You Say You Want A Revolution?

10/02/2001 5:00 PM, Yahoo! Music
Rob O'Connor

In Michael Azerrad's new book about the alternative-independent underground rock of the 1980s, Our Band Could Be Your Life, there are mostly stories about earnest young bands who wished to keep their music and the business around it very pure. Then there is the chapter on the Butthole Surfers--a band whose spiritual purity is that of a fanatic religious cult fueled by cheap psychedelics and limited exposure to the outside world. According to BS percussionist King Coffey, what Azerrad describes is only the tip of the sugarcube. "It's factual," says Coffey. "If anything, he's understating the terror that was involved."

Coffey has a casual, lazy way about him. He is unexpectedly friendly and lucid, the kind of guy it seems who watches the insanity around him with a casual shrug. Insanity, he seems to be saying without saying, is just one of the side effects that goes along with the trip of being in the Butthole Surfers.

"After a successful album, everybody started freaking out," says Coffey. "Our manager was freaking out, our label was freaking out, we began freaking out. To this day, I don't think I'll ever know what took so long for this album to come out. We handed it in in 1998 and it didn't come out until the year 2001. Had we known it would've taken so long, we would've founded great civilizations and done other things with our time than release another album."

The new album is called Weird Revolution, and it is mostly a return to the loosely paced sound collages that the band once made its signifying mark. In the old days--the old days being the mid-'80s--the band schlepped around an eight-track recorder, passing it from hand to hand to layer and re-layer its ominous, hypnotic sound. Those albums-- Rembrandt Pussyhorse (1986), Locust Abortion Technician (1987)--are still considered by most serious BS fans to be at the very center of the band's canon. Outsiders also relish the idea of this crazy band from Texas living communally, and--excuse the Eagles reference--taking it to the limit.

Coffey wasn't wearing rose-colored glasses, though: "We lived together because we didn't have a choice. We had one source of money, and [singer] Gibby [Haines] was holding on to it for records and live shows. We all hung tight to Gibby because he had the money. There wasn't money for us to maintain different houses. It was a cult mentality we had with our own band. Everything else was secondary. We were oblivious to anything else. It was all about just recording and doing anything that was just band-oriented. If we had been playing to smaller and smaller audiences, there would've been warning signs that it was time to move on with our lives. But the fact that the crowds got bigger and bigger gave us the idea we were doing something right."

The Surfers eventually wrote near-conventional songs, and the albums they released--Hairway To Steven (1988), Independent Worm Saloon (1994), Electriclarryland (1996)--showcased a band extremely capable of conquering the riff, but also of one that lost a little of the madness in its soul. They even reached near-mainstream acceptance, playing Lollapalooza and later scoring a "hit" with "Pepper."

"I guess doing the Lollapalooza tour seemed like the bonus round; after years of touring in a van to playing amphitheaters and corporate-sponsored events was pretty surreal," says Coffey. "We were just the band they had to wait through until Ice-T or Nine Inch Nails came on. It was like ourselves and Rollins Band drinking coffee on the side of the stage just to wake up so we could be shuffled onstage to do our little punk-rock vaudeville act."

But while some may get nervous--for when the weird turn pro the effect is usually that of perfunctory blandness--Coffey lays to rest any notion that his co-conspirators (vocalist Gibby Haines, guitarist Paul Leary, and new bassist Nathan Calhoun) have mastered what it means to be a Butthole Surfer. The new Pro Tools set-up is hardly a walk in the park. "This is a new way for us to work," explains Coffey. "We probably made more mistakes. We could get all the way through a song before we realized that it sucked."

And there it is, folks. The reason they are the Butthole Surfers. They not only dare to make mistakes, but they make them on a regular basis.

Some might regard the band's teaming with trailer-park icon Kid Rock on Weird Revolution's "Shame Of Life" to be a misaligned move. Coffey explains it this way: "[Kid Rock] had a day off in Austin and he came to Gibby's house, and Gibby had a real skeletal idea for a song with a drumbeat and a bassline and Kid Rock heard it and he put down a guitar line that made sense, and then he put down what would become the chorus: 'I love the money and the girls and the shame of life.' And at that point we were kinda horrified, because while it was sounding cool, just that vocal line is so very Kid Rock and so very un-Butthole Surfers that Gibby's challenge lyrically was to write around what Kid Rock was saying. In the song he's kinda playing the policeman, trying to talk down a completely delusional guy who's about to kill himself. Gibby's trying to provide a counter to what Kid's saying about the girls and money and provide a more realistic take on existence."

Repeat that to yourself for a minute: Gibby Haines is providing a more realistic take on existence.

The next tour promises to be vintage Butthole Surfers, with the band doing what it does best. "Sensory overload," says Coffey. "We're going to play a lot of older songs. Lots of images and sounds. We're going to have a second drummer. We're going to go with what we know."

Could we perhaps expect a live DVD at some point replicating the band's live impact?

"We're so lame. We're so humiliated that [the album] took five years to make. It would terrify us to do a DVD. It would take 20 years."