Cast of characters:
Jim Berry - Road sound engineer for the Butthole Surfers, 1985-92.
Jello Biafra - Lead singer of the Dead Kennedys and self-described "absentee thoughtlord" of Alternative Tentacles, which issued the first two Butthole Surfers records.
King Coffey - Drummer for the Butthole Surfers, 1983-present; head of Trance Syndicate, which has
released albums by Bedhead, Crust, and his own Drain, among others.
Phil Costello - Senior vice president of promotions, Capitol, which released the Electriclarryland and P albums.
Tim Devine - Former vice president, Capitol.
Brent Grulke - Austin, Texas, scenemaker.
Gibby Haynes - Butthole Surfers lead singer.
Jerry Haynes - "Mr. Peppermint," the dean of Texas kiddie-television hosts; father of Gibby Haynes.
Robbie Jacks - Austin actor, musician, artist, and bon vivant.
Jerry LaTouf - General manager, Texas Sky Festival park, Corpus Christi, Texas.
Paul Leary - Butthole Surfers guitarist. Quinn Mathews[sic] - Butthole Surfers bassist, 1981.
Flynn Mauthe - Opened for Butthole Surfers in early '80s as a member of the San Antonio Marching Plague.
Hale Milgrim - Former president and CEO of Capitol.
Margaret Moser - Austin Chronicle writer.
Jeff Pinkus - Butthole Surfers bassist, 1985-95, now of Daddy Longhead.
Joe Pugliese - San Antonio music promoter.
Scott Stevens - Butthole Surfers bassist, 1981.
Stuart Sullivan - Recording engineer at Arlyn Studios in Austin.
Roland Swenson - Director of the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference.
Mike Taylor - Studio engineer at Bob O'Neil Sound Studios in San Antonio.
Teresa Taylor - Drummer for the Butthole Surfers, 1983-89.
Don Walser - 61-year-old yodeler and country-music singer.

Jerry Haynes - Jamie Tobias of Channel 8 [in Dallas] interviewed us this year for Father's Day. Gibby was asked the similarities between us. He said, "We both do kids' shows." Then he said something like, "I steal souls and he restores them."

Gibby Haynes - What was it like having a dad who was a local television children's show host? It was badass. At the drag races I actually got to go in the pits. We'd get free tickets to Six Flags. In fourth grade I actually got in a fistfight because someone called my dad a clown. That Spanish song "One Ton Tomato" ["Guantanamera"], we went on vacation in Acapulco and my dad sang that song with Trini Lopez in a bar. He's a player.

Jerry Haynes - In the mid-60's, Gibby would come down and help a little bit on the show. Once, his chair fell over backwards. He fell over five or six feet, and he came up laughing. He could do anything. He learned how to blow five bubbles within bubbles, then moved on from that. He did a lot of weird things at Trinity [the San Antonio college the younger Haynes attended from 1978 to 1981]. He played nude tennis and got arrested by the campus police.
    He entered an art contest. The name of the piece was "Hold the Pickles at Auschwitz." He was brought before the student government. They said it was anti-Semitic. He was never subtle, I guess. But he's pretty smart. He got the Accountant of the Year award down at Trinity.

Scott Stevens - Gibby was in my class at Trinity, and Paul was a couple years ahead of me. Paul's dad was the dean of the business school, and Gibby was the star accounting student, the accountant in the black leather
jacket who was also a frat president, president of the Thetas.

Paul Leary - Gibby and I met in college. He was going to be an accountant and I was going to be a stockbroker. Gibby worked at Peat, Marwick & Mitchell for a short period of time--it was the biggest accounting firm in the world. We put out this magazine called Strange V.D. magazine, and Gibby left this picture of wildly mutated genitalia in the office copy machine and got reprimanded by one of the partners and it was downhill from there.
    I came about a semester away from a master's degree in finance. We'd start practicing and Gibby would come in wearing a suit and tie and strip down to his underwear as he was walking through the door and start practicing. It was a cool little routine.

Jello Biafra - They really ought to resurrect Strange V.D. It's the only fanzine I've ever seen devoted totally to fictitious diseases. Case number 36, tacoleg. Or blackbag or pinecone butt or several others. And there'd be
pictures of people with distended intestines or huge gashes in their leg or whatever, with, of course, their own descriptions. Still one of the weirdest homemade zines I've ever seen in my life.

Paul Leary - The first gig, in 1981, was at an art gallery in San Antonio. It was more of a performance piece than a musical piece. It involved lots of stuffed dummies and toasters and Big Mac hamburgers and things. We played music while Gibby ran around with a piece of meat hanging out of his mouth. We started out as the Dick Clark Five, then we were the Dick Gas Five, then it was the Ashtray Babyheads, then Nine Foot Worm Makes Own Food, Vodka Family Winstons, Abe Lincoln's Bush, Ed Asner's Gay, the Right To Eat Fred Astaire's Asshole, which was shortened from the Inalienable Right To Eat Fred Astaire's Asshole. Music was an excuse. We had to de-learn how to play.

Quinn Matthews - They were doing a lot of TV songs back then. They were doing "Theme to Mannix," the Perry Mason theme. We did the Brady Bunch theme in 30 seconds flat. The band was much more punk, a hardcore thrash-type band. Gibby took his clothes off a lot onstage, and he was famous for singing through a toilet-paper roll.

King Coffey - I had a fanzine back in Fort Worth and a band called the Hugh Beaumont Experience, 15-year-old kids wishing we were the Sex Pistols, later wishing we were the Germs. We went down to Austin and saw this band with the lead singer in underwear and clothespins in his hair. We tried to recognize the song they were playing and finally my friend punched me when we realized they were playing Bloodrock, "D.O.A..," the most uncool song in the world for a hardcore punk-rock band to be playing.

Jello Biafra - They opened for us and TSOL in L.A. at the Whiskey a Go Go. They brought out this cockroach confetti, Gibby had clothespins attached to his hair, he still had his spray-painted red saxophone at the time. Most of the harder-core-than-thou kids who'd come up form the beach to see TSOL were so dumbfounded they didn't even bother to boo.

Paul Leary - Jello Biafra liked us. He said if we got somebody to pay for the recording, he would reimburse them. That's when Bob O'Neil from the BOSS Studios in San Antonio loaned us some time.

Joe Pugliese - Gibby lived like a street urchin for a long time. He'd just crash at Bobby O'Neil's studio on Broadway downtown for days on end. Mike Taylor, the engineer, would spend hours and hours laying down all that crazy shit. He's responsible for their sound. Gibby and Paul just took the tapes to Jello Biafra, and Mike never heard from them again.

Mike Taylor - We spent a lot of hours doing the first EP. We did a lot of tape-manipulation tricks I wanted to try out, like double tracking in unison. No one had done that in hardcore. We were sneaking reverb in when you couldn't tell anyone it was reverb because it was a slick studio trick. Paul brought in a guitar with six E-strings all tuned in unison. But I never got paid a penny. [According to King Coffey, the band paid the studio.] I did the second album, Live PCPPEP, recorded it and put it all together. Then it came out on Biafra's label and that's the last I heard from them. I was one of the buttholes getting surfed.

Jello Biafra - As far as business goes, "sharp" is one way of putting it. I've heard the term "cutthroat" bandied about quite a bit. Let's put it this way: They've definitely got the Texas wildcatter mentality down.

Brent Grulke - Around 1984, they were playing as the Jack Officers. They were on stage and between songs, David Yow came up and yelled at Gibby, "You motherfucker, you owe me two bucks. Where's my money?" And Gibby flipped him off. David came back a few minutes later, and got into it again. "You owe me $2, motherfucker!" Then David spit at him. Gibby wiped it off and kept going. A few minutes later, David comes up a third time. "Where's my $2?" spits at him, then knocks Gibby over the head with a beer bottle. Gibby collapses on the floor, and just as he does, the band launches into a tune, and David takes over the microphone and starts singing the song. Blood's spewing everywhere and people started fighting with each other. The aggression level in that place was phenomenal. Nobody knew it was staged. It was brilliant.

Teresa Taylor - I was 22 years old when I joined the band [in 1983]. We traveled three years straight. We never came back to Austin. We literally did the whole country that way for three years. Gibby in those days would take condoms filled with colored dye and put those in his pants so that at some point they would burst and it would look very bloody. He would change clothes onstage during the set a lot.  Then he went and bought the first vocal effect and that was a big deal. We had strobe lights, $10 strobe lights, and then we bought a 16-millimeter projector, because we started to make more money. Everything was invested back into the band, so we could have a better show, better sound. Later we got another projector and showed two 16-millimeter films overlapping. The full-on shows would make people puke and scream and run out, that kind of thing. It was what we'd always wanted.

Roland Swenson - They had two drummers and kept this beat for what seemed like hours. There was a light show. It was like tripping without taking drugs. Yeah, he sang through the bullhorn. But the main thing was the drums and the paint. He was really scary. I was scared.

Jim Berry - They were into multimedia a long, long time ago, when they were just doing it on a total shoestring with the films. Teresa was an RTF [radio, television, and film] major and she'd get all these old 16-millimeter shorts. The most bizarre film was a medical-education film that involved this poor farmer guy who'd been in an accident and his
genitalia was being reconstructed. My sister saw it and said, "It hurts to watch it and I don't even have one."

Don Walser - I got to play a show with them, I never will forget that. After my set, the little bass player that used to play with them, Jeff Pinkus, he said, "Don, you don't need to stay for this, you need to go." It wasn't the music, it was what went on with the music. They had a couple screens up there and one of them had a naked lady, and the other one had an operation going on where they were changing a man into a woman. That's why he didn't want me to stay.

Jim Berry - They'd have projectors going simultaneously, strobe lights, the dancer flailing around. You'd have people in the crowd that were borderline epileptic, you could spot them from the sound board, and they'd have a seizure from the strobe lights.

Teresa Taylor - After leaving the band, I learned I had an aneurysm, and I've had brain surgery, and now I've come to find out I suffer from strobe light-induced seizures. When the neurologist asked me if I had ever been exposed to a lot of flashing lights, I had to laugh and say, "You'll never even imagine, in your wildest dreams, the shit I've flashed."

Gibby Haynes - We'd roll into a town, I was booking the shows, we didn't know where the clubs were. We'd literally pull over somebody and say, "Hey, where do the queers hang out? Where's the college area?" Just follow the queers to the club. We played the Celebrity Club in Atlanta when RuPaul, Lady Bunny, and all the other drag queens were hanging out there before they all moved to New York. It was this weird, artsy, funky, disco crowd in Atlanta that for some reason liked us. Kathleen [the Butthole Surfer's naked dancer from 1983 to '89] was friends with this friend of ours from Atlanta.

Teresa Taylor - Later we met Kathleen again in New York. She was working for Sex World in Times Square. She was known as Ta Da the Shit Lady, she could really control her shit. We took her on the road as our dancer and started building the whole package. She was kind of into her spiritual thing; she stopped speaking for a year, and I asked her why, and she wrote down that God had told her to take a vow and stop speaking. She loved the human body, smells of the human body, dirty socks, urine, things of the body were really beautiful to her, b.o. was beautiful, and we had a hard time making her bathe. I remember once we pretty much had to hold her down and do her laundry, and she was yelling, "no, no!"

Paul Leary - We were at a house and we watched Kathleen perfectly pee a spoonful of urine without spilling a drop, she put that teaspoon of urine into a pot of old dried macaroni and cheese, and that's when this drag queen came in and started eating the dried macaroni and cheese with that spoon and we were like, Felicia, didn't you just see Kathleen putting her pee in that pan? She said, "I'm eating on the side."

Jeff Pinkus - We all went down to Key Largo--it was one of our first vacations that we actually took as a band. We decided to go snorkeling, but Ta Da stayed on the boat with the captain. We come back and the captain of the ship was just looking at us like we were all crazy, and we couldn't figure out what was going on, he wouldn't talk to us. Later we found out that when we were in the water Ta Da had thrown up and had diarrhea at the same time. She had the diarrhea in her hand and she threw up into the water. She said she was feeding the fish. We returned to Austin, in 1986, and not long after moved into the compound, a house at Highway 183 and Cameron Road that we called 1401. We were all living inside there. I lived in the master-bedroom closet. We built some lofts, so Paul lived up above the console, and King had a mattress that he put on the wall that he slept on in the [performing] live room, and Gibby had a loft up above the hallway connecting the two rooms; he and Teresa actually stayed up in there.
    We were doing eight-track recording at that time, discovering the studio and digital technology, we had a Sony Betamax and a PCM machine for our digital recorder. Usually the poorest version of whatever somebody had, but we learned how to work with what we had.

Flynn Mauthe - I was going through this weird responsible phase in my life, working as a real estate agent, so in 1988 I found them this ranch near Driftwood, about 30 miles outside of Austin. The ranch house was built into the side of a hill--five acres, with this incredible old oak tree. They really became nature lovers: Don't throw cigarette butts onto the front yard, and especially don't littler. The album Hairway to Steven, with the birds chirping and stuff on it, I think reflected the kind of laid-back lifestyle they were getting into. Gibby had just bought a Prophet 2000 sampler and every room was full of recording and video equipment and had a loft above it where somebody slept. They were getting steady royalty checks from Touch and Go, so times were real good--a lot of barbecue and beer drinking.
    Gibby and Paul both had their own very distinguished barbecuing styles. With Paul, all the meat, whether it was chicken or hot dogs, steaks, they would all have to touch each other "so they would get to know each other." It was a little ritual he did. Paul was always carrying this huge burden on his shoulders: "I gotta work, I gotta work work work."

Paul Leary - We all left by 1991 because we were finally able to afford to live on our own, plus Gibby's dog was shitting all over the house and Gibby quit washing dishes.

Teresa Taylor - I only found out much later when I got into therapy, but it's not necessarily a natural state for five or six people to eat every meal together, live together, have one person carry the money and dole it out.

Gibby Haynes - Paul was getting married, and King was queer, didn't want to tell us [Coffey responds that the group knew about his orientation long before], and Teresa wanted out. It was too far away to live, really, if you wanted to live in the city. It was kind of strange to be stuck out there. It wasn't a desirable place to live.

King Coffey - It was my New Year's resolution in 1990 to start a record label [Trance Syndicate]. By then, I had the resources to pull it off. So I challenged myself. If I was just playing drums for 15 years, I'd be incredibly boring. I like to think I'm not that boring.

Paul Leary - Lollapalooza was the first tour where we didn't have to drive our own vehicle, set up our own equipment, tune our own guitars, and collect our own money at the end. That set us free so--we could get a
little bit fucked up.

Jim Berry - We all enjoyed it because we played the second slot in the afternoon. I'd be rolling the last case in by 4:30. They always took care of us, gave us plenty of beer and liquor. Our bus was a good escape for Perry Farrell and everybody else who'd want to hang out and not be bothered. No one would think, to look on the Butthole Surfers' bus.

Paul Leary - We made a bunch of money and I guess it was instrumental in getting to live like normal people do.

Hale Milgrim - They totally were into improvisation. I'm a Deadhead, and I like the Butthole Surfers for some of the same reasons. This group kept on changing their sets, kept on growing and improvising. I knew that we would have some problems with key accounts that unfortunately are into censorship. I talked to the Capitol promotion department. I said, "Look, whatever you can get the group to go along with, the 'B-Hole' Surfers, would be appreciated [by the sales and marketing staff]." But I knew what I was signing. The A&R people didn't come to me and say, "Hey Hale, we want you to sign the 'B-Hole' Surfers."

Tim Devine - I started working with the band after Independent Worm Saloon and I knew that after 12 years that they had enough base and were ready for the big time. In order to fill the gap in the interim, we released tracks on movie soundtracks, such as "Hurdy Gurdy Man" for Dumb and Dumber, and the band did a Nintendo commercial and the one-off P record, which was conceived as a vehicle to keep visibility up.
P was a whim at a moment in time--Gibby, Johnny Depp, Sal Jenco, Bill Carter, along with Flea and Steve Jones, and the producer from Ween, Andrew Weiss. It sold slightly less than 10,000 in the United States, but they had a No.1 hit in Southeast Asia with their cover of "Dancing Queen." How can you argue with that?

Paul Leary - It's no secret that Gibby got way strung out on drugs. It was life-threatening. As friends, we did everything we could do, but it was up to him. There was no choice. We lost our bass player. We were at a point where we could dictate our own destiny. I love the studio. That's a sanctuary for me. But what Gibby was doing to himself was so depressing that I couldn't get out of bed.

Gibby Haynes - P were playing at the Viper Room. We were playing a song and River Phoenix was right down in front of me, to the left. We started the song "Michael Stipe," and it's got River's name it . So it was going to be cool, he's a friend of mine and he'd never heard the song. So we were singing up on stage, "Him and River Phoenix were..." And right at that moment, he was basically on the sidewalk. I saw him right at the beginning of the song, then I didn't see River anymore. I've got a guitar solo and at the end of the guitar solo, Johnny stepped offstage. He was frightened. River died just a few feet away from us, right on the other side of the wall.

Margaret Moser - I wrote this article in the Austin Chronicle headlined "Tell It Like It Is: Celebrity Sightings and Scandals of 1993" and three of the ten items were about Gibby. This was when Ministry was thinking about moving to Austin and Gibby was working with Al Jourgensen and they did "Jesus Built My Hot-Rod." It was around this time that Gibby got into heroin, and when he left the Ministry enclave in Chicago, he slipped into smoking crack and doing heroin all the time. He'd walk into the Black Cat bar and his eyes were going in two different directions. He smelled bad. He had that translucent look, like he didn't know what was going on. He was in rehab within four months.

Gibby Haynes - I don't know why that's news. People that have a problem with alcohol or drugs, it's news. It's strange. If anything, it's a medical problem. You just don't read about Eddie Vedder's bilateral hernia repair. It's always, "God, he's in rehab." I was Kurt Cobain's roommate, and no one ever talks about this, but I'm convinced Courtney Love was in the same rehab. She arrived the night before he split [and killed himself days later]. And [jokingly] she was in the psych ward.

Robbie Jacks - Gibby hit rock bottom. He had just rehabbed. He was at the point where he needed money, and he really wanted to do a morning show [on alt-rock radio station 101X in Austin], cause his dad did a morning TV show, Mr. Peppermint. We always gave out the wrong time [on the air], and Gibby always spelled the words backwards on whatever we were talking about. He'd say sgurd for drugs: "I spent all my money on sgurd."

Jerry Haynes - It was great. He was really funny. He'd introduce all the songs he didn't like as "puke chunks." Robbie Jacks - When the station got enough publicity out of the morning show, they told him, "You're too rank for the mornings," and put him on at nine at night. Instead of going to bed at nine at night, he was going to work, and so it was time to party. He just degenerated into drink. I called the station manager on the first night and I was like, " Do you want me to go down there? I mean, he's falling apart, just listen to him." And she was listening and she found it compelling.
    One night he locked the engineer out of the door and then just rambled for two hours and he didn't even do an air call, and it was hysterical. He had Mike Watt on the phone and he wouldn't let him go. I think the band getting back together saved him more than anything, not AA.

Tim Devine - It was just a matter of making the record that would make a difference in their career rather that another Butthole Surfers mind-fuck that would appeal to a limited audience. The band went to New York with Steve Thompson, who came from the world of dance and heavy metal. After eight weeks in Bearsville, Steve felt that they had a completed record, but the band felt they needed to do more work. With Leary at the helm, the recut several songs from the album as well as recording three or four new songs to round out the LP.

Stuart Sullivan - Paul has an incredible commitment to working. He can shut off his mind and bang his head against the wall, almost at will. He's not goint to write an opera, he's going to write a stupid three-chord rock song and like it. Paul is the umbrella, he creates the structure. It's great to have someone investing hundreds of thousands of dollars on a project, and here you are with all that money riding on it, listening to Paul say, "Which one is stupider?"

Tim Devine - When I brought Electriclarryland into the company and played them tracks like "Pepper," "Cough Syrup," and "Jingle of a Dog's Collar," everyone knew we had a record beyond the potential of what the band had done before. It was time to push the button and blow this out.

Phil Costello - It was really obvious. My two-and-a-half-year-old could get this thing played on a modern-rock format. It's a smash, no question about it.

Gibby Haynes - It's a bummer, because I actually like "Pepper." It's good, it's catchy, it's tight, it's kind of got an unusual sound. "All I ever see of them is you." It's not quite up to Jimmy Webb's Standards, but hey, "Up, Up, and Away."

Paul Leary - I heard that Casey Kasem is going to have to announce our name.

King Coffey - It's the most success, the most attention, and the most money that I'll probably ever make in my life. There's no career in being a Butthole Surfer. We might as well ride it.

Paul Leary - We're pretty thrilled Gibby didn't kill himself. We love each other dearly. We're like a family. Everything's cool and we're glad Gibby made it back.

Gibby Haynes - I went to this custom car show in Columbus Ohio; this is, like, not our fan base. And two people came up to me, it really freaked me out. Then after Letterman, I was walking down the street in New York City and this cop pulled up, screeches in front of me adn says [gruff voice]: "Hey, good job on Letterman last night." You get all kinds of new bills when you've been on the David Letterman show. You owe people more money.

Jerry LaTouf - We had about 5,200 people for the Butthole Surfers here in Corpus Christi in July. Gibby is up there playing and somebody throws a very expensive Casio diver's watch. It hits him on the hand and it hit him hard. I don't blame Gibby for doing what he did. He lashed out. He yelled, "Find that guy and hit him. This city is nothing but poor white trash. Fuck you. I've got your money. It's over. I'm going home," and walked off.

Jerry Haynes - I liked the Elecriclarryland tour a lot. It's total professionalism. It's good that they don't have to get up and get nude all the time.

Paul Leary - We're not done getting ripped off by any stretch.

Gibby Haynes - Yeah, you arrive in a limo, you leave in a bus.§
 

Interviewers: Joe Nick Patoski and John Morthland
ŠSpin, 1996