XL Cover Story: Old Surfers never die

They built a reputation on crazy, intense live shows and had a hit single in '96 with 'Pepper.' But where are they now?

By Joe Gross
August 19, 2004

   More: Where the Surfers Are Now

The last time we heard an album of new material from the Butthole Surfers, it was late summer 2001. "Weird Revolution" had taken nearly three years and two record labels to complete, and the single from it was written and produced with Kid Rock.

Casey Monahan/AA-S 1987 The Butthole Surfers, from left, Paul Leary, Gibby Haynes, Jeff Pinkus and King Coffey, built a solid fan base with their live shows. At back is Teresa Taylor, a drummer who was one of a cast of dozens who floated in and out of the band.

Twenty years earlier, the Surfers were little more than a rumor, a noisy art-lark begun in San Antonio by a young accountant from Dallas named Gibby Haynes and an art school dude named Paul Leary.

Between those two moments, the Surfers turned into the craziest, most infamous, most nakedly notorious rock band Texas has ever produced. Their name sounded like an eighth-grade joke, their records were often barely comprehensible to those outside their fanatical cult and their live shows made them genuine rock legends.

"I think a mid-'80s Butthole Surfers show is the closest thing to the festival of Boujeloud that most of us will ever see," Craig Koon says. (He's referring to a Moroccan fertility rite where a naked man dresses in a goat skin and dances as hard as he can, beating the crowd with oleander branches while musicians egg him on -- which sounds pretty much correct.)

Koon, a longtime underground scenester and the former manager of Sound Exchange Records on the Drag, has been a Surfers fan since 1985, when he saw them as a college student in Ohio.

"The phrase 'religious experience' is pretty overused, but that's what is was," Koon says. "It was about 110 degrees inside the club, humidity on the walls and most of the crowd was standing there in total shock at the band's intensity."

Koon says the band engendered a fanaticism in its believers: "You immediately wanted to drive to the next town to see them, and if you missed them, everyone looked at you funny and said you'd be an idiot to miss them again."

Koon says much of the appeal came from the lack of a difference between who the Surfers were on-stage and off. "It was just like, this music is crazy, their life is crazy, these people are crazy," he says. "There was no artificial wall between the performance and who they were.

"You just got the impression that if you saw them at the laundromat, there would be something very strange going on, like there would be a couch in the dryer, or maybe another customer."

"I've known them for 20 years and I still don't quite understand them," says rock critic Charles M. Young. Young has been working on a book about the Surfers for years.

"I'm just fascinated by them," Young says. "Gibby and Paul are two of the funniest and smartest people I've met in music, two very complicated character studies. Everyone in the band was bright, really, and their career is the strangest thing. You couldn't ask for anything better from a literary standpoint."

The question of influence is a tough one with the Surfers. "If you really look at their work," Young says, "there's nothing else like it in the history of rock 'n' roll. They're almost their own genre."

Young also thinks the fans had a profound effect on the band. "I always thought that the Buttholes had a very soulful audience," Young continues. "An audience that understood and admitted their own humanity in a way that other bands' fans do not. I think they inspired all sorts of people to try new stuff in the 1980s, a time when the definition of punk rock was very, very narrow."

Smiley N. Pool/AA-S 1987 Gibby Haynes gets some help from a megaphone at this 1987 show at Austin's Cave Club. The Surfers' intensity left many a concert-goer in awe.

Michael Azerrad agrees with this assessment. In 2001, the longtime rock critic published "Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes From The American Indie Underground 1981-1991." The chapter on the Surfers is one of the very few essays about the band to be found between hard covers. He isn't as big a fan as Young ("I didn't care for the records so much," he says) but acknowledges they were an extraordinary presence. "It was all about the show," Azerrad recalls. "A traveling circus with scary, scary clowns.

"It's like they were acting out people's internal fantasies on stage," he continues. "The Buttholes had a lot of room to be freaky, and with bands making a smaller proportion of their income on record sales and more on concert receipts, I think there will be more on emphasis on the show. That's where the Surfers will be seen as visionaries."

But what about these days? What about right now? In 1996, the band released "Electriclarryland," which contained the Beck-ish hit single "Pepper." A follow-up album, called "After the Astronaut," was supposed to appear in 1998, and Capitol Records even sent out press copies of the abortive album. But the record was never released.

By 1999, the band was off Capitol and had successfully sued beloved indie label Touch and Go Records for the return of their old albums. The Capitol mess was bad enough, but the Touch and Go suit alienated scores of hard-core indie fans (admittedly, most of the folks who cared about the suit were the sort that lost interest in the Surfers around the time they signed to Capitol in 1993). The band re-released its back catalog on its own Latino Buggerveil label in 1999.

"Weird Revolution" finally appeared on Aug. 28, 2001 on Hollywood/Surfdog Records. It contained the aforementioned "Shame of Life," which made an excellent Kid Rock and a mighty weak Surfers tune. Nobody in the Surfers has anything good to say about that album or the time period.

Since then, the band has released a nifty '80s-era odds and ends set called "Humpty-Dumpty LSD" in 2002, and save for a handful of shows, generally kept a low-to-nonexistent profile.

With the first album credited to Gibby Haynes and His Problem released this week, it seemed a good time to catch up with some key Surfers. As Koon put it, the Surfers "seemed like folks who one day ate a piece of acid the size of a basketball and became ... something else." What comes next?

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jgross@statesman.com; 912-5926