Butthole Surfers
Given they spent the last few decades plumbing new depths of
musical blandness embracing the corporate dollar, it's hard to
imagine drug-crazed Texans Butthole Surfers were ever an
underground force to be reckoned with, even feared.
But once Sonic Youth had deconstructed rock music on behalf of
punk, the Buttholes merrily pissed on the rubble, turning Black
Sabbath's Sweet Leaf into the gross-out Sweat Loaf and generally
savaging anything that remained sacred from the 60s and 70s golden
years.
Thankfully, we not only have their pre-90s catalogue to scare and
confuse our children but also the Blind Eye Sees All DVD
- a slice of visual insanity recorded over two nights at Traxx in
Detroit in 1985.
Interspersed with hilariously drug-addled interview footage and
snippets from their first ever live debacle-cum-show, the
Buttholes' sound on the DVD is a chaotic barrage of acid rock,
hardcore punk and twisted Beefheart-esque weirdness, skewed still
further by singer Gibby Haynes' electronically treated vocals,
Paul Leary's mind-altering guitar and the manic tribal thump of
dual drummers King and Theresa.
 The
Buttholes were still a way off the penis-surgery-and-hands-aflame
craziness of their late 80s peak, but Blind Eye Sees All is
an impressive testament.
Their 1987 album, Locust Abortion Technician, was
chock-full of the type of humour that should make you feel nervous
and nauseous rather than tickled.
They sampled an old Thai hunting song for Kuntz, and
the track 22 Going On 23 was actually built around a
sample of a sexually assaulted female who, according to Gibby
Haynes, was a serial caller to a radio show, and had multiple
personalities.
She called the show every night with a different problem and a
different age; claiming at various times to be a widower and a
14-year-old girl. Amid samples of bellowing cattle - as if to say
"silly cow" - the Buttholes unleashed a guitar solo of
monumental pathos in (dis)honour of this woman's sadness.
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