Butthole Surfers: The Weird History Of The Band Behind "Pepper" & "Who Was In My Room Last Night"

Sign up for our Rock Newsletter here: https://bit.ly/3fjldAi ⬇️ Rock merch I'm loving right now: Nirvana poster: https://amzn.to/3fmUMKc Van Halen mini collectable guitar: https://amzn.to/3ebm1WM Alice in Chains on MTV Unplugged: https://amzn.to/3ei0Hif I recieve a small commission from link purchases Today we take a look at the band Butthole Surfers. LOVE ROCK N’ ROLL TRUE STORIES? NEVER MISS A BEAT FACEBOOK: @RNRTrueStories TWITTER: @rocktruestories BLOG: www.rockandrolltruestories.com #gibbyhaynes #buttholesurfers Today we’re talking about one of the weirdest acts in Rock N’ Roll - the Butthole Surfers and I've had a few people ask me to do this topic and today we are finally going to tackle it. The Butthole Surfers started out as a drug-fueled post-punk band from Texas. After all they really had nothing to lose to lose. They were like the bradley cooper of rock n’ roll. What do I mean? Well they both found major success much later on in their career. Their live shows were an assault on the senses rumored on-stage sexual antics and disturbing images projecting above the stage were all standard. There was also an instance when full-frontal nudity happened at an all-ages show. Bassist Jeff Pinkus would tell Classic Rock Magazine “I think we inspired other people to be more debauched,” In an interview with Kerrang online, Guitarist Paul Leary talked about how frontman Gibby Haynes went on a bender onstage in Rotterdam in the Netherlands at a show where the Cult had just played - he ended up in a dress and threw chairs at the audience. Ironically though, this was when the band really started to take off in Europe! Leary couldn’t take all the sound equipment back himself so he hid it under the bushes overnight. At a February 1986 show in New York’s the band used “piss wands” which were - plastic baseball bats filled with, well you know, that were waved around the crowd. From the get go the band was single minded in their mission. They wanted to do something other bands hadn’t with guitarist Paul Leary explaining to Classic Rock “We’d asked ourselves what we wanted to see from a rock band, something that nobody else was doing,”. “We were influenced by psychedelic bands so we wanted strobes. Soon we had shotguns, walls of strobe lights and movies showing penis reconstruction. It just seemed like a kick in the ass to do. It helped that there was no message we were trying to convey. It was all kinda nihilistic.” Their onstage behavior soon crossed over to offstage antics. Leary would explain “It was just a party every night,” “Gibby was definitely our ringleader. We would go into a new town every day, raise as much hell as we wanted, get to drink beer for free, act like lunatics, make a big mess and then move on to the next town" he'd remember One of their most ridiculous offstage antics was touching their, uh hmmm, manhood to a briefcase used by President Jimmy Carter. And for a band that could be so visceral, they were actually inspired by some pretty intellectual philosophies. Dadism also known as the art of the absurd) and Fredrick Nietzche’s Nihilism both influenced the group. Frontman Gibby Haynes and Paul Leary formed The Butthole Surfers in 1981 in San Antonio, Texas. Ironically, the band members had pretty wholesome backgrounds. Hayne’s father hosted a children’s program in Dallas called Mr. Peppermint and Leary’s father was the business school Dean at Trinity College in Dallas. They were influenced by punk rock bands like Black Flag, and the Dead Kennedys, In what should have been a clue for what lay ahead the pair created a humorous magazine called Strange V.D., which looked at bizarre medical problems. Haynes was working at an accounting firm at the time when he was fired when his superiors after they found pages from the magazine in the company printer. And it didn’t really matter since the Butthole Surfers had already formed. Leary would paint a funny picture of what the band’s early rehearsals looked like saying “We’d go over to our drummer’s house in the evening and start rehearsing,. “Gibby would usually get off work late at the accountancy firm, stumble into practice in his suit and tie, and immediately start stripping down to his boxer shorts while we were playing. That’s how it got incorporated into our live show. We’d play until the police came and turned the power off." The early to mid eighties were formative years for the band. In San Francisco in 1981, the Surfers met the Dead Kennedys’ Jello Biafra , who signed them to his Alternative Tentacles label. King Coffey and Teresa Nervosa joined the band as percussionists in 1983. Jeff Pinkus joined in 1986 as bassist. There was no one label to fit the band’s music. The band blended elements of punk, metal, psychedelic rock and just strange noises.