Back to School With the Butthole Surfers
They’re collaborating with teenagers now. Terrible idea. Wonderful idea.
By Michael Hoinski
Gibby Haynes is 50, but he’s still off the wall like he was in the ’80s, when he and the rest of his Butthole 
Surfers were passing off hallucinogenic-fueled performance-art shows as “music” for the likes of a young, impressionable Daniel Johnston and other Austin freaks looking to get their psych on outside of cosmic country.
“It’s a big que sera, fuckin’ Hallmark, fuckin’ Valentine’s Day, kinda fuzzy- feeling dealie,” Haynes says over the phone about the Surfers’ classic lineup—including guitarist Paul Leary, bassist Jeff Pinkus, and stand-up drummers King Coffey and Teresa “Nervosa” Taylor (the weirdo in Slacker who tries to pawn off the Madonna pap smear)—reuniting for the first time since their 2002 reincarnation at Japan’s Fuji Festival, this time for a 14-date run with the Paul Green School of Rock Music All-Stars.How ass-backwards. The Surfers are (or were, back in the day) totally X-rated. Among 
other acts of decadence, their shows featured a naked dancer named Kathleen Lynch, a/k/a “Ta-Da the Shit Lady,” whom Haynes reportedly had sex with onstage while Leary punctured the club’s speakers with a screwdriver. They used films of penis-reconstruction surgery andFaces of Death–type car wrecks as backdrops. And, of course, they got a real kick out of cross-dressing and arson, too. Meanwhile, the fact that the 2003 movie School of Rock is based on the grade-school bashers who receive tutelage at the Paul Green School of Rock Music chain (with Jack Black starring as a non-anal version of Paul himself) just about says it all. But this is of little consequence to Haynes, who insists that Surfers gigs are way tamer than in the olden days and that it’s now more or less about the music.
“It’s just really fun,” he adds of the collaboration, facilitated by fellow shtick-rock band Ween. “I mean, they’re kids, and some of ’em are really, really talented. You can see the ones who are gonna be totally fucked up when they’re older.”
Seminal Surfers albums like Psychic . . . Powerless . . . Another Man’s Sac, their 1985 debut, with its innovative tape-looping up against Haynes’s perverted, bullhorn- amplified, “Gibbytronix”-inflected gibberish, are indeed lessons in coordinated chaos lost in translation as noise. But in order to properly convey the older, borderline- improvisational hardcore-punk songs that constitute most of the Surfers’ set lists on this tour, some live theatrics are essential. That’s where Sheehan and Johnson strike again: The smoke machines, projectors, and strobe lights are part of their double-duty tour, thanks to their work in the same capacity during a string of Haynes solo shows in New York (where he relocated five years ago) that preceded this tour. “By now, we’re into a groove on how to do that,” says Johnson, who also plays in a band called the Will.