Recorded with a single microphone and an 8-track recorder in the Butthole Surfers’ home studio in Austin, Texas, presumably with band dog Mark Farner in attendance, 1987’s Locust Abortion Technician remains a testimony to what a dedicated few can achieve in service of human depravity and bad taste. It’s always nice to run across a band that would appall John Waters.
A mutant metal masterpiece released at a time when the likes of U2, Sting, and Echo & the Bunnymen ruled the world, Locust Abortion Technician cemented the Butthole Surfers’ “acid on their morning cornflakes” reputation as a psychotic traveling three-ring circus. It’s all there on the LP’s John Wayne Gacy-inspired cover, which depicts a pair of laughing clowns and one decidedly nervous dog. The only thing more frightening than a clown is two clowns, and one can’t help but fear for the poor pooch’s safety.
The Butthole Surfers established their bona fides as post-hardcore’s most interesting case study of abnormal psychology thanks to one-time Trinity University Accounting Student of the Year Gibby Haynes’ deranged stage antics and such dada inspired classics as “The Shah Sleeps in Lee Harvey Oswald’s Grave” and “The Revenge of Anus Presley.” On Locust Abortion Technician they took a swan dive into full-blown dementia with their fusion of bad trip psychedelia and syphilitic bump and grind, defying the predictions of the mental health community that they would soon descend into incurable schizophrenia and have to be permanently institutionalized.
On Black Sabbath parody “Sweet Loaf” Paul Leary goes back and forth between a monstrous earache my eye riff and some pretty guitar blandishments while Haynes–the son of Dallas-based children’s TV host “Mr. Peppermint”–comes on like a straight-jacketed berserker in a padded echo chamber. On the two count ‘em two versions of “Graveyard,” Leary goes full distortion over the ominous drumming of King Coffey and Teresa Nervosa while Haynes does a perfect picture impersonation of the Lord of the Flies growling through a broken megaphone from the ninth circle of Hell.
“Pittsburgh to Lebanon” is as frightening as the drive that takes you from one locale to the other (believe me, I’ve done it) thanks to Leary’s slowed to gridlock guitar and Haynes’ buried under a ton of sludge vocals; I used to think he was speaking gibberish until I looked at the lyric sheet and found out he’s singing about how he bought his first shotgun at the age of three. You would think that’s illegal but I guess they do things differently in Texas. The up-tempo “Human Cannonball” sounds like the Sweet on morning glory seeds, but the most hallucinogenic thing about it is that Haynes seems to be singing about an actual human emotion–heartbreak. If there’s a joke in there someplace, I’ve yet to find it.
“U.S.S.A” sounds like a battalion of Nazi’s goose stepping in triple time; Haynes is really upset about something, and he just won’t shut up. On “The O-Men” he speaks in tongues to the accompaniment of what sounds like a lobotomized chipmunk while Leary makes the avant-garde guitar twerps in Sonic Youth sound like the effete and impudent art snobs they are. On “Kuntz” the band makes lewd use of a Thai song by Phloen Phromdaen and Kong Katkamngaeon, adding distortion and a whole lotta crude references to female genitalia while they’re at it.
The Surfers go musique concrete on “22 Going on 23,” interweaving music and found sounds to wondrous effect. Unfortunately the latter consist of phone calls to a therapy-friendly radio talk show by an anguished woman recounting an episode of sexual abuse, and call me a moralist but I think the joke’s a cruel one. I’m not much for laughing at the traumas of real people, and I can’t help but think even the demented should know when to say enough’s enough.
The Butthole Surfers celebrated a fleeting moment of pop success with the disappointingly Beck-like “Pepper” from 1996’s Electriclarryland, but I’m hardly the one to accuse other people of selling out if only because I’ve made a career of it. That said, I’ll forever prefer the Butthole Surfers who specialized in the barely bearable to the Surfers who came daringly close to the mainstream. “Hollywood,” the playwright Wilson Mizner once said, “is a trip through a sewer on a glass-bottom boat.” With Gibby Haynes at the helm the boat is going down, and there’s not a life-preserver in sight.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
