Butthole Surfers – Psychic… Powerless… Another Man’s Sac/Live PCPPEP/Rembrandt Pussyhorse
Matador
Butthole Surfers weren’t originally called Butthole Surfers. As the story goes: Back in the very early 1980s, when the San Antonio group—then (briefly) known as the Ashtray Babyheads—played their first paid gig, the announcer mistook a song title for their official sobriquet. And thus was born one of the most notorious band names in rock history. Even more than their visceral deconstruction of rock and roll and even more than their famously outrageous live shows—think nudity, crowd taunts, fire, destruction—that name seemed to doom them for underground notoriety and exclude them from mainstream success.
Or so it would have seemed at the time. The group’s anarchic music was like one of those cartoon fight clouds, with punk, post-punk, industrial, goth, psychedelia, college rock, and collage rock duking it out with old EC Comics, MAD magazines, and the Lone Star proclivity toward general orneriness. Butthole Surfers specialized in an off-the-grid strain of avant-garde—based in fucking shit up—and even before they scored a few minor hits during the alt-rock boom of the ‘90s, their sound and their philosophy seeped into bands that seeped into the mainstream, including Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails, and the Flaming Lips.
After releasing their self-titled EP on Jello Biafra’s Alternative Tentacles label in 1984, the Surfers signed with Touch & Go for a series of albums earning the reissue treatment 40 years later. It’s a little strange to see their legacy gentrified with deluxe editions, but not even a remaster can dull the clamor, menace, and humor of these songs. Their first full-length statement, Psychic… Powerless… Another Man’s Sac, contains all the elements that would define the band, bold yet disarrayed: the pummeling drums, the claustrophobic production (most of these songs sound like you’re trapped in a small room with the band), the guitars strummed by backhoes, and the giddily confrontational ravings of Gibby Haynes. Vulgarity is more often an end than a means—especially on “Lady Sniff,” a symphony of pukes and farts and retches and hocked loogies—but who needs the niceties of a “cohesive” album when you’ve got a killer rhythm section suturing these songs together like that surgeon in The Human Centipede?
Butthole Surfers quickly gained a reputation as a literally dangerous live act, prone to destroy stages and set fire to their instruments. It was chaos every night, and on good nights it was catharsis as well. Live PCPPEP was recorded on a pretty good night in San Antonio, with the band playing loud enough to drown out the crowd. They were already sharpening their songwriting skills and expanding their musical vocabulary: “Cowboy Bob” is a death-defying surf-rock monster-stomp, with off-beat saxophones and somebody screaming bloody murder throughout. “Wichita Cathedral” actually swings, at least relative to most punk, and “The Shah Sleeps in Lee Harvey’s Grave” tips all sorts of Baby Boomer sacred cows: Jimi Hendrix, Marilyn Monroe, even God Himself. “I smoke Elvis Presley’s toenails when I want to get high,” Haynes boasts, as the din descends into a call-and-response with the audience: “Shut the fuck up!” they scream back and forth.
Their 1986 follow-up, Rembrandt Pussyhorse, opens with the Surfers’ vilest, most hideous, most contentious piece of music: a solo piano theme that’s actually kinda pretty. “Creep in the Cellar” sounds like they’re rewriting Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold” (the horror!), complete with an actual vocal melody and a frenzied fiddle. The song is weird, hilarious, and maybe even poignant. Two tracks later, they really do cover the Guess Who’s “American Woman,” with a distorted, high-pitched vocal to genderfuck the original.
It’s a perfect—albeit possibly accidental—skewering of the sexism and machismo that motivated so much classic rock, which just shows how precise and thoughtful their subversion could be. If punk was rejecting the self-importance of previous generations, few punks were so jubilant and so careful in their attacks. And that’s what’s so surprising about these reissues: Because the albums are crammed to bursting with so many sounds, so many ideas, so many what-the-hell experiments, it’s clear that Butthole Surfers lampooned from a place of love.
GRADES: Psychic… Powerless… Another Man’s Sac (B+), Live PCPPEP (B), Rembrandt Pussyhorse (A-)
You can check out the reissues on Bandcamp and elsewhere.
