“look, daddy! i’m a surfer!”

Thu. Oct. 23 :: MAIN ROOM :: Butthole Surfers

Alternative Rock / Underground / Experamental Rock:
Arguably the most infamously named band in the annals of popular music — for years, radio found their moniker unspeakable, and the press deemed it unprintable – Butthole Surfers long reigned among the most twisted and depraved acts ever to bubble up from the American underground. Masters of calculated outrage, the group fused the sicko antics of shock rock with a distinct and chaotic mishmash of avant-garde and Texas psychedelia. It should only stand to reason that any band who would call themselves Butthole Surfers would be masters of irony. But after 15 years and, with “Electriclarryland,” now 13 releases, the ultimate irony may be how these twisted purveyors of musical mayhem have become pioneers of the current underground music scene. It’s not anything they set out to become. “We weren’t really thinking about things too much,” says guitarist Paul Leary of the band’s genesis. “I think it was to avoid working at a restaurant washing dishes or working at the lumber yard. We did manage to do that.” “Electriclarryland” is an even-more dizzying panorama of power chords, musical pranking, conceptual weirdness and all-out rock ‘n’ roll hysteria than their major label debut, 1993’s Independent Worm Saloon (produced by Led Zepplin’s John Paul Jones with the alternative rock hit “Who Was In My Room Last Night?” Butthole Surfers were founded in 1981 by Leary and singer Gibby Haynes, who, at the time, were both students at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. Haynes had grown up in Dallas (where his father hosted a popular children’s TV show), and was a star accounting and economics student. Leary, a native of San Antonio, had been playing guitar since the age of five, and was studying art and finance (in which he almost earned a masters degree). Despite such seemingly straight-laced academic interests, the two were definite square pegs in a round-hole world. They scammed their way onto a Dead Kennedys bill in San Francisco. In early 1983, they added drummer King Coffey whose band the Hugh Beaumont Experience had opened for Buttholes. Their raucous experimentalism and Texan rebelliousness made Buttholes critical favorites.