My love affair with the Butthole Surfers began in 1987, when I escorted a lovely young lady to the band's gig in Boston. Their album, Locust Abortion Technician, had just come out, and I was smitten with their manic subversion of Black Sabbath's "Sweet Leaf," which they rather cleverly renamed "Sweet Loaf." That night, the indie rock crowd was a throbbing mass of ready freaks, pushing ever closer to the stage, impatient to the point of riot. Once the band appeared, amid a corny cloud of dry ice, the crowd lurched to the front where there was already no room, stampeding over a 20-foot-long drink stand and creating a swirling sea of insane humanity. Gibby Haynes, the Texas bunch's chief instigator, pulled out his bullhorn and--imitating a child's voice--belched out the intro of "Sweat Loaf." Then a riff the size of New Jersey kicked in, and...bedlam.

A semi-nude dancer pranced around the stage like a drunken leprechaun, covered only by a hula skirt which she shimmied up her body and wore as a hat. Behind the band, a 16mm medical school film of a penis reconstruction flickered.

The vertiginous lights of classic psychedelia screwed with your eyes like a bad set of glasses. Scared to move, my date inched up under my arm as we watched the spectacle safely from the fringe. Haynes teased the crowd as it surged forward and ebbed back, widened up, tightened up. Lights swirled, blood oozed, the dancer jiggled; The Butthole Surfers had turned the place into a rock and roll theater of the absurd--entertaining, nauseating, insane, deafening, and very, very beautiful. Then my date fainted.

Few musical experiences in life leave you feeling as tainted and as exhilarated as listening to (or watching) that other little ole band from Texas, Butthole Surfers. Unlike so many other freaky faux filth purveyors, who enjoy descending into rock and roll squalor because it meets with some criteria of "cool," the Buttholes do it because that's where they live. That's what they do best. And they don't give a shit about what anybody else thinks. Why else would they name their band something that until recently radio and television couldn't even say?

"Yeah, if I had to do it over," Haynes said in an interview with Rolling Stone, "I'd name the something different like 'I'm Going To Shit In Your Mother's Vagina.'" Together since 1982, and also featuring guitarist Paul Leary and drummer King Coffey, the band has constantly challenged conventional rock behavior with a legendary history of mischief and debauchery.

But it wasn't always so. Leary and Haynes met in business school; Haynes was training to be an accountant , and Leary has aspirations of being a stockbroker. They brought out the subversive in each other. Their first creative manifestation was a magazine they published together called Strange V.D. that was totally devoted to fictitious diseases. Musically, they started as the Dick Clark Five, they changed to Dick Gas Five, then to Ashtray Babyheads, then Nine Foot Worm Makes Own Food, then Vodka Family Winstons, Abe Lincoln's Bush, then Ed Asner's Gay, then the Right to Eat Fred Astaire's Asshole. Butthole Surfers came, allegedly, from a mispronunciation that stuck. Clearly their imaginations were fertile; clearly they were not your average garage combo.

Above average musicians to start, they de-learned how to play. Gibby got randy, and started stripping onstage. For their first EP, guitarist Leary brought in a guitar with six E strings all tuned in unison. They manipulated tape way before today's electronica prodigies existed. They used 36 drum tracks on one song. They had two drummers to start, a brother/sister team, no less. (Only the brother, King Coffey, remains.) They made music they knew was bad, and they loved it. They belched out records on an unsuspecting public, like Cream Corn from the Socket of Davis and Psychic Powerless...Another Man's Sac. They discovered melody enough on the whacked-out Rembrandt Pussyhorse, its follow-up, the aforementioned Locust Abortion Technician, and their magnum opus, Hairway to Steven. They could write excoriating riffs, courtesy of Paul Leary's mesmerizing power, and devolve into drug-induced noise fests, sometimes in the span of a single song. Leary, by the way, also enjoys "the full vein effect"; that is, closing his eyes during his twisted guitar solos and watching the veins in his eyelids pulsate as the bank of strobe lights flash. With Butthole Surfers, surreal anarchy ruled the day.

The band had been independent, recording for the Alternative Tentacles and Touch & Go labels over 10 years of destructive deviance, before signing with a major label. They've since mercifully cleaned up their sound and developed a bit of business savvy, perhaps so as to allow them to ride this charade of a career until the horse collapses. "They've definitely got the Texas wildcatter mentality down." said Jello Biafra. Alternative Tentacles' label chief in a Spin interview. In reality, the Surfers always understood entertainment, always understood the inferior mentality of rock, and they played it to the hilt.

Everyone has his favorite Butthole Surfer story: Gibby F**ked the band's dancer onstage. Gibby shared a room with Kurt Cobain in rehab. Gibby rubbed his dick on Amy Carter's suitcase handle minutes before Amy's dad, former President Jimmy, hoisted the luggage himself. In Boston, Gibby once nearly destroyed himself, the band, and a popular club when he lost control of a self-contained fire. The fire department put an end to the show. At Lollapalooza in 1991, Gibby took a shotgun (presumably loaded with blanks, though you just never know) and began firing into the crowd.

Oddly enough, a hit came last year, off their Electriclarryland album, in the form of a song called "Pepper." The record went gold, the band's first ever: David Letterman wanted them, and they made their national television debut. Yup, the same Butthole Surfers, led by a guy with a crossed crack pip and syringe tattooed on his arm. Sure, their sound had evolved from their first noise romp, "The Shah sleeps In Lee Harvey's Grave," to become a more sophisticated and melodic brew, but the fact remained: Cruel had suddenly become cool, and nobody was crueler than the Butthole Surfers.

Today the trio, along with Kyle Ellison on rhythm guitar, has just finished an as-yet untitled sequel to Electriclarryland. It may not hold the same unorthodox surprises as some of its brilliantly skewed predecessors, but you can be sure that this is one old dog that has no trouble learning new tricks.

And by the way, that date who fainted in my arms at that first Buttholes show? I married her.