Butthole Surfers is an American rock band formed in San Antonio, Texas, by singer Gibby Haynes and guitarist Paul Leary in 1981. The band has had numerous personnel changes, but its core lineup of Haynes, Leary, and drummer King Coffey has been consistent since 1983. Teresa Nervosa served as second drummer from 1983 to 1985, 1986 to 1989, and 2009. The band has also employed a variety of bass players, most notably Jeff Pinkus.
Emerging from the 1980s hardcore punk scene, Butthole Surfers quickly became known for their chaotic live shows, black comedy, and a sound that incorporated elements of psychedelia, noise rock, and punk as well as their use of sound manipulation and tape editing.
Although they were respected by their peers and attracted a devoted fanbase, Butthole Surfers had little commercial success until 1996's Electriclarryland. The album contained the hit single "Pepper", which climbed to number one on Billboards Modern Rock Tracks chart that year.
History
Formation (1976–1981) Butthole Surfers formed at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas during the late 1970s, when students Gibson "Gibby" Haynes and Paul Leary Walthall (later just Paul Leary) met for the first time. Though it was their overall strangeness and shared taste in non-mainstream music that caused them to become friends, both appeared to be headed for very conventional careers. Haynes, as captain of Trinity's basketball team, as well as the school's "Accountant of the Year", soon graduated to a position with a respected Texas accounting firm, while Leary remained in school working on his MBA degree.
In 1981, Haynes and Leary published the magazine Strange V.D., which featured photos of abnormal medical ailments, coupled with fictitious, humorous explanations for the diseases. After being caught with one of these pictures at work, Haynes left the accounting firm and moved to Southern California. Leary, at the time one semester shy of his degree, dropped out of college and followed Haynes. After a brief period spent selling homemade clothes and linens emblazoned with Lee Harvey Oswald's image, the pair returned to San Antonio, and launched the band that would eventually become Butthole Surfers.
Early years (1981–1984) Haynes and Leary played their debut show at a San Antonio night club, The Bonham Exchange, in 1981; at that time, they had not yet settled on the band name "Butthole Surfers". By 1982, the band was backed by the sibling rhythm section composed of bassist Quinn Mathews and his brother, drummer Scott Mathews. The band did not gain a following in San Antonio, and purchased a van to return to California later that summer.
During a brief concert at the Tool and Die club in San Francisco, Dead Kennedys frontman and Alternative Tentacles overseer Jello Biafra witnessed their performance and became a fervent fan. Biafra invited the group to open for Dead Kennedys and T.S.O.L. at the Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles, and soon made an offer that would launch their recording career; if they could get someone to lend them studio time, Alternative Tentacles would reimburse the studio when the album was complete. The band then returned to San Antonio to record at BOSS Studios (a.k.a. Bob O'Neill's Sound Studios, a.k.a. the Boss). However, the Mathews brothers did not enter the studio with Haynes and Leary; the two had quit following a physical altercation between Scott Mathews and Haynes. The bass position was taken over by Bill Jolly, who would play on Butthole Surfers' next two releases, and a number of drummers participated. The last of these, King Coffey (born Jeffrey Coffey), is still with the band to this day.
Released on Alternative Tentacles in July 1983, the resulting EP, Butthole Surfers (also known as Brown Reason to Live and Pee Pee the Sailor), offered songs with provocatively absurd titles like "The Shah Sleeps in Lee Harvey's Grave" and "Bar-B-Q Pope", alternately sung by Haynes and Leary. (Haynes would become the band's primary singer by the time of their first LP.) The album cover, like the many bizarre illustrations that would accompany Surfers' succeeding work, was designed by the band itself. Teeming with humor, Butthole Surfers laid the foundation for what was to come. It influenced at least one future superstar in Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, who listed it as one of his ten favorite albums in his Journals. Cobain later went on to list the album "Pee Pee the Sailor" by Butthole Surfers as one of the fifty most influential albums for Nirvana's sound. Cobain would later meet his wife, Courtney Love of Hole, at a Butthole Surfers/L7 concert in 1991.