Canon in Miniature #184

Butthole Surfers Butthole Surfers

1983; Alternative Tentacles

What I’m about to say here might not make me any new friends, but it needs to be said; in 1983, hardcore punk needed a kick in the ass unlike any other genre. Like its parent genre, stagnation set in quickly and the limitations of a genre whose life’s blood was to have bands play faster than their peers and deliver their lyrics more aggressively were starting to show. For every release where the results were truly inspiring and inspired there were a dozen or more that were just plain boring. The genre needed a band to come along and inject something – anything – into the genre to show that the aesthetic wasn’t simply conducive to a thousand Nervous Breakdown rehashes. The genre needed visionaries who saw its potential. It also needed someone to take the piss out of it, because let’s face it; a lot of the earliest hardcore bands were waaaaay too self-serious. In short, no matter how much people looked down on their first EP at the time of its release, hardcore needed Butthole Surfers’ specific brand of insanity in order to progress.

Yes, I just called an album whose initial missive is a burst of feedback and the most childish parody of The Byrds’ “Turn! Turn! Turn!” before launching into a full on blast of nearly atonal hardcore an engine for progress. I’m referring to an album with a song about shooting the pope in the ass as a necessary step in hardcore’s evolution. I’m considering the album whose best song turns the exclamation ’and I ate some cheese and rice today’ into something of a chorus as a watershed moment in the history of a genre. I’m giving Butthole Surfers’ debut EP all kinds of credit, credit that on first blush it doesn’t seem to necessarily deserve, for doing something that for all I know it never set out to do. For all I know this was little more than an acid-soaked joke on punk rock from the heart of Texas, not an attempt to fuse heavy psychedelia to hardcore in an attempt to inject the genre with some much needed creative energy. The fact that both readings are equally valid and neither reading invalidates the EP on a qualitative level is probably why I find myself liking it so damn much.

See, if this is a joke, the Buttholes taking a shit in the punchbowl and watching the reaction from afar, it’s a worthy one. The joke is taking the tone and fury of a self-serious subgenre and applying it to what amounts to little more than juvenilia, then slapping together songs that sound nothing like each other and presenting it as a cohesive statement. That reading is strongest on Paul Leary’s songs here, the stop-start blast of “The Shah Sleeps in Lee Harvey’s Grave,” the saxophone meets Flipper epic “Something” and the gleefully blasphemous “Bar-B-Que Pope,” but Gibby Haynes’ cuts are just as gleefully pointless despite sounding a bit more polished, and the closing Black Flag pisstake “The Revenge of Anus Presley” is the most obvious nod to the fact that this isn’t a release to be taken too seriously. If it’s joke, then it’s genius by accident and all the more compelling for it.

If the intent was more serious though, and given how much the band would push in this direction on their subsequent albums I’m thinking it was (or at least they realized that they stumbled upon something worth continuing with,) the delivery as a joke is key to its success. You can listen to this EP without thinking and get a shitload out of it – cheap laughs, the occasional moment of hilarious guitar molestation – but if you look at it more critically it becomes clear that beneath the piss-take the band knew what they were doing. “Something” is probably the best example of what I’m talking about here; on the surface it sounds like a misshapen beast with little more than a static pulse and some weird sax/guitar duet for a chorus, but over the course of its five minute running time the misshapenness becomes hypnotic, and that chorus winds up sounding truly exciting. Plus Paul Leary – an underrated guitarist in the grand scheme of things by the by – adds in some truly loopy guitar riffs that contrast nicely with the more leaden pulse of the song itself. It’s a truly special song, not quite perfect but slowly develops into the most noteworthy track on the EP, and when its competition is as good as Gibby Haynes’ psych/dark-pop/noise hybrid ”Hey” – the one time that Haynes’ really sounds like he’s found his groove on this EP, sadly, though “Wichita Cathedral” is a nice oddity and “Suicide” might be the best of the album’s straight hardcore tracks – and the masterful opening salvo of “The Shah Sleeps in Lee Harvey’s Grave” that’s not exactly faint praise. [8.3]