BY MICHEAL CORCORAN
CAN REMBRANDT'S PUSSYHORSE DO THE DOG?
It's such a blue-veined movie that bands have been playing off the image and content of Apocalypse
Now ever since it came out. Visually, P.I.L's "Flowers Of Romance" video did it best, and the Clash
got a great song from Robert Duval's line, "Charlie don't surf. It's been done. So I clutched onto no
delusions of originality when I started having Apocalypse Now thoughts about the Butthole Surfers.
I knew it was an obvious idea. But that didn't make it go away.
My apocalyptic visions of the Butthole Surfers started at July's Woodshock 86 festival featuring 20
or so Austin bands and a few from out of town. Framed by jutting cliffs with wild foliage melting into
green ponds a discus throw away from the stage, the setting was not as different than Coppola's Cam
bodia as you'd expect. When the psychedelics kicked in, the Butthole Surfers led off with eerie guitar
meanderings, which lept headfirst into four-armed thunderdrops and bullhorned pleading. Gnawing
through my unconscious were the fireworks of death reflecting off the soldiers deperately swimming
out to Martin Sheen's boat as he left the last US, outpost. Like Apocalypse Now, the Butthole Surfers.
hit you in a psychic region that their medium usually forsakes for more acceptable locales. "Do Not
Disturb" is not only an order placed on hotel room doorknobs. It's an edict that rules the diversion biz
as well. But the movie about Vietnam (but not really) and the hardcore group (if you had to label them)
went ahead and disturbed away, and have met with success.
The Apocalypse/Butthole analogy also involves similarities in plot. Col. Kurtz was a brilliant officer
with a very promising military future. But he changed in radical ways, discarding his previous existence,
bucking the chain of command and leading his loyal charges into Cambodia where he did things his
own way. Similarly, singer Gibby Haynes of the Buttholes, the son of kiddie show host Mr. Peppermint.
was an A student and record-setting basketball star at Lake Highlands High School in Dallas. He graduated
with honors from Trinity College of San Antonio and was named Accountant of the Year his senior year.
He took a job with the prestigious accounting firm of Peat, Marwick and Mitchell and was well on his
way to the "house with the white picket fence," which he would customize by painting alternate pickets
red in honor of his father. With the Good Life in clear view on the horizon, Gibby Haynes dropped out.
He joined up with his Trinity pal, Paul Leary, who was just one course shy of his Masters in business,
and they made awful, crude music in San Antonio art spaces. They got a bass player and a drummer
and called themselves the Ashtray Babyheads, and then the Butthole Surfers
Imagine an investigator hired by Peat, Marwick and Mitchell to find Gibby Haynes, just as the Army
sent Martin Sheen after Kurtz. See him in the Greyhound on I-35 looking over Gibby's dossier in disbelief.
First he would go through the school record, the budding accounting career, the charity work, with copies
of his awards and commendations. Then he would read about what Gibby Haynes has become. A But-
thole Surfer. The fascination with human waste. Getting ejected from Austin Coliseum for spitting on
John Lydon. The admission of drug use. Jumping onstage nude at a Sandra Bernhardt show in Houston.
Having sex onstage in New York with a woman called "Ta-Da the Shit Lady" The investigator would
look at the photo of Gibby in his high school yearbook, down on one knee, basketball cradled-the
all-American boy. And then he'd view a recent picture of Gibby wearing a bra, nurse's smock and a
hundred multi-colored clothespins in his long, dirty hair. Could this be the same guy?
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The last page in the file would contain a
transcript taken from the Butthole Surfers video
"Blind Eye Sees All" in which Gibby traces his
family history.
"Thousands of people that come before me that
are descendents of me, all down the line to where
there were worms and there were flat worms and
Chinese men that were tied to walls would show
worm movies out of their penises into the air in
apparent disgruntle and dismay and it would be
wadded up like a little girl would wad up some.
tissue after she had blown her nose and looked
in it and the horror of seeing little speckled pieces
of blood in her snot it was on that rag that she
had wadded up and she threw it away knowing
that was her life in there and that her life would
never be the same because the world was divid-
ed up into four parts. There was the Maggus, the
Tutor, the Fangkor and the Doria. And the Doria
and the Fangkor were at war with the Tutor and
the Fartols, who I haven't mentioned until this point
because they were the fifth part who were invisi-
ble and all powerful and they were beyond the
worms and beyond the Chinese men tied to the
wall who would show worm movies out of their
penises and who had originally been non-existent
at all and never knew how to make fireworks or
rifles or they never knew anyone from Saskat
chewan and they didn't know how to dial the
telephone and they had these Volkswagen buses
that they had designed like they were cathedrals
of God and they had directed all of us, all of my
relatives, the worms and the Chinese man himself.
they had travelled hundreds and thousands of
miles when they came to the sea they went under
the sea and talked to the fish and when the fish
travelled in a line there will be a little dot near their
rear end and a string will come out and I have
made a kite before and I have flown it out of the
string that I got from the dots on fishes' bottom
ends and I have flown it so high that I have been able to see the Atrustians, the Bolivians, the Artesians
and the Wallhonkers."
All the investigator wanted was a mission, and when this one was over, he'd never want another.
O LUCKY DOG
It is of friendly face, short brown hair and plump body. "This is not a fat dog." Paul contradicts the
visual testimony, "she's just got big bones." Four years ago she resided on Death Row at the San An-
tonio dog pound, with fractional hope of having her sentence commuted in the midst of all more desirable
breeds. This canine was special, as the future would bear, but the untended doggie business and non-
stop squealing had a way of rushing the inspections right past her subtle charms. A pair of Trinity Col
lege buddies didn't mind the smell. And the noise was actually kinda nice. They took their time and
saw something in the mutt who would never save the lives of children, never jump from Ed McMahon's
lap and never make paw prints in Hollywood cement. On the way home they named her Mark Farner.
The Butthole Surfers love their dog. She's a tail-wagger in a watchdog world.
Mark Farner is unaware that she is one of the Five Most Famous Dogs in America. Her masters have
shown her the color photo of them holding her above their heads in Spin and have read the passages
mentioning her in the countless Hunter Thompson daydreams which pop up in publications that put
typesetting in a category with caviar, lynx jackets and butlers, but media is invisible to dogs. Farner
just wants something to chase, something to chew, something to sniff or someone to run a hand over
her veloured finish like the girl back home who feels the crewcut of her beau just back from basic train-
ing. Dogs just wanna have fun. And the Butthole Surfers know it. That's who and what. They're fascinated
with the wheres, whens and hows. And if they knew why dogs just wanna have fun, they wouldn't be
the Butthole Surfers. And you wouldn't care
Questions of nature being unanswerable in the complete sense, the Butthole Surfers are perhaps
the most popular underground band in the world today. Their recorded products-two albums and three
EP's-are annoying, radical, distorted, ugly and unflinching. They sell enough of them that they could
live off their royalties if they didn't keep buying recording equipment. But they've always invested the
past into the future, and now have their own $30,000 recording studio. Even with such freedom and
facilities, their records will never match their live show, which is one of mankind's strangest gifts. If a
Butthole Surfers show was to be described in a sandlot football huddle, it would be, "Go out to Captain
Beefheart, cut left to Pere Ubu, wrap them in toilet
paper, then zig-zag through the Living Theatre,
rip off Howlin' Wolf, go in the alley with a Mex-
ican guy with an afro, come out twenty minutes
later and go long." They splatter sounds and
stance all over rock concert decorum like Jackson
Pollock threw paint on canvas. They don't know
why, but why not?
Since re-settling in Austin six months ago, the
Buttholes have restricted the airing of their spec-
tacle to the Houston/Dallas/ Austin/San Antonio
circuit and one-shot gigs in cities like Chicago,
New York and San Francisco, which they fly to,
do the show and then fly back to Austin. "Before
we moved into this house, we spent almost three
straight years touring in our van with no place to
come home to," Paul said from the front yard, bet-
ween rock throws at the tall glass sign naming
the drive-in theater which used to be next door.
"It's kinda nice, you know, living somewhere," he
said and then apologized for the scarcity of good
throwing rocks. "There used to be a lot more
here."
THE WIPE-A-BILLY REVIVAL
When the last big musical revolt spat its way i
out of graffiti'ed dives in late '70's, it was uncer-
tain where it would lead. The parade moved for-
ward on the pavement of its intentions, but mar-
chers dropped out due to boredom, value-shift
Swirling toilet paper art surrounds the Butthole Surfers.
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