Revinylization

Music's lunatic fringe drifts further out every hour. As it should. In this century, with computers playing an ever-larger role, music continues to fragment and become infinitely more varied. This splintering is either the essence of what keeps it relevant as an art form or something profoundly disturbing, to be hated and feared.

In the mid-1980s, few bands were as loved, despised, and misunderstood as the Butthole Surfers. The impulse to tread in unexplored borderlands of noise, studio blathery, live excess, indulgent nonsensicalness, and the urge to reconnoiter unheard sonics were all taken to heart by a nutty duo of Texans whose dulcet appellation was originally one of their song titles. Paul Leary (guitar) had ambitions of getting an MBA at San Antonio's Trinity University, which is where he met accounting student Gibson "Gibby" Haynes (singer/guitar). They jointly published a 'zine, Strange VD, that combined humor with explicit photos showing the effects of strange diseases. Naturally, they decided to form a band. From there, the Surfers' history is convoluted, colorful, and way too long to tell outside an encyclopedia of the morbidly bizarre or a psychedelic docudrama on alien sexuality.

After a short apprenticeship in outlandishness, they were plucked from obscurity by Jello Biafra (Eric Reed Boucher), leader of punk band the Dead Kennedys and owner of Alternative Tentacles, the record label that in 1983 released the live EP Butthole Surfers, also known as Pee Pee the Sailor. The EP was later name-checked by Kurt Cobain, who supposedly met Courtney Love at a Surfers gig in early 1990. Throughout the Surfers' history, rhythms were usually kept by two standup drummers (King Coffey and Teresa Taylor, aka Teresa Nervosa, replaced for a time by Kytha Gernatt, who went by Cabbage Gomez Jr.) and a revolving door of bassists, most notably JD Pinkus and former solo artist Kramer. The topper was the live shows, which in the beginning were epic and utterly mad. I remember being distracted during a Surfers show in the 1980s by Highways of Agony and Wheels of Tragedy—bloody 1960s driver's ed films meant to frighten teenagers—projected behind the stage. A chaotic circus never to be forgotten, those shows were a gyrating swirl of lights and sound complete with fires, smoke machines, strobe lights, and a bald, nude dancer called Ta-Da the Shit Lady (Kathleen Lynch).

Surfers music from their "Psychedelic Imperial period," as a press release put it, is the subject of a long-overdue, hot-selling vinyl-reissue program on Matador Records. These fresh vinyl remasters, pressed at GZ, were carried out by audio engineer JJ Golden, who has worked on recording projects by the Black Pumas, Sharon Jones, Calexico, and Dawes, among others. The hype-stickers on the outside shrink mention that the remastering was accomplished "with guidance from Paul Leary."

The Surfers' sound was never overtly lo-fi, which may seem out of character. But to their credit, they valued ensuring that listeners could hear what was going on in their music more than they did being cool and punk-rockesque with deliberately compromised sound. These new remasters of Rembrandt Pussyhorse (1986) and Locust Abortion Technician (1987)—the definitive albums in their catalog—have more bottom end than the originals, which were released on Touch and Go Records, and many elements in their kitchen-sink sound are better defined and separated. (Earlier this year, Matador also reissued the debut EP and Psychic... Powerless... Another Man's Sac, from 1984.)

Despite the increasing outrageousness in their live shows, touches like the crazed violin line in "Creep in the Cellar" or the droning echo chamber and horn parts of "Whirling Hall of Knives," both from Rembrandt Pussyhorse, showed that the band had musical ambition. With its horror-film organ, bubbling cauldron, and twisted vocal samples, "Strangers Die Everyday" is persuasive. And their cover of The Guess Who's "American Woman" still blows Lenny Kravitz's away.

Egged on by their infamy, the band's next album, Locust Abortion Technician, was heavier and even more unhinged, eschewing song structures in favor of sonic and artistic abandon. Yet a composition like "Hay"—where the band endlessly shouts the title in the background as menacing low strings and a gaggle of samples cloud the foreground—is still charged and fun. "Human Cannonball" shows they could be a mean, straight-ahead punk-rock act when they chose to be. For a more complete description of that album, I bow to the eloquence of the inestimable Ira Robbins, whose description in his Trouser Press Record Guide says the album "ebbs and flows like organic waste, an unpredictable flux of noise, movie score politeness, grating grunge-rock, fake folk, chirping birds, voices, tape manipulations and words done at various recording speeds." Exactly.

Given the unsettling nature of the music, it's no surprise that neither album has had an extensive reissue history. After its original 1986 release, Rembrandt Pussyhorse was remastered and reissued in 2013. Locust Abortion Technician followed the same path, though it later received a repress on colored vinyl by Newbury Comics in 2019, using the 2013 remasters.

Listening again to their second and third full-length albums, still their most fully realized communiqués, it's amazing how far experimental music has come in 40 years. These onetime exemplars of indie-rock experimentalism sound positively tame today. Alas, yesterday's freaky outer limits are tomorrow's boring stasis. Yet, as Robbins put it, the band's admirable madness was genuine. "Unlike so many nouveau scuzzbos, Austin's Buttholes don't descend into the depths of squalor to make a point about the human condition—they just like it down there."