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New ‘visual history’ book celebrates 50 years of the Residents! Sneak peek and exclusive premiere!


‘A Sight for Sore Eyes, Vol. 1’
 
For about 50 years now, the Residents have operated in secret, hiding their identities behind masks and costumes. But now you can see the members of the band full nude!

Yes, the Residents are the subject of a handsome new coffee-table book from Melodic Virtue, the publisher of like retrospectives about the Butthole Surfers, Pixies, and Ministry. The Residents: A Sight for Sore Eyes, Vol. 1 collects beautifully printed reproductions of art, photos, correspondence, press clippings and ephemera from the first 13 years of the Eye Guys’ career, opening in their humble San Mateo dwelling in 1970 and concluding on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before the triumphant 1983 Uncle Sam Mole Show
 

‘Not Available’
 
While their faces remain mostly obscured in these pages, the Residents’ bare genitals are reproduced in black and white in more than one spread, so if you ever run into a pants-less member of the group, you’ll have no trouble recognizing him! That alone is worth the price of this volume. 

But let’s suppose you’re jaded about seeing the Residents’ junk; say you’ve already got enlargements of the Delta Nudes CD cover tacked up all over your walls, and Kinko’s quality is good enough for you. Well, how about a sharp full-color photo of the Mysterious N. Senada’s saxophone and another of its case, bearing the word “COMMERCIAL” in giant red capital letters? Do you have that, Mr. Great Big Residents Fan? How about shots from inside Poor Know Graphics’ design studio circa 1972, hmm? You got pictures of Snakefinger’s wedding? I’m so sure. What about the fucking floor plans for the Residents’ old Sycamore Street headquarters in San Francisco?
 

‘Eloise’ from ‘Vileness Fats’
 
Many of the book’s contents are things I’d hoped to find inside—shots from the set of Vileness Fats, beautiful stills from Graeme Whifler’s “Hello Skinny” film, W.E.I.R.D. fan club papers—but nearly as many are treasures I didn’t know I’d been missing, such as images from a proposal for an Eskimo opera, or screenshots from a prototype Mark of the Mole video game for the Atari 2600, or a snap of a promotional packet of Residents brand Tunes of Two Cities aspirin (to treat “the newest headache” from the band). Old favorites like the black-and-white promo photo of the band shopping for groceries are accompanied by contact sheets and other prints from the shoot. Turn the page, and it’s like The Wizard of Oz: the Residents are standing in the checkout line in Technicolor.
 

‘The Act of Being Polite’
 
Peppered throughout are testimonials from the group’s many-generational cohort of colleagues and fans. Collaborators and Ralph Records alumni like Mole Show emcee Penn Jillette, members of Tuxedomoon and Yello, and all of Renaldo & The Loaf get in reminiscences. Don Preston of the Mothers of Invention tells how he came to play his Moog parts on Eskimo; Patrick Gleeson conveys his delight at the Residents’ “fuck-you-ness”; Andy Partridge of XTC (a/k/a Commercial Album guest Sandy Sandwich) apostrophizes the Eyeballs in verse.

Then there’s Alexander Hacke of Einstürzende Neubauten remembering the Berlin record store that turned him on to The Third Reich ‘n Roll in the Seventies, and Les Claypool takes us to the living room in El Sobrante, California where his teenage girlfriend first played him Duck Stab on her Marantz. Danny Elfman hears a different path his own life might have taken when he listens back. And bringing down the mean age of this all-star gang are some of the Residents’ “children”: Eric André, members of Steel Pole Bath Tub, Death Grips, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum…
 

Handwritten ‘Lizard Lady’ lyrics from the ‘Duck Stab/Buster & Glen Notebook’
 
The book includes a seven-inch of “Nobody’s Nos,” an unreleased song composed for the early masterpiece Not Available. There’s also a signed deluxe edition that comes with a picture disc of “Nobody’s Nos” and a supplementary 24-page book of notes and handwritten lyrics from the making of Duck Stab/Buster & Glen. Mercy.

Below, the band Star Stunted (Sam Coomes, Rob Crow, Zach Hill, Mike Morasky, and Ego Plum, all of whom contributed to the book, along with its author, Aaron Tanner) performs the Residents’ 1972 holiday heartwarmer (heartwormer?) “Santa Dog” in an exclusive Dangerous Minds premiere.

It’s a Christmas miracle!

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Residential: Homer Flynn on the Residents’ ambitious ‘God in Three Persons’ show at MoMA
The Residents’ press conference at the Lincoln Memorial, 1983
The Residents demolish ‘We Are the World’
Take a walk around a masterpiece with the Residents’ ‘Eskimo Deconstructed’
‘Oh Mummy! Oh Daddy!’ The Residents’ first show as The Residents, 1976

Posted by Oliver Hall
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12.15.2021
05:18 am
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‘All Day’: Daniel Johnston sings with the Butthole Surfers, 1987
03.03.2017
09:53 am
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A Texas Trip, the wonderful 1987 compilation produced and recorded by the Butthole Surfers, was the first release on the group’s Latino Buggerveil Records. Like the label’s second release, Double Live, it’s highly recommended if you can find an affordable copy, and just like the title says, it is a trip: a psychedelic audio tour of the Surfers’ Bloodrock-damaged Southern milieu.

There was Steve Fitch, later immortalized on My Album By Me By Steve Fitch, singing “In The Neighborhood” in his impossibly deep voice. (All I know about Steve Fitch, I learned from the handwritten liner notes to A Texas Trip: he was born in the same town where surgeons operated on President Reagan’s butt, and 30 years ago, he could be reached at Kobe Steakhouse in Nashville, Tennessee: (615) 327-9083, now the restaurant’s fax line.) One of the two songs submitted by the terrifying Dallas punk outfit Stick Men With Ray Guns was the definitive version of “Kill the Innocent,” and the Surfers themselves contributed “Flame Grape,” later to become “Jimi.”

Daniel Johnston gave Latino Buggerveil “Don’t Play Cards with Satan” and “Grievances,” and the troubled singer-songwriter joined the Buttholes on the disorienting, nine-minute drone and percussion jam that closed side one, “All Day.” Again, the liner notes don’t exactly, ah…

THE BAND WAS PLAYING a SONG, THE SINGER WAS HAD BEEN SINGING AWHILE THEN DANIEL WALKED IN THE ROOM AND STarted singing THEN THEY BOth STARTED SINGING Together and all the otheR THINGS ©1987 SECOND HARVEST

Several years later, during the brief, post-Nevermind craze for quality, Buttholes guitarist Paul Leary produced Johnston’s major-label debut (and major-label swan song), Fun.

Listen to “All Day” after the jump, plus Gibby Haynes’ interview with Daniel Johnston. Acid comes up…

READ ON
Posted by Oliver Hall
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03.03.2017
09:53 am
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The Jackofficers: House music from Hell with this Butthole Surfers side project
01.26.2017
08:56 am
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The Jackofficers’ ‘Digital Dump’ LP

Pioughd, the first and last record to discern the revolutionary content of the late Garry Shandling’s life and work, was also the Butthole Surfers’ first and last album for the Rough Trade label, which went bankrupt in 1991. Two years later, Paul Leary told Fiz:

Apparently, Rough Trade’s entire existence was based on getting in a position to be able to fuck the Butthole Surfers, and they fucked the Butthole Surfers. And almost doing that, they had no further reason to exist so they went belly up and took all our money with them.

I wouldn’t presume to question Leary’s analysis, but I think it’s fair to point out that Pioughd was bookended by Buttholes side projects for Rough Trade that probably did not contribute much to the label’s solvency: Leary’s own meticulously produced solo debut, The History of Dogs, and the house record Gibby Haynes and Jeff Pinkus made as the Jackofficers.

Though marketed as house music—Rough Trade’s ad campaign called the record “demented house dada”—I’m not sure today’s EDM fan will rush to acclaim Digital Dump as a classic of the genre. I like the album because it’s an audio cartoon of what the future sounded like in 1990, when the future sounded like samplers. The pink balloon-animal turd monogram on the cover of Digital Dump perfectly depicts the title and tells you a lot about the style of the period. At the time, there were some people among us who had revived the wearing of DayGlo colors and the taking of acid, but instead of Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles, these people danced to whump whump techno sounds. If it was this crowd’s dollar the Jackofficers were after, they misfired; but if they set out to make the soundtrack to the ultimate L.A. cop drama, they struck the bull’s-eye. Digital Dump sounds great in the car.

Speaking of LSD, Oliver North’s sexual life was a topic that captured the imaginations of the Butthole Surfers. They made a few bold assertions about Ollie’s habits over WNYU-FM on July 28, 1987, just as Attorney General Edwin Meese III was explaining to Congress that, upon looking into the matter, he suspected nothing criminal in the Iran-Contra affair (on which this Bill Moyers special is good if you can survive the terrible Jackson Browne song near the beginning). At least two of the Jackofficers’ songs are seasoned with bits of Oliver North’s testimony from the Iran-Contra hearings, making them valuable sources for a neglected area of Butthole Surfers scholarship. “Time Machines Pt. 1,” the second song embedded below, is one of them: “You know that I’ve got a beautiful secretary, and the good Lord gave her the gift of beauty.”
 
More after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Oliver Hall
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01.26.2017
08:56 am
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Sandra Bernhard and the Butthole Surfers cover Heart, in Spanish, 1987
12.16.2016
08:50 am
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Bands come and go; Butthole Surfers rarities are forever. This one is especially mysterious.

The April 1987 issue of SPIN gave it one sentence, in between items about the Fat Boys’ upcoming feature film Disorderlies and Bob Stinson’s recent firing from the Replacements:

Sandra Bernhardt [sic] has teamed with pals the Butthole Surfers to desecrate Heart’s “Barracuda.”

Not much, but it’s more than you would have learned from the Buttholes’ interview with Blatch, which ended like this:

I saw Sandra Bernhardt [sic] on David Letterman and she said she hung out with you g—(Tape Ends)

Though it’s possible the Butthole Surfers biography that came out last year has more details about the Bernhard-Buttholes relationship, above are the scant facts in my possession touching on this 30-year-old event. Since then, Bernhard has covered Heart’s “Alone” (with Winger!) and spoken of her love for the Wilson sisters. She apparently recorded two versions of the vocal to the Buttholes’ “Barracuda,” one in English and one in Spanish. If either has ever surfaced on a bootleg, it’s news to me.

More after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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12.16.2016
08:50 am
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Ramones, Butthole Surfers, Violent Femmes and more, covering Saturday morning cartoon theme songs


 
In 1995, MCA Records released Saturday Morning Cartoons Greatest Hits, a compilation of then current alt-rock stars and also-rans transforming the 30-60 second theme songs from classic children’s shows into three-minute pop songs, accompanied by a full length home video that featured all the songs on the comp with the linking device of Drew Barrymore watching them all and commenting with her central-casting Gen-X friends. It dovetailed both with the vogue for alt-rock tribute comps and the ongoing popularity of the Television’s Greatest Hits series, which by then had been around for ten years.

Though they win points for sporting cool Glenn Barr cover art, both the CD and video were pretty crummy overall, but naturally, amid the dross of tepid mid-’90s radio alt (Sponge, Semisonic, Collective Soul, Sublime—I’ll bet you just can’t wait to hear it now, right?) there were some terrific moments. How could the Ramones doing the unforgettable theme to those endearingly cheap 1967 Spider-Man cartoons be bad? IT CANNOT. Violent Femmes went on a marvelously weird tangent. Instead of covering the Jetsons actual theme song, they did a deep cut: “Eep, Opp, Ork, Ah-ah!” by the in-universe teen idol Jet Screamer. It’s pretty great. The Reverend Horton Heat did a roaring psychobilly medley of the Jonny Quest theme and another deep dig, “Stop That Pigeon” from the short-lived Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines. The Butthole Surfers, though they were well past the height of their powers by then, did a mindwarping take on the Underdog theme. And there’s perhaps the album’s most perfect pairing of artist and material, the Aussie folk-pop band Frente! doing a really charming “Open up Your Heart (and Let the Sunshine In),” a 1954 song about rejecting the Devil, which became huge when the infant Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm sang it on The Flintstones.
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Ron Kretsch
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10.12.2016
09:22 am
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Al Jourgensen and Gibby Haynes were Timothy Leary’s psychedelic guinea pigs


via Timothy Leary Archives
 
I knew Al Jourgensen and Dr. Timothy Leary were friends. Leary’s voice opened the Revolting Cocks’ Linger Ficken’ Good (see below), and when I saw Ministry at the Hollywood Palladium a couple weeks before Leary’s death in ‘96, Jourgensen announced from the stage that Tim was in the building. Jourgensen writes in his memoir that at the Palladium, he and Leary “hung out with Joe Strummer and Captain Sensible, and the four of us did more cocaine than you can fit onto a picnic table.”

But I was unprepared for the revelation, dropped as casually as a handkerchief two-thirds of the way through the same book, that Jourgensen lived with Leary for two years in the mid-90s, during which time both he and Gibby Haynes were test subjects for Leary’s experiments with psychedelics.

In the context of the book, this comes as a piece of good news, because at least Al is getting something like a doctor’s care. Fix, the depressing documentary filmed on Ministry’s Filth Pig tour (or “Sphinctour”), leaves no doubt as to the severity of Al’s multiple drug problems during this time, and the corresponding chapters of the book open dark new vistas of degradation. (One of Jourgensen’s war stories from this period includes the sentence: “She’s wearing a colostomy bag, and I was naturally curious.”)
 

Timothy Leary backstage at a Ministry show
 
At this point in the narrative, White Zombie bassist Sean Yseult has kicked Jourgensen out of their shared apartment on Melrose, and he has moved in with Leary. And here comes Gibby Haynes:

In addition to taking me in, Tim let Gibby Haynes stay at his house for a while. Tim encouraged us to take whatever drugs we wanted—he was the guru of LSD, after all. But as an academic and a researcher, he wanted to see what effects different hallucinogens had when they were coupled with different substances—coke, heroin, Nyquil, Hungry Man dinners. He would get all this hallucinogenic shit mailed to him from all these companies and universities and then test it on us every couple weeks. Actually, it was mostly on me. He kicked Gibby out of the house after he peed in the drawer of an antique desk in Tim’s office when he was off his head. So Gibby went and I stayed. Tim would get me to shoot up all these laboratory drugs that were based out of MDA—ecstasy and Ayahuasca, an Amazonian concoction made from shrubs, leaves, and Virola, a South American drug that you grind into a powder and cook down. Tim had me shooting up all this shit. He would be all excited and say, “Hey, I got a new package.” And I would groan, “Okay, fuck. Let’s do it.” I would shoot it up, and he would scribble down notes on how the drugs affected me. I don’t know what he was writing because to me the hallucinations were always the same.

I’d have these horrific visions of Hell and the apocalypse: naked people with blood spouting from every orifice; skies that turned black, then silver, then white again; winged beasts with razor-sharp talons; and, most of all, spiders of all shapes and sizes. They’d fall from the sky. They’d come up from the ground. They’d creep around corners and crawl all over me. I’d be screaming and trying to brush off the bugs. And I’d always end up staggering over to Tim’s blind dog, Mr. Bodles, that Lemmy, my dog, is probably related to. I’d grab his collar, and he would take me outside so I could breathe without spiders scurrying in my mouth and down my throat. Talk about the blind leading the blind. After an hour or so Tim would come out and stare at me. Then he’d take more notes and ask me some questions about how I was feeling and what I was seeing. He’d measure the diameter of my pupils and see if I could track his fingers with my eyes. I don’t know if I passed or failed; I just know I saw spiders. The stuff he gave me was so strong that it took effect in less than twenty minutes. The visions were instantaneous, and they were never enjoyable. But I’d subject myself to it because it helped him out somehow, and I knew if I did my job, my rent was paid and I had a place to stay.

 

Jourgensen and Leary horsing around
 
Elsewhere in the book, Gibby Haynes shares his own memories of the Leary years in an interview with the book’s co-author, Jon Wiederhorn:

When [Al] hooked me up with Tim Leary a lot of weird situations happened. We got kicked out of a Johnny Cash concert at the Viper Room because Tim was heckling Johnny Cash. The killer one was waking up in Tim’s study and seeing him feverishly typing three feet away from me. I was so hungover that I had pissed in his kitchen. He was nervously typing, like I shouldn’t have been in the room, and I discovered my dick was hanging out of my pants and was warm and moist.

Errr, what caused that?
Who knows? I guess when you sleep in Tim Leary’s study your dick comes out of your pants and gets warm and moist.

Maybe you pissed yourself?
I definitely pissed in his kitchen. Oh, and I let his blind dog shit in his living room. In the middle of the summer the sliding-glass doors to his house were open. I shut them in the middle of the night. I didn’t know you were supposed to leave them open because of his blind dog: It was the only way he could go outside to poop in the middle of the night. Not only did I urinate in his kitchen but I let a dog shit in his living room. I was not the consummate houseguest.

Is that why Tim kicked you out of his house?
The urine thing wasn’t really my fault. I was like, “Dude, your entire kitchen is white. That screams toilet to me.” There were probably three times I got so drunk in the middle of the night I got up and randomly urinated. It usually involved the color white. I peed on a couple one time, in their bed in the middle of the night. Their room was white.

Continues after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Oliver Hall
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08.26.2016
08:57 am
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Cooking with the Butthole Surfers: Gibby Haynes’ dessert and drink recipes
05.27.2016
10:35 am
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If you were going to ask musicians for recipes, the Butthole Surfers might seem like unlikely candidates. There isn’t a Martha Stewart type among them; indeed, their dancer, Kathleen, once mixed her own urine in with the macaroni and cheese. But reading through the band’s old interviews has more in common with taking a Home Ec class than you might expect.

“I can cook a bad-ass peach cobbler,” Gibby Haynes bragged in the June ‘86 issue of SPIN. The interview concluded with the recipe for Gibby’s Spillane Peach Cobbler, named for Haynes’ old college basketball teammate Jeff Spillane, whom Gibby named alongside Ed Asner as one of the band’s heroes:

He’s this weird kind of straight guy with heavy beard growth and a hairy chest. He’s a nice guy, but he’s kind of geeky. He used to wear this lime-green polyester leisure suit. He’s the first person I ever saw light a fart. We usually sing songs that have Jeff Spillane in them, like “Back on Spillane’s Gang.” I think he’s now an accountant somewhere.

 

 
SPIN doesn’t say if Gibby read these very precise instructions off the back of a foxed, four-by-six recipe card inked with a grandmotherly scrawl, or (as I prefer to imagine) reeled them off from memory.

GIBBY’S SPILLANE PEACH COBBLER

Stir together ½ t. salt and 2 c. flour. Cut in ½ c. shortening until crumbly. Add ⅓ c. milk and stir with a fork until the dough leaves the sides of the bowl. On a lightly floured board, roll the dough into a rectangle a little less than ¼ in. thick. Put it on a baking sheet and bake it at 425° until it’s lightly browned. Then put mixed-up water, brown sugar, egg white, and cinnamon [5 egg whites, ¾ c. water, ½ c. brown sugar, ¼ t. cinnamon] on top of the crust and bake it until it foams up like a custard. When it starts to look cooked, take it out and put sliced fresh peaches on it. It’s amazing. It’s a killer dessert.

Gibby also gave a cocktail recipe to Fiz, a short-lived, strongly pro-alcohol punk magazine from Los Angeles. In the 23 years since that issue of Fiz hit the newsstand, I’ve never mustered the courage to fix a Bloody Leroy for myself, but I imagine it would complement the peach cobbler very nicely when dining al fresco on a summer evening. The interview it accompanied outlined the band’s plans for a Joy Division game show in which contestants guess what Ian Curtis is singing (“You get points for correct answers and more points for better answers which are incorrect”), and is worth reading, though the transcription omits the drink recipe. From my personal tear-stained copy of the March/April ‘93 issue of Fiz, here’s the “BADASS BUTTHOLE BEVERAGE” you didn’t know you craved:

GIBBY HAYNES’ BLOODY LEROY

The best drink is barbecue sauce and vodka with a twist of lemon. The barbecue sauce has gotta be real thin. Stir it with a rip up. It’s badass. It’s cold. A Bloody Leroy!

Below, whet your appetite with the savory Buttholes rarity “Beat the Press.”
 

Posted by Oliver Hall
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05.27.2016
10:35 am
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When the drugs were still working: Cheerfully insane footage of the Butthole Surfers backstage, 1986
03.10.2016
01:27 pm
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This laugh-out-loud funny footage of backstage mayhem at a Butthole Surfers show was taped at Atlanta’s 688 Club on February 28 1986. It’s probably one of the two or three most sublime (non-musical) moments caught on tape of the Butthole Surfers in their lysergic prime (when the drugs were still working for them and not against them, in other words). It’s right up there with the “Bed In” interviews seen on their infamous classic Blind Eye Sees All home video release from the year before.

I’ve had a copy of this video courtesy of the person who shot it—the late New York-based video artist Nelson Sullivan—who, knowing I was a big Butthole Surfers fan, gave it to me himself just a few months after it was taped, along with the entire show, which is more or less too dark to really enjoy. But the after show hijinks? This is a true classic. If you are a Butthole Surfers freak, trust me on this one. I’ve posted this here a long time ago, but in case you missed it then, well, don’t make that same mistake this go round… Not unless you want to miss Gibby drawing a dick on a mural of Thor or not find out what he discovered when he went lookin’ for “Louis” & Clark.. and other things.
 

 
Here’s something that you have to know to be able to make maximum sense out of what’s going on here: Nelson—who had been invited to the show by then-drummer, Cabbage (Kytha Gernatt)—was behind the camera obviously. However, what you can’t see is that he was attired in an absolutely outlandish outfit comprised of red, white and blue plaid matching bell-bottom pants, vest and cap. It was truly an ensemble that “Rerun” from What’s Happening!! would have been ashamed to wear out of the house. The sight of Nelson—who was probably 37 at the time, but who came off as much older—in this getup was perplexing to say the least, under any circumstances or in any setting, including yes, even backstage at a Butthole Surfers’ concert.

More after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.10.2016
01:27 pm
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Butthole Surfers live in Rotterdam: ‘Those people put a lot of mayonnaise on their french fries’
02.01.2016
04:20 pm
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I have said it before and I will happily say it again: There was never a band that was as extreme live as the Butthole Surfers. None came even close. Not before and certainly not since. They raised the insanity bar so high with their violent, chaotic, druggy, duel-drummer götterdämmerung that they probably merit a special category of high weirdness all to themselves. Maybe someday someone will coin a term—like surrealism—to describe their potent and singularly evil—yet juvenile, often silly—art form.

During their mid-to late-80s heyday, the Satanic mayhem of a Butthole Surfers show was probably about as far as most people would have ever wanted to go in search of entertainment. For what foul-minded, dark ritual would lie beyond them? The Butthole Surfers pulverized their audience, who were often as lysergically loaded as the demonically jerking jesters onstage. One did not simply attend a Butthole Surfers show, one chemically prepared for it like some horribly fucked-up pagan ritual. Volunteering, as it were, for a very bad acid trip.

Aside from the vicious and lacerating sonic assault of the music—which was fucking loud, I can assure you—there was also the incomparably incomprehensible nude go-go dancer, Kathleen Lynch; seizure-inducing strobe lights and 16mm projections comprised of Faces of Death-type footage, cheap Mexican horror films and 1950s era shots of people with Down’s syndrome ballroom dancing. Gibby Haynes would douse his hands (and the cymbals) with lighter fluid and then stare at the flames like a drooling idiot before putting the fire out by sticking his hand down the front of his pants.
 

 
Perhaps the most legendary of their many legendary interviews was for Forced Exposure, the greatest underground music “zine” of the 1980s. Forced Exposure, like Mondo 2000, was produced erratically, so when a new issue came out, it felt like an event. The Surfers were the cover subject of Forced Exposure, issue #11 in 1987 and much of the “mythology” of the band comes from this one source. Like their hilarious “bed in” interviews (a John and Yoko parody) on their infamous home video release, 1985’s A Blind Eye Sees All, the extra-lengthy Forced Exposure interview is a masterpiece of stoned Jabberwocky and nutty road stories:

FORCED EXPOSURE: How were the shows there?
GIBBY: They were fun. They were really fun. I couldn’t tell if they liked us. We did a good job. We had fun at the show in…
PAUL: Wales?
GIBBY: Wales, yeah.
KING: Rotterdam?
GIBBY: Yeah. What a show in Rotterdam. We used to have a cassette of the radio interview that was played over the Dutch radio station.
KING: Yeah. Gibby was put on videotape putting his dick on the record executive’s shoulder from behind. For a long time. The guy didn’t even know it was there for a long time.
GIBBY: Yeah. And Kid Congo Powers was following me around ‘cause he wanted to be my friend. Then I realized that he thought I had all the money, and he was waiting for me to pass out so he could take it all out of my pocket. I was walking around breaking bottles and trying to push people over these fifty foot things ...
PAUL: Gibby took on five Dutch security guards. That was a fun night. I ended up trying to carry all the band’s equipment back to the hotel by myself. I almost left an overcoat and something else behind because I couldn’t carry them, not knowing that all our money was in the coat. Everybody else took off.
GIBBY: I didn’t take off.
PAUL: Gibby was taking on the entire bouncer scene looking for the money that I was getting ready to leave in the bushes.
FORCED EXPOSURE: You playing Rotterdam again this time?
GIBBY: I don’t know. Those people put a lot of mayonnaise on their french fries.

Continues after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Richard Metzger
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02.01.2016
04:20 pm
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Hear Butthole Surfer Gibby Haynes’ morning radio show
12.31.2015
08:58 am
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In the years before the Butthole Surfers had a radio hit with “Pepper”—a single that, Billboard noted at the time, “borrows liberally” from a much better song by DM’s Marc Campbell—not much was heard from the band. About a year after I saw them (billed as the “B.H. Surfers”) at the bloody, fiery Castaic Lake stop on 1993’s Bar-B-Que Mitzvah Tour, I heard that singer Gibby Haynes had roomed with Kurt Cobain during Cobain’s final trip to rehab; one year after that, I caught a glimpse of Haynes at the business end of a blowjob in Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. One day bled into the next. Butthole Surfers news was scarce, and Butthole Surfers kicks were scarcer.

(I was unaware of P until the late 90s, when I asked a record store owner to explain why the Buttholes’ 1993 promotional 10-inch, wrapped in Mylar in parody of Madonna’s Sex, was no longer prized by collectors. He told me that everyone stopped caring about the Butthole Surfers when the P album came out.)

During some of that period, Haynes hosted a radio show on Austin, Texas’ brand-new alternative rock station, 101X (KROX-FM), which has recently posted a few clips in celebration of its 20th anniversary. It’s a good time. When he wasn’t forced to play the period’s dreadful “modern rock” product, Gibby took calls in rapid succession, dispatching listeners’ requests and opinions with psychedelic non sequiturs, and he fit in some quality music when he could, too. Sometime co-host Robbie Jacks and Gibby’s father Jerry described the chaotic radio show in SPIN’s oral history of the Butthole Surfers, “Feeding the Fish”:

Robbie Jacks Gibby hit rock bottom. He had just rehabbed. He was at the point where he needed money, and he really wanted to do a morning show [on alt-rock radio station 101X in Austin], cause his dad did a morning TV show, Mr. Peppermint. We always gave out the wrong time [on the air], and Gibby always spelled the words backwards on whatever we were talking about. He’d say sgurd for drugs: “I spent all my money on sgurd.”

Jerry Haynes It was great. He was really funny. He’d introduce all the songs he didn’t like as “puke chunks.”

Robbie Jacks When the station got enough publicity out of the morning show, they told him, “You’re too rank for the mornings,” and put him on at nine at night. Instead of going to bed at nine at night, he was going to work, and so it was time to party. He just degenerated into drink. I called the station manager on the first night and I was like, “Do you want me to go down there? I mean, he’s falling apart, just listen to him.” And she was listening and she found it compelling.

One night he locked the engineer out of the door and then just rambled for two hours and he didn’t even do an air call, and it was hysterical. He had Mike Watt on the phone and he wouldn’t let him go. I think the band getting back together saved him more than anything, not AA.

 

Some of Billboard’s “local radio air personalities of the year,” 1996
 
As the unnamed station manager suggested to Jacks, if there was a problem with the show, it wasn’t the DJ or his “sgurd” habits. The problem was the miles, acres and tons of grade-N horseshit music demanded by the 1995 alternative rock format—a format I remember all too well, since it was invented in my hometown of Los Angeles, where the only entertainment option in my teenage car was a 20-year-old stock radio that picked up about three stations. Listening to these broadcasts from the grim days of the 104th Congress, I heard long-forgotten songs by Soul Asylum, Hum and Green Day that made me wonder what the opposite of the word “nostalgia” is. Take the top clip below, in which, after playing a killer set of Jon Wayne, Chrome, Mudhoney and Cycle Sluts from Hell, Gibby is reduced to setting up this “rock block” of undifferentiated hog slop:

I regret to inform you that we’ve done enough damage to radio programming in general, at this point. Now we’re forced—we’re literally being strong-armed by a woman with blood on her shoes—into playing Live, whom I hear from a reliable source cries onstage. I want to cry onstage, and I have cried onstage, and I will continue to cry onstage. One of my favorite ways to cry onstage is to do it alone while playing an acoustic version of “Daniel, My Brother.” And, uh, this would be, we’re gonna totally throw up on ourselves as we play Live, Bush and the Offspring all in a row on the X.

(Happily, Gibby improved the Offspring song with judicious use of a Jeff Foxworthy sample.)

The two longest clips (undated, I’m afraid) are embedded below, and you can find others here and here.

There’s much more after the jump!

READ ON
Posted by Oliver Hall
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12.31.2015
08:58 am
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Beastie Boys and the Butthole Surfers, live on NYC cable access TV, 1984
06.18.2014
10:32 am
Topics:
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Beastie Boys & Butthole Surfers
 
Ah, 1984, back when hardly anyone knew who the Beastie Boys and the Butthole Surfers were, and even a lowly New York City cable access show like The Scott and Gary Show could snag them—because nobody else was booking them yet! This is some kind of retrospective episode of the show (lasting about 30 minutes) in which Scott Lewis and Gary Winter reminisce about some of the show’s most memorable moments. The Beasties appeared in January 1984, not long after their pranky single “Cooky Puss” had made the rounds, and the Buttholes’ appearance dates from October 1984—their first visit to New York. (They popped up on MTV the next day.)

The Beastie Boys were two solid years away from the release of Licensed to Ill, and if I understand their history correctly, they hadn’t really considered doing rap in any serious way yet. Meanwhile, the Butthole Surfers had a single solitary EP to their name when they appeared on the show.
 
Beastie Boys
 
The Beastie Boys are frankly pretty terrible, prompting the thought that a lateral shift from feckless hardcore to feckless rap was a pretty good career move! Mike D. is in charge of the vocals, Ad-Rock is on the guitar, and MCA gamely tries to keep up on the bass. The drummer is Kate Schellenbach, who would later be in Luscious Jackson. Actually, Schellenbach probably has the best moves of anyone here.

How did I miss what an incredible ham/camera-hog Mike D. is? I don’t think I knew that before, I always thought that Ad-Rock was the hammy one. Well, there’s a reason that Mike D. has the mic here, and in the interview portion afterwards, he obstinately refuses to cede control to Scott, forgetting that he’s supposed to speak into the mic he’s clutching for it to function properly. (Side note: It was interesting to hear Mike D. confess that he attended Vassar briefly. I went to Vassar a few years later, and we would whisper this “rumor” that one of the Beasties had dropped out of Vassar…. this was all a couple years before Paul’s Boutique came out.)
 
Butthole Surfers
 
The best adjective for the Butthole Surfers segment is “sweaty.” The Buttholes’ segment is a salutary reminder of the effectiveness of using two drummers—man, that shit works really good. If you have two drummers going at it balls-out, you can flail around on the guitar and throw yourself all over the stage, and it’s going to sound good. (I think Kid Millions has already figured this out.) Also, disrobing is a viable strategy. Gibby has spectacular polka-dotted boxers, and supports someone named Gilbert A. Rodriguez for county treasurer. By the time they’d gotten to October, Scott and Gary had figured out how to superimpose images, so sometimes the footage of the band will fade to an image of a mushroom cloud or something, it’s all pretty rad. Afterwards, Scott asks the audience, “Where else are you gonna see the Butthole Surfers?” and receives the reply “Uganda,” in return.

The commonality between the two clips is obviously Scott’s lack of authority as the host, which is actually kind of charming.
 

Posted by Martin Schneider
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06.18.2014
10:32 am
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Butthole Surfers’ Gibby Haynes, college jock
06.04.2014
12:02 pm
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Gibby Haynes
 
It don’t get a whole lot better than this. Many people have seen that news story from the 1970s of Guided By Voices frontman Bob Pollard throwing a no-hitter in college. Quite recently we posted a pic of a newspaper article about Stephen Malkmus, later of Pavement, from his high school days describing his exploits of playing in a punk band and also playing soccer for the high school team.
 
Gibby Haynes
 
But it turns out that Gibson “Gibby” Haynes of the Butthole Surfers was a star forward for his basketball team when he attended Trinity University in San Antonio. That’s right: The mastermind behind Locust Abortion Technician and Rembrandt Pussyhorse averaged 11.5 points a game and 4.7 rebounds as the starting forward on Trinity’s team. As we can see, Gibby was an “Accounting and economics major,” which makes sense given that he once landed a gig at a top accounting company in the area. Note that he also made the Dean’s List—kids, stay in school and you too can become as upstanding a citizen as Gibson Haynes!
 
Below, the full Blind Eye Sees All live concert video, shot in Detroit in 1985.
 

 
via WFMU and Marc Masters

Posted by Martin Schneider
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06.04.2014
12:02 pm
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The legendary X-rated Butthole Surfers show at Danceteria
05.16.2014
05:39 pm
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The Butthole Surfers show at Danceteria in early 1986 has become the stuff of legend, but as is often the case, “legends” can be imperfect and are often reported on by someone not even born when the event in question transpired or by someone who didn’t bother to even check a single source other than Wikipedia.

Here’s Gibby’s version, as told to Option Magazine in 1993:

At the legendary Danceteria in New York during the early days of the Butthole Surfers, Gibby got caught drinking and tripping with his pants down. “Ten minutes into the show, I’d put on ten dresses - you see, I used to put dresses on and then tear ‘em all off,” he explains. “But I’d gotten so trippin’ and so drunk. I forgot to put on my underwear. So I got down to my last dress” - he pauses for a well timed hiccup - “and, goddamn it, I was naked. “I looked over at [band members] Cabbage and Kathleen: Cabbage had come out from behind the drums and she had this Fred Flintstone plastic baseball bat filled with urine and was sprinkling it on the crowd. Kathleen was totally naked and bald. And all of a sudden it became like this sexual thing, and there I was with a semi-erect penis onstage, in between this girl’s legs, and about to do this thing. Then it kinda suddenly dawned on me what was going on and I was like, Whoa!”

After the show, the mentally and physically impaired Gibby caused some more trouble. “They tried to pay me and I tore up the check and threw it at the guy,” he says. “And I almost got in a fight with this gigantic doorman who would’ve just thumped me.” He pauses for a well-timed sheesh. “There’s just so many of those kinda things. “But really,” he adds, like a surgeon general, “before anybody goes out and takes a bunch of psychedelic drugs, they should first go and visit Roky Erickson down in Texas. He’s a casualty. That can happen, too, you know.”

 

 
Guitarist Paul Leary told the tale this way to the Phoenix New Times in 1991

The frenzied peak of this touring period came during a gig at New York’s Danceteria club in 1986. The show started out predictably enough. Lead singer-guitarist Gibby Haynes—with economy-size bottle of lighter fluid in hand—was up to his usual pyrotechnics. But then the onstage shenanigans got out of hand—even by Butthole standards.

“I walked around with a screwdriver and started playing samurai with every single speaker,” Leary says without a note of either pride or regret. “And then Cabbage, our drummer at the time, and our dancer Kathleen were taking turns peeing into the tiny hole at the end of this plastic Fred Flintstone baseball bat. They filled it with piss and were shaking it around everywhere.”

By the end of the gig, almost all of the Buttholes were naked, including Gibby and Kathleen, who were fornicating at the foot of the stage with the casualness of X-rated movie actors. Maybe more went on, says Leary, but time—and over consumption of acid—has blurred his memory of many of these seamier shows.

In Paul Young’s book L.A. Exposed: Strange Myths and Curious Legends in the City of Angels, it’s said that Haynes was copulating with a female audience member. Kathleen Lynch, says that no actual fornicating took place. She ought to know (but the video evidence seems less certain…)

Then again, there is Kramer’s account, as told via his pal Macioce in Michael Azerrad’s book, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991. He was playing bass onstage that night:

In early ‘86 they drove from Los Angeles all the way to New York just to play two lucrative weekend shows at the Danceteria club, only to arrive to find that the second night had been canceled. The band was livid; Haynes got quite drunk just before show time. “During that show it was just complete bedlam,” says Leary, a man who knows from bedlam. After only a song or two, Haynes picked up a beer bottle and viciously smashed Leary over the head with it. Leary’s eyes rolled back in his head as he crumpled on the floor. Then he quickly got up and resumed playing. It was a stunt bottle, made out of sugar. Then Haynes picked up a real bottle and heaved it the length of the room, where it exploded above the exit sign. Soon Haynes had set fire to a pile of trash in the middle of the stage. “And you’re really thinking, ‘Should I get out of here?’” says Michael Macioce. “That was the type of feeling you had - you were* in danger* at one of their shows.”

Then Lynch jumped onto the stage from the audience and began dancing. Macioce then left - it was about three in the morning by this point - but he called his friend Kramer the next day to see how the rest of the gig had gone. “That girl, she pulled down her pants and Gibby started sticking his thumb up her ass!” Kramer told Macioce. He was fucking her with his thumb just back and forth and this went on for like a half hour or forty-five minutes, just like that!” And that was only the beginning. The band had played only five shambolic songs before Leary leaned his guitar against his amplifier, producing ear-splitting feedback; the strobes were flickering, sirens were flashing, the films were rolling, and through the dry-ice fog a couple of open fires burned brightly. “Gibby filled up a plastic whiffleball bat full of urine - he managed to pee in the little hole in the end of the bat,” says Leary, “and made this ‘piss wand.’” Haynes then began swinging the bat, spraying urine all over the crowd. But it didn’t stop there - Lynch, now completely naked, lay down on the stage and Haynes, in Leary’s words, started “mounting’ her. Later Leary saw video footage of the scene. “Her legs are up in the air and there’s Gibby’s pumping butt in the strobe lights and the smoke,” says Leary, chuckling. “it’s really fuckin’ hideous, man.”

In the midst of the chaos, Leary went around discreetly poking screwdriver holes in every PA and monitor speaker in the place. After the show there was a tense confrontation between the Danceteria management and the band. The Buttholes got paid, but they literally walked out of the place backward as the club’s hired goons not so subtly showed them the door. “You’ll never play New York again!” the club’s manager screamed after them. “And we were playing CBGB within two weeks,” Leary crows, “*for more money!”

 

 
Someone on the Internet named JoJo Jones writes:

at danceteria, gibby came out in a bloody dress with a pregnant belly that soon exploded and cockroach confetti sprayed everyone…then he had sex right on stage in the fog with some buxom lass…then get up and ranted on the bullhorn then went back down in the fog…totally nude…blood and roaches. Anyone who says these were not one of the most amazing live shows really knows nothing about the infamous late 80’s nyc shows. There is more to a “show” than music my friend. Danceteria had some license problems after word got out about the live sex. They were soon banned by many clubs and had bouncers all over them at the Cat Club show.

I was actually at this gig myself, but more or less by accident. I wasn’t there to see The Butthole Surfers—I had never heard of them—Danceteria was just where I hung out at that age, so I happened to be there. At a certain point during their set, the buzz about the (literally) balls out lysergic Dionysian insanity that was going on the first floor of the club started to climb the steps and I went down to check it out. My memory of this gig is that Gibby Haynes had his feet and calves up to the knees covered in clay like he was a tree with roots going into the floor and that he was naked otherwise. Maybe he was standing in a potato sack?

Or maybe not. It would appear that my own standing-in-the-audience memory is a faulty one, too, but apparently no more faulty than the conflicting reports and the Rashomon-ish variations in the tale as told by band members themselves and people who, like me, were there that night

I was at the Cat Club show, JoJo mentions, too and it was equally demonic. I saw the Butthole Surfers many, many times in their heyday. The first time was this Danceteria gig. For several years, the era when the drugs were still working for them, rather than against them, the Butthole Surfers were the most fearsome live act in rock, bar none. Their NYC shows were the sort of events you had your drugs sorted out for well in advance!
 

 
Here’s Gibby Haynes telling the story again in 2011:

Ah, there are so many, but one of them was that we were playing in the Danceteria, one of the first of the big shows in New York here, and we went on about 4 o’clock in the morning and we were waaaaasted! The first band had played for about 3 fucking hours and we were ready to play at midnight man! So we had just kept drinking the hard stuff, oh man, we were wasted, and we went on stage and we immediately just took off all of our clothes and just started making noise! I tried to burn one of our amps and it wouldn’t stop working, it was just burning! And I tried to kick it with a bare foot and stubbed my toe! I was totally naked and I remember looking over at Paul was behind the drum kit without any clothes on with 2 drum sticks playing with his dick!

And then I started dancing with Kathleen our dancer and I grabbed her and was like humping her between her legs, and then my dick started to get hard and I was like “whoah this shouldn’t happen!”, so I put her down, and she was like “whoah!” and I walked back to my gear to fuck around with the delays or something and I looked up and there was this guy with a 16mm camera filming this and he was freaking out, and when I was walking towards the camera, my dick was sooo big, I looked like a God! (haha!) That was a crazy night!

Indeed it was, no matter how few brain cells any of us who were there that night have left…

Another account from SPIN, 1990.

Below, you can see a bit of the Butthole Surfers at Danceteria in Jem Cohen’s short film “Witness,” which was also shot in Texas and in San Francisco. Be warned, at the 8:15 mark it might get a little uncomfortable if you’re watching this at work… (Part II is here).
 

 
Thank you kindly, Ken!

Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.16.2014
05:39 pm
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‘No Slam Dancing’: Black Flag, Dead Kennedys and… Jon Stewart?


Henry Rollins and Greg Ginn during a Black Flag show
 
I’ve read an absolutely embarrassing amount of books on pop music for someone who’s never read Dostoyevsky, and over the years I’ve learned to make my recommendations with care. I’ve found out the hard way that not everyone is as interested in Ronnie Spector’s autobiography as I am (ingrates), and that it’s difficult to convince someone that you don’t have to be a metal fan to enjoy a book on the history of heavy metal. However, I’m completely serious when I say everyone will enjoy No Slam Dancing, No Stage Diving, No Spikes: An Oral History of the Legendary City Gardens—it’s just that universal.

To give you some background, City Gardens was a music venue in the most unlikely of places, Trenton, New Jersey, a city that’s been on the rapid decline for decades. After the assassination of Martin Luther King, riots ravaged the downtown, and even the cops were looting (for welding masks and catcher’s helmets to protect their faces from flying debris). Insurance companies began to drop businesses’ claims, deindustrialization exacerbated unemployment, and suburban flight grew in droves—Trenton, NJ remains a pretty dismal place, economically.

However, where there is a void, there is also opportunity, and a giant warehouse in a rough part of town became the site of a musical oasis, all through the tireless efforts of a few committed fans and staff. The actual City Gardens building had been re-purposed many times before, from a grocery store to a car dealership, but when it was reopened as a disco in 1980, local DJ Randy Now approached the owner, hoping to find a venue receptive to his New Wave tastes. What began as a few weekly dance nights quickly paved the way to booking some of the best bands in underground music.
 

The Descendents in front of their perilous tour bus
 
Before you write off City Gardens as just another scummy punk venue, realize two things. First, the Trenton neighborhood it called home was volatile. While slam-dancing can certainly incur some injuries, to say City Gardens was merely “violent” is an understatement. It saw a lawsuit in 1981, not a year after it began booking bands, when a woman was brutally beaten with a pool cue in inside the venue. And this is to say nothing of the skinhead riot that occurred later. The late Dave Brockie, better knows as GWAR singer Oderus Orungus, said City Gardens was so bad, they’d never go there as fans. Second, when I say “some of the best bands in underground music,” I think City Gardens’ booking philosophy is best summed up in Mickey Ween’s forward when he said, “they did not cater to the audience.”

This was not just a punk or hard rock club. For every Black Flag and Danzig (who had their very first show there), there was a Bo Diddley, Sinead O’Connor, Lydia Lunch, Iggy Pop, DEVO, Bauhaus, The Ramones (who played numerous times), Ricky Nelson, The Violent Femmes, RIcky Nelson, or Toots and the Maytals! The Daily Show‘s Jon Stewart was bartending during a Butthole Surfers set with a topless dancer and some careless DIY pyrotechnics! The Beastie Boys almost didn’t play and got their tires slashed, presumably for being late! Someone threatened to break down the dressing room door to stab Jello Biafra! The chaos and sheer wildness of City Gardens is what truly made it unique, and it even hosted all ages shows!
 

Al Jourgensen of Ministry
 
Co-Author Amy Yates Wuelfing pinpoints the preposterous success of it all:

City Gardens was in the middle of nowhere. Not Philly, not New York, but it was still a big club.  That fact that it was so close, and in the middle this dead zone, made the community of people who went there stronger and tighter. It was almost like college, you saw the same people all the time so they became your friends. That was the main thing for me. And unlike the clubs in Philly and New York, the pretentious element wasn’t really there.

What’s truly captivating about No Slam Dancing is the story-telling—it’s a complete oral history, meticulously collected from the memories and reflections of bands, employees, regulars, and all manner of City Gardens alumni. Over a hundred interviews were conducted to create an amazing compendium of anecdotes, and they don’t pull punches. Not everyone comes off well, and sometimes everything goes wrong, but the spirit of the moment is exciting and ambitious, and it’s all the more inspiring when you realize the entire fourteen year musical renaissance of Trenton, New Jersey was built from the ground up by Randy Now, the hobbyist DJ with a day job as a mailman. It’s an insane story, and I highly suggest you pick it up.

Below, Jon Stewart, Ian Mackaye and others talk about City Gardens in a trailer for Riot on the Dance Floor: The story of Randy Now and City Gardens.
 

Posted by Amber Frost
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04.09.2014
02:48 pm
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‘Entering Texas’: This demented Butthole Surfers video could permanently barbecue your brain
08.29.2013
04:34 pm
Topics:
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At a time in the ‘80s when hardcore was on the wane and college radio was increasingly dominated by future yuppie-rock arena stars like REM and U2, the Butthole Surfers stuck out like an angry boner. True to their Texas roots, they did nothing small, spiking their twisted but virtuoso experimental punk with heretical genres like acid rock and prog, all half-digested and projectile-vomited onto the burgeoning audience for the music that would eventually come under the catchall of “indie rock.”

The Butthole Surfers were creatively fearless, gleefully unpredictable, utterly glorious. Live performances were overwhelming and often just flat-out frightening multimedia affairs featuring projections of alarming/disgusting surgical footage, a nude dancer named “Ta Da The Shit Lady” who’d reputedly indulge a bandmate in the occasional onstage sex act, a pair of tandem tribal drummers, and vocalist Gibby Haynes recklessly playing with fire WAY too close to the audience (and his own penis). Nothing else at the time came close to that level of danger and excitement, and even when they toned the volatility down after improbably getting signed to Capitol Records in the heat of the ‘90s corporate-alt moment, they still remained one of the key yardsticks by which fuckedupedness was measured.
 
Just when you thought it was safe to wipe…
 
filer
 
One particularly hilarious but not often seen expression of the band’s demented lysergic ethos was “Entering Texas” (a/k/a “The Bar-B-Que Movie”), which surfaced in 1988 on a VHS oddity called Impact Video Magazine. If you can track it down (and afford the punitive, if not downright larcenous prices decent copies can fetch), there’s much to recommend it. Directed and compiled by Alex Winter (“Bill” of Bill & Ted’s Yadda Yadda Yadda fame), it includes segments on Jane’s Addiction, Public Enemy and Bill Hicks, but “Entering Texas” is the tape’s high point. Starring the Surfers as an unhinged Texas Chainsaw Massacre-ish clan that’s enticed an unwitting family to join them for a barbecue… well, just watch it.

Heads-up for trainspotters: See if you recognize the nervous dad.
 

 
If this is the sort of wrongness that appeals to your baser instincts, it may interest you that the band is reissuing its first four albums on vinyl. The press release from their label, Latino Bugger Veil, claims that these will be the first vinyl pressings since the original ‘80s releases on the Touch And Go label (whom, it can’t go unmentioned, the band infamously sued in 1996, a move which cost them significant goodwill in the underground that made them famous to begin with), though CDs and digital downloads have been continuously available. 1984′s Psychic, Powerless…Another Man’s Sac, 1986′s Rembrant Pussyhorse, 1987′s Locust Abortion Technician (the one to get if you can only get one) and 1988′s Hairway To Steven will all be re-released on October 1st. The press release makes no mention of the contemporary Butthole Surfers (a/k/a Brown Reason to Live), Live PCPPEP or Cream Corn From The Socket Of Davis EPs, all of which include some must-have material, but even without the EPs, these four albums, taken together, comprise a crucial document of the development and creative peak of the single most combatively weird band ever to find a mass audience.
 

 
For a taste of their signature weirdness from their embryonic period, we leave you with some rare footage of the band in its early days, in a wonderful performance/interview segment from NYC cable access’ The Scott And Gary Show in 1984.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The Butthole Surfers: The Shah Sleeps in Lee Harvey’s Grave
Butthole Surfers live in Austin September 11, 2011
The Butthole Surfers: Live in Concert 1996
The Butthole Surfers bring the gospel to West Virginia, 1985

Posted by Ron Kretsch
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08.29.2013
04:34 pm
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