In a bygone era, the Butthole Surfers were just another band with a  name newspapers wouldn't print who happened to make some of post punk America's most vital music. Somewhere along the way, alt-rock got big. The Buttholes signed to Capitol Records, played Lollapalooza, and, by 1996, the band responsible for tunes like "Chewin' George Lucas' Chocolate" and "I Saw and X-Ray of a Girl Passing Gas" even had a gold album (Electriclarryland) and a hit single ("Pepper"). "It was a dream just getting signed to Capitol," cracks guitarist Paul Leary, "because that's where Grand Funk Railroad was."

After their initial success, the Buttholes became a textbook example of the perils of surfing alt-rock's waxing and waning tides. After "Pepper" broke, they entered into a legal battle with Chicago's Touch and Go Records, the indie that released most of their early albums, over control of the Buttholes' back catalog. The band and Touch and Go's owner Corey Rusk, had always operated via a handshake agreement, 0 a common practice among indie labels. A judge ruled in favor of the Buttholes this past January, allowing them to re-release their old records on their own label, but the lawsuit took it tool on the band. "One of the most painful moment of my life was going to [my] deposition," drummer King Coffey told the Chicago Reader. "It tore me up to see my name attached to a lawsuit against a friend."

Meanwhile, their situation with Capitol was deteriorating. Many of the band's supporters had left the company, and by the spring of 1998, communications between the group and the label were so strained that Capitol sent out promotional copies of a new Buttholes album that the trio considered unfinished. "Things went wrong for the band," says former Capitol A&R rep Kim Buie. "They trusted their surroundings, and ultimately it hurt them."

But the Buttholes bounced back in September, the band left Capitol and signed with Hollywood Records. A new album in expected this spring. "It feels like bungee-jumping," says Leary of the band's litany of label jumps. "But instead of jumping down, you're shooting up. You feel like this massive rubber band is trying to pull you down. And all you want to do is sever yourself from the earth.