Have been re-reading Michael Azerrad's tome on 1980s American underground rock over the past few days and as a result, the simple but lucid writing of Azerrad reminded me of how much I loved the craziness of the Butthole Surfers more than a decade ago. Almost immediately, I went to dig out all my Butthole Surfers' CDs and they have been spinning in my stereo ever since.
From "Butthole Surfers/Live PCPPEP" to "ElectricLarryLand", the Buttholes have managed to bring artistic and musical derangement to mainstream consciousness and scoring a few MTV hits and a gold album along the way. Many people, especially in the American underground have very different things to say about the band: from opportunistic money grabbers to absurdist dada damaged blues monsters and anything in between, they were often a bit of whatever that people have spew out about them. Who could beat a group with two drummers who play standing up, a naked lady dancing and doing far-out stuff on stage, with gruesome images/films being projected in the back with a bunch of acid-fried longhairs bouncing around with guitars?
No matter what people say about them, they were important: they were there, fearlessly pushing the form of rock forward, sideways and backwards even during their prime in the mid-1980s. Even their more recent major label albums were head-scratchingly fun to listen to and at least a few yards ahead of what was been released then. The avant rock/underground noise/New Weird America scenes of today would have been less interesting without the Buttholes.
And of course with a name like Butthole Surfers to top it off, what else do we need to say?
Check them out here.
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