Wow. It's not easy to describe a 20-year-old band with album names like Locus Abortion Technician and Hairway to Steven. Trying to sum up a group that has been pigeonholed as everything from acid-fueled metal to jazz to industrial; a band that has collaborated at one time or another with every industry outsider from noise gurus Ministry and offshoot Revolting Cocks to trailer park rapper Kid Rock is like summing up current world politics in one sentence. In a word: impossible.
The first time I ever saw the Butthole Surfers - art-punk impresarios whose sonic weirdness rivals even Ween - was during Perry Farrel's 1991 Lollapallooza tour stop in Cleveland. I was just a kid then - OK, I was 18 - but I remember thinking "what on earth is this caterwaulling?" as vocalist Gibby Haynes, guitarist Paul Leary and drummer King Coffey shook the black-clad crowd with searing feedback and unintelligible lyrics.
Though they still claim legions of art-rock fans from the Sonic Youth, Big Black and Minutemen era, the Butthole Surfers' sound has morphed over the years to something that's almost palettable by the masses. Hey, you can even dance to the beat-heavy tracks of their new album Wierd Revolution!
Actually, you could have danced, and may still, to the Austin, Texas, based band's unlikely but infectuous 1996 breakthrough radio hit "Pepper," from Electriclarryland. The single brought the band, which was adored for its commercial innaccessibility, its first taste of success but alienated many hardcore Butthole Surfers fans.
Wierd Revolution, the Surfers' first album in four years, continues the band's exploration into hip-hop territory that began with Electriclarryland - imagine a cross between the eerie sampling and often painful noise of Negativeland and the haunting background trip hop of Portishead.
Coffey says in a release that the album reflects the band member's shifting musical interests.
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"I haven't been listening to much rock," he said. "I was more into jungle and break-beat, the DJ culture. Collectively we were all fascinated by computers."
The album's much ballyhooed first single, "The Shame of Life," has raised a few eyebrows in the underground music community - it was cowritten by Haynes and Kid Rock.
"It seems like everybody is saying, 'So Kid Rock wrote this song,'" he said. "And I'm like, 'No, he didn't. We wrote it. Lets see, he wrote 24 words of the chorus, and I wrote 40. So I wrote 40/64ths, which is 5/8ths. I wrote 5/8ths of the chorus and all the verses."
Though not as memorable as "Pepper," "Shame's" trance-ish hip-hop sound and vocals that alternate between Kid Rock's canned beer drawl and Haynes' growl will probably bring a few crossover rap-rock fans into the fold. It's sort of hard to imagine how the Buttholes were able to justify singing the refrain to Rock's cheesy chorus. A sampling:
Rock: "I love the girls and the money and the shame of life/ My shallow mind's just a sign of your game of life."
And Haynes' refrain: "There were girls in the front and there were girls in back/ And there was girls pettin' squirrels and there was squirrels smokin' crack/ With an old navy seal and the DEA and the loaded automatic just to blow me all away/ With the dog drinkin' liquor from the hole in the sky, and the picture of the picture that pitches at a guy, he had problem with his sister and the 3D cops, and a brother with a shovel just to shake it all up."
But I guess that's par for the course for a band that relies mostly on bizzare soundbytes and even a rehashed Malcom X speech to drive this album. Nothing would surprise me from a band that writes a catchy pop song reminiscent of that annoying Filter hit "Airlplane" about raining missiles onto Beiruit ("Jet Fighter").
The Butthole Surfers, with new bassist Nathan Calhoun will bring their weird, noisy world to the Sunshine Theater, at 120 Central Ave. SW, Friday. Electronica cutup Kid 606 is the opening act. For more information, call the Sunshine at 764-0249.
