Switch on your local "hits" radio station, and you'll typically hear a limited selection of songs from Oasis, Alanis Morrisette, Pearl Jam, and their bastard cousins. But what's this? The Butthole Surfers' "Pepper" too? The band of our punk-rock youth is now parading around in the midst of 311 and Fun Lovin' Criminals. Jeff "King" Coffey, the Surfers' dremmer and owner of indie label Trance Syndicate, spoke with me about the trend of punk-rock heroes going mainstream.

You mentioned before that you were into Nirvana initially, but once they made it big, you were turned off. Did their success cause you to look at the band differently?
It did. Nirvana changed from being this grooby band from Seattle that was a cult underground thing that had never played Austin. Their first album I thought was really cool and was recorded for $700. It was very much a part of my scene and my background, a peer-group kind of thing; and they turned into this band where kids in shopping malls were buying Nirvana t-shirts, and you would see big Nirvana displays at mall record stores. When I bought Nevermind I thought it was a great album, but after a few weeks I began to see what was happening, especially when it went to Number One. I couldn't think of the last time I actually liked an album that was Number One on the U.S. charts since K.C. & the Sunshine Band.
To me, one of the fun things about punk rock was that it was antisocial. Punk rock is not meant to be popular. So that to me was very challenging. I liked the same album when only a couple thousand people were into it, but now that a million-plus people are into it, it still doesn't make the music any different. Digitally, on the CD, it doesn't. It's still the same series of zeroes and ones falling at you from the speakers, but culturally it does make a difference. It's not Nirvana's fault, and it's not even the kid's fault. It was all a curious thing that I never experienced before.

New Order complained that half of their concert audience was made up of jocks once a lot of the band's songs were hits on commercial radio. Have you noticed the same thing since the success of "Pepper"?
More or less. There is the faithful, a couple hundred max, who know all the songs and have been following us for years and will continue to follow us for years. God bless them. They're the ones paying for my dog's surgery right now. Generally, the crowd we're playing for in '96 in contrast to the ones in '86 are, to state the obvious, incredibly different. The crowds in '96, generally, are there to hear the songs they've heard off MTV or radio. The two albums they have are the two on Capitol. It's harder for them to find the albums on Touch And Go, and they probably don't even know the albums exist. A decent chunk of the audience may be showing up only for "Pepper." To them we're a new band, like any of the other new radio bands.

The main goal of the music business is to sell a lot of records and make a lot of money. How do you handle that profit-oriented mentality as a musician who wants to create songs he personally likes?
The point of being a musician is to play music. The point of music is to create something worthwhile that has some artistic meaning to you. None of that necessarily means selling records. So it kind of depends on why you're into music. For a lot of the bands that I work with on Trance, it's a very purist concept of wanting to make a record that they want to make, that they want to hear without pressure from MTV or major labels breathing down their neck or even any pressure of, "Will this be successful?" They just want to make an album that meets their criteria of what is good without any other preconceived ideas. If people like it, and buy it, sure, that's a happy thing.
That's kind of what the Surfers are all about. It was a lot easier in the past when there was no avenue for us for major-label attention or distribution or MTV or commercial radio. What the hell? We were just making pure art records to entertain ouselves. I think we still are. By the same token, when we did this last record, "Pepper" was the last song we worked on. We had finished the album and had time left over, and we were fucking around with some samples and a drum machine, and as soon as we began to piece together the first guitar sample, I thought, "Okay, this is so obviously going to be the single." But we went ahead and pursued it. It was so obvious.

Now that you have a hit single, do you find yourselves having to adapt due to pressure from the profit-oriented side of the music industry?
If it's there, it's very subtle pressure, but the reality is that you can't turn to Surfers into Nirvana or Oasis. We are who we are. We have always been, and we always will be, a bunch of Texas surrealists with a punk-rock background who are making art records. If we were asked to come up with a hit song, it would fail so miserably.

Would you want to write a hit single, though?
I might want to do it as a sheer art project. "Your homework is to come up with a hit song. Go!" That's so ludicrous. "Let's write a hit song." There's no way. We couldn't write a popular song to save our lives.

If an old Butthole Surfers fan came up and told you that you suck now because you're played on MTV and on commercial radio, what would you say to that person?
Well, I'd say, "Fuck you!" To me, "Pepper" is just a song. It's like an experiment. This little experiment that was actually playable on the radio. As we speak, we still have no idea if there's going to be a second single because the album is so all over the place. A lot of the songs are pretty rocking and aggressive. I hate to say those words. The whole thing with "Pepper" was such a one-off fluke thing. We actually coughed up a hip-hop song that people could somewhat relate to.