So, how'd you get the name?" "How'd you end up working with a lesbian former rock star?" "Look at the dick on that one!"

The Butthole Surfers are simultaneously conducting their own interview, attempting to joke about their famous producer and scrutinizing a pack of dogs. Dogs are a major Butthole Surfer passion. On a recent trip to London, guitarist Paul Leary and singer Gibby Haynes sponsored the Butthole Surfers' Cup at a Wembley Arena greyhound race. Leary's pit bull, Mark Farner of Grand Funk Railroad (yes, the full appellation), was even considered a member of the band until she retired to a life of backyard loafing and biscuit chomping.

Right now the four Surfers - or if you prefer, Buttholes - are hamming it up in an Austin, Texas, park, and the canine community is out in force. Haynes focuses on a trotting twosome, intently tracking it from the swimming pool to the basketball court, although it's possible he's actually ogling the blond woman at the other end of the leash. "Pools have bottoms but no tops," he declares, grooving on the echo in the waterless, debris filled pool. "Just like girls!"

No, the humor of the Buttholes Surfers is not exactly erudite or PC, even though with their new album, Independent Worm Saloon, they are now on a major label (Capitol), with production by Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones, (who, incidentally is not a lesbian). In the twelve years since a club mistakenly introduced the band by one of its song titles, the Butthole Surfers have reveled in derangement and disgust. You wouldn't know it from their daytime sets during the 1991 Lollapalooza tour, but their best-remembered live shows featured the gyrations of a paint-covered nude dancer, film footage of car accidents and penis-reconstruction operations and frequent episodes of Haynes' pyromania. This spring, audiences can look forward to his cockroach-torture video. "He dismembers it with wire cutters," Leary says. "You pull the body shell off, and there's this shiny sac that moves."

Perversity aside, the Butthole Surfers are a dedicated bunch. "We're in a band based on support through rumors, a gossip mill," bassist Jeff Pinkus claims, but in fact, incessant touring and half a dozen records for the indie labels Alternative Tentacles and Touch and Go have made the Butthole Surfers one of the most popular underground bands in America. Warped and mink warping, the group is an inspired junk heap of white noise and black magic, Gothic Texas horror and adventurous art rock seasoned with hardcore, psychedelia and heavy metal.

Independent Worm Saloon might be the heaviest display of the Surfers' mettle yet. The first single, "Who Was in My Room Last Night?," is an infectious hard-rock anthem, proving the band's love for Grand Funk, Sabbath and Zeppelin was never really a joke. Jarring noise is crammed alongside Leary's inspired catalog of power riffs and rollicking punch of King Coffey's drums, while Haynes's vocal rants cover topics like "Dog Inside Your Body" and "Alcohol." There's also a pair of endearing acoustic based songs: "The Wooden Song" and "The Ballad of a Naked Man."

It might be the least weird Butthole Surfers album ever, but that's still pretty weird: They manage to slip in the sound of urination, computer-meets-Chipmunk vocals on "The Annoying Song" and, on "Clean it Up," an unsettling loop of vomiting noises, which they wanted to draw out to forty minutes and submit to Capitol as the whole album. Leary, a notoriously self-deprecating perfectionist, says: "Our songwriting and the way we sound really sucks, but the production and everything is great. I think it sounds like the Butthole Surfers to me, more than any of our other records, probably, because we had more than one microphone at our disposal. That's how we recorded a lot of our stuff in the past, in our bathrooms and closets and whatnot. This is a bigger sound."

John Paul Jones was drawn to the band's more straightforward material because, Leary says, "he didn't like our swirly songs." "He's a man of rock," he adds. "Or maybe those songs just plain sucked. Sometimes it takes an outsider to realize that." Jones was initially taken by the band's 1988 album Hairway to Steven, but the Buttholes can't remember who actually hooked them up. "As soon as we see how the record does, we'll find out whose idea it was," Haynes says. "If it was a good idea, Capitol will take the credit," adds Leary. "If the record does bad," Haynes says, "we'll never know. We're just hoping for .05 percent of Led Zeppelin fans to buy it. Meaning, like, an extra 200,000 copies."

But is the world ready for the Butthole Surfers? Leary's mom has said their name out loud only twice in twelve years, and when the band met Shaquille O'Neal on the set of CB4 (both have cameos in the movie), the seven-foot-one-inch hoops sensation just stood there shaking his head, repeating, "The Butthole Surfers, the Butthole Surfers." Nevertheless, the band thinks it should fit right in. "They say penis at least two times a week on national television," Pinkus says. "And it's a lot less entertaining to hear about a yeast infection than the Butthole Surfers. Therefore, we have a chance."