XL Cover Story: The Surfers Now

By Joe Gross
August 19, 2004

   More: Old Surfers Never Die

GIBBY HAYNES / Behind the (expletive) music

Aconversation with Gibby Haynes is a little like the silver ball in a demented, pop-culture pinball game. You careen from topic to topic, from life in his newly adopted home of New York -- "Everyone, everyone, everyone has (expletive) headphones stuck in their ears or walkin' around with a (expletive) telephone" -- to accused Abu Ghraib torturer Lynndie England -- "She seems like a big ol' sex freak" -- to record company politics -- "You think major labels, they keep track of all those musicians from the 1970s they're making money off of? Every label owes every musician an apology" -- to the culture of downloading -- "Now you have musicians at odds with their audience."

He doesn't even spend that much time talking about his new band, Gibby Haynes and His Problem.

Shore Fire Media Gibby Haynes and His Problem is, from left, Kyle Ellison, Shandon Sahm, Haynes and Nathan Calhoun. Their brand of rock is more straightforward than the Surfers'.

"I really like touring, I think it's really fun to play live," Haynes says in the thick Dallas accent that years on the road has done nothing to temper. "(The Surfers) hadn't done it for a long time. We played a few shows (in 2002) but those were mainly practice-for-two-weeks-then play-in-Japan shows. When you do that sort of thing, it is definitely for the money, it's not very fun and it's extremely unsatisfying."

Haynes says the stresses of recording 2001's "Weird Revolution" were the primary causes of the Surfers' "hiatus" -- "the rest is weird personal (expletive) that I don't wanna talk about" -- so it was time to find another outlet.

Haynes and final Surfers bass player Nathan Calhoun had been talking about putting a band together last year. They wrote some songs, were joined by Shandon Sahm and occasional Surfer Kyle Ellison. The results are some of the most straightforward rock Haynes has ever made, veering dangerously close to the classic rock of Haynes' Dallas youth (acoustic guitar and piano on "Dream Machine"; delicate, country-rock picking on "Stop Foolin' ") . But Gibby's singular vocals are the glue that holds it all together; his voice is still like nobody else's.

Like the Surfers, Haynes says His Problem is best experienced in the live arena, and live shows are accompanied by the sort of casually surrealist found film that made the Surfers famous. "We wanted to make it real multimedia," he says. "The video as important as the music." Recent shows at Austin's Room 710 revealed an A/V setup not unlike a less manic Surfers performance, complete with video from the ubiquitous found-film artist Lori Surfer.

He remains unsure when or even if the Surfers will do something in the future; "but if we do make another record, it's gonna be our 'Metal Machine Music,' " he says, referring to Lou Reed's infamous double album of nothing but electronic feedback.

But what he remembers most about the Surfers' golden age was just how ready the supposedly jaded underground was to be shocked. "We were amazed how easy it was," Haynes says. "It just seemed like everybody operated within a zone of constraint; you could only do certain things given your certain punk rockdom. People were so one-dimensional."

As for their albums, Haynes chalks up their famous diversity to simple boredom. "So, so many bands put out albums with one song on them. They all sound the (expletive) same. And that's fine when you've got a great sound, but we didn't."

The creative process scared even Haynes sometimes. He cites the first record as his favorite, possibly for the following reason. "Paul and I were tripping really hard and mixing the song 'The Revenge of Anus Presley' and there were all these rants on it. I just got scared and looked at him and said, totally serious, 'Do you think we're gonna go to hell for this?'

"Paul looked over at me and starts yelling, 'Don't think like that! Stop it!'

"That's what the Surfers was like."

PAUL LEARY / Settling into the studio

Paul Leary doesn't really need to leave the house. He says he doesn't go to too many shows, other than to see bands he's working with. The 47-year-old Surfers guitarist has a nifty little studio right there in the Austin home he's owned since 1997.

Photo by Brian K. Diggs/AA-S Paul Leary doesn't take the stage much anymore, opting to work in his home studio as a producer for local bands.

"I have a computer, pre-amp, some compressors," Leary says. "I do mostly editing here, a little writing on bass or guitar. I had (former Ministry bassist) Paul Barker here the other day and he was horrified at how primitive it was."

That's the role that Leary is playing these days: one-off collaborator, engineer, occasional remixer and in-demand producer. He's working with local acts such as the hard rock band Pushmonkey and WideAwake. In January he's producing for the noise-rock supergroup Tomahawk and legendary sludge-sters the Melvins. He plays guitar in the studio-only project band Dambaby with Sam McCandless, former drummer for nü-metal band Cold, and McCandless' wife, Georgia. He even contributed some chaos to the Gibby Haynes and His Problem album. It seems like a good life, especially for a guy who spent a good couple of years not really knowing where his next meal was coming from, even as he was playing music that was polarizing the American underground.

"I mean, when we were in New York, there was a time when each band member got three dollars a day," he says, "which meant two slices of Ray's pizza and a beer or one slice of Ray's pizza and two beers.

"We really lived on the road for four to six years," Leary continues. "One of our old bass players (Terrence Smart) woke up one morning and decided going back into the armed forces was better than being in the Surfers."

But Leary doesn't sound too fond of the other end of the success spectrum either. "After 'Pepper,' we started out being fresh off of a No. 1 radio and MTV hit, and thinking we had the world by the tail, to being dropped and suddenly, the whole world hates us."

Does he miss being in a touring band?

"Not really," he sighs. "Every every once in a while I see some band and I wish I was on stage having fun.

"Then I start thinking about those other 23 hours a day."

KING COFFEY / The pop and the fury

"I've never been in a band when you can just go totally nuts," King Coffey says. "I consider the Buttholes to be a pop band to a large degree."

Huh? Most folks saw plenty of "nuts" in the Surfers, and until the band's 1996 radio hit "Pepper," any characterization of the Surfers as a pop band would have sounded, frankly, insane.

Photo by Ralph Barrera/AA-S King Coffey's current band is Rubble, whose music he describes as 'up-tempo noise.' With Coffey is his Vizsla puppy.

But these days, that's probably how thousands of kids remember them, and like Leary and Haynes, Coffey swears that the minute the Surfers do get back together, the results will be miles away from "Weird Revolution."

"The last record was a horrific experience that lasted years," Coffey says. "At the end of it, I somehow wound up playing tambourine on a song co-written by Kid Rock."

With the exception of Jeff Pinkus, who's rocking out with Honky, Coffey might be the most visible Surfer on the Austin scene. He and partner Craig Stewart, who books bands for South by Southwest, are Red River regulars, a constant presence at clubs such as Emo's and Room 710.

And with his currently defunct Trance Syndicate label, which documented the '90s Austin noise rock explosion, he did as much as anyone to show how the Surfers influenced local rock.

He's also the most reluctant to talk about the Surfers in the past tense. "We still pretend like we're a band," Coffey says, "even if we don't do those bothersome things like record or play live or even hang out regularly in the same room as other bands seem to do."

These days he just wants to play drums. If would be nice if it were with the Surfers, but in the meantime, the soft-spoken 40-year-old has been sitting with a wide variety of folks. Coffey did time with songwriter Richard Buckner, who recently split for New York. "It was nice playing with Buckner," Coffey says. "The drums had to go in a very carefully arranged sort of place." But that's certainly not going nuts.

Enter Rubble, Coffey's new group with various local psychedelic rockers, including members of Baby Robots and Iron Kite. The loose-knit band has only played a handful of shows, but all of them have been prime slices of mighty loud abstraction.

"Rubble reminds me of the last 20 minutes of a Surfers show, just up-tempo noise until we all drop dead," Coffey says.

Guess that solves the pop band problem.

JEFF PINKUS / Hang seven: a bassist's longevity

"I think I outlived 'em all put together," Jeff Pinkus says with a laugh.

Photo by Amber Novak for AA-S Jeff Pinkus, center, with Honky bandmates Kenny Wagner, left, and Bobby Ed, says his tenure with the Surfers helped him build his people skills.

After nearly five years of rotating bass players, a Georgia kid who had been on his own since 15 joined the Butthole Surfers in 1986 and didn't leave for more than seven years. This was no small feat, as the Surfers went through bass players faster than socks. Pinkus still holds the record.

The 37-year-old was a mere 18 when he joined the Surfers' circus at the height of their chaotic, acid-soaked powers. Leary and Haynes were a good 10 years older than Pinkus ("it was like seeing what my life was going to be like 10 years from now") and he almost likens it to joining a cult. "We were exposed to no pop culture at all," Pinkus says, "We had no idea what was going on outside of our band."

Pinkus lasted until after 1993's "Independent Worm Saloon," the band's major label debut. A few years earlier, he began Daddy Longhead, a noise rock band with guitarist Jimbo Young and local drumming legend Rey Washam (Big Boys, Scratch Acid). They produced a couple of albums and split in '97, but by that time Pinkus had put together his longest-running band, Honky. A few years later, Pinkus formed Areola 51, a more obtuse, on-and-off project with former Scratch Acid guitarist Brett Bradford and former Ministry drummer Max Brody.

These days, after three CDs and a mess of touring, Honky's 10-gallon acid rock is a constant presence on the Red River scene, playing nearly weekly somewhere. "Balls Out Inn," the band's new album, is due in February on Seattle's Dead Teenager Records. Pinkus seems like a lifer, which might be what being the Surfers' longest-running bass player does to you.

So what does one learn spending seven years with the Surfers? "How to deal with people in very close quarters," he says. "Stay out of other people's arguments. If things get ugly, don't try to be the mediator. Try to get everyone to find a common enemy outside the band."

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jgross@statesman.com; 912-5926