When I think about the Butthole Surfers, what comes to mind is how Gibby Haynes, the singer, and Paul Leary, the guitarist, stop their lives every 10 minutes or so to have an aesthetic experience. A few years ago, I was walking on the Lower East side with Gibby. It was cold and raining and both of us were under-dressed for the weather as we pursued some business errand. Suddenly Gibby stopped. "What are you doing? Come on!" I said. "That rain is badass," he said, staring at a gray, shimmering sheet of water falling from a restaurant awning. No one could deny the badass beauty of that moment, and no one but Gibby could have seen it in the first place.

And I remember this strange house they all used to live in on the outskirts of Austin on Anderson Lane in 1987. The windows were boarded up, so it was perpetual night inside. The nearest neighbors lived 200 yards away, so they could make all the noise they wanted. The delivery man would arrive every day with movies they'd purchased from medical schools to show on the backdrop of their live shows - movies of epileptic fits, eye operations and surgical repair of mangled genitalia. Their beloved pitbull Farner, a gentle orphan Paul had rescued form the pound, had worms and would periodically whine and rub her ass on the floor, leaving a streak. Where everyone else in the world, even other Butthole Surfers, would see shit on linoleum, Paul admired Farner's "brown comets." If that ain't imagery, tell me what is.

Those days are gone for the Butthole Surfers. In an industry where the few are rich and the many poor, they've achieved the unimaginable, especially unimaginable in underground music: They've entered the middle class. Three of them - Paul, Jeff Pinkus the bassist and King the drummer - live in their own houses. And the only reason Gibby doesn't is he blew all his money on hot rods. Most imaginable of all, and a milestone of colossal heaviosity in the history of underground music: They've signed a contract with a major label, Capitol, home of the Beatles. Capitol is betting a wad that the Buttholes can expand their audience beyond the 70-80,000 loyalists who buy their poorly distributed product and pack large clubs in every city in America. They spent $225,000 recording their next album, Independent Worm Saloon, and Capitol is gearing up for a major promotion with video. Paul's been transcribing Gibby's lyrics to reassure MTV it won't inadvertently broadcast smut beneath their standards. John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin produced.

"No, I hadn't heard them before," says Jones. "People send me an awful lot of tapes, and I've heard an awful lot of uninteresting bands. When my manager sent me the Buttholes' demo tape, I was just immediately interested. It was alive and exciting and subversive. Then Paul sent me their album Hairway to Steven. He didn't quite realize what he'd done when I thanked him for it. He said, 'I sent what?' They probably thought I had a more serious or sacred attitude, but Hairway confirmed that I wanted to work with them. I also like their version of 'Hurdy Gurdy Man,' which I arranged with Donovan. I prefer the Butthole version, actually"

Could you compare working with Led Zeppelin and the Butthole Surfers?

"They're similar in their work habits. When it came to recording, both bands got down to it and worked very hard. I insisted the songs be 80 percent finalized by the time we went in. There's nothing worse than wasting studio time at $2000 a day. Paul was a total perfectionist. He'd produced them before and was a mine of information about how things worked amongst the band."

How would you rate his guitar playing?

"Totally original. I'd like to use him on my own projects. His imagination just soars."

Gibby seemed to have some resentment toward you.

"There's always that element between producers and singers. It depends how they're singing that day. We got on fine when things were going well. When they weren't, the knives were out."

Did his drinking interfere with the creative process?

"Well, the first time we tried to do the vocal on 'Alcohol,' he was too drunk to sing it. That's rather poetic."

Think you could perform onstage with them sometime?

"If it pisses Gibby off, sure."

Did you notice how they're always having these aesthetic experiences? The other night, I watched Paul mesmerized and chuckling for hours over this biology book on bugs. .

"Were they defecating?"

•JOHN PAUL DIDN'T show any preference to any instrument," says Jeff Pinkus, in Atlanta where he just got married. "Kinda bummed me out, 'cause we're both bass players and I wanted more bass, but he got real cool sounds. He and the engineer worked their butts off. He had a big line of amplifiers and a big line of guitars, and we'd try different combinations until he got what he was looking for. He also helped in the arrangements, always knew when something got too repetitive. When he played bass on 'The Ballad of Naked Man,' I was playing banjo and I kept thinking, 'Who could have guessed when I was growing up and listening to Led Zeppelin that one day John Paul Jones would be playing bass with me on a song I wrote?' It was probably my biggest thrill since joining the band."

•JOHN PAUL JONES was the richest person I'll ever meet," says King over coffee in an Austin hippie restaurant. "But he came across real down to earth, kind of a nondescript English guy. He had the least attitude of any producer we interviewed. And he seemed easily amused. "King has one of the most distinctive styles of anyone now thumping drums. In the early '80s, he stood up and had no kick drum, compensating with a long line of toms and his little sister Theresa, who played another long line of toms. Theresa has since left the band, and King has compromised with tradition to the point of getting a kick and a stool, but he still emphasizes the toms more than anyone. "Tribal" is the description he prefers, and he cites Paul Whaley of Blue Cheer and Mitch Mitchell as influences. At 6'1", he leans back more than sits, and he towers over his kit.

"I couldn't get the drums low enough, so I made me high enough," he says. "It's just easier to play that way. Chuck Biscuits in DOA, a great punk drummer, also plays high. He feels you have better reach and can beat down more forcefully. I find it easier to move around if I'm above everything. Most drummers are taught otherwise, but there's no one way to play the drums. The only goal is to strike it. I just love the sound of really driving toms propelling a 4/4 beat."

"When John Paul came to town, I went to pick him up at the airport," says Paul Leary in the backroom that serves as his home studio, sort of a cross between the Starship Enterprise and a chicken coop. "I was expecting someone with mutton-chop sideburns and bellbottoms, and I just couldn't find him anywhere. I had him paged and he was standing next to me. He looked so.. .normal."

What did you learn from him?

"Augmenting the kick drum with a nice 30-hertz sine wave, so you get that thump in your chest."

Seems like his name might help with your credibility, getting on commercial radio.

"Yeah, that had a lot to do with it. Mostly it was, man, if I pass up a chance to work with John Paul Jones, I don't think I'll ever forgive myself. Even if he had some other name, he was the coolest producer we talked to on die phone. He was fun to work with- He'd done a lot of session work in England before Led Zeppelin, and he did a lot of the cooler stuff like 'Black Dog.' That was his riff and he claims Page was never able to play it right. He hummed it to me, and I went, like, 'My god, no shit he couldn't play that Why'd you even want to play it that way?'"

So Jones came to Austin and they did two weeks of pre-production. During the day they'd jam on "Kashmir" in the Butthole rehearsal space, and at night they'd check out local attractions like the 60-year-old yodeler Don Walser and his Pure Texas Band. Next they moved to the Site, a beautiful studio in a bucolic Marin County setting, for seven weeks of recording. In the past, Paul has pretty much been the producer on the many Butthole LPs and EPs on several labels.

"I'm the guy who figured out how to use all that shit," says Paul "But it's hard to concentrate on being a musician and on making a record at the same time. If everybody's in the band, who's gonna be impartial about what you end up doing? So it's a real luxury to sit back and say, 'Okay, here's our songs. You nix die ones you don't like, and we'll focus on the ones you do like.' To have someone else worrying about the equipment was so freeing. That's something I hope translated in the record, that we were enjoying ourselves."

Yeah, it does. It sounds terrific, heavy yet astonishingly varied, keeping that Butthole sense of whimsy and terror that has made them America's greatest underground band for the past decade. Be interesting to see in this era of FCC censorship if you can even say the name of the band on commercial radio.

"I think you can. They're sending the single to both alternative and mainstream radio, putting stickers on in two ways: 'Butthole Surfers' and 'B.H. Surfers.' I hope somebody plays it. Capitol didn't seem too concerned."

Showing talent for both math and art back to his preschool years, Paul got his first guitar at the age of five. By high school, he had worked his way up to a Les Paul and a Fender Twin with an Echoplex, practicing for several hours every day. But by the time he enrolled at Trinity University in San Antonio (where his father taught economics) he was burned out. Rock had fallen into one of its dull periods and Paul sold his Les Paul to concentrate on business and sculpting. Then toward the end of '76, music started getting interesting again. All those punks making a horrible racket made die odds against a music career appear less insurmountable.

At the same time, he became friends with a 6'5" basketball player with spiky hair. His name was Gibby Haynes, and they shared an interest in horrible racket. Son of "Mr. Peppermint," the Captain Kangaroo of Dallas television, Gibby had first attended Kilgore State on a basketball scholarship but got thrown out on a pot bust. At Trinity, a small liberal arts school loosely affiliated with the Presbyterian

Church, he found a more tolerant atmosphere. Not completely tolerant, however, as he received a letter of reprimand for playing "nude tennis" on the courts just across the street from the homecoming football game.

Upon graduation, Gibby went to work for an accounting firm and Paul went for his MBA. Both found their future prospects intolerable, so Paul took the remainder of his $15,000 student loan and bought amplifiers. In 1983, Alternative Tentacles, label of the Dead Kennedys, released the Butthole Surfers' first eponymously titled EP. Never has a band announced itself to the world with such ferocity and hilarity. "There's a time to fuck and a time to crave/But the Shah sleeps in Lee Harvey's grave," Paul shrieked on the first cut. Horrible racket.

"There's a time to shit and a time for God/The last shit I took was pretty fuckin' odd." Horrible racket.

On subsequent records—Another Man's Sac, Cream Corn from the Socket of Davis, Hairway to Steven, among others—they gradually mastered the horrible racket on a limited budget. Anyone who bought them for the joke stuck around for the music. If that other Texas guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan could play Hendrix note for note, Paul Leary, more than anyone, captured his spirit of freedom. Insistently modest, he calls

his style "retarded," because of his love for simple riffs.

"There's nothing worse than some heavy metal guy trying to be musically proficient," says Paul. "All I can think of is how much those suckers practice. When I practice, I just play along with the drum machine until I find something usable. Once your fingers are strong, the guitar is a remarkably easy instrument."

•I GOT A BEEF against John Paul Jones," says Gibby Haynes, his long hair stuffed under a baseball cap. One floor below on 6th Street, Austin's music strip. New Year's Eve revelers scream and honk. Inside this brick apartment, currently rented by actor Johnny Depp, for whom Gibby is house-sitting, a television flickers with Hercules Versus Moloch.

"I think he's an amazingly cool guy for a rock star," he continues, sipping Crown Royal Canadian whiskey. "He came from an era where they pushed it to the limit- And he did. And I admire that He's a nice guy.. .what's the next word?"

But?

""Yeah!" Gibby laughs. "He may not even think I'm a nice guy. But when we got to the airport in San Francisco, there was no limousine waiting for us. We had to rent a car to get to the studio. And he said, 'What kind of a manager would not arrange transportation for his band?' He wailed on that, tried to get us to ditch our manager. Well, I respect our manager. And he has a contract that would cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars to ditch him. I don't want anyone fucking with my income. This band has no money to throw away. And that pisses me off—how much money this record cost. We could have recorded it in Memphis for $50,000 with better equipment and a place to live. I could use that money right now to build my dream house."

Gibby hands over a set of blueprints for a metal warehouse divided down the middle—one half for living, one half to store his hot rods. Trailing off into financial calculation of how many units they need to sell to break even, Gibby suddenly brightens. "You know what I really want to do? Make a seven-minute version of It's a Wonderful Life where Jimmy Stewart jumps off the bridge. What would that cost in

computer animation?"

So what inspired the first single, "Who Was in My Room Last Night?"?

"This crack whore I went out with for a month and a half. She was a sweet person in one of her personalities, but the other 50 are fucked."

Let's talk about your lyrics in general. You go for this let's-dispense-with-consensus-reality approach.

"Sheer, documented confusion. The song is somehow directed, but you can't see where. I love that kind of presentation in any art form. Intense emotional reaction and you can't tell why but you know it's important. Conveying a feeling and making no sense—that's success. You wanna see my DWI tape?"

Gibby shoves a video cassette into the VCR. It shows the drunk tank at a police station at 3 a.m. on November 2,1992. A cop is asking Gibby to do certain tests designed to demonstrate intoxication after he got pulled over in his '49 Chevy with a flame paint job.

"You're refusing to take the test?" asks the cop.

"I suppose I just have to respectfully decline your request. I truly don't think I should. From what I've been told. Is that outlandish?"

"A simple yes or no will do."

This continues for several minutes. We both watch in horrid fascination until it ends. Gibby goes to the kitchen and returns with a prize from the freezer. "This is cool," he says. "You want an ice cream bar half-eaten by Johnny Depp ?"