NOW I’M NOT AFRAID TO DIE: PASSING THE ACID TEST WITH THE BUTTHOLE SURFERS
- Bernard Zuel
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
A DOCUMENTARY ABOUT A RIOTOUS, flagrantly provocative, musically adventurous and chemically volatile band, who had more bassplayers than Spinal Tap have had drummers, led by “a total agent of chaos”, as one famous fan, Flea of Red Hot Chili Peppers, describes him, not surprisingly comes with some warning.
And I don’t necessarily mean those accompanying this particular one, that “the film contains content some viewers may find disturbing, … including strobes, drug use, nudity, puppet nudity, puppet violence, exploding toys, underwater photography, loud music, and regret”. Though it’s always good to see puppet violence foreshadowed for anyone still scarred by the Punch & Judy scene in G.I. Blues, with Elvis Presley singing the truly awful Wooden Heart. But I digress.
I have in mind a very specific one here when it comes to the story of Texas’ own The Butthole Surfers, a movie which begins with first a long-haired middle-aged man in Brooklyn surrounded by tools of art and music, then cuts to a less hirsute middle-aged man “somewhere in Texas” riding a bike in dayglo smiley top who describes himself as ”an old man that looks like I should be working at the hardware store”. And he’s not wrong.
Now, I’m not assuming anything about any of you good citizens reading this, but let’s just say, that for certain people of a certain age with a certain disposition and certain habits in their youth, watching this film has the potential to bring on not just acid flashbacks, but acid flashbacks of the bad, maybe even the worst, trips experienced.
Filmmaker Tom Stern accepts this blame. And knows the feeling.
“As Dean Ween says, The Butthole Surfers were experts in bad trip vibes,” he says with a smile, before adding ruefully. “I had a terrible trip at a Butthole Surfers concert. Mostly I had good trips, and I did take a lot of psychedelics, as most of the audience did in the ‘80s – coz they were kind of our post-punk Grateful Dead – [but] one time I lost my mind. It was in New York City, it was at the Cat Club, and I made it about two minutes into the beginning of [frontman and aforementioned gent among the paints and machinery] Gibby Haynes doing his ‘Gibbytronics’ vocal loops, a spoken word collage of Gibby’s distorted vocals slowed down, pitched up, very disorienting. I was like, ‘oh my god I need fresh air’.
“Next thing you know I’m hugging the beefy leg of the bouncer in front of the club saying, ‘please can I stay here?’. By the end of the trip, I’d overcome my fear of death. I’m not even kidding, it was a profound experience – I thought I was dying. The Butthole Surfers ushered me into this eight hour simulacrum of death and by the end of it I was traumatised, but then I was like, that’s what it’s like to die, so now I am not really afraid to die.”
Welcome to The Butthole Surfers. Welcome to Stern’s Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth And Nothing Butt.
The band’s journey begins in the late ‘70s as a kind of platonic love story between Haynes, the tall, charismatic, academically gifted sports star with a future at a big accounting firm who wanted out, and Paul Leary, now the bike-riding man in the hardware store but then the withdrawn guitar-playing Catholic “Mom raised to be a gentleman”, who wanted in, but never was, no matter how far he got with his MBA.
Making art as performance and freak rock as an invitation in San Antonio, Austin, briefly LA, then longer stays in San Francisco and Atlanta before going back to Texas, they were, in Leary’s words, “unfit for polite society”. And yet they had a brief, late-career flowering as a post-grunge mainstream success, produced by John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin, with famous friends/hangers-on like Johnny Depp. I know right, the ‘90s were odd.
How is it that a band that could be the definition of a bad trip experience survive for so long and have people care that they existed?
“I think it was a magnificent exploration of what art can do. The Butthole Surfers were so experimental, they didn’t have the self-censorship that most bands do. Most bands would have some point where they would say, we can’t do that; The Butthole Surfers were like, let’s do that,” Stern says. “So it was more like a rite of passage than a rock ‘n’ roll concert, and I think rites of passage are very valuable and, you know, pretty intense. We talk in the film about how, in a way, it has a precursor in ancient Greece where they had bachanals, which were complete back to a primal state: sex, wine, throw inhibition out the door, and go with your primal urges. And that serves a purpose. In my case, it was a life changing experience, and I think a lot of people would say The Butthole Surfers’ concerts were life changing experiences.”
Mixing rough home-made films, live footage Stern shot himself as an NYU film student, surreal puppet interludes and more recent interviews – featuring particularly their twin drummers and outsiders in their own way, King Coffey and Teresa Nervosa – The Hole Truth is on one hand, hardly conventional, as befits the band.
“As Frank Kozik, the artist who did a lot of the posters said, for about an hour, an hour and a half [when Butthole Surfers played], the laws of the universe changed,” Stern says. “The combination of music, visual effects, performance art, the naked dancer with foil on her teeth – all the cognitive dissonance, all the strange juxtapositions between beautiful and ugly and horrific and funny, were hitting so many different buttons on the emotional keyboard that it scrambled your brains.”
But on the other hand, as a filmmaker, approaching a band that aimed for disturbance, that regularly threatened to fall apart – though musically, they rarely did – and whose impact was in good measure visceral, there was a challenge to make a film that can be understood by people who not only weren’t there, but who would probably not be on the same, ahem, astral plane as a younger Stern.
“That was a central dilemma,” he concedes. “I’m immersed in their aesthetic, I understand their aesthetic, and we tried a lot of stuff. I tried visual effects and different styles of editing, conceptual twists and with structural experiments, but at the end of the day I found a chronological telling of the story worked best.
”I thought, do we really want to be that straight ahead, because I wanted to honour the anarchy and irreverence of the band, but at the end of the day you have to make your peace with the fact that this is a different form. The idea of keeping it mysterious, like they did, would be a mistake. We needed to demystify them in order to tell the human story.”
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Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth And Nothing Butt screens on September 12, as part of Sydney Underground Film Festival at Dendy Newtown, running September 11-14.
Find the full program, times and tickets at www.suff.com.au