The ‘80s Texas underground music scene had some of the most boundary-pushing acts of its era. From the openly gay Dicks singing about first-hand experiences in the cruising ground, to MDC’s enlightened dissections of American hegemony, to Scratch Acid experimenting with how non-euphonic music could be while still being palatable, the Lone Star State was a Petri dish for what could come after the radical freedom permitted by the punk movement.
Of these acts, the most celebrated and mythologised is, without a doubt, Butthole Surfers. Toiling away throughout the ‘80s with an unconventional, uncongenial and unpredictable discography and live show, the band became infamous for their psychedelic freakouts, where they utilised crude projection tech to cast imagery of surgery, war, death, fetish porn, and kaleidoscopic imagery over their unrelenting performances spiced with amateur pyrotechnics and surreal prosthetics and visual art designed for a bad trip.
Despite their name, harsh, unpredictable sound, and intensely demanding live shows, which were all purposefully antithetical to mainstream success, the band managed to find it, regardless. Butthole Surfers signed to Capitol Records in 1992, who then brought in Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones to record their sixth album, Independent Worm Saloon.
The band would go on to have two radio and video hits with “Who Was in My Room Last Night?” in 1993 and “Pepper” in 1996, tour arenas with Nirvana, become a favourite band of the animated duo Beavis and Butt-Head, have their t-shirt worn by Todd Flanders in The Simpsons, and get featured on the soundtrack to several Hollywood films.
Yet despite this success, what has truly cemented the band’s legacy and caused several books to be written about them, from James Burns’ Let’s Go To Hell, to Aaron Tanner’s What Does Regret Mean?, to Ben Graham’s Scatological Alchemy, is their initial decade.
“Early on, sure, things were animated, but we really weren’t that crazy of a band,” laughs their media-adverse frontman, Gibby Haynes, when he reflected on the Butthole Surfers in a rare interview with us.
“It was all planned; there was really no element of chaos to it,” Gibby goes on to explain. “As far as the Butthole Surfers, we were trying to freak people out, and we succeeded. We really were trying to do that, so I would say ‘No’ [to the notion that they were chaotic].
“There’s very few things that people have accused me of doing on stage that I haven’t done. I can’t think of one thing that anybody has said; it’s just a question of ‘How often?’ Yeah, anything physically possible, I think I’ve done on stage.
“I haven’t been arrested on stage, but almost! They would always just arrest the naked person. I was naked plenty of times, and they never came after me. I don’t know why. I guess cops want to arrest a naked girl more than they want to arrest a naked guy. I don’t know.”
While eschewing the “shock rock” label that has sometimes been thrown at them, Gibby insists that the Butthole Surfers’ performances wouldn’t even be considered provocative in the digital age. “What we relied on a lot and what was kind of noteworthy of our shows was the use of projections,” he says.
“Nowadays, of course, you can see anything on YouTube, including the films we used to project behind us and on top of us. Sure, the internet has ruined it in that regard, but we weren’t really one of those bands that had to go out and double-up on the shock every time.
“You’d probably be surprised, musically, how good the Butthole Surfers are nowadays. We haven’t played in…what? I mean, the music kind of stands on its own, oddly enough. It really does. […] That’s not what we were trying to do [to be shocking]. That’s the problem; if you’re in one of those bands, if that’s the point of your show, you do have to come up with a new show every time.”
For a more accurate representation of the Butthole Surfers’ history, one may look to the new tell-all film from filmmaker Tom Stern (whose credits include the short-lived-but-much-loved MTV iconoclastic sketch show The Idiot Box, the 1993 cult comedy Freaked, the Netflix docuseries The Toys That Made Us, Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob SquarePants, and collaborations with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Ice Cube, Alex Winter, Bill Hicks, Norm Macdonald, and Jimmy Kimmel) called The Butthole Surfers Movie.
Premiering under the title Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt at the SXSW festival in Austin back in March, Stern’s doc has been touring the international festival circuit and is currently seeking a distributor for a global release.
“That process, apparently, is a slow one, so I don’t know,” Gibby says of the film and its expected release. “It’s gotten good reviews; people seem to like it. I’ve been to several screenings, and the first two I went to…dude, you could hear people crying! So much so that [the] three of them I’ve been to, I’ve done Q&As after each one, and I’m like, ‘Did anyone cry?’, and there’s a bunch of people like… [Puts hand in the air and sobs] [Laughs]
“We worked kinda close with the filmmaker, but, still, it was his film. Definitely, I think, it’s accurate, and if there is any confusion, the confusion is accurate. I mean, if you go see the film and have questions, then it’s accurate that you should have those questions! [Laughs] You’re reacting accurately!”
The Surfers have been on a sabbatical since 2017, and, in that time, Gibby has chosen to express himself through other artistic mediums. While he has made contributions to other musicians’ work, he’s been primarily focused on his illustrations and watercolours, taking some bit-part roles in indie films, and writing a young adult novel called Me and Mr. Cigar.
In his off-time, Gibby has mainly been focusing on parenthood and finding awe in convention. When we spoke, he was wearing a Lidl-branded baseball cap as a means of cultural embracement when conversing with a European outlet like ours, while also admitting that the German chain has become somewhat of a fixation that he has become quite evangelical in preaching since they expanded operations to the U.S. in the late 2010s.
“It’s the most non-German thing!” exclaims Gibby. “Nothing made sense in this fuckin’ store! There’s no sections for anything! Oh, Jesus! I couldn’t stop buying shit! I bought tracksuits, shit that waves at flies! It’s incredible what you can get there! [Laughs]
“It was so fuckin’ weird, that’s all I can say! It said on the outside it’s a grocery store, which generally means you go in and buy food. [Laughs] Ohhhh, no! […] I couldn’t stop buying shit. After I stopped buying shit for myself, I had to buy it for other people.”
But starting next week, Gibby will hit the road once more, with The Thunes Institute of Musical Excellence (TIME). The tour with Gibby concludes two years of advanced musical training for students aged thirteen to nineteen, who have been under the direction of former Frank Zappa bassist and institute founder Scott Thunes.
TIME is a programme born from the Paul Green Rock Academy, with which Gibby had been working for over twenty years. As Gibby recalls, he had met Thunes through Dave Dreiwitz of Ween fame, and when asked to do the tour, he agreed.
Starting in Helsinki on August 5th, the tour will bring Gibby and TIME across the continent for little under a fortnight, and conclude in Dublin’s Opium on the 17th. Condensed and sporadic, Gibby says that the tour pattern was dictated somewhat by the kids’ availabilities and their parents’ permission.
“It’s kind of a weird thing,” Gibby says of the tour. “I mean, they make movies about this shit – taking high school kids to Europe from America. I’ve done it in Europe. The Butthole Surfers toured with a school of rock band one time.”
This tour will be Gibby’s first time in Europe since 2010, and he’s looking forward to returning. “I think we’ve only been to Dublin once, which… everybody loves Ireland,” he says. “Who doesn’t love Ireland? Just don’t call it Scotland! We’re going to play in Estonia. I’ve never played in Estonia. We’re playing a lot of places that I haven’t been to.”
The tour promises renditions of Butthole Surfers songs, and Gibby confirms that the kids are up to translating the band’s tentative and erratic sound. “There’s a few songs that kind of change every time I’ve done one of these things, that change and kind of evolve over the tour,” he says. “There’s one song that we do that’s a Butthole Surfers song mixed with ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.’”
We wrap by asking if Gibby has had to rein in his performance for the company of children. “Oh, no!” he laughs in response. “No, not at all. That’s a good question. There’s really nothing that I wouldn’t do on stage with these kids that I wouldn’t do with my bands. It’s basically the same thing. The same maturity level. People in bands don’t ever really grow up.”
Words: Aaron Kavanagh
Images: Gibby Haynes – photo courtesy of Tone Deaf Booking
Gibby Haynes with The Scott Thunes Institute For Musical Excellence will be performing at Opium Dublin on August 17th.
Tickets for all dates on the European tour can be found here
