FOLLOW US ON:
GET THE NEWSLETTER
CONTACT US
The Butthole Surfers bring the gospel to West Virginia, 1985
01.19.2013
05:42 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
Like canaries flying into a coal mine, the Butthole Surfers fearlessly travel the long and lonely stretches of American highways spreading the word of rock ‘n’ roll and clearing the way for others to follow. Bringing light to where darkness reigns. In this case, Morgantown, West Virginia. The year is 1985 and the natives are restless.

Gibby: vox, sax   Paul: guitar, vox    Kramer: bass    King: drums   Teresa: drums.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
|
01.19.2013
05:42 pm
|
Butthole Surfers live in Austin September 11, 2011
09.12.2011
06:06 am
Topics:
Tags:


 
Emo’s, Austin’s venerable, historic and aging rock venue, has opened a new state-of-the-art space that launched last night with a classic performance by the Butthole Surfers.

In the early 80s, BHS formed in San Antonio, an hour drive from Austin, and drew inspiration from Austin’s psychedelic musical past, particularly from the Crown Princes of Texas-style mindbending rock and roll Roky Erickson and The Thirteenth Floor Elevators. It seemed karmically ordained that BHS should christen Austin’s newest church of rock.

At tonight’s gig, BHS did what they’ve been doing for the past 30 years: creating sonic shamanistic magic with Paul Leary’s acid-infused guitar licks, looped feedback, gut rattling rhythm from Jeff Pinkus and King Coffey, and lead singer Gibby Haynes’ Echoplexed and bullhorn-mutated vocals. Throw in a diabolical light show and you’ve got a Devil’s brew of rock and roll voodoo.
 

 
Last time I visited with Gibby, he was 30 pounds heavier, I was 30 pounds lighter and we were both 20 years younger. In my case, the weight difference could be the hair.

 
I’m excited by the new Emo’s. It raises the bar for live rock and roll in Austin. It’s got great sound, air-conditioning, a huge dance floor and a stellar staff. I predict that bands from all over the planet will embrace this fabulous new club that offers both the artists and the audience a perfect environment to exult in the power and glory of rock and roll.

Despite the sentimental notions of a bunch of punk rock nostalgists, playing in shitholes doesn’t give you hip cred, it gives you the crabs.
 
I shot this video expressly for Dangerous Minds’ readers and I hope you dig it. Watch it in high definition. And crank up the fucking volume!
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
|
09.12.2011
06:06 am
|
Emo’s East: Austin’s new rock venue gives audiences and musicians some respect
09.07.2011
04:38 am
Topics:
Tags:


 
The closest thing Austin, Texas has to a CBGB-style rock venue is the venerable shithole Emo’s, a dilapidated, barn-like dump with bathrooms that come close, but not quite, to the urine-soaked hell-holes of Hilly Kristal’s legendary Bowery punk venue.

Like CBGB, Emo’s has established itself as one of the great rock and roll venues in the world and, like CBGB, it’s a lousy place for bands and audiences to experience rock and roll. Fuck street cred, we’ve all outgrown rock venues that charge $30 and more for a ticket and in return offer an environment suitable for firing squads and hangings.

I’ve been pissing and moaning for years that rock audiences are masochists, willing to put up with the worst kinds of settings in which to listen to the music they love. I can’t imagine theater goers, opera or ballet fans lining up to take a shit in port-o-johnnys that are belching methane like over-stuffed plastic cows or suffering through security checks by no-neck thugs looking to find contraband like bottled water and video cameras.

I guess Emo’s arrived at a similar conclusion: rock audiences need to be treated with respect and so do the bands that entertain us.

This coming Sunday, Emo’s will be opening a new state-of-the-art music club with a performance by The Butthole Surfers and I think the new venue will be great for the bands and the fans.

What the audience will pay for (and, hopefully, benefit from) includes elephant bark flooring (great for acoustics and soft on the feet), 100 tons of A/C, a group of tiled bathrooms, three large bars, double sheetrocked walls (again, for sound), a large outdoor smoking patio and 500-plus parking spots.

The bands will kick back in a green room with flat screen televisions, a washer and dryer (life on the road is tough) and shower facilities; and, of course, they’ll have ample tour bus parking with a private back entrance.

For smaller acts, the 1,700 capacity room can be partitioned into one with an 800 cap.

Great for both band and ticket-holders? A 48-foot ceiling that transitions back to a 12-foot height, meaning there is hardly a bad line of sight in the house.

The Butthole Surfers’ gig is a test run for the venue, not its official opening. The fact that the Surfers wanted to do this on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 seems either perverse or perhaps something else…we will see. I’ll be there and get back to you.

In the meantime, here’s Alex Winter’s homage to Texas Chainsaw Massacre featuring Gibby and the boys.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
|
09.07.2011
04:38 am
|
The Butthole Surfers: The Shah Sleeps in Lee Harvey’s Grave
04.26.2011
01:29 am
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
Between 1985 and 1989, I saw the Butthole Surfers play several absolutely unforgettable gigs in New York City. They were a swirling, lysergic tornado onstage, producing a dirty, unholy wall of sound that was so utterly unhinged and deranged—and yet weirdly beautiful—that I feared for the sanity of the musicians making it. Few acts I’ve seen before or since have achieved anywhere near the sonic or psychic intensity of an 80s Butthole Surfers gig. With their demonically-possessed go-go dancer Kathleen Lynch (who I have written about here) and the violent bedlam of the music, no other group of the era came close to the brutal skull-fucking they subjected their audience to (except for maybe the Swans and Einstürzende Neubauten, although I’d still give the Surfers the edge).

Let me put it to you another way, who except the Butthole Surfers would hire GWAR as their opening act without fearing in the slightest that they would be upstaged? That’s an achievement! It’s well-known that Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love met at a Butthole Surfers concert and this makes perfect sense.

I saw the Butthole Surfers at the Pyramid Club, Danceteria, CBGBs, The Cat Club, The Ritz, The World, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. A “typical” evening with the Butthole Surfers involved nudity, tearing stuffed animals apart, strobe lights, Gibby lighting his own hand on fire with lighter fluid (he’d stare at his flaming hand like a drooling moron before putting the fire out by sticking his hand down his pants) and then the drumkits.

The last time I saw the group live, it was at The Lyric Theater, a faded 42nd Street porno palace that was about to be torn down. It smelled of semen and bleach and the floors were sticky. The fact that this fleapit was going to soon be leveled seemed to give the band—and the audience—the license to destroy it early.

I have it on good account that the promoter of the show gave lead vocalist Gibby Haynes six hits of acid before this performance, thinking he was giving him enough for the entire band, only to see him pop them all into his mouth at once. Watching him on-stage that night, as the group played a berserk version of Gordon Lightfoot’s folky epic “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” I wondered if he, or the audience, would ever recover.

Gibby screamed into a bullhorn, the dual drummers hit flaming cymbals and they projected 16mm films of bloody operations, people with Down’s syndrome dancing in top hats and tails and a man with a gigantic sombrero that was revealed to be much larger than a house. If Beelzebub himself would have come out to jam with the band for the encore, no one would have been the least bit surprised.

If the music they made in the 1990s is anything to go by, the bad-living caught up to them. After 1987’s Locust Abortion Technicians, they quickly became an uninspired parody of themselves, tarting up their sound to appeal to MTV’s 120 Minutes audience. I’ve had copies of all their albums since and I could seldom get past one listen.

Sadly the brain-crushing early work of the group has become somewhat obscure and I don’t think a lot of younger people know much about them. This is a real pity. Their Psychic… Powerless… Another Man’s Sac (1984) is a flat-out masterpiece. A stunner. Nothing—and I mean nothing—else sounds like it. 1986’s Rembrandt Pussyhorse and Locust Abortion Technician (1987) are also quite amazing albums. Here’s a sampling of some of their finest moments

“And son, if you see your mom this weekend, be sure and tell her….” Listen to one of the Butthole Surfer’s most infamous numbers, a tongue-in-cheek Black Sabbath tribute called “Sweat Loaf”
 

 
My favorite Butthole Surfers song, the bone-crushing “Cherub”:
 

 
Below, a moment edited from the laugh-out-loud funny “Bed In” interview from the Blind Eye Sees All live video. (See complete video below)
 

 
This video somewhat captures the infernal, chaotic insanity of a Butthole Surfers show and you can (more or less) see what Kathleen Lynch got up to onstage with them at about 30 seconds in. Shot in Bremen, Germany in 1987.
 

 
After the jump, backstage with the Butthole Surfers and live in Detroit, 1985.

READ ON
Posted by Richard Metzger
|
04.26.2011
01:29 am
|
Space rockers Lumerians play ‘Black Tusk’
12.28.2010
02:42 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
Strangely mesmerizing Bay Area space-rock combo, Lumerians, will be the opening act for the Butthole Surfers shows in Brooklyn this week (12/30 and 12/31) at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. Lumerians’ debut full-length, Transmalinnia, is due in March on Knitting Factory Records. In the clip below, they perform “Black Tusk” on cable access.
 

 
Via Brooklyn Vegan

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
12.28.2010
02:42 pm
|
Download 911 American Hardcore Tracks From 1981-1986 For Free
12.02.2010
12:18 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
Steven Blush, author of American Hardcore: A Tribal History, has uploaded 911 hardcore tracks of his favorite bands for free.  Some of the artists include: Flipper, Minor Threat, Bad Brains, Minutemen, Hüsker Dü, Dicks, Butthole Surfers, Cro-Mags and more!

Travel on over to 24 Hours of Hardcore compiled by Steven Blush and download the goodness while it lasts. 

Side note from Steven: “COPYRIGHT HOLDERS: I will delete your tracks at your request.

(via Das Kraftfuttermischwerk)

 

Posted by Tara McGinley
|
12.02.2010
12:18 pm
|
The Beme Seed: God Inside
11.22.2010
07:08 pm
Topics:
Tags:

In place of the DM talkshow this week, here is a music video for an enigmatic cult band called The Beme Seed that I co-directed in 1989. The Beme Seed were fronted by Kathleen Lynch, the utterly psychotic go-go dancer whose distinctly dada take on the art of burlesque made Butthole Surfers’ concerts so demonically powerful in the 1980s. Although never an official member of the group, she was a major, major part of their reputation for legendary live shows (along with the pyrotechnic cymbals, Gibby’s flaming hand, the films of dental and penis reconstructive surgery, etcetera, etcetera). Kathleen’s inspired go-go dancing was as surreal as it was pagan. At one late 80s New York show I saw (held at The Ritz nightclub, now Webster Hall), she went from sporting a huge afro wig and an extremely hairy “merkin” to being completely naked (and shaved) and then back again, as violent strobe lights provided cover—in other words, it happened in such a way that it seemed like a special effect to the audience—stunning, I tell you. Later in the show, she came out nude, painted gold and wearing tennis rackets on her feet.

For someone who has made an entire career of seeking out oddballs, I’d have to say that Kathleen Lynch, truly, is one of the weirdest people I’ve ever met. But in a good way! There was nothing negative or mentally unstable about her, she was just fuckin’ odd. But cheerfully weird. Her weirdness was organic, not forced, let’s just say. I’d call her a hippie, but she was too punk rock for that. She was a most singular creature, Kathleen, fitting no easy categories.
 
image
Above, Kathleen Lynch on the cover the Butthole Surfer’s Double Live album.

Here are a few statements made about Kathleen Lynch by the Butthole Surfers themselves:

Paul Leary - “The whole band got scabies once, and we had to hold Kathleen down and get her medicated. She had decided she didn’t want to kill the scabies because they were her friends.”

Gibby Haynes - We’d roll into a town, I was booking the shows, we didn’t know where the clubs were. We’d literally pull over somebody and say, “Hey, where do the queers hang out? Where’s the college area?” Just follow the queers to the club. We played the Celebrity Club in Atlanta when RuPaul, Lady Bunny, and all the other drag queens were hanging out there before they all moved to New York. It was this weird, artsy, funky, disco crowd in Atlanta that for some reason liked us. Kathleen was friends with this friend of ours from Atlanta.

Teresa Taylor (AKA Teresa Nervosa) - Later we met Kathleen again in New York. She was working for Sex World in Times Square. She was known as Ta Da the Shit Lady, she could really control her shit. We took her on the road as our dancer and started building the whole package. She was kind of into her spiritual thing; she stopped speaking for a year, and I asked her why, and she wrote down that God had told her to take a vow and stop speaking. She loved the human body, smells of the human body, dirty socks, urine, things of the body were really beautiful to her, b.o. was beautiful, and we had a hard time making her bathe. I remember once we pretty much had to hold her down and do her laundry, and she was yelling, “no, no!”

Paul Leary - We were at a house and we watched Kathleen perfectly pee a spoonful of urine without spilling a drop, she put that teaspoon of urine into a pot of old dried macaroni and cheese, and that’s when this drag queen came in and started eating the dried macaroni and cheese with that spoon and we were like, Felicia, didn’t you just see Kathleen putting her pee in that pan? She said, “I’m eating on the side.”

Jeff Pinkus - We all went down to Key Largo—it was one of our first vacations that we actually took as a band. We decided to go snorkeling, but Ta Da stayed on the boat with the captain. We come back and the captain of the ship was just looking at us like we were all crazy, and we couldn’t figure out what was going on, he wouldn’t talk to us. Later we found out that when we were in the water Ta Da had thrown up and had diarrhea at the same time. She had the diarrhea in her hand and she threw up into the water. She said she was feeding the fish.

Paul Leary - “What’s my resume going to say? For the past 12 years I’ve been touring with someone who shits in their hand and feeds it to the fish in front of a bunch of people?”

Okay, I think you must get the picture by now. (So, she was a little eccentric. Haven’t we all shit in our hands and fed the fishies at least once in our lives? No?)

When I met Kathleen, I think she was paying the bills by being a professional dog walker, but she’d been a “live nude girl” at Sex World in Times Square. That’s where she got her evocative nickname. Since I’m sure this has already been told elsewhere (and because it’s so damed funny) here’s the gist of it: She was working, had eaten some Chinese take-out and gotten food poisoning. While with a customer, she had an “accident,” which caused the poor guy to run out of the booth, exclaiming what had happened. The octogenarian woman who owned and ran the place—one of old skool 42nd St’s more memorable characters—could be seen there daily wearing a mic around her neck the way Bob Dylan wears his harmonica, hawking her live nude girls over the PA system. Without missing a beat, she started hyping, “Step right up guys, ta-da, it’s the shit lady!”

I heard that story directly from Kathleen, herself. I recall being in tears from laughing so hard the way she told it.

So the Beme Seed. I don’t know much about the actual band. I think they were actually broken up at the time we made the video and may have reformed with different members later. The music of Beme Seed was psychically disturbing and featured a lot of chanting and quasi-formless guitar feedback. They sounded really evil and their live show was like a LOUD seance. (The closest comparison I can think of is the early Virgin Prunes). They made three albums for the Blast First! record label, who also distributed Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers, Afghan Whigs and Big Black and disbanded for good in 1992.

The entire budget for the “God Inside” video was around $60 bucks. It was co-directed with a friend of mine named Alan Henderson, who was also the editor. Although it may seem very “so what?” by today’s standards, the digital layering on this video had only recently made possible, due to the introduction of what was then a brand new digital video compositing computer known as the Abacas A-62 (which cost $160,000 at the time—Alan and I were both working in a high tech digital video post-production facility and used their expensive equipment off-hours). What Alan did was to feed an signal through the device and then he could control the level of feedback via an analog video switcher while he controlled the output. (Such was the level of technological advancement 21 years ago. Now, of course, After Effects is a million times better than anything available then for a fraction of the price).

We considered the “God Inside” video an homage to Kenneth Anger, albeit one with tiny, tiny budget. Kathleen herself, initially at least, was not down with this treatment for the song, but she also didn’t want to turn down a professionally produced music video, something she knew she’d never be able to afford otherwise, so she went with it. (Her idea, which surprised me when she told me about it, was to use all found footage and archival films of people doing nice things for each other—a nurse helping a patient, someone pushing an elderly lady in a wheelchair, uniformed school crossing-guards with children—and I was like “What?” She also told me that the song was about the female orgasm and masturbating, so the “happy people” concept was a real disconnect for me).

The costume, as such, consisted of Kathleen painting her naked body white, wrapping tin foil around her teeth and cutting a lock of hair from her head and gluing it to her chin. She also had these yellow, almost glow in the dark, strands of fake Halloween costume hair which she glued to her arms. The overall effect, I think you’ll agree, was striking. I also had something I really wanted to shoot for this and that was Kathleen emerging from water like some sort of sea creature. To get this shot, we got up at 4:30AM and hightailed it up to Central Park for sunrise and hoped no one would be around. Kathleen was wrapped only in a sheet. There were a few joggers, but we got the shot.

In the studio, we shot take after take, especially of the lip-sync. I wanted her to do the speaking in tongues part at the end and really go to town on that, but each take was too subdued. She complained that we were working her too hard, but I insisted. Finally, I think she was so mad at me, that she let loose and did what I wanted and you can see this in the final video. As soon as that was in the can, we turned off the camera and went home.

When the video was finished, I showed it to Kathleen and she cried tears of joy. Then she asked me if I could leave the room and she watched it several more times alone. She really loved it. However, later that night when I showed it to the young woman I was living with at the time, she was so freaked out that she asked me—I’m not kidding—to remove it from our apartment! (Turn it up loud, so it seems extra infernal!)

Needless to say, a music video featuring full frontal nudity was never going to be shown on MTV or anywhere else for that matter. The “God Inside” video, made 21 years ago, for all intents and purposes (a few crappy YouTube versions aside) is being premiered here now. I hope you enjoy it, if that’s the right word…

Beme Seed (The Book of Seth’ at Julian Copes’ Head Heritage)

Beme Seed MySpace page

How Did It Come to This? An Oral History of May 3, 1987: The Day The Butthole Surfers Came to Trenton, New Jersey (The Rumpus)

Previously on Dangerous Minds:

Bongwater: The Power of Pussy

READ ON
Posted by Richard Metzger
|
11.22.2010
07:08 pm
|
Gibby Haynes on Fox News Channel
05.29.2010
04:19 am
Topics:
Tags:

 
Ummm… Err….

Posted by Tara McGinley
|
05.29.2010
04:19 am
|
Page 2 of 2  < 1 2