatted chairs. There was a big crowd of kids and singles around the pool. I just sat there and peed in my pants, just drained myself. It felt so good to sit there in the sun with a beer in my hand, talking to everyone while I did it. And there was this big puddle below the chair that was slowly traveling toward the pool.
It wasn’t openly addressed in our conversation. But later on, the people from the apartment office called Paul and asked if I was on heavy drugs.
Paul Leary: We got out of college, and it was either go to work or be in a punk rock band. It was just something to do for the fuck of it, like every- body does. I thought I was gonna be a stockbroker. That would have put me six feet underground . . . [but] hell, I think being in a punk rock band got pretty close to doing that to me too.
Paul Leary: We were gonna change the name of the band every week. We had a bunch of names lined up for the future. We’d already used the Vodka Family Winstons.
Gibby Haynes: I still like Nine-Foot Worm Makes Own Food. Ed Asner Is Gay. The Philippi Meeple Peeps. Black Astronaut was another good name. There was the Againsters and the Againsters. The Againsters were against everything, and the Againsters were into doing everything over and over again.
Jeff Smith: [Singer and founder, Hickoids] The first time I met Gibby and Paul was when I was sixteen. I was hanging out in this bar called Eddie’s—it was sort of a frat bar. And Gibby had heard that I was booking bands at this barbecue joint that I worked at. So Gibby came and took me out of Eddie’s and over to the apart- ment he shared with Paul. They played me this blown-out demo tape that they’d made with one of those desktop cassette players. The song was called “Peggy from Mannix.” It was the most god-awful thing I’d ever heard.
Adriane “Ash” Shown: The Butthole Surfers played their first shows at my dad’s art gallery, the Shown-Davenport Gallery. I wasn’t in Texas yet. But when I turned seventeen, I found one of their props at the gallery—it was a paper cockroach. My father told me it was from this band Butthole Surfers. He loved Gibby and thought he was artistic and funny.
Chris Gates [Bassist, Big Boys, Poison 13; guitarist, Junkyard]: I have all these cassettes from back in the day, and one of them is a rehearsal tape of the Butthole Surfers that Gibby gave me [before they] opened for the Big Boys the first time. It’s a phenomenal recording, made with one of those early Eighties jamboxes with the great microphones. It’s amazing. They’re changing instruments on almost every song.
Bill Daniel [Photographer and filmmaker]: The first time I saw the Buttholes was on the Riverwalk in San Antonio. It was theatrically goofy. It was arty.
Chris Gates: Gibby played saxophone as literally a guy who doesn’t know how to play saxophone. Then, when I listened to [New York “no wave” punks] James White and the Blacks, I thought, “Oh! James White is doing that on purpose. He can play the same part next time.” But Gibby wasn’t trying to pretend he was a good sax player. He was just making an interesting noise with an instrument that happened to be at hand. That’s kind of how they approached all of their instruments in the early days.
Bill Daniel: Even before they moved to San Francisco, they had developed into what they were, with tight musicianship, a powerful sense of arrangement [laughs], and a fucking all-out, emotional performance, you know? After I saw them on the Riverwalk, they understood that the whole show was the piece.
Courtesy of University of Texas Press
Paul Leary: In 1982, we decided to go to California. We sold everything we owned, got a van and loaded it up, went to California. We had one show lined up, with the Minutemen or something like that, in Hollywood. So we played our one show and got our fifty dollars, and there we were . . . in California.
We would show up at punk rock gigs and start unloading equipment. Someone says, “Who are you?” “We’re the Butthole Surfers.” “Well, you guys aren’t playing here tonight.” And then we’d start crying about having no gas or food. And they’d say, “Okay, you can play three songs!”
It was one of those shows — at the Tool and Die in San Francisco — where the Dead Kennedys showed up. And Jello Biafra took a liking to us and let us open for them at the Whisky a Go Go, and the next thing you know we’re on his label Alternate Tentacles and playing more live shows with the Dead Kennedys.
From inception, the Buttholes split the difference between shock and schlock, Black Flag and Black Sabbath, Grand Guignol and Grand Funk Railroad. As Haynes and Leary scuttled back and forth between San Antonio and Austin, they also studied the local legends. They noted Big Boys’ disregard for the line between band and audience, but they had no interest in feel-good funk. They loved the spectacle of the Dicks’ Gary Floyd — and later even named a song after him —but they had no use for politics. And they admired the way that Stick Men with Ray Guns bludgeoned their own crowds, but the Buttholes were after a more extra- dimensional sound.
Most important, while other bands in Texas and all over the United States were xeroxing Circle Jerks and Minor Threat, the Buttholes understood hardcore punk not as a set of loud and fast rules, but as an aesthetic. For them, hardcore was a synonym for extreme, and they decided to be the most extreme of all.
They began their Alternative Tentacles debut with “The Shah Sleeps in Lee Harvey’s Grave,” a squealing, atonal freak-out that is either the craziest hardcore punk song ever or a hilarious parody of one. It is probably both. Elsewhere on the record were perfect, almost winsome melodies (“Hey”) and guitar solos that sounded like someone losing consciousness. The band were already distinguishing themselves by wedging huge, chunky-salsa riffs underneath the scabrous noise of the EP. Halfway through its recording, the Buttholes introduced a new drummer who preferred to play standing up: King Coffey, formerly of Fort Worth punk heroes the Hugh Beaumont Experience. They would soon add a second stand-up drummer, Teresa “Nervosa” Taylor; together, Coffey and Taylor gave the group a sinister, ritualistic groove.
Paul Leary: After we went to California, we came back to San Antonio and recorded our first couple of records. Gibby and I started [the first record] by ourselves, and we got King part of the way through it. He’s on “Bar-B-Q Pope” and some other songs.
Jeffrey “King” Coffey: The first show I saw in Austin was the Buttholes, and they were playing Bloodrock’s “D.O.A.” and it was so great! When I was invited to join the band, I felt like I’d won the punk rock lottery. I was living my dream.
The Buttholes were known as a great live band, but Paul and Gibby worked so hard on that first record. They grew out of the US hardcore scene — I use the word they here, since I joined the band after I was already a huge fan. I think the performance aspects of what the Big Boys and Dicks were doing in their shows set the template for what Gibby wanted to do. But the Butts approached a live show and a record as completely different, unrelated things. We tried to experiment in the studio and challenge ourselves.
Jeffrey “King” Coffey: The Buttholes were seen as a moronic, drooling, knuckle-dragging band, but Gibby and Paul were essentially art students who were unafraid of everything. We were all attracted to punk, but it got so codified, so we said, “Screw that!”
Was there an intellectual aspect of the band? [hesitates] Well, it was all instinctual. An intellectual quality was something you didn’t want to admit to. Paul made no apologies for lifting riffs from classic rock and blues.
Paul Leary: I have this bad habit of crossing my eyes when I play, so I can’t focus on anything. You end up with drool running out of your mouth. You see this big puddle under your lip. Then you realize you’ve split your pants, and you forgot to wear your underwear.
Clarke Blacker [Guitarist, Nervebreakers, Stick Men with Ray Guns]: When we met the Buttholes, they were younger than us [Stick Men with Ray Guns], and they were much more rhythmic. They hadn’t gotten so abstract yet. But after playing with us for a few shows, that changed. I think if I sat down with Paul, one on one, he’d tell me we influenced them. I don’t think they influenced us so much. We were going down our own road.
Sally King [Fan]: Buttholes shows at the Ritz were a full visual-oral spectrum of performance art and music. They played while projecting driver’s education films with mangled corpses behind them. They were fucking great.
Rey Washam [Drummer, Scratch Acid, Big Boys, Rapeman, True Believers]: Our relationship with the Butthole Surfers was a friendly competition. Gibby was really funny, and the band were just undeniable. I liked their songs. But Scratch Acid were the first ones to play with films projected behind us. [Future Slacker and Dazed and Confused cinematographer] Lee Daniel once came up to us and said, “Do you want to play with a screen behind you?” We said, “Sure!”
The next time I saw the Buttholes, they were doing it too.
Maria Cotera [Fan]: My parents hosted a dinner for some Austin City Council members once, and the Butthole Surfers came. And then Gibby came over one Christmas — he gave my mother a Christmas tree ornament that was basically a tiny Budweiser beer can.
Paul Leary: Before we got King and Teresa in the band, we were pulling drummers off the street. Guys that couldn’t play their entire drum kits. We got a guy named Kevin Layman from San Antonio, who had a wife and a child, to play drums. Before our first show together, he went on and on about how scared he was. He was not a punk rock sort of guy; he was just a drummer. We told him, “Oh man, nothing’s gonna happen. Don’t worry!”
We were playing at Studio 29, and Mike Milligan threw a bottle at Gibby from the back of the club and missed Gibby and hit Kevin in the nose. Stopped the show. His nose was bleeding profusely — it was probably broken. He went home and never showed his face again.
Rob Buford: [Singer, Crotch Rot] Gibby pulled down his shorts, then Mike Milligan grabbed them and pulled them down some more. Gibby kicked Mike in the face. Mike was holding a bottle of beer, and he got so mad that he threw it at Gibby as hard as he could. He missed Gibby, but the bottle hit the drummer right in the nose. Blood everywhere, show over. All the kids who were flying on acid fled the scene. A few weeks later, Mike was walking up the Drag, and Gibby was approaching from the other direction. Mike could not avoid him. He was terrified — Gibby is, like, six foot four — so Mike got down on his knees and said, “I’m sorry, Gibby!” Gibby put his hand on Mike’s shoulder and said, “It’s all right, Mike.”
Michael Corcoran [Journalist]: Butthole Surfers, Glass Eye, and mydolls played at Uncle Sue-Sue’s in May 1984. They pulled the plug on the Surfers after ten minutes because it was closing time, so the band did a free show at Laurie Greenwell’s house the next night. There was a big frat party happening across the street, so there were a couple of fights. I remember a dumpster was set on fire, and Gibby did all his vocals through a megaphone.
Laurie Greenwell [Fan. Married to Dicks bassist Buxf Parrott]: They played on our front porch. There were people everywhere, all over the place and in the front yard. Our place was right in the middle of all these frat houses. The police came and told the band to stop playing. And they did. After the police left, though, the Buttholes played “The Shah Sleeps in Lee Harvey’s Grave.” Then they packed up and left.
Diana Garcia [Fan]: I really loved the Butthole Surfers. I was at their show at Liberty Lunch, and Gibby was starting fires. I thought I was at a pagan ritual. I don’t know if I hallucinated this, but I think someone took a dog to the show. And they had the dog in the mosh pit, and then they were crowd- surfing the dog. I got really scared because I thought they were going to sacrifice the dog.
Teresa Taylor: And, of course, there was that famous show that we played at Voltaire’s Basement as the Jack Officers. Me and King had to play an air conditioning duct that was hanging from the ceiling, and we were breaking sticks every two minutes.
Sally King: There was something a little bit dangerous at those Butthole shows. But Voltaire’s Basement itself was extremely dangerous—you know, an old bookstore basement with one exit.
Teresa Taylor: At the peak of the show, David Yow ran up and smashed a bottle over Gibby’s head. Then El Borracho, I mean Roger Manriquez, jumped onstage and said—very sentimentally—“Don’t do that to Gibby!” and he punched David in the face. They all took David to the ground and were beating the shit out of him. They thought they were defending Gibby, so that was touching.
Adriane “Ash” Shown: [Fan] I was at that Jack Officers show. I was front and center, as I always was, and it was a mess.
Teresa Taylor: It was all a setup. Gibby had gone to a theatrical prop store and gotten a Jack Daniel’s bottle made out of hard sugar. Then, before the show, he gave it to David and said, “Make sure everyone sees you guzzling this Jack Daniels, and act super drunk.” I was in on it, but not everyone realized this was gonna happen. It was hard to explain to people that it had been planned. People got mad.
David Yow: [Bassist, Toxic Shock; singer, Scratch Acid, the Jesus Lizard] Gibby told me to start bad-mouthing him early, to do it all day, and I did. He gave me two bottles to use. He had a cue—he was supposed to say, “We weren’t gonna play, but David Yow’s mom gave us all blow jobs, so . . .” But I didn’t trust Gibby. I thought he was gonna do something I didn’t know about, so I hid the second bottle.
Rey Washam: Just before it happened, David Yow was running around, asking, “Where’s that bottle, where’s that bottle?” I saw him head for the stage, but I didn’t see him hit Gibby. I was in the back, trying to pick up some girl.
Sally King: I was surprised—I thought everyone would know that this was part of the performance. Because the band kept playing, you know? Also, I mean, David had already done a [Scratch Acid] show dressed like Hitler. So it wasn’t like this wasn’t a direction that they had fully embraced. [laughs]
David Yow: After I hit Gibby with the first bottle, the guy going out with my ex-girlfriend, Kevin Scollan, jumped onstage and started beating the shit out of me within seconds. I was covered with hematomas. They pulled him off me just as he was about to kick me in the face with his steel-toed boot—his boot just grazed my nose—but if he had connected, he would have broken my jaw. Gibby said, “Where’s the other bottle?” Then he took it and smashed it over his head to show everyone that it was a joke.
Adriane “Ash” Shown: I wasn’t angry that I’d been tricked because I was there for the theatricality. But I ended up in that little backstage dirt room, and I was talking with them, saying, “Oh my God, I thought it was real.” It fooled me for a second.
David Yow: Kevin and I were hanging out backstage after the show. We became great friends that night. He’s a good fighter. I am not.
Sally King: But once people realized, “Oh, that was a shtick; that was a thing”—it changed everything. I think everyone—all the other bands— stepped up their game after that show. People took performing a lot more seriously.
D Angus Macdonald [Fan]: You fucking guys and your art bands.
By 1984, the Big Boys had broken up, Gary Floyd had moved the Dicks to San Francisco, and everyone in Austin was talking (or arguing) about the Butthole Surfers. In addition to manufacturing bloodshed at their shows, the group had begun encouraging (or crafting) rumors about themselves, especially anything that made them seem more inbred or craven. But the Buttholes didn’t even live in Texas anymore: They had begun a punishing international touring schedule that would last almost seven years. Begin- ning in a tricked-out 1976 Chevy Nova and ending in a series of sputtering used vans, the Buttholes made friends and enemies in faraway places like CBGB in New York, O’Cayz Corral in Madison, and the Effenaar in Eind- hoven, the Netherlands. They finally settled on an unflappable bass player, Jeff Pinkus, and added a naked dancer, but somewhere in that decade, they lost Teresa Taylor. Their wild, psychedelic shows became a notorious rite of passage for punks and innocent civilians across the nation—Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love allegedly met at a Buttholes show in Seattle in 1991. No other Lone Star punk band had been so ambitious or relentless.
Like ambassadors or novelists, the Butthole Surfers explained Texas to the world, but they had to become stateless to do that.
Jeffrey “King” Coffey: So much of the eighties was just brutal for us: We had no money, no home, no girlfriends, no boyfriends, no possessions. No relief. But playing the shows was the payoff.
Michael Laird [Skateboarder and Fan]: The Butthole Surfers would play a show, then get off stage and start rehearsing again. They were professionals. They always had the best equipment. I don’t think they wanted to become famous. I think Gibby knew that wasn’t gonna happen. If he’d wanted to make money, he could have been an accountant. I don’t think it was about getting famous. They just wanted to get better. To be a better band.
Paul Leary: Our first bass player was Scott Stevens. He gave me this souve- nir plaque from Apollo 1. Then there was Andrew Mullen, then there was Quinn, then there was Bill. We took Bill on some tours, and he kinda fried. And went home to be a computer programmer.
Gibby Haynes: Terence Smart. Terence had a Bozo [the Clown] haircut.
Paul Leary: Then there was Juan—he liked to wear dresses. And then there was Trevor. Trevor was the guy who brought a sousaphone with him. He was from Windsor, Canada. So when we played in Windsor, they ran a promo photo of the band in the Windsor paper. The high school band director recognized that stolen sousaphone, and he came to the show and took it back.
Brad Perkins [Drummer, Marching Plague, Fearless Iranians from Hell]: I actually played on a few songs on the first Buttholes record. And they asked me if I wanted to join the band and go on tour with them. But they were going to go on tour in a car, not a van or anything. They sawed out a hole in the back of this car. And I thought, “That will be fun for a couple of weeks, and then . . .” It just didn’t seem like a good idea.
Paul Leary: It wasn’t that people in Austin hated us. We were just homeless. Every time we’d show up in town — I mean, a lot of people were real nice and gracious. A lot of people put up with us for a long period of time. It’s just that after a while, you can only expect so much from people. I didn’t want to put people out.
Michael Laird: The Buttholes toured so hard. They toured for years. I saw them in Houston one year, at Numbers, and talked to them backstage before the show. Teresa and King were so white, so pale, from living that life: getting up at five in the afternoon, then staying up for 100 percent of the night, then just a few hours of daylight and then sleeping, for years. They were so white. They were so beautiful.
Paul Leary: Gibby’s parents have bailed us out on a few occasions. We might be coming through at the end of some god-awful tour, with no money, and the van breaks down right as we’re getting to Dallas. So where do we end up for two weeks over Christmas? Let’s ruin the Hayneses’ Christmas! That’s what people suffer from us. It took us three and a half years to save up enough money to buy sleeping bags. We were always sick. You’d get the flu, and six months later you’d still have the flu.
[My dog] Mark Farner protected our tour van for years. She’s a pit bull blend, and when she’s in protect mode, you’d be very startled to hear her. She makes a noise that sounds like flapping sides of beef.
Teresa Taylor: Once when we were living in Winterville, Georgia, our friend Cammy came to visit us. We told her we weren’t getting anywhere as a band, so we were going to change our name to Stargazer. She started crying. King said, “No, Cammy, Stargazer is a name that could really take us somewhere.”
Jeffrey “King” Coffey: We also told people that Teresa and I were brother and sister. There are times—when I’m looking at some of your photos, Pat — that I’m not sure if I am looking at Teresa or myself. She might as well be my sister — certainly the closest thing to a sister I’ve ever had.
Teresa Taylor: I was the one who finally, finally, finally told everyone that King and I were not brother and sister. Then the next thing that I heard was that [San Francisco band] Frightwig—who I love—started crying when they heard this. Someone told me that [Frightwig bassist] Deanna [Ashley] said, “I know that King and Teresa are brother and sister because they are good friends of mine, and they would not lie to me.” And I wondered, “How many people out there did I just lie to?” Instead of looking like we had a cool idea, we hurt a lot of our friends.
Paul Leary: We met [Butthole dancer] Kathleen [Lynch, a.k.a. Ta-Da the Shit Lady] through the Celebrity Club in Atlanta, Georgia. The Celebrity Club had nude lesbian grit wrestling, where they’d spike the grits with a turd. Six-foot-four drag queens dancing on the bar in lingerie with tampon strings coming out of their bottom ends. Whenever we played that place, there’d always be some guy in the pit with a machete, waving it around in the air.
We’d play there, and after the show, we’d take turns standing out by the truck with a two-by-four, guarding it from the guy with the machete. He was a regular at the club. One afternoon, we saw him passed out on the sidewalk. And then he came to the show that night. And he came toward the van with his machete. We were trying to show him we meant business with the two-by-four, so Gibby says, “Man, I remember you! You were passed out on the sidewalk.” And the guy goes, “Yeah, but it was only for a second.”
Teresa Taylor: I shaved my head too. When the Buttholes were in New York City, I had people in the street trying to give me money because I obviously had some kind of cancer. Because my head was partly shaved— Paul had shaved around these three dreadlocks that I had. People started asking me, “Oh, how long have you had leukemia?” Ha ha! “No, I actually did this to myself.”
Paul Leary: There was one night when Gibby got stabbed by some crazed woman up in Canada. Emilio Estevez was at that show. Gibby did some lyric about a “crippled midget lesbian boy,” and somebody took offense. It was kind of hard to tell what happened because of the strobe lights and smoke machines. It all looked pretty weird.
Gibby Haynes: I got stabbed in the arm [chuckles] but we played it up a bit later. People thought I had been stabbed in the intestines and would have to pee in a bag for the rest of my life. Stabbings are always good.
Steve Marsh [Singer-bassist, Terminal Mind, Miracle Room]: I was living in New York City in 1985, and I saw the Butthole Surfers eight or nine times there. They were at the height of their powers— nobody in New York would have disputed how great they were. And after one of these shows, everyone was leaving at the same time out of this one entrance, and just as I got to the door, I found myself face-to-face with Gibby. I’d never met him, but he was still in that after-show mode. And he said, “You’re Steve Marsh, right? What are you doing here?” I said, “Well, I live here now.” And Gibby said, “Dude, I was at a Terminal Mind rehearsal once, high on acid, and that was the thing that made me want to start a band!” And I said, “Well, that’s funny, because what you’re doing now makes me want to keep doing a band.”
Paul Leary: We played a show in Los Angeles in 1986, and then [long sigh] we drove from LA to New York to play two shows. Friday and Saturday night at the Danceteria. We had four days to get there, but we had to stop at Bryce Canyon [in Utah].
We get to New York, and they’d canceled one of our shows without telling us. We were really pissed off, so we were rambunctious. We had this drummer named Cabbage who was filling up this plastic Fred Flintstone bat with her own urine and waving it at the audience, and the little hole at the end of it was emitting this stream. And the hole was about an eighth of an inch across, and she and our dancer Kathleen were taking turns trying to pee into that little hole. We’d lit a lot of the stage on fire. And the strobe lights and the flames and Gibby humping down on Kathleen . . . I’ve seen the video. It’s shocking. I doubt there was penetration, but it looks good! There’s legs in the air and butts.
Steve Marsh: A few weeks after that, Gibby called me. He told me they were going on a European tour, and he asked if I would like to go with them as their bass player. We talked about a few other details of the tour, and then I asked about money. He said, “Well, we put the money we make back into the band for recording and equipment. I mean, you’ll get enough to eat and everything you need, but . . .”
I said, “It’s one thing if you’re asking me to join the band. But if you’re just asking me to go on this tour with you, I gotta come back with something, some kind of money.” He didn’t say much more after that, then he hung up, and I never heard from him again. I believe that was the point where they asked the bass player from Shockabilly [Mark Kramer] to go on the tour with them.
Teresa Taylor: King and I were the nice ambassadors. We would get embarrassed when Gibby would be rude. Especially in other countries. We were used to it. When we went to England for the first time, Gibby started yelling at everyone and calling them teabaggers. Gibby was the absolute provocateur. He would always say what no one else had the nerve to say. But then me and King would be, like, “Hey, do y’all like Hawkwind?”
Paul Leary: Gibby urinated at the customs checkpoint going into Switzerland once. We pulled in, and we were waiting for the equipment truck, and Gibby got out and right in front of all the guards, he just urinated. When they started yelling at him, he yelled back. He wasn’t high. We’ve been kicked out of Europe a couple of times. When you’re in Europe, after you’ve been there for a while, you get to the point where you just want to go home. So it’s like, “Let’s see . . . let’s kidnap the tour bus and make the driver go to Belgium instead of Norway” or “Let’s urinate in front of the border guards.” What are they gonna do? They’re just gonna send you home.
Teresa Taylor: After I quit the band, I had a guilt trip because maybe the Butthole Surfers had led a lot of people astray. One of our first fans jumped off a building, and another one shot herself. We were getting older, and our fan base was getting younger. People would say, “I’m tripping my ass off, and I can’t wait to see you play.” We were showing heavy, strobe-lit shows and movies, and Kathleen was dancing. I think some of those kids left those shows changed. And not always for the better. I just had to drop out. If I had stayed in the band, I was gonna die.
A few years later, the Butthole Surfers were the most famous Texas band on earth. One night in 1996, they were in Paris, appearing on the legendary French talk show Nulle part ailleurs. The were performing their hit single, “Pepper,” from their Top 40 album, Electriclarryland. Haynes talk-smirked through the verses of the song, as if it were a Vanilla Ice cover. Leary solemnly began a guitar solo at exactly the moment where any other guitarist would begin it. There was no naked dancer, and nothing was on fire. “King” Coffey was playing the drums while sitting down. What in the Sam Hell had happened to them?
The Buttholes began the nineties by accomplishing the unlikely, then the unthinkable. First, they joined the first edition of Lollapalooza, the most high-profile US touring festival of the decade. Then they signed with Capitol Records, former home of the Beatles (and Grand Funk). The Butttholes’ first Capitol record was produced by Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones. Electriclarryland was their second, and a surprise breakthrough. “Pepper” was shocking in another way because it was the first Buttholes song that sounded like someone else (especially the alternative songwriter and “loser” Beck). The only trace of Texas in “Pepper” was the lyrics, which extolled various doomed characters from Gibby’s adolescence in Dallas, including Stick Men with Ray Guns’ Bobby Soxx.
Teresa Taylor: Gibby and Paul are magic together. They’re like Rock Hudson and Jerry Lewis. Someone asked me once, “Are you an equal in the band?” Well, of course, I was an equal human being. But I was a drummer. In how many bands do you want to know what the drummer is thinking? Paul and Gibby were the managerial team. They drove the van. King and I were younger. Gibby and Paul seemed so grown up. I just trusted them.
Paul Leary: Locust Abortion Technician is still my favorite record, probably. That was just a totally different recording procedure. We had this big, old, ancient, dinosaur, one-inch, eight-track tape machine and microphone out in the middle of Georgia. Recording in weird ways. We’d say, “Let’s hit this one drum over and over and add this, that, and the other” or “Let’s record something off the radio—that sounds good!” With Independent Worm Saloon, we just made a rock record. It was some- thing we just wanted to do. When you spend a quarter of a million dollars on a studio project, you kinda wanna know what you’re gonna do. Everybody wants to know what you’re gonna do.
Gibby Haynes: We wasted so much fucking money. That album cost as much as Billy Idol’s record.
Paul Leary: After recording Independent Worm Saloon, we’re in debt for a third of a million. We gotta go gold to break even. Otherwise, we’re gonna be fucking bums on the street again.
The Butthole Surfers became a mainstream success story because they released a series of brilliant, compelling albums and crafted a reputation as the most insane live band in the United States. But they also understood marketing in a way that few bands do because their product was them- selves: their bodies, their drawls, and, more than anything, their backstory. They were inspired by the terrible beauty of Texas and performed what King called “Texas drag” more believably than anyone since Willie Nelson. At Lollapalooza, the drummer refused to wear anything but cowboy boots, and Gibby punctuated his onstage patter with blasts from a shotgun.
But after Electriclarryland, Butthole Surfers’ fifteen minutes were up. Their major label deal fell apart. Gibby descended into a nearly fatal spiral of drugs and public outrage, while Paul and King retreated to Austin. They had been the exception that proved the rule, the Texas punk band that left the scene yet epitomized it. They began as a group who didn’t sound like anyone else and finished with an album that didn’t sound like anything at all. In 2015, a reporter from Texas Monthly was speaking to Haynes and mentioned accusations that the Butthole Surfers had sold out. His reaction was characteristic and instructive: “Yeah, but who cares?”
Paul Leary: MTV used to have this jingle with their network logo and that little melody. They went through a few versions of that, and then they wanted us to do a version. They sent down this saxophone player who had played the solo on “We Are All Prostitutes” by [English first-wave punk band] the Pop Group. They came to our toilet studio in Driftwood, Texas. They were saying, “No, this way.” “No, this way.” And we were like, “Okay, whatever you want.” And they used it. They used it on the hour, every hour, for at least a year and a half. We were on TV more than fucking Van Halen.
Scott Stevens: I am neither surprised nor baffled by the Butthole Surfers’ success. Paul and Gibby worked very hard for what they have. Have they changed? Hell yes! Gibby wasn’t a fucking junkie when I knew him back then! I think Paul is very well-grounded and has a wife who loves him for who he is, rather than [seeing him] as an ATM or a step up the social ladder. In some ways, Paul has mellowed. Gibby still needs to be the center of attention, no matter what. When the Surfers did a book signing at Waterloo Records in Austin in March 2019, there was definitely an air of relief that Gibby was not there.
The lyrics are everything. The lyrics are 100 percent of the song. All the music is something some Black dude did forty years ago, man. And then we’re just putting new lyrics on top of it. Believe me, rock and roll is just what a bunch of Black dudes did in East Texas, and no one’s giving them credit.
Louis Black [Editor and publisher, The Austin Chronicle; cofounder, South by Southwest]: The Butthole Surfers never lost sight of their humanism. That band went to some dark places, some places that are almost unimaginable, but it wasn’t about evoking devils. They were saying that humans are complicated people, but you can be dark and still be a human being. We are just seriously complicated motherfuckers. It’s the same with Rick Linklater’s films.
Paul Leary: Ahh, we’re just grateful that anyone wants to listen to these terrible records that we make. I know that I wouldn’t buy our records if they were made by someone else. It’s like Jiffy Pop — it’s a lot more fun to make than it is to eat.
Excerpted from the book Someday All the Adults Will Die!: The Birth of
Texas Punk by Pat Blashill. Copyright © 2025 by Pat Blashill. From University of Texas Press.
Reprinted by permission.
