Thirty miles south of Austin, in the midst of fields full of wildflowers and big sky so blue you could lose your mind looking at it, lies the town of Driftwood, Texas. Situated a ways off rural route 457 something or other, it sleeps year round under a greenish-brown blanket of rolling hills, a million miles from anything remotely urban, from parking spots and shipping malls and Burger Kings and crack houses. Driftwood is the spiritual opposite of Manhattan or Paris, yet there among the birch trees and hummingbirds and the awesomely large sky, operating with almost no urban or artistic input other than the occasional fuzzy episode of "Oprah," works one of America's most creative independent rock bands, the Butthole Surfers.
        The civic center of Driftwood consists of one weathered, wooden corner store with one old gas pump in front, and the volunteer fire department building across the way, an equally weathered structure set in a grove of trees. It sports a hand-lettered notice that tells of a town meeting that'll take place sometime in the far-distant future.
        For the moment, there is no future. There is only the dead calm of afternoon and a long wait in the shade. I buy myself a cold Pepsi Cola at the general store and sit myself down on the rickety porch. The air is so still I can hear the sound of mockingbirds pecking at the nearby birches. Nothing happens for a long time. And then, far off down the road, I see a guy on a bicycle coming toward me at a hot March afternoon pace. The road he's riding is giving up dust and as he draws closer I can see he's the same guy I last saw swathed in colored smoke, torturing an electric guitar in front of a screen displaying a gory film of a sex change operation, his lips drawn back in a terrorizing grimace, bathed in the noisy, sinister haze that all Butthole Surfers concerts engender. Presently, he gets off his bicycle and we stand face to face in the middle of the road, looking around at the fields and the sky. "God's country," says Paul Leary, finally, nodding approvingly at some horses cavorting in a nearby field, and I agree: it's as far from the world where Surfers vocalist Gibby Haynes shrieks "Satan! Satan! Satan!" as one could possible imagine.
        I say as much to Paul as we tool slowly over field and creek on our way to Butthole Ranch. He nods, "Yeah, but that's the whole point. It's really great out here; we just love it. Hays County is dry - got to drive 30 miles just to buy a six pack. See those horses?" he adds inconsequentially, nodding over at a yellow ridge. "I been watching then since they were foals, they used to never get a foot apart from each other, and now just look at 'em!"
        Soon we've turned up the road to the house. "All this land," says Paul, pointing out toward the brush-covered horizon, "we own it now. Gonna buy another ten acres soon, too. Oops! Watch that little bitty bridge - don't worry, if we can get over it in our van, you can do it in a Toyota...the Meat Puppets once wrecked that fence over there though, with their big ol' RV."
        Inside the house we're met by Gibby and Jeff, who are whiling away time watching an Oprah episode on "Men Who Love Fat Women" (and people dare think the Buttholes' album are tasteless!). The television is static-ridden and Gibby and Jeff aren't really paying much attention: "We don't get too good of reception out here," Gibby shrugs, unconcerned. Mark Farner, the Butthole Surfers' nice brown doggie, and Papillon, the cat, are curled up on the carpet in front of the set. "We have two blue jays and some hummingbirds and some mockingbirds that came 'round, too," Paul adds. "You should see the bluebirds; the female's really cool. And last week there were three days when there were about 100 robins on the lawn, there's doves too, and when they take off all at once, it sounds like Vietnam!"
        First stop on any tour of the Buttholes' house is the studio, one room crammed full of about $100,000 worth of equipment. There's a DAT machine, a 32-track mixing board, a Dolby II sound equalizer, all kinds of speakers and reel-to-reel tape axles, sound muffling foam on all the walls, the usual studio stuff. "We're always allowed to bring equipment home from the music stores," Gibby explains, "they just love us 'cause we spend TONS of money, and then if we like it and use it, we pay for it. Otherwise, we just bring it back."
        Gibby, at one time employed by a Texas accounting firm, obligingly winds up a reel-to-reel of the band's most recently recorded track, one which Paul just wrote, kind of on a sequencer. "I write the drum parts," he explains, "then added guitar over there" - he points through the double doors to his bedroom, where he plays, away from the studio equipment, under headphones, to eliminate distortion - "and Gibby added vocals."
        He switches on the tape, and the room fills with the relentless thud of sequenced drums. At this volume they sound like a giant hand is using the Empire State Building and the Island of Manhattan as mortar and pestle. Paul's vicious guitar comes in, then Gibby's insane chant. It sounds really good. Paul shrugs. "That's just some of the stuff we've been working on out here."
        When not on the road, this is where the Butthole Surfers now live and work. Or at least where some of them do sometimes. The band owns the land, the ramshackle, ranch-style wood house that was already on the land, and all this equipment, on which they can write music, experiment on tape, record demos and just plain have fun. "I'd much rather make money making records than putting myself through the touring meat grinder," Paul states flatly.
        Paul says the band prefers the things they're doing now at home to the performances on Hairway to Steven, which, he explains, "was one of the few records where we recorded all the tracks at one studio, at the same time. And we'd practiced those songs for about a year on the road.
        "Studios are expensive," Paul continues. "And we've recorded in a lot of them. But the best stuff always comes out of our own house." Despite his disclaimers, Hairway is a singular work of uncompromising strangeness. It's a rock'n'roll record front to back, with lots of aggressive guitar chops, over-amped chords and meandering, psychedelic leads. But the mix is tempered by an unsettlingly weird aesthetic: the opening cut plays at the "wrong" speed, layers of noise obliterate the most musical moments, the lyrics grapple with subjects from bodily functions to Julio Iglesias, singer Gibby rants like a manic preacher. While not quite as technically raw as some of their earlier releases, the recording isn't any safer or saner than past work. The entire Buttholes catalog is characterized by an arty abrasiveness, the sonic equivalent of a brain seizure. It's not for everyone, but as an antidote to jangly pop and phony MTV badness, it's positively brilliant.
        The Buttholes have been doing nothing but recording on their own out here for about six months, one of their more extended periods of time off the road in the last eight years. They have many, many songs on tape now, some of which are just fragments, some of which are in an almost finished state. In addition, in the next few months, they'll be releasing a limited edition double live set (as a bootleg) which they've been busy picking tracks for and equalizing; a new Butthole Surfers record and a record by their alter ego band, the Jack Officers, which is, Gibby says, "like synthesizer music, neat dance music, space music. It's just got a few singing parts...it's like acid house. No, it's Hick House!"
        "You have to admit," Paul says proudly, "it's pretty neat that Driftwood, Texas became hip to Easy E and NWA before New York! Forget all about punk rock music; rap music is what punk rock always wanted to be! It's accessible, but they want to piss people off, and they don't hold anything back. It's like the most glorious diarrhea and ridiculousness imaginable; it's too heavy!"
        Working on tracks for those three releases, the guys in the band have been busy enough, due perhaps in part ot the lack of good television and radio reception to distract them. But there's a little bit of tension in the Butthole camp at the moment: though the band claims to prefer recording at home to (what they call) the "stiffer" sound of the studio-recorded Hairway to Steven, there's random talk of flying to New York to record with Bill Laswell; additionally, their label situation is covertly up in the air. Although Gibby says they're happy with Touch & Go (the label which released most of their albums to date), he admits that the band is attracted to the idea of a major an is in fact talking to one in particular.
        "The big thing would just be distribution," he says, albeit noncommittally. "We went into a mall in Tulsa recently, and we saw these bootleg Butthole T-shirts for sale, but eh store didn't carry any of our records! That means that bootleg T-shirts get better distribution than our albums! With better distribution we'd sell more albums. But then again, to a major, maybe selling under a hundred thousand is a failure because of the way they do things..."
        The Buttholes are exceedingly cagey about any information regarding record sales: direct questions about financial figures tend to be met with gaping silences, although, when asked how many copies a Butthole record sells, Jeff does say, "More than the Fabulous Thunderbirds and less than Suicidal Tendencies." Gibby adds that they'll be pressing 20,00 copies of the live LP, all of which are already pre-sold, and adds, "we could easily do double that." On the other hand, as Paul says, "there's only a limited dollar for Butthole Surfers records. Basically, we'd want to get more records out than once a year, but that's all it'll ever be, given the limitations of touring and stuff." The "limited dollar" of devoted Buttholes fans is one reason the band is virulently opposed to all bootlegging activities - so opposed, Paul tells me, that whenever the band discovers another bootleg on the market, they immediately press a better recording of the same show, copy the cover art, and flood the market. This is also the impetus behind the upcoming live album.
        Still, there are bands in this world who probably wish they had such problems. Its' been a long strange road for the Buttholes to get to a point where the Springsteen-like dilemma in which how to counter bootlegging is a major concern. For years, all they were wondering about was where their next meal was coming from.
        The Butthole Surfers got together in the spring of 1981, when, Gibby says, he and longtime high school and college pal Paul got together in a San Antonio living room and began playing music together. Gibby had known Paul forever ("first his family thought I was a bad influence on him, then my family thought he was a bad influence on me, and then they just went and figured we were bad influences on each other"). Their affinity for calculated outrage obviously predates the formation of the band - prior to that event, the two of them - then graduate students in business at Trinity College in San Antonio - had a T-shirt selling company that sold silk-screened shirts of David Berkowitz (Son of Sam) on Venice Beach one summer.
        It was on Venice Beach that they met Bruce Licher, head of Independent Projects Records and member of Savage Republic, who, Gibby says, "taught us a bunch of stuff, about all the bands, and turned us on to a bunch of music - Black Flag, Fear, the Circle Jerks, X...hell, even Oingo Boingo seemed cool in those days."
        Subsequently, Gibby and Paul returned to Texas. "And one time that Big Boys were playing at the Lake (Travis), and they asked us to play a couple of songs right before they went on - that used to be the thing to do if you were a new band, remember?"
        "And then they offered us money to come back and play a gig and we thought we was going to get rich!" Paul interrupts, cracking up.
        Prior to this experience, Paul's last band had been when he was in the fifth grade, in a band called the Crowd Pleasers, which played covers of Monkee songs in front of his entire elementary school. (Paul still has the guitar his daddy bought him in 1964, probably to his father's constant regret.) But after playing Lake Travis, Paul and Gibby and the then-Butthole lineup decided to move back to L.A.
        "I remember trying to impress my mom," Paul says, "'cause she was real disgusted that I was gonna quit my job selling lumber at the hardwood lumber mill and go play in a punk rock band, and I go, 'But mom, there's these guys in California called the Minutemen, and D. Boon, he writes ten songs a day!' And my Mom goes, 'Yeah? That's because he can't stand any of 'em after he's written 'em!"
        True fact: to this day, Mrs. Leary has yet to pronounce the name of her son's band out loud.
        The Butthole Surfers played their first real gig as such at L.A.'s Whiskey on July 4, 1982, with the Dead Kennedys and TSOL. "It was fucking great," Paul recalls. "Most fun I ever had. We sounded like hell, and they loved it. In fact, to this day, the better we sound, the worse people like it." "And the worse you sound," Gibby adds, "the better it gets."
        After that, things went downhill for a while. At one point, the band broke up when their then-bass player (they had 14 prior to Jeff, who's lasted longer than all of them put together) forgot he owned an amp. Another one went into the desert and tried to light himself on fire; a third ditched the band to try and get on "Jeopardy" when he had a dream indicating that the first step on the road to becoming the Messiah was to win at Jeopardy five days in a row. ("We used to know the formula for how you could win like 5 million bucks on Jeopardy, if you got like a double jeopardy at the end of all the hardest categories," Jeff says)
        So the Buttholes ended up back in San Antonio, where Gibby went so far as to get a suit, cut his hair and try and get a job. "But at every job I'd get there'd be someone who I used to work with at the old firm...I was just notorious! Like one time there was this guy I was working with and he was going down the steps and this 80-year-old lady whom we were auditing, she was going up them, and I saw him coming down. So I stooped down under the steps and pretended to look up underneath her dress. And I did it, like, so he could see me but I pretended I couldn't see him seeing me? And he didn't get the joke at all, he just thought I was the most disgusting human being alive..."
        "And another time we put out this magazine called Strange V.D. Magazine that had these pictures of wicked venereal diseases with really humorous descriptions of what it actually was. And all that time Gibby was working at Pete, Morrow and Mitchell, which was then the largest accounting firm in the entire world. We made copies of Strange V.D. Magazine in the copier there and left one of the original pages in the machine by accident, and it got returned to him personally by one of the partners," adds Paul gleefully.
        Suffice to say, soon the only career option open to Mr. Haynes was to reform the Butthole Surfers. "Our careers were ruined, our family ties severed..."
        "...all because we'd set out to test the First Amendment!"
        Thus, the newly reformed band (this time including current members Jeff, King and Teresa) began recording records (Cream Corn and Rembrandt Pussyhorse) by breaking into a recording studio whose tool shed they were sleeping in at night. They began - slowly - to gain a certain amount of notoriety, especially via their live shows, which were - well, colorful. The band's name, originally intended as a little kid's joke, got them banned from the mainstream press, but in some ways that fact has ultimately worked in their favor: "Other famous bands would be interviewed, you know?" Paul notes, "and they'd make these real disturbing remarks about the Butthole Surfers."
        So, the legend grew. Giant Texans carrying flame throwers. Dueling drummers playing in stobe-lit unison - naked women, ugly movies, the last word in scary, mind bending, morally disturbing music. It was irresistible to the art-appeal in all of us. And what about Art? "Art," Gibby explains patiently, "Is just the last three letters of 'fart.'"
        Nonetheless, by 1985, the Butthole Surfers were entirely committed, heart and soul, to the art-bound, road-rock lifestyle. What followed was a three-year period of complete and utter homelessness.
        "Living on porches and floors," Gibby recalls.
        "Once or twice a week we'd all sneak into a motel room at a Motel Six and sleep for 24 hours," Paul reminisces.
        "It was this big breakthrough when we bought sleeping bags. It was like a revelation: 'Wow! Why didn't we have these the whole time?!?"
        "Yeah, we'd had flu for six months of the year without realizing if we'd just had a sleeping bag in winter we'd stay warm all night..."
        Grueling though it seems, Paul and Gibby enjoyed the experience. "Sure, it had its moments," Gibby says. "I don't regret it at all. We met a lot of wild-ass, cool-as-shit people doing it." Additionally, it was through touring that the band earned enough money to buy the equipment and living space they now occupy.
        "You know, all the people who've come after us, all the other bands have been ripped off by the exact same people as us, though," notes Gibby. "We all made the same mistakes. It's weird - a lot of people really freak out that we write our own songs, record our own music, do our own artwork, and just about distribute our own records, and are doing as well as we are. But that's just what you've got to do, it's not that it's any harder today that it was before..."
        But isn't it true that the Buttholes have done it better than anyone else?
        "No," Gibby says stubbornly. "I wouldn't say that. It's just that we've more or less invested what we made back into the band. We've done a bunch of records, and we haven't gone into outside studios and recorded a whole lot. I mean, a cheap ass fucking record costs $15,000 to do...and that a cheap ass one. $20,000 is the budget we've done the last few for, and $100,000 wouldn't even buy coke spoon for Guns N'Roses' recording project. And so it's been like five records for $20,000 each; $100,000. So we just bought it all, did it all ourselves. That what we spent our money on. Instead of spending our money on rent, we just bought equipment, just gritted our teeth and stayed out there on the road.
        "It's been a lot of work," Gibby continues, "and most bands don't have the stamina to last through the really tough years. Most bands break up after they're on the road 'cause they can't stand each other for extended periods of time. But we get along amazingly  well compared to most bands."
        "Or," Paul speculates, "maybe they just have other priorities. But when you do this for a living, these kinds of things naturally develop. You've got to sell records to go on the road, and you've got to go on the road to sell records. So that's what you do..."
        "First we got one projector," Gibby adds, "then we got two projectors. First we got one little light and one little smoke machine, and then this ex-con sold us these $1200 worth of strobe lights for like 50 cents..."
        All of which eventually developed into the full-blown Butthole Surfers shows of today. The ones with the smoke and the fire and the naked dancing girls ("we don't even hire 'em anymore, they just show up," grimaces Gibby). The ones with the gross-out films in the background ("we just check 'em out of the University Film Library here," paul tell me). The ones which KLM's in-flight magazine plugged in a recent issue with the following description: "Obscenities, perverse humor, chaos and bad taste are the ingredients for a live performance by this Texas band. Be sure to see them while in Amsterdam!"
        These shows are also equipped with audiences which have what Jeff politely call "such a heavy grunge factor in them...it's amazing, you light one guy on fire and he'll follow you around the country wearing his scorched jacket... try and get backstage and everything."
        "It's weird how for such normal people we sure know a lot of freaks," comments Paul, with no apparent irony.
        Currently, the Butthole Surfers command a reputed $15,000 a gig. Their shows are automatic sellouts, coast to coast, putting them in a position to book one-offs on either coast, without having to drive hellish distances between dates, without having to practically kill themselves every night. "We want to buy that other ten acres over there," Paul points out across the long grass. "So nobody can build on it and wreck our view. And we want to build more, so we can have a studio out there and then each have a nicer bedroom in here."
        "And we want a swimming pool that we can do laps in..."
        "A circular swimming pool, and ice skating rink and a basketball court," Gibby goes on.
        Mark Farner yawns, Papillon stretches. The mockingbirds make mocking noises and the sun sets on Driftwood. The band's just joking, of course, but they know as well as I do that none of those dreams are necessarily out of reach. No dream is. Punk rock originally dreamed of a world where the most outrageous acts could put on the status quo, a world where people who spat in the face of authority were king. Punk rock postulated that the only way one could ever live that dream was to never give in to the powers that be; to do it yourself and be damned - or rewarded - for it. The Butthole Surfers may well be the living embodiment of a dream that everyone else thought died, because somehow or other, against every premise, up against adversity, in the teeth of all odds, the Butthole Surfers have succeeded on almost everybody's terms.
        Everybody's, that is, except Paul's mother, who still threatens her grandchildren with certain death if they ever reveal to any of their teachers the name of their Uncle Paul's rock band.
        "Well, my mom admits we're doing well," Paul concedes. "But then she'll add in the same breath, 'yep; and so's crack!'"