9:00 AM, March 19, 1990. I woke up with my boots on, lying in a shaft of central Texas sun that came through the ranch house door. I pried one eye open and groaned, letting Mr. Cigar, Gibby Haynes's Jack Russell terrier, lick the other one 'til it came open. My feet were hot and the room was mauve. I experienced a moment of utter regret. The TV hissed and the crusty odor of stale cigarettes and pot and half-empty cans of Coors rankled on the table next to my swollen head.

Waking up fully clothed has meant one of three things in my life: camping out, having an accident or owing someone an apology. I dug out my wallet and winced: it was empty except for my doctor's card, my lawyer's card and a cash receipt for $150 from an Austin, Texas topless bar called sugar's: A Cabaret. When Butthole Surfer vocalist Gibby Haynes and I had roared away from the Butthole ranch in Driftwood, Texas, hours earlier, $250 had been in there.

I pulled bassist Jeff Pinkus's dog, Lincoln, off my ear and bolted for the bathroom. Nitrous oxide, those silver demon eggs that whipped-cream connoisseurs know as Whip-Its ... the KISS masks . . . Bunny, the amateur stripper ... the first bout of dry heaves brought the whole evening back.

The night before, Gibby, Jeff Pinkus, their pal G and I had tumbled out of an Austin bar and pool hall around 11:00 PM, then made a side trip out to a convenience store aptly named the "Whip Inn" to pick up 12-packs of beer and Whip-Its. The next thing I knew, I was toddling about G's couch with an inhaling canister in my hand. Gibby's grinning mug was melting, the walls pulsed and everyone bobbed violently to the deafening throb of a house music tape made by the Butthole Surfers' alter-ego band, the Jack Officers. Greg whipped out some KISS makeup masks. Funny how KISS can still make you laugh so hard you piss yourself.

Then the very fabric of the time-space continuum sort of folded, and we were sitting down at a bar table with naked women. The amateur-night girls in this titty bar called Sugars: A Cabaret had laughing eyes and soft breasts like air. Buttholes & Co. settled in, surrounded themselves with naked flesh and spent the next few hours maligning the lyrics to the girls' rock 'n' roll soundtrack. A topless marvel named Cat talked with G and kept slapping me. Our waitress brought more and more of these wretched $10 Cocaine Cocktails or -- even worse -- Russian Quaaludes.

"These drinks taste like Robitussin," Jeff shouted.

Don King, the night manager at Sugar's: A Cabaret appeared at our table and threw down a round of free drink business cards. Suddenly there was God's voice, booming.

"Sugar's would like to extend a big, wet, sloppy kiss to the Butthole Surfers and our friend from SPIN magazine!!!"

Fingered! And a huge voice was telling us we had carte blanche here! While the girls drank up our second round of Don King's free drink cards, I got up and lurched into the dancers' dressing room with two fingers hooked into the G-string of a girl named Bunny....

And woke up clutching my wallet to the sound of a water bong bubbling far off over the breezy, green Texas hill country. Genius Butthole guitarist Paul Leary showed up at the ranch around 9:00 AM to work in their private studio.

"I know absolutely nothing about what I'm doing" smirks Paul, knee-deep in dumped 1/4-inch mastering tape cut from the new album. In an adjacent room are amps, including an original 1964 Marshall head. Guitars are strewn about -- a Firebird, a Jackson, a sweet custom Les Paul. A closet holds about a dozen more. "I've been a guy who's had money and loves sound equipment and guys sold me all kinds of shit, so we've got to make the stuff pay for itself. And we have."

The Butthole Surfers are Texas hardcore's most relentless anomaly, a gypsy commune of killer clowns revelling in their own morbid fascinations. Few people, it seems, can tear themselves away from the Buttholes' lij spectacle, or the real threat of random mindfuck captured on their recordings. Birthed in a San Antonio living room in 1981, the Buttholes have honed an instinct for art that reveals the grotesque, the horror and the humor in free association without boundaries like Gibby's drawing of a trussed-up Chinese man projecting worm movies from his penis. Or the backwards, mid-Eastern folk melody from "Kuntz," on 1987's Locust Abortion Technician, where the refrain is a fractured chorus chanting "cunt," the lowest of them sounding like a flabby fart.

They disgust nearly everyone, yet no one finds them patently offensive. They've become notorious at no one's expense. Rather, their art is an indictment -- one that says to me: "We are the hunters and gatherers of dream logic, and we are splashing around in the raw info-tainment of violence and psychosis. On the way to some freedom we will pass through our own orifices and stinks, because everyone has them. We might find either a fistfight or an orgasm or the best fuckin' joke you ever heard."

And their cult continues to spread. There are few Butthole Surfer virgins anymore. When they come to town for one of their periodic psychoevents, the masses gather. The Buttholes have loomed large in the indie underground over the last nine years, spewing seven LPs, three EPs, countless bootlegs and one unreleased house project. Fans still instinctively come to suck at the band's onstage mythos: the most brutal, dangerous and hilarious band this country's ever known.

Later that evening, on the lanes at the Wimberly Astro Bowl, we worked our way down from Coors to Busch, scratching for a title to the new Butthole Surters studio album.

"Jane Nixon's Red Hot Mojo Chill Garden of Sonic Nigger Addiction," chuckled Gibby between frames. "No, wait: jane's Red Hot Nixon Nigger Chain With Sonic Mojo Attitude... No…."

Time and inertia have stripped the Butthole Surfers down from a crew of six to four: Gibby, Paul, Jeff and drummer King Coffey. They remain as aloof and obtuse as they've ever been. Their notoriety has taken its toll. After a decade of work, they'd like some major-label recognition, but the Surfers' history of taking axes to record industry offices has made them anathema. Today the band is feared by the industry that could turn their outlaw status into money the money they need for bigger, louder multimedia shows.

Gibby: We probably suck. Who knows? They might be ashamed to tell somebody they're pushing the Butthole Surfers; Guns N' Roses is bad enough. At least they get a huge amount of money from Guns N' Roses insulting what was it? blacks, homosexuals and immigrants inside of ten lines, [phone rings]

Nigger! Farm worker! Queer! [into phone] Hello? Yeah, man, what's goin'on?

[hangs up] Maybe some of those people are just embarrassed. Maybe after they shit, they think they're wiping a lily or something down there.

Paul: They're probably embarrassed for us. 'Cause we'd certainly never admit embarrassment ourselves.

Gibby: No way. That's all part of our embarrassment.

Few people know that the 15-second jingles you've heard between videos on MTV for the last year were done by the Buttholes. "It's pretty fun to turn on MTV every hour on the hour and know that they can't say our name on MTV but they play us more than any other band," says Jeff.

The reason for their exile status is plain. This band has never compromised. Not once. On anything. What you get on Butthole Surfer discs and in their anally expressive stage show is the unretarded fire and phlegm of off-hand social critics. Orneriness now has the Buttholes taking potshots at the acts that Gibby calls "press machine bands," many of whom, like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, used to open shows for the Sorters.

The Butthole Surfers are arguably the most successful self-produced, self-promoted band to survive the heyday of hardcore without a major deal. At the dawn of the 90s, they've struck something of a balance between piss-wallowing insanity and recognizable totems of success. Their Driftwood ranch commune is a thriving, ever-growing glom of guitars, master tape, MIDI equipment, computers, Whip-Its, hot rods and dogs.

King and Teresa the mute rhythm twins of some methadrine tribe with electric hair are reduced to flailing arms by the pulse of the strobe. Smoke curls over the monitors. Cabbage slides over and begins to pull Gibby out of his clothes, pulling him down to the stage on top of her. In a few minutes the band is naked and there are only sporadic noises. Gibby claims "penetration." Kathleen says it never happened.

"The video was just flashing lights and butts and legs," says Paul.

The crowd, many of whom are also massively fucked up or screwing each other in the bathroom, are starting to get agitated and pushy. A "goon squad" as one fan put it moves in and starts tossing fans out. But the management makes no move to stop the live sex show on stage.

Gibby: Kathleen and Cabbage peed in these plastic Fred Flintstone whiffle-ball bats there's a hole in the end, you know, and they peed in there and they were dousing the crowd with them.

Paul: They were pisswands.

Jeff: That's when the Danceteria dude told us we would never be able to play New York again. I understood, too.

Both Jeff and Gibby talk incessantly of hot rods. Jeff's checking out a 69 Charger. Gibby has a 49 "Shoebox Chevy" Coupe that is in the process of being refitted with a front end, a shortblock 400 and a new paint job. He also has a true prize -- a 37 Lincoln Coupe which is completely stripped down to a frame and a solid body. Those two cars are going to be strictly hot rod, fuel-injected competition vehicles in the true Texas tradition.

Jeff pulls out a cassette of Helios Creed's latest album The Last Laugh and jacks it in at about 80 decibels. We careen out to Route 150.

Paul and King live in Austin now, while Teresa and Kathleen have left the band altogether. Teresa is in Austin starting an all-female band called The Deadbeat Girlfriends. Kathleen's new band Beme Seed are in New York recording their second album.

Jeff and Gibby still live in the three-bedroom, two-bath ranch house, but the place feels like a camp. There's no food. Nobody seems to want coffee in the morning. The refrigerator doesn't have shelves in it, just a bunch of beer and styrofoam fast-food containers piled up in the bottom. Maybe that's because their visitors bring them gifts of booze. I did but it's more likely that they're caught up in a cult of those fast foods they worship, having memorized dozens of commercial jingles, like the one for Taco Bell, off the TV.

Most of the Surfers' neighbors are cattle ranchers with big spreads. We rumble by herds of Brahmans and hybrid Brangus heifers.

"We love breakfast tacos," says Jeff at the Taco Farm Cafe. "But it always brings back bad memories of Tijuana."

A double bill in Tijuana with the Red Hot Chill Peppers on September 23,1989, has become the latest example of the Butthole's weird confluence of popularity and notoriety.

Jeff explains, "Paul threw a beer bottle toward their chicken screen that they had covering the monitor setup, 'cause the monitors weren't working at all. And Gibby accidentally got someone in the head with his guitar.

"So they threw us outside, and the federales took over. They had us up against the car and said, 'You're in Mexico now, son.' And the guy gave me probably around six to eight kidney punches with like three of 'em holdin' me down. I was pissin' blood for two days. They had hauled Gibby to a downtown alley, where like four guys punched him out and broke a couple of his ribs -- luckily, our sound man, when they had Gibby, went up to him and took as much monev as he could find out of Gibby's pocket -- so we'd have some left. They'd gone through my wallet, but I didn't have no cash on me, except for maybe 20 bucks. That's the money we were gonna use for the rest of the tour."

By 1983, Paul had finally quit his job at the lumber mill. Gibby was thrown out by the accounting world. He'd failed to capitalize on a free ride to a Florida clown school which had been set up by his father, Jerry Haynes, who has his own children's TV show, "Mr. Peppermint," on the ABC affiliate in Dallas. Nothing left to do but... surf.

"Brown Reason to Live" ("Pee Pee the Sailor") deranged the rock music mind forever. This 1983 Butthole EP featured the most morbid jokes ever to hit hardcore except the jokes and puns didn't hit like they were disposable. They were meat. The Buttholes' bizarre take on industrial punk was intelligent and addictive. The voices were layered with an anal attention to detail peculiar to the kind of men who smoke a lot of weed and then fixate on a task day after day.

The Buttholes bailed out of their rented digs and took the show on the road with newfound drummers King and Theresa. For three years.

The madness of that highway marathon has become legend. They drank anything they could get their hands on. They smoked pounds of weed and gobbled acid. They confronted most audiences completely fucked up. It took them a year to hit on the idea of buying sleeping bags. They'd take a room at the Motel 6 once a week, pile in the bed and sleep for 24 hours straight. They seem to remember that 1983-86 period as 10 or 20 distinct tours, distinguished mostly by changes in vehicle.

"It's really funny when I think of all the different moments when Kathleen has been yanked off the stage," chortles Gibby. "One time in Minneapolis there was a guy who got up on stage and had his dick out and was jacking off this limp dick. Kathleen was up there dancin' with her tits way out and this guy was just up there for a long time. Then, after the show, they arrested Kathleen."

During a six-month stop in Athens, Georgia, Paul began to assemble their first 8-track studio, and Jeff joined the band. They recorded the material for an album called Psychic Powerless:

Another Man's Sac and their 1985 "Touch & Go" EP, "Cream Corn." In many people's minds, the surreal lyrics to "Moving to Florida" broke the band into heavyweight status on the underground.

By 1986, they ended up back in Austin, where they recorded Rembrandt Pussyhorse. Then Paul and Gibby bought their own version of Spahn Ranch in Driftwood, about 25 miles southwest of Austin, along with 10 acres of the scrubby hill country.

"The more money I make, the further away from civilization I want to get," says Paul, musing under an oak with a Coors. "I like waking up in the morning and just hearing nothing."

Last summer, the Buttholes had the studio cranked into overtime, wringing out two releases -- an "authorized bootleg" twin-LP called Double Live, which came out on their own label. Latino Bugger Veil, and a new studio EP, "Widowermaker." They also labored over a yet-unreleased project by their alter-ego house band, the Jack Officers. The project is exactly what you think of when you think "house" -- thumping, relentless disco mixes full of samples and twisted rhythmic breaks.

"It would be great to put our house music to a film of two dogs screwing in slow motion," drops Gibby during a steak dinner in Austin. "I still want to do a song where we pan the sound of semen hitting the carpet."

Most visitors are amazed at the Surfers' techno-wizardry. But anyone who can record songs like "I Saw An X-Ray Of A Girl Passing Gas" and make it pay nine years running must be pretty damn smart.

The two 1989 releases also showcased Gibby's latest medium of choice the graphics computer. The ranch is now outfitted with a Hewlett-Packard 386 with an optical drive, a "paint" program and an animation package. It fits right in next to the dog bowls and the retired 8-track recorder. Gibby designed both of the album jackets and, yes, the naked alien with the bizarre spinal projections on the Double Live jacket is Kathleen.

"You've never seen Kathleen from the back?" deadpans Jeff.

The new disk is bound to join the first Pee Pee experiment as a staple in the record collections of punk rock kids all over America. Its frightening to imagine all those disaffected brats soaking up the text to "The Revenge of Anus Presley"-- "your pain makes me hungry / I'm hungry for pain ... I'm gonna peel off your toenails like they were cupcakes like they were Twinkies," etc. until you step back and listen to the song steeped in its own title. If you're like me, you weep tears of joy.