Fables of the Reconstruction: Butthole Surfers

November 2, 1984

I was 16 the first time the Butthole Surfers played in Colorado. The show was at the old Packing House. The place wasn’t much bigger than a Tuff Shed, and you had to blindly wind your way through the deepest, darkest, post-apocalyptic wilds of Commerce City to get there. On the flyer for the show it said, “IF LOST, WAIT AT 7-11 & ASK A PUNK ROCKER TO GUIDE YOU!” I left before the Buttholes took the stage because my mom said I had to be home by midnight. This would come to be one of the biggest regrets of my life.

April 16, 1987

Two and a half years passed before the Butthole Surfers returned to Colorado to play at Norman’s teen nightclub in Aurora. In the interim, I discovered L.S.D.

The truth is, I wasn’t ready for them when they came through in 1984. I’d only heard their self-titled EP, and I only liked one song on it, “The Shaw Sleeps in Lee Harvey’s Grave,” because it was the closest to hardcore punk, which was all I thought I liked at the time. It goes, “There’s a time to shit and a time for God. The last shit I took was pretty fuckin’ odd.”

But then I got Rembrandt Pussyhorse and it spoke to my newly lysergified soul. The psychotic cover of “American Woman” on side one drew me in, with its amped up tribal drumbeat, distorted high-pitched vocals and an interlude where the lead singer shouts into a megaphone, “Come on out of there, you little creep, we know you’ve killed thousands and you’ll kill thousands more!” The rest of the album is filled with bent and tripped-out distortion, echoes and space sounds, punk rhythms and psychotic lyrics. The Butthole Surfers were just about the only psychedelic thing going in the late 80s. So when they returned in 1987, I was ready. Or at least I thought I was.

            To prepare for the show, some of my friends and I ate a bunch of mushrooms and arrived at Norman’s early enough to snag a spot up against the stage. Everything was Wonderland wonderful when the opening band, Happy World, took the stage and played a quick set, and I was peaking when the lights went down before the Buttholes came on. Then things went downhill real fast. Fake smoke billowed from a machine behind the dual drum kits and consumed the stage. A strobe light flashed and made the smoky air thicken and pulsate and the speakers filled with the most wretched feedback my ears had ever heard. The stage filled with psychotic people: a pair of drummers who stood as they hammered away, their long hair dangling in front of their faces; a lean and mean-looking guitarist with super short hair; a naked woman with a shaved head who writhed above the strobe light. The lead singer wore no shirt, had long hair and he kept pouring lighter fluid on his hand and setting it on fire. He raised a megaphone to his mouth, pointed it at a microphone, and screamed the kind of scream you might scream if you had a debilitating case of irritable bowels, and as he did the screen behind the band filled with a movie I had seen in drivers ed and had been sickened and horrified by: Mechanized Death.

            I stood against the stage, mouth wide open, unblinking, hypnotized, probably headed toward permanent brain damage. All at once, a big fat bouncer grabbed me, picked me up and set me aside so he could take my place against the stage. This jolted me out of my daze, and I suddenly comprehended the horror I was witnessing. I turned to my friend Dave, and his eyes were wide and full of fear.

            We raced out of the club and waited on the front steps for our non-tripping friends join us. When they finally did, they said the show was awesome.

Halloween, 1988

I quit drugs two weeks before the Butthole Surfers returned to Colorado a year and a half later, for a Halloween show at the Glenn Miller Ballroom in Boulder, and I was truly ready this time. I had all of their records by now, and I was listening to their newest release, Hairway to Steven, everyday – often all day long. It’s a quintessential document of weirdness from an era when weirdness was in short supply – a funny, transcendent, at times horrifying record that is, in the words of a friend of mine: “unimpeachable.”

And they were playing on Halloween! In Boulder! (And that was back when they still did Mall Crawl.)

            I was so excited that I decided to write a story about it.

I contacted the band’s label, Touch and Go, and got a phone number for the band and a time to call. Then I called the Colorado Daily, and they said they’d buy it for 50 bucks. I was 20 years old. I’d never written anything professionally. The only questions I remember asking were, “How would you describe your music?” and “What is your live show like?” To which lead singer Gibby Haynes replied, “It’s like getting shit stuck in your penis hole,” and “It’s like getting shit stuck in your pussy hole.”

I worked both those quotes into the lead of the story, and the editors cut them out. They never paid me.

I also made the coolest Halloween costume I ever made - two, in fact. I went to the hardware store and got a bunch of chicken wire and paper maché goo and I built a pair of giant Cyclops alien head masks for my buddy Dave and me.

When Halloween rolled around, we headed down to the CU campus early in the afternoon and sat by the front door of the Ballroom with our masks at our side. When the Butthole Surfers’ truck showed up, we jumped in and helped unload. Everyone figured we were just supposed to be there, so we got to see the sound check and wound up with de facto backstage passes.

We carried our masks into the green room, smiling goofily and wearing outrageously garish Hawaiian shirts. We presented our masks to Gibby and the others, and they passed them along to the bald woman who dances naked on stage under the strobe light. I asked her if she was really going to wear them, and she nodded and said, “In four-four time, I will.”

Then we sat down next to Gibby. We were both star struck. All I could think to say was, “You guys are so great,” which I said a lot, until finally Gibby turned to me and said, “Oh, shut up.”

We grabbed spots up against the stage. Minus the hallucinations, the concert was mind-blowing, but survivable. And the naked woman wore the mask!

Afterward, I tried to retrieve it from the green room. But the guy at the door had been told to not let us in under any circumstances. I thought about asking him to get the mask for me, but naively thought the band might want it as a keepsake.

And so I went home from another Butthole Surfers’ concert with yet another high-ranking, lifelong regret.

October 6, 1989, May, 1991 & August 25, 1991

After that, my Butthole Surfers concert experiences were somewhat anticlimactic. When they returned to the Mile High City in 1989 for a show at the old Mammoth Events Center, they played horribly because the sound was jacked up and they were too pissed to get into it. When they played the Gothic Theater in 1991, they brought with them a wall of super-bright strobe lights that made you feel like you were falling into a black hole (this was actually one of the most psychedelic experiences of my life, and I was as clean as Art Linkletter). And when they came through Fiddler’s Green Amphitheater as part of the first Lollapalooza tour, Gibby came out on stage shooting a shotgun.

They played Colorado again in 1993, 1996, 2001, 2009, but I didn’t go to any of those. I’d drifted away from them, started getting into jazz and more mellow tunes. But I recently picked up a few of their old albums on vinyl – Psychic… Powerless… Another Man’s Sac, Rembrandt Pussyhorse, and Cream Corn from the Socket of Davis – after getting back into the more raucous and insane side of the current independent music spectrum, and I’m stunned at how well they hold up. There were a lot of freaky and obnoxious bands before the Buttholes came along, and there’ve been a lot since, but none truly compare. Maybe it’s just me, the fact that I have so many memories of them that are important to my sense of who I am, but I like to think it’s more universal than that, that the Butthole Surfers are a shining example of how the most incredible art can come from the most repressed and repressive times, and the 80s certainly were that. Regardless, I think it’s safe to say that anyone who values weirdness has to have at least one of their early records in their collection.