Gibby Haynes is laughing so hard he's hacking. Something about the idea of dropping LSD with Henry Rollins and Stipe has sent him into a loop. "Think about it , man," he says, in his Texas drawl, "would that be in-tense?

Whew! Michael Stipe - he freaks me out!"

It's like the pot calling the kettle burned out. Or something.

Gibby is pent up in a St. Louis motel, on the road with his Butthole Surfers as a part of a package tour that also includes as he calls 'em) the Stone Pimple Toilets. Right now he wants to forget last night's bad trip - another show in front of a Toilets crowd - and thus is trying to think of the ideal person to take acid with. "Axl Rose, Henry Rollins ... I dunno," he trails off, flipping through the pages of a magazine. "Just looking at this picture here, maybe Brett Anderson'd be wild to trip with. If you looked at his face for too long, he'd probably turn into Johnny Depp or something ...

After their first gig in 1982 at LA's Whiskey, the Butthole Surfers went on to become America's premier multi-media psychedelic road show, surpassing even the Greatful Dead for sheer mind-altering value. The groups pre-grunge sicko style of rock'n'roll has sometimes come out fairly straightforward, but it's the sudden, confused, jumbled twists and turns that characterize the B-holes' oeuvre and leave you feeling nauseous. Their gender- and morality bending stage antics - involving androgynous, nude, horned, skinhead dancers, close-up projections of sex-change operations - and distorted Flannery O'Connor-meets-David Lynch tweaked Southern America, culminate in a weirdness that's second to none in the avant-pop world. It only makes sense that acid would be at the bottom of this "Jesus Christ!" Gibby barks, "I've never taken acid in my life!"

C'mon!

"Oh my goodness gracious, another drug interview - OK, all right." Gibby skirts around the topic like a fox, sniffing and pawing at it before finally beginning to flash back through the years, recalling the wrong strange flips he's taken - onstage and off. There was that show at Danceteria. There were all those late nights out on the road, when he and the band would drop a couple of hits just to stay awake and drive. And there was that Christmas, when he dropped a hit and went out gift shopping with his mom.

"It was one of the first malls in Dallas, you know, and I was with my mom, tripping my butt off on mescaline [laughs]. Now that was truly psychedelic - the essence of the psychedelic experience. You know how women are when they shop - they look at everything. I was perfectly in tune with that. I was seeing more than she was."

Growing up in Dallas, Gibby Haynes must have had a colorful childhood. His dad, Jerry, was better known as Mr. Peppermint, the host of a local kids' TV show called The Peppermint Place (featuring such characters as Mr. Wiggly Worm and a bear named Muffin). By junior high he was listening to what everybody else who was 14 and slightly psychotic listened to: Abbey Road, the Allman Brothers' Eat a Peach, Grand Funk Live. "Aw man, any music is psychedelic when you're tripping your nuts off in the seventh grade," he growls. "I mean, television commercials take on a whole new dimension."

The first time he tripped, at 13, Gibby miscalculated it and did it too late in the evening. He had dropped the acid at ten, was peaking by the time he made it home for his midnight curfew, and didn't come down until well into the wee hours. "I mean, I was so paranoid, I had to get back right at 12," he recalls. "If I came home at two, I'd bee in trouble. So I walk in at midnight and talk to my mother for like an hour. All I remember is that I had no idea what I was saying. My mom didn't act weird the next day, so I guess I didn't say too much bad. So as you see, psychedelic drugs are responsible for what little closeness I had with my parents."

By the time he formed the Butthole Surfers ten years later, Gibby already had his psychedelic pilot's license. He also had his whiskey license and his stripping license. He doesn't recommend combining all three. "See, when you're tripping and drunk on whiskey, you don't really know what's happening," he explains, like a wise uncle. "You are physically out of control and you're mentally out of control."

At the legendary Danceteria in New York during the early days of the Butthole Surfers, Gibby got caught drinking and tripping with his pants down. "Ten minutes into the show, I'd put on ten dresses - you see, I used to put dresses on and then tear 'em all off," he explains. "But I'd gotten so trippin' and so drunk. I forgot to put on my underwear. So I got down to my last dress" - he pauses for a well timed hiccup - "and, goddamn it, I was naked. "I looked over at [band members] Cabbage and Kathleen: Cabbage had come out from behind the drums and she had this Fred Flintstone plastic baseball bat filled with urine and was sprinkling it on the crowd. Kathleen was totally naked and bald. And all of a sudden it became like this sexual thing, and there I was with a semi-erect penis onstage, in between this girl's legs, and about to do this thing. Then it kinda suddenly dawned on me what was going on and I was like, Whoa!"

After the show, the mentally and physically impaired Gibby caused some more trouble. "They tried to pay me and I tore up the check and threw it at the guy," he says. "And I almost got in a fight with this gigantic doorman who would've just thumped me." He pauses for a well-timed sheesh. "There's just so many of those kinda things. "But really," he adds, like a surgeon general, "before anybody goes out and takes a bunch of psychedelic drugs, they should first go and visit Roky Erickson down in Texas. He's a casualty. That can happens, too, you know."