Tone Glow 136: Paul Leary (Butthole Surfers)
An interview with Paul Leary about the formation of Butthole Surfers, the terror of major labels, producing for the Meat Puppets and Daniel Johnston, and being incredibly lucky
Paul Leary (b. 1957) is a Texan musician and producer who is best known for being a co-founder of the Butthole Surfers. The group began when he and Gibby Haynes met at Trinity University, sharing an interest in visual arts and punk rock. The two would end up getting signed to Jello Biafra’s Alternative Tentacles, where they released their self-titled EP and a live release titled PCPPEP (1984). The latter has been remastered and reissued by Matador alongside the band’s first two albums, Psychic... Powerless... Another Man’s Sac (1984) and Rembrandt Pussyhorse (1986). The Butthole Surfers would eventually find a #1 hit on the US Modern Rock Tracks chart with “Pepper,” a single from their 1996 album Electriclarryland. More recently, Leary released a solo album titled Born Stupid (2021). Joshua Minsoo Kim talked with Leary on March 16th, 2024 via Zoom to discuss his childhood bands, his first gig at a punk rock club, the terror of working with major labels, producing for artists like the Meat Puppets and Daniel Johnston, and the extremely lucky life he’s had.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: I read an interview where you mentioned that you grew up in a middle-class family and went to a church with a lot of rich people and consequently felt out of place. I’m thinking about that, and then I’m also remembering how touring in Butthole Surfers was a very hand-to-mouth situation. You once said that playing shows felt like “revenge” in some way. Is there a link between these two things? I’m wondering how much of your upbringing and being around upper-class people affected the way you thought about the band and the art you made.
Paul Leary: I was middle class and I went to public school where I was one of the better-off kids, but then on Sundays I went to church where I was one of the poor guys. My dad was an associate professor at Trinity University, where I met [Butthole Surfers co-foudner] Gibby Haynes. And there were a lot of rich kids at that school too. But I don’t know… I think I just ended up doing what I was destined to do.
Did you always feel like music was your destiny?
When I was five years old, I saw Elvis Presley and I talked my dad into buying me an acoustic guitar. He bought me a $5 guitar from Mexico and I played it enough to where, when I was six, he bought me a regular acoustic guitar, and I played that enough to where when the Beatles came along a couple years later, I was like “Oh, I gotta have an electric guitar.” And so he bought me one. I was a pretty spoiled kid. It was my dream to be in rock bands. I played in them in elementary school and junior high, and after I got out of high school and went to college, I packed a guitar and went to college and thought I was gonna become a stockbroker. And then I graduated from college and nobody wanted me to be a stockbroker—I would’ve been a terrible one. Nobody wanted me; I didn’t have any skills and I was working in a lumber yard.
Gibby wanted to be in a band and he kept trying to talk me into coming over for band practice. One day I actually went over there, picked up the guitar again for the first time in four or five years, had a good time, and before long we burned our bridges and hopped in a van and went out to California.
There’s so much there I want to talk about. Where’d you first see Elvis?
It was probably on The Ed Sullivan Show, but I was five so I don’t really remember. But I do remember seeing the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, and I was already familiar with them because I had an older cousin who turned me on to them. I was just stunned to watch girls screaming. Yeah, I needed some of that.
Was this older cousin someone who was constantly showing you records?
I lived in Texas and she lived in Wyoming, but when she would come to visit, she would turn me on to the music she was listening to. One year it was the Animals, and another year it was the Beatles. She took me to see A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965), which were playing back to back at a Texas theater in downtown San Antonio. And once again the girls were screaming and that was pretty profound.
The screaming girls were profound?
Yeah. You couldn’t even see the movie because they were screaming so much in the theater, and this was in San Antonio.
You mentioned that you were in these bands in elementary school. You played guitar in these bands?
Yes.
What sort of memories do you have of those experiences?
Well, imagine how good a bunch of third graders could possibly be (laughter). I think my first band was me and another guy who played guitar and we got to play in front of the school and we played a Rolling Stones song or a Monkees song, and my job was to play a riff. I played the riff but when the song was over, I kept playing the riff and didn’t stop. The other guitar player, who was older than me, looked over at me and the school laughed. I was embarrassed. Later, when I was in the fifth grade and he was in the sixth grade, we had a Battle of the Bands. It was his band against my band, and we kicked their ass—that was revenge (laughter).
So you guys won the Battle of the Bands?
Oh yeah, easily, even though they had more money and could afford a microphone.
Were these the first experiences you had with performing in front of a public audience?
Pretty much, at least in a rock sense. I went to a school that had a square dance team. I didn’t really enjoy square dancing that much, but because I played guitar they let me play guitar off to the side while they were square dancing. So we got to do some creepy auditorium performances, that kind of thing.
Do you feel like being in these early bands acted as a catalyst in terms of you pursuing your destiny to become a rock musician? You won this Battle of the Bands, you played for people square dancing—how much of an impact did those things have, if any?
Well, I’m pretty terrified of crowds and that pretty much desensitized me to the fear of playing in front of crowds. But I was even terrified for the first few Butthole Surfers shows. I would cross my eyes when I played so I couldn’t see the crowd, and I would pretend that nothing was real and I was in some other space.
What about it terrifies you? Just that people are watching you? That you’ll mess up?
It was just stage fright. A lot of people have it, and I had it.
When you look back on your childhood and growing up in San Antonio, do you feel like there’s anything distinct about the city that may have helped foster creative impulses for you? Do you feel like San Antonio was good for that?
San Antonio is a traditional heavy metal hotspot. They had a pair of radio stations—KMAC AM and KISS FM—Lou Roney and Joe Anthony were the DJs. They would play AC/DC and stuff like that nonstop, and it was a really fun radio station. They were prone to doing things like putting on Led Zeppelin and smearing the needle across the vinyl to then put AC/DC on for the 100th time of the day (laughter). They’d put an album on vinyl and go outside and smoke a joint, and the album would get to the end and you’d hear the kshhh kshhh kshhh sound for ten minutes. And then they’d come back all stoned. Great radio.
How old were you when you were listening to this radio station?
In high school, so the early ’70s.
Are there any other important things that you feel like was going on for you, musically or otherwise, around this time?
I was interested in art and painting and sculpture. I was interested in nihilism and Dada and Yves Klein and stuff like that. By that time I got into music, it was less about doing things that made sense than doing things because they didn’t make sense. I liked being in things for the sheer absurdity of it. I’m not talented, and none of us in the Butthole Surfers were talented—there was just this complete lack of talent—but we understood what we had and what we could do and then did it anyway. We burned our bridges and toughed it out until we made it.
Who introduced you to Dada and nihilism?
I studied art in college. I studied abstract art and art history and I just loved Yves Klein and his Monotone Symphony. I loved his performances in New York where he’d have naked women fling themselves at canvases while covered in paint. I just thought that was all great.
What specifically? The absurdity?
Absolutely. And the randomness of it. There was no message he was trying to promote, and the Butthole Surfers never had a message—we were the anti-message group. A lot of the punk rockers of the time were about this or that and doing things a certain way, but we weren’t in for any of that crap. We were just trying to make enough money to buy enough beer and pot and get on to the next town.
Were you specifically at Trinity University because you wanted to pursue the visual arts?
I fantasized about being a painter and sculptor, and I studied it in college because I was interested in it. But I also studied business and accounting and management because I really thought I was going to be a stockbroker.
Was that because it was something your parents wanted you to do?
No, it was because it was absurd. “Stockbroker” even just sounds absurd—what the fuck is a “stockbroker”? (laughter). I don’t know why I thought I wanted to be one, but I thought that if I waited for recruitment day, the companies would come and I’d interview and get a job. But I didn’t, and there I was, still working at the lumber yard even when I graduated from college. I’d met Gibby in college and we shared a love of the visual arts. He even had an art exhibit on campus that received a lot of backlash.
How so?
You know how at crime scenes they use tape to show where the bodies were lying? That was his art show. He had a bunch of silhouettes all over the floor. He called his exhibit something inappropriate—it was called Hold the Pickles at Auschwitz—and of course it was the stupidest idea in the fucking world. Of course people were offended, rightfully so; it was just a combination of words that made no sense. That was all part of the Dada appeal—that things at random were just as significant as things that were purposefully plotted out. And we weren’t good at plotting out things, we were drunk and stoned and stupid. And so, plotting things out wasn’t what we were gonna be about; we just kind of had fun and let the chips fall where they fell.
Do you remember the first impression you had of Gibby?
Yeah. Trinity was a pretty straight-laced college with typical ’70s kids running around, and then there was Gibby who was 6’7” and wore a biker leather jacket and had spiky hair. We both had a common interest in punk rock and new wave and we spent time listening to records. Gibby actually got a job when he graduated from Trinity. He was an accountant at Peat Marwick Mitchell, which at the time was the biggest accounting firm in the world. He was wearing a suit and tie every day, going into work, and by the time he talked me into joining the band, we had band practice every evening. He would get off work late and come stumbling in around 7:30 or 8:00pm in his suit and tie, and we’d already be playing in the drummer’s living room. He’d come in and immediately tear off his suit and his tie and his shirt and his pants and start singing. That kind of spilled over into our live performances where he would come out on stage and go down to his underwear and socks. But we started out as more of an “art band” than a “music band.” Our first couple of shows were in art galleries and they were art performances, and they were really stupid.
How so? Give me an example of the stupidest one you remember.
The first one we did, there was just a pile of stuff on the floor in the middle of the gallery, and we just played behind this junk. There were stuffed bodies and things, and Gibby would tear apart the stuffed bodies and he would bring out a Big Mac or a toaster or a blender and wave it around. At one point he got a Big Mac and took a big bite and the next thing you know, he’s running around with a meat patty hanging out of his mouth.
Having these opportunities in a gallery setting feels like a good test run for when you became a “music band.” Galleries are such revered spaces, as places for high art, so to do something dumb feels like it would’ve had more impact there than if you were to do it at a bar.
True. And it’s also because San Antonio didn’t have punk rock bars to play at. 70 miles north on the highway, there was Austin, TX and one day, we were at the lake outside of Austin with our girlfriends—we were skinny dipping or whatever—and on the way back to San Antonio, we stopped by downtown Austin and saw one of their punk rock clubs. There was a show there with the Big Boys. We stopped in and said hi to the Big Boys and lo and behold, Gibby talked them into letting us play a couple of songs before their set. We actually played at a punk rock club and played music without any of the art stuff.
We got asked to come back and play again, and the next time was when we actually got called the Butthole Surfers. Up until that point we changed the name of the band every week. We were the Ashtray Baby Heads and Abe Lincoln’s Bush and 9 Foot Worm Makes Own Food. We played this punk rock club in Austin and the bass player of the Big Boys, Chris Gates, came out and introduced us to play. He didn’t know what the name of our band was that week (laughter), but he knew we had a song called “Butthole Surfers” so he called us that. We were a little confused at first but we were like, okay, let’s roll with it. Then at the end of the show, someone gave us fifty bucks and we were like, okay this is it, we’re gonna be rich.
So this was prior to King [Coffey] joining? Like ’81 or ’82?
Yeah.
What was it like playing in a punk venue for the first time? Do you remember how you felt?
The punk rock clubs in Austin were really fun. You’d stop to tune your guitar and the next thing you know, people are yelling at you to play a song again. People would have fun, they would slam dance. It didn’t take talent to do any of that, so we felt right at home.
You mentioned working at a lumber yard earlier. Do you feel like working there was significant? Do you feel like you learned specific skills or things about yourself?
It was a great job and I worked for a great family, the Hubinger family. They took me in and let me work and it was an exotic hardwood lumber mill and lumber yard. They had like 86 different species of hardwoods and softwoods and I learned about bubinga and cocobolo and rosewood and ebony. I learned how to run machines in the mill shop and how to drive a forklift and how to do bookkeeping in the office. I learned how to do a lot of stuff, and it was a really great job. I still feel bad because I remember, towards the end, the old man Hubinger sat me down and said, “We’d like you to stay and we’ll give you a position as vice president, and we’ll also give you a loan to buy a house, what do you say?” And I was like, “Well, I think I’m going to California to be in a punk rock band.” (laughter). That really took him by surprise and I think his feelings were hurt. I still get along with those people real good.
You still talk with them?
Well, not the old man, but his son who also worked there was very influential in my life and he’s good friends with my older sister, and every now and then we’ll run into them. They’re just good people.
How was he influential?
These were people of German heritage that just worked their asses off. The old man had come from hard times and he had scraped things together and they had a successful lumber yard and made a good living. He was the first one there in the morning and the last one there at night; he worked everyone to death and he worked himself even harder. And that was real respectful. I learned what it was like to make a living and to make a life out of it, but I didn’t want that (chuckles). It was hard work and it was six days a week, and I didn’t want to work six days a week or make an hourly wage or even a mid-level salary. I didn’t see it as a pathway to being special as a human being.
I had an opportunity to go out to California, even though it wasn’t much of an opportunity. I think it was one show in Los Angeles at the Grandia Room with the Minutemen. We got out there and played the show and that was it. The next thing you know, we’re like, “What do we do now? We’re hungry and homeless.” We scraped up our last few pennies and went to San Francisco. They had soup kitchens and we learned how to eat for free six days a week. After a while, we wear our welcome out wherever we go and have to move on.
What year was this when you went to California?
That would’ve been ’82.
Okay right, so their debut album [1981’s The Punch Line] already would’ve come out by then.
Yeah, we were fans. We got to hang out with D. Boon and Mike Watt and before we played, I was hanging out with Robo from Black Flag and I was like, wow, I’m hanging out with rock stars, this is freakin’ awesome.
You mentioned that working in the lumber yard wouldn’t have made you special. Was being a musician something that you thought would make you special?
I just didn’t think about it too much. I just knew I didn’t want to work a job for a living, and there was an alternative where I could act like an idiot and play like a fool and smoke dope and drink beer every night. When we went to San Francisco after a month in Los Angeles, we had a van that didn’t drive very well. It was prone to breaking down a lot. We got onto the Bay Bridge going into San Francisco and our fuel pump started to die. We were like, “Oh my god, it’s rush hour and we’re going up a hill on a bridge and if this car dies, we’re gonna die. What are we gonna do?”
The van actually made it to the top of the hill of the bridge before it died completely, so we were able to coast down the hill to the other side and off the very first exit. The van just rolled to a stop in front of the ol’ tool and die building. We look over and we see these punk rockers loading drum kits and guitar amps into this building, so we started loading our equipment too. This woman stopped us and she was like, “Who are you?” And we were like, “We’re the Butthole Surfers.” “You’re not playing here.” We started crying. “We’ve got no money, we’ve got no food, we’ve got no place to stay, we have no place to play.” And she said, “Okay, you can play three songs.”
We were given three songs, and the Dead Kennedys showed up at the show. They weren’t on the bill or anything but they showed up. Jello Biafra saw our three songs and immediately signed us to Alternative Tentacles. So we went from a broken down van to a record deal. You talk about random and stupid—that’s as random and stupid as it gets.
It’s almost like a cartoon, this entire story.
After the show, our van still had problems but I was able to get it started and we drove about two blocks away where it died again on railroad tracks. We said fuck it and slept on the railroad tracks that night. I kept thinking that we’d get hit by a train and that we were gonna die but it was like, oh well. Every once in a while a cop car would drive by and shine a spotlight out at us and I’d wave and say help. They’d say, “We’ll be back later.” And I was thinking… no, you won’t be back later.
How long were you in San Francisco? I know the Alternative Tentacles releases were recorded in Austin.
We probably hung out a couple of weeks in San Francisco and then our drummer and his brother, who was the bass player, decided they couldn’t take it anymore and wanted to go back to San Antonio. We went back there and parted ways, but we had a record deal so me and Gibby talked this local studio into letting us record there with the promise that Alternative Tentacles would pay them. Gibby and I, as a two-piece, were living in the tool shed by the studio. We’d play there by day and sneak in there by night to record some more.
We were trying to talk people into playing drums. Eventually King Coffey ended up joining the band during the making of the first record. There’s one song called “Hey” and we were gonna record it, but all of a sudden a guy off the street comes in. He was a short guy with bell bottom pants and platform shoes and mutton chops. He said, “Hey, I’m a drummer from New York and I heard all the noise. Can I play on a song?” And we said sure. We showed him the song but he needed to record everything one at a time. He started with the hi-hat and then the kick drum and then the snare drum. And then when he was done, he said thanks and walked out the door and I never saw him again. I never even knew the guy’s name, and he’s on our album. It was just one of those things that worked out for us in the end.
I wanted to ask about that release. You have the song, “The Shah Sleeps in Lee Harvey’s Grave” and then you have the cover art. Were these things in the lineage of your zine, Strange VD, which had images of medical ailments? I know you also had clothes and stuff with Lee Harvey’s face on them.
The year before me and GIbby started playing music together, we went out to Venice Beach in Los Angeles and decided to earn a living by making Lee Harvey Oswald t-shirts, pillowcases, and bedsheets. We’d sell a few and then take the profits to buy beer. We did that for a while and we met some chicks and then we came back to San Antonio, and then about a year later was when we started playing as a band. So Gibby had this book of tropical diseases and that was a source of art for us for our first EP and first two full-length albums, Psychic... Powerless... Another Man’s Sac (1984) and Rembrandt Pussyhorse (1986).
What was the appeal of all this?
Back then, people weren’t making stupid album covers. There was disco and there was punk rock of course but it was cool and had serious pictures that were black and white. And then we had a picture of a man with a massive growth on his leg or whatever. It was just stupid. Strange VD only had one issue and it had our own names and descriptions—it was all juvenile. One day, Gibby was using the copy machine at work to make the pages of the magazine. He left a page in the copy machine and that was it—it was over.
That kind of worked out, though, because there was only thing you guys could do—which was to be this band and commit to it.
We were good at burning our bridges. We had no option but to go down the path that we started, no matter what. We were very lucky.
What was it like recording the material that ended up on the first self-titled EP? Do you have any memories of being at The B.O.S.S. studio in San Antonio and recording in that space?
Oh yeah. I didn’t know anything about the recording process or microphones or tape machines or recording discs, so I got a pretty good rudimentary education about what these things were. They had this really expensive mic that they cherished, but at any other studio it would’ve been their piece of shit microphone (laughter). Because we were sneaking in at night when they were gone, we got to be hands-on with the equipment and learn how to hit record on the tape machine and how to channel things through the desk and know what the patch bay did. It was really fun.
I wanted to ask about Live PCPPEP (1984). What was it like to revisit this live recording? Are there specific things that you see in these performances that you’re able to reflect on? Like, “Oh, this is back when we did things this way. We wouldn’t have done that later on.” Are there things that feel very emblematic of those early times?
I remember when we made those early records, I wanted to sound like a good band. But we were not a good band. We had cheap instruments and we were recording through cheap microphones onto cheap tape machines onto used tape that somebody else had thrown away. When it was all said and done, it wasn’t what I really wanted it to sound like but it was what we had, so we went with it. We had a song on an early album that was recorded at B.O.S.S. studios called “Creep in the Cellar.” I remember that we didn’t have it all planned out. We had piano and drums and vocals and we recorded them on the multitrack tape, which was used tape that some country western band had used at the studio but had not paid their bill. At one point, we were trying to play it back but there was this damn backwards fiddle track that we couldn’t turn off, but by the time we did, we were like, “Wait a second, that actually sounds really good.” It followed the chord progression and it was haunting and we left it there.
Jello signed you guys. Did he ever give advice or talk to you about what to do with the band? What were your interactions like with him during the early days of Butthole Surfers?
I remember he came to visit us in San Antonio when we were making the album. He was a big rock star to us—I loved the Dead Kennedys. I had my dad’s Suburban that he loaned us and we drove him to the lake with our girlfriends to go skinny dipping. On the way back, I was driving down the highway and the next thing you know, there’s a family in a station wagon next to us. I look over to see children with these horrified looks on their faces. I look behind me and Jello Biafra’s got his ass out the window and he’s pulling his ass cheeks open as far as he can. That shocked me a little bit.
Later that night we were driving around and the studio was in a very poor part of town. We were drinking beer and Jello Biafra took his empty beer bottle and threw it against the windshield of an old Cadillac that was parked on the street. He smashed the windshield. He thought it was funny and I just remember thinking it was horrible. If it was a rich neighborhood that’d be one thing—they’d have insurance and it’d be an inconvenience—but in a neighborhood like that, somebody’s Cadillac would be their pride and joy. It haunts me to this day that I was a part of that.
Did that play a part in getting you off the label and signing to Touch and Go?
We had a couple of EPs out with Alternative Tentacles and I remember I was talking with someone who was running it, it might’ve been Mike Vraney. I asked if we were gonna get paid for the records and he was like, “We were gonna pay you but we needed the money to finance the next Dead Kennedys record.” And I was like, “Wait a minute, the Butthole Surfers are financing the Dead Kennedys? That’s not what I signed up for.” So that was the end of it for me.
Oh god, that’s bad.
(laughs). Welcome to the record business. There’s nothing fair at all. When that stuff happens, you gotta let it roll off your back and feel lucky to be doing what you’re doing. You’ll get ripped off but ultimately you’re going to win. Once you get into music and get kicked around awhile, you either have to adapt or you’re never gonna get along. People say, “Oh it’s so unfair.” Yeah, dude, the whole thing’s unfair. If you want fair, go get a job.
You mentioned earlier that you borrowed your dad’s car. Were your parents really supportive of you and being in the band before you got super successful? Were they musical people themselves?
No, my dad was a schoolteacher and a part-time accountant and my mother was a schoolteacher. My dad was supportive—he bought me my first three guitars. And he was cool about everything. I know he didn’t like the Butthole Surfers but he never said anything. My mother was more outspoken. I think she eventually took all of my pictures down that were in their house and refused to talk about me to anybody. Bless her heart. She passed away in ’96 just as we had our first hit song.
I wanted to ask about Psychic... Powerless... Another Man’s Sac. You had the first EPs, and now this is your debut LP and you’re on a new label. And you had experience with recording at a studio too. Did you have specific goals with this release? What was going through your mind during the recording process?
There was not much going through anybody’s mind (laughter). We were not a thought-process band at all, we had no goals or objectives. We were a band and bands had to have records and I didn’t care if it sucked because we were gonna do it anyways.
Were there specific songs on the album that were hard to make? I ask because I’m wondering if you just went into the studio and just shit these songs out.
Yeah, we shit ‘em out. We didn’t have much time. I think our first EP was recorded and mixed in two days or something like that. Then we started making our first LP but that was so sporadic and we had PCPPEP that filled in the gap. There was no plan.
That’s interesting to me. Do you look fondly on these albums as specific statements at all? You’re framing these records as things you just had to do as bands, but is there any attachment you have to the first two LPs?
When we signed last year to Matador Records to release all this back catalogue, we had all these tapes in the storage. There were multitrack tapes and mixtapes and there were missing tapes, and I was the one who was tasked with going through everything and getting the best of everything I could come up with. At first, listening to these old songs again was really depressing. I didn’t know if I could do it. All I could think of was the hard times we were going through, and I didn’t want to relive that. It was painful. After a while, when I was getting the things to sound a little better, to sound more tolerable, it was kind of fun. It’s easier now to listen to the back catalogue than it was a year ago.
Can you paint a picture of how hard it was for you guys as a band? Are there instances that can convey how dire things got?
I remember we were in San Francisco once. There was this place called The Vats and it was this old abandoned beer brewery and it got taken over by punk rockers who used jackhammers to jackhammer holes into the sides of the concrete beer vats. And they would move in and establish homes in these things. We went to visit, and I didn’t have the energy to go from the van to The Vats, and everyone else in the band had enough energy to go in and hang with people. I stayed in the van and laid down in the back. I look under the seat and there was a saltine cracker in a cellophane wrapper. I remember thinking—food. I remember eating that saltine cracker and feeling so much better. I never felt that much better from a cracker in my life.
Given how tough everything was, did you or Gibby or King ever think about getting out of the band and doing something else?
With Gibby and King and I, no. Like I said, we lost the drummer and his brother who was the bass player, and we went through a string of bass players, and people couldn’t take it. Jeff Pinkus was in the band but eventually he couldn’t take it. It’s just not easy, and if there’s something else you can do, it’s so tempting to just do that. None of us had anything that could rescue us from what we were doing, so we had to see it out.
You guys released multiple LPs throughout the ’80s, and you mentioned how when you went into the studio, you didn’t really treat each album as a grand project. Even then, do you see a progression from how the Butthole Surfers grew from Psychic to Rembrandt to Locust Abortion Technician (1987) to Hairway to Steven (1988)?
At one point, we figured out that we didn’t have enough money to go into a studio long enough to fulfill our dreams. This was about when we were going to make Locust Abortion Technician, which didn’t have a name at the time. We were living out in the country in Winterville, Georgia outside of Athens. We got a hold of an ancient 1” 8-track tape machine that had tube electronics. We bought two microphones and the tape machine stood about seven feet tall. It was massive. You could plug the microphones straight into the back of the machine and we were free to do whatever we wanted without the fear of a studio bill.
We were just doing dumb stuff. I had a handheld tape recorder and we went and recorded the cows down the street. Everyone was asleep and there was a transistor radio I turned on and all of a sudden there was a woman who had a bad dream, and so I had to hit record on the tape machine and record her and make a song around it. And for another song called “Graveyard,” I wrote a riff on the bass guitar where all the strings were tuned to the same note. I wanted guitar on it and Gibby is the most influential guitar player on me, and that’s because he’s so funny when he plays. I knew better than to ask him to play because that would’ve been hard, so I just set up a guitar amp and plugged the guitar in and mic’d it up and left it sitting there. I sat in the other room with the tape machine and waited for him to come by. He eventually did, picked it up, and started playing it. I pressed record and he wasn’t even listening to the song he was recording to; it was just him farting around. And it was so awful that it was great.
I do think your music is humorous beyond any visual aspect or text—it’s there in the music, too. Do you think you’re able to articulate the reasons why his guitar playing is humorous? And are there other guitar players who others didn’t see as humorous that you understood as such? I ask this because humor is such a big part of your life, even before Butthole Surfers.
There was one other humorous guitar player and it was Roy Clark, but of course he was a spectacularly talented musician. He was funny but it was no joke at all. It was great watching him play because you could tell he was entertaining himself as much as anybody else. Gibby was like that but he didn’t have the talent, and I respected that a lot. I’ve been listening to the old tapes and I just got back from mixing a live album that we recorded in New York in 1992 and there’s a couple songs where Gibby’s playing guitar and I’m like, holy fucking cow, this guy is great. What he’s doing is so perfect and pure. There’s no screw up because there’s nothing to screw up. I kind of doubled down on my respect for him as a guitar player when mixing this.
How do you feel like he influenced you in your guitar playing?
I just wanted to imitate his style. It just amused me that you could play something so bad and it would be so good. I wasn’t talented myself. I knew chords and I knew how to play and that kind of stuff, but there was nothing more fun than playing a horrible, rotten riff and then having something even more rotten going over it. It was almost like, “Okay, you want to buy this album? Here’s your punishment.” (laughter).
Was this something you wanted to do intentionally? Was it a goal to offend or antagonize or rile people up?
It was more about punishing people (laughter). Like, “Look at you. You act like you like this crap? Are you out of your mind?” (laughter).
Did you guys try to up the ante in terms of how you tried to punish people?
I think Locust Abortion Technician was the pinnacle of that. I don’t know about the rest of the band but I personally became a little self-deluded into thinking that I was a rock star and that I needed to do more rock star stuff and make more realistic stuff. I kind of pursued that for a little while.
Is Locust Abortion Technician your favorite Butthole Surfers album then because of what it represents?
Probably so. There’s a few moments on Rembrandt Pussyhorse where it got out there. Like, we weren’t even trying but it turned out so good.
Yeah, I love “Waiting for Jimmy to Kick” and how that’s sort of like a no wave jam, and then right after you have the organ just playing on “Strangers Die Everyday.” There’s just a lack of care of what’s going on, but in a good way.
You just nailed it. That’s it. It was a lack of care.
But then it ends up sounding interesting because of this spontaneity and variety. Like, you have “In the Cellar” and “American Woman” that sound like Public Image Ltd. because of the drums.
It’s neat that you mention Public Image because I loved them. Do you remember that they had a bootleg album called Nubes (1979)?
I don’t know about it.
It sounded like it was recorded in a gas station bathroom (laughter). It’s like you could hear the tile walls and it was really one of the most awful sounding things I had ever heard in my life, and it’s glorious. There’s all this screeching and you hear, “I wish I could die!” I loved that so much.
Were there specific influences that you guys had that shaped how you wanted the Butthole Surfers to sound? Did you guys want to sound like Nubes?
I don’t know if I ever wanted to sound like Nubes, but I think one of the reasons I ever joined the band with Gibby in the first place was because I got a copy of an early single by the Meat Puppets. An early single had these songs, “In a Car” and “Out in the Gardener,” and it sounded like a train wreck. It sounded like the three people weren’t listening to each other while playing. It was so amusing and I was like, oh we could maybe do that. And that’s what really got me picking up the guitar again. I really wanted to be like the Meat Puppets.
Oh and that’s awesome because you ended up producing Too High to Die (1994).
Oh yeah, that was a trip.
I think you started producing for other people in the early ’90s, right?
I’d been producing Butthole Surfers records before I knew that I was producing—I didn’t know what a fuckin’ producer was, but I knew that somebody had to do it, and so I did it. Towards the early ’90s, I started thinking that Butthole Surfers wasn’t gonna do it for us and I was thinking of something else down the road for me. I was like, maybe I should be one of these record producers. There was this bluegrass band in Austin called the Bad Livers that I liked a lot. They played Hendrix covers and they were really good musicians. I approached them one day and said, “If you let me produce, I’ll pay for the studio time.” And so I got ‘em into the studio and I produced an album that was on Touch and Go [1992’s Delusions of Banjer].
The Meat Puppets and I were kind of friends at that point. John Paul Jones [of Led Zeppelin] produced an album for us [1993’s Independent Worm Saloon] and after that, the Meat Puppets were looking for a producer. They had signed a major label deal. They wanted John Paul Jones to produce their record, and they asked if I could send a tape to him. I thought he would do it because I would play the Meat Puppets a lot while we were recording our album. He turned ‘em down, and then I gave them the bad news. “Sorry, John Paul Jones doesn’t wanna produce your record.” And they were like, “Well, we liked that Bad Livers album you produced, would you do it?” And that was my first paid job, producing Too High to Die (1994). And that produced a radio hit called “Backwater.”
And that was it. That radio hit was enough to get the attention of Sublime. They had a producer in David Kahne, who produced some really great stuff for them. They sent me something that I thought was a demo tape, interested to see if I would produce for them, and I heard three songs that David Kahne produced for them. I was like, “You guys don’t need me, you just need to continue doing what’s on these tapes, they sound great.” And they were like, “No, David Kahne wants to work with drum loops and we’ve got a drummer and we want to be a live rock band like the Meat Puppets, and we want you.” That turned out really great for me.
It’s funny hearing about your life because everything just seems to work out in a serendipitous way. You had the hit with Meat Puppets early on, you also had Toadies’ “Possum Kingdom,” and then you had Sublime obviously. All these things are just lining up year after year. And then of course down the line you work with bigger bands like U2. Was there something you took away from producing for other bands that you took away for yourself as a musician, that you’ve incorporated into your own work?
I learned a lot. When I was working with the Meat Puppets, I remember going into a studio in Memphis, TN and it was a gymnasium that was turned into a recording studio. I was a huge Meat Puppets fan and everything they did was gold to me. They’d record a version of a song and I’d be like, “That’s great! It’s done!” At one point the drummer looks over and says, “You know, the record label’s not gonna accept that, right? We’re gonna need lyrics they can understand.” And that was a little shocking. Like, “You mean we have to do those vocals again?” And so that was a little bit of a learning curve for me there because it worked out well. Because when the Meat Puppets go (garbled singing) that’s fine with me. That’s a wrap (laughter).
Did you feel sad that you had to think about the approval of record labels and what could be “successful”? Is that something you had to wrestle with?
That was wrestling, alright. I remember the record label would send the A&R person down to the studio for the mixing and we’d be sitting in the control room. The A&R person would say, “I think that hi-hat’s a little too loud, can you turn it down?” And I’d say, “Stuart, turn the hi-hat up.” (laughter). I didn’t know that they would control your life and everything about it. I didn’t give a shit what anybody thought. I only cared about what I thought and what the Meat Puppets thought. And when it came down to record for Capitol Records, I was not ready for the big game at all (laughs).
What sort of things happened there?
We made the record with John Paul Jones and I had so much love and respect for him. If he told me to jump off a cliff to make a song better, I would’ve done it. Then we worked with Steve Thompson for the next album, Electriclarryland (1996), and that ended up with a radio hit and went gold and we were in Hollywood and they called us to the Capitol building to celebrate. We went to Gary Gersh’s office and they made us wait for 45 minutes while he had a meeting or something. He invites us into this room with all these record executive stiffs in there and I’m just standing around like I’m at the wrong party. I was feeling pretty stupid. At one point, Gary Gersh walks up to me and introduces himself and says, “Hi, I’m Gary Gersh, I just want you to know that I really respect what you do.” And I was thinking, wow, I was having bad feelings about this guy but that’s pretty cool. But then five minutes later, he walks up to me again and goes, “Hi, I’m Gary Gersh, I just want you to know that I really respect what you do.” (laughter). I was like, (sarcastically) “Oh, I can tell.”
From that point on, I was all about antagonizing Gary Gersh. I remember he wanted to use one of our songs for a movie, Hellboy (2004) or something like that. I was always saying no to Gary Gersh. It didn’t matter if it was a good idea or a bad idea, I just liked saying no to him. I had no business talking with the guy at all. Eventually he got tired of our crap and decided that he wanted to wreck our career by not putting out our next record or doing anything. That was a really dark period for us. I learned a lot about record labels in those years.
What specific things did he do to make sure your lives were miserable?
We had an album in the bag and they were gonna put it out. They were sending out promo copies. But then they had enough of everything and just dropped us. We were left with a record that we couldn’t put out ourselves. They still owned us. And we couldn’t sign to somebody else, we couldn’t put it out ourselves, we couldn’t do anything. There were a few years where we could play live shows but couldn’t record, and that was tough.
What did you guys do during that time?
We played a show and got sued. There was a show in Corpus Christi, TX where a kid got injured on the blanket toss. They were tossing people up and down in the air. He fell on the ground and hurt his head and was bleeding out of his ear and they took him to the medical tent, and a couple weeks later I get a phone call. “The kid died and his parents are suing you.” I was devastated. It was my nightmare come true. I never signed up to be a part of some kid’s death. And I said, “That’s it, I’m never playing again. I’m not gonna play another fuckin’ note.”
We were insured and everything, but then next thing you know there’s depositions with lawyers and there’s video cameras recording everything and there are people trying to rip us and make us look bad. And then we learn, “No, he didn’t actually die, he’s actually a vegetable and his parents have to change his diaper.” Well, that didn’t make me feel much better. And then we’re still doing depositions, and then I hear, “Well, he’s fine, he’s not in a diaper. In fact, he took his SAT again and scored even better than he did the first time.”
What had happened was that he had taken ecstasy before the show, and the thing is that if you take ecstasy and take a brain scan, the scan shows brain damage even if there isn’t any. He was suing us because he couldn’t remember the name of his favorite football player from when he was a kid. At that point, I wanted to fucking kill the guy myself. Motherfucker. I just had the worst three months of my life and it was all foolishness. Their lawsuit went nowhere. That was the kind of life experience I had while Capitol had their thumb on us.
That’s crazy. I did want to ask, while we’re talking about major record labels, about Daniel Johnston’s Fun (1994). That was for Atlantic. What was that whole process like?
I had known Daniel for years at that point. I was comfortable working with him and I knew what he was about. What I didn’t know was what the record company was about. I was working with a fella named Yves Beauvais at Atlantic who was in charge of their “special recordings,” and Daniel was their special recording. Yves was a big fan of Daniel as well but he had his own vision of what he wanted Daniel to sound like.
I took my recording equipment to Daniel’s parents’ house in Waller, TX and set up in their garage. We were recording there and when we were doing vocals I’d have to unplug the meat freezer, which made a bunch of noise. His parents were as gracious and sweet as they could be. They even left town and left me alone with Daniel for like a week. That was very trusting of them. It was up to me to see to it that he took his medicine and stuff like that, and that was a big responsibility.
It was a terrible time for Daniel. He was not reacting well to the medicine he was taking and he was shaking so much that he couldn’t really play his instrument. He had trouble writing the lyrics, he had trouble reading the lyrics. I remember struggling to get lyrics finished for a song. We had been trying for days and it was like, “Oh it’s almost done, we’ve almost got a take!” And then 10 seconds before the end of the song I hear this slurping sound and I look over and he’s drinking from a Big Gulp. I go, “Daniel, you were almost done!” “Well, I was thirsty!” (laughter). Bless his heart. That was a wonderful experience.
Then we get to the mixing stage and I had all this really crazy stuff, and it was just wonderful to me. I was into crazy stuff and did crazy stuff myself, but the record label was like, “No, we can’t put this out, we’ll look like we’re exploiting a crazy person.” And, you know, you are exploiting a crazy person—it’s just this mutual exploitation where everybody benefits. And they were like, “We need a record of songs that aren’t gonna terrify people.” And so he stepped in and we ended up co-producing it. That was an interesting experience. I was still learning about the power that record labels have. They’ll leave you alone when they want to, but when they don’t want to… they don’t.
With Capitol, for Independent Worm Saloon, they had no idea what to do with us. No one there knew what to come in and tell us. They just left us to our own devices. And then we go to record Electriclarryland with Steve Thompson and they still didn’t know what to do with us and left us alone. Suddenly we’ve got a #1 record with “Pepper,” and that’s all cool and everything but the next thing you know, there’s a line around the block of people from the label telling us what to do and how we were gonna do it. They didn’t care until we became successful, and then they wanted to tell us how to do and be? Go fuck yourself. I’ll take a shit and record that and you can put that out. I thought I had that kind of leverage, but I didn’t.
What was your thought process when “Pepper” had become a hit? You went through Butthole Surfers shitting music out, you thought the music was dumb, you wanted to punish people. You mentioned that you wanted to have actual songs as you got further into the band, so what was it like when you had a massive single?
It was very surreal. We finished recording “Pepper” and during that process, we recorded it at Bearsville Studios in New York, which was a really fun experience. When we finished the recording, we mixed it in Steely Dan’s studio in Manhattan, and that was a trip because it’s like, wow, Steely Dan is one of the most awesome and legitimate bands that ever lived, and we were basking in the glory of their studio while Steve Thompson of Guns N’ Roses fame is working with us, and he’s a masterful producer. Gibby had no interest in hanging around the studio. He’d do it for a little while and then off he’d go.
So we made “Pepper,” which started out with my guitar riff, and then it turned into a drum loop and then Gibby added vocals and then he walked away. Steve Thompson wanted to juice it up so he hired Mark Eddinger to come in and add some parts. And I was hanging out with Steve and we were all working on this song and crafting it together and having a really good time. We were like, wow, this is actually something. And when it’s all said and done, Gibby comes into the studio and he hates it. It was like, dude, this is the wrong time to hate it—you should’ve come in two weeks ago and hated it. We would’ve done something else.
After we recorded that, that’s when I produced Sublime. And then we go on tour, and then “Pepper” comes out as a single and it’s on the charts. I say, “Okay Gibby, it’s on the charts, you happy with that song now?” “No.” And then the next thing you know, “Hey Gibby, it’s in the Top 20.” “No.” “Top 10” “No.” “It’s #5.” “No.” “It’s #2.” “No.” “It’s #1 now, what do you think?” And he says, “It should’ve been #½.” It was pretty funny, we cracked up over that real good. But it was really surreal. I was coming to grips with that, and then the Sublime album comes out and as “Pepper” starts drifting back down on the charts, Sublime started drifting up, and they kind of intersected each other somewhere in the Top 10. It was really strange, it didn’t even feel like this was real. And then I felt like I was invincible. I soon found out I wasn’t, but it was quite a feeling for a while.
What happened that knocked you down a peg?
Getting dropped from Capitol because I was a dick. That’ll come crashing down real quick. And then there was the lawsuit and all that stuff. The record business will humble anybody and everybody at some point.
We were talking about Daniel Johnston earlier. Tour most recent album, Born Stupid (2021), was released on Shimmy. And I know that label had his album 1990 (1990). What was it like to have another solo album decades after the first one? What was it like to work with this label?
When it started out, I wanted another Butthole Surfers record because I wanted a happy ending for the band. I didn’t think that what we had was a happy ending. So I started writing material and then it became obvious that we weren’t gonna have another album, and I didn’t wanna just throw that shit in the trash. I worked on it, polished it up, and I had a really good time. I did it for myself—it’s a vanity record. Not many people like that record and I don’t mind it because I like it.
I really like the title track and “Mohawk Town” in particular.
Oh those are my two favorites on there! And it’s funny because I’m real good friends with Josh Freese, who’s the drummer for the Vandals. I don’t think he was the drummer for them when “Mohawk Town” was recorded, but he was all excited to play “Mohawk Town” for the Vandals, and he did. I asked him one day, “Did you play it for ‘em? Did they like it?” (in a quiet, avoidant voice) “Oh yeah, I think so… yeah.” That was the last I ever heard of that. I guess they didn’t like it that much (laughter).
What have you been up to recently? Obviously you had these reissues and remasters. What’s 2024 been like for you?
I lose track of time. I decided that I didn’t want to produce as much anymore. I’d rather just sit in my studio and mix because I can do that at my house by myself and send emails. I worked with a fella, Gus Englehorn, and finished an album with him. I’m excited about that. It’s probably not gonna come out for another nine months.
Mostly it’s been Butthole Surfers’ back catalogue. We had all these tapes in climate controlled storage for decade, and just digging them out of the backroom… we did not keep good notes. We drew pictures and other stupid things. The first thing was getting these tapes transferred to digital so I could remix or remaster. That was quite a process; some were on multitrack, some were on a weird format, some were on a 1” 8-track, which was easy enough because we still had the 1” 8-track machine. A friend of mine, Stuart Sullivan, helped me transfer it at his studio. He’s been my favorite engineer for decades and decades. He worked on Meat Puppets with me and quite a few other things. And that’s all time consuming. You have to listen to everything and remix and remaster. It’s probably gonna be the last thing I do because I’ve got some other jobs lined up.
I’ve had a couple of major surgeries in the past couple years and there’s been a lot of chronic pain and recovery time. It knocked some sense into me. I’ve had my time as a musician and a producer and I think it’s time to just start focusing on getting well.
What sort of surgeries did you have?
I had a hip replacement. I went through chronic pain for a couple years and then broke down and got a hip replacement. It did not go well, so they had to replace the hip replacement, and that surgery is a lot gnarlier. I go under the knife and they go out to take out the old hip and they couldn’t get it out, so they try a second extraction point and they couldn’t get it out, and then they try a third extraction point and then the extractor tool broke off. They had send for a metal saw, all while I’m under anesthesia. They got it out eventually. I got a new hip in there and I’ve got titanium from my hip down to my knee. Then there was a lot of bedtime and physical therapy—it’s been a rough road from that. It’s been very painful and it’s wracked my whole body with pain and I don’t know what caused it and nobody can tell me why. There’s been a lot of pain involved and I can consider it revenge for all the fun I’ve had in life that I didn’t really deserve to have.
Why don’t you think you deserved it?
I came from parents who worked really hard and made do with not a whole lot. They made do by saving and being responsible and working hard and working late. And then I was a Butthole Surfer. I didn’t think I deserved anything that I got. I was just really lucky. And there’s good luck and bad luck (laughs).
Is there anything we didn’t talk about today that you wanted to talk about?
No, I never really think about that stuff. I’m going back to that old Dada thing. Thinking is overrated. I’m not a smart guy—you may have figured that out. I don’t have good thought processes. The more I think about things, the more trouble I get into. But no, I don’t. You’ve been a good interviewer.
I end all my interviews with the same question and I wanted to ask this to you. Do you mind sharing one thing that you love about yourself?
It would be the luck. One thing I haven’t talked about is my wife of 24 years. That was my lottery winning in life. Had I not met her, I’d probably be dead by now. She helped me turn into a responsible, normal human being. That’s why I wanted to be a stockbroker—I wanted to be normal—but it wasn’t in the cards. My wife gave me a second lease on life and now I lead a normal life and hang out with a normal family and go out to normal dinner.
It’s been 24 years? So you met her after you had gone through all these terrible things in the late ’90s?
I met her in the late ’90s. She worked in a rehearsal complex in Austin and we practiced there a lot, and when I showed up, she’d be the one who unlocked the room for us. I thought, god, that woman is so cute. Just way out of my league. And then at one point, after my first wife left me, I started hanging out with her best friend and we became good friends. And then she hooked me up with my wife. And it was just so awesome. At first I was a little reluctant, like “oh, she’s too good for me.” Like, what was I going to say? But it’s been so natural and so great, and it’s been nothing but happiness since. Well, happiness and a couple surgeries.
Thank you for reading the 136th issue of Tone Glow. I'm gonna bowl me a perfect game.
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Excellent interview but I am a but surprised you didn't ask him anything about the Surfers' legendarily transgressive live shows: they were an influence on so much performance at the time.