Butthole Breakfast, 1987
Visiting New York in May of 1987 changed my life. I came on a social trip with friend David McMullan but I also brought along a photo portfolio which I'd just completed upon graduation from Ryerson. The editorial meetings went surprisingly well and set me on a course to move to NYC.
Today is the anniversary of our meetup with the Butthole Surfers on that fateful NYC trip. From the story: I shyly approach Gibby, who is friendly and offers me some acid. He reads Nerve’s Buttholes piece from last November and approves; we may be able to get another interview if we wait around until after the show, when they go eat. “Great, what time do you expect to go on?” ”About 3:30, maybe have breakfast at 6.”
Hence we ended up interviewing them at the Nighthawk Diner in the East Village over breakfast, after their CBGB gig. The story ran in Nerve in July 1987 issue and may be the best piece of writing that I've contributed to.
SWEATLOAFING with the Surfers, Chris Buck’s Butthole Breakfast
Alan is originally from Tennessee. He has done some extensive travelling, though. It’s mostly left him with questions regarding where he can find the best surfing peaks. The only questions he’s so far prepared for our Buttholes interview regards what kind of boards they use.
Gibby: I was in the toilet–where was that, Baltimore–and there’s two guys in front of me. One goes ‘this club has changed a lot since the last time I played here.’ The other guy says, ‘oh, really, you played here? What’s the name of your band?’ ‘Dead Teachers In Space.’ ‘Oh really.’ And then they split and I was like: ‘Wow!’
While trying to connect with The Butthole Surfers at their alleged sound check, we run into Sonic lifers Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon, who decline my invitation to their home, but agree to introduce us to St. Mark’s Place (“the happening street Madonna walks down in Desperately Seeking Susan”), and warn us about Buster Poindexter. We waste time in a record store, where Alan examines the Smack My Crack compilation, finding the Butthole Surfers crediting themselves with professional golfers' names–some of them are spelled wrong. Another topic for the interview.
Gibby: Have you all heard about the Mama Cass/Satan Church connection? Doubleday’s putting this book out about this thing called the Process Church. It’s the major Satanistic Church; they’ve been Devil worshiping world-wide for hundreds of years! I haven’t read the book, but apparently there’s some really killer shit about Mama picking up guys, treating them to a great weekend, buying them a motorcycle, etc. Then at the end of the weekend, they waste him...on film. Supposedly it exposes the whole John Phillips-Charles Manson-Sharon Tate connection, as well.
The thing about this book is they’ve got some really incriminating stuff about very famous people and they’re covered! They haven’t been sued and they are not going to be sued.
The editor of the book was at the show tonight.
WALKING ABOUT CBGB’s, Gibby wears a black leather vest over his Firehose t-shirt, and his wallet sits in his back pocket chained to his belt like that of a trucker or biker. He’s a tall man, his long slimy hair is tucked under his leather cap. He has a baby’s face, but not a normal baby, more like in a B grade Horror movie.
Talking with a friend outside the washrooms, Gibby and the other patrons are confronted by an upset CBGB person. “Who opened this?” he asks, pointing to an unmarked door. They look at the man but don’t respond. The man impatiently explains, “the sick person who is kept in there will hurt people if let loose!” His rant is suddenly interrupted as Gibby desperately defends himself, as if he alone were being pinned with the blame.
Teresa: Oh, it's the New Dating Game with Elaine Joyce, my favorite show. Excuse me, could we listen to...I love the New Dating Game with Elaine Joyce, it’s just a great fantastic program.
Nerve: She’s so hellish.
Gibby: This coffee is absolutely the grimmest. (He sings) Oh, good, my friend. My friends all told me, change your life...
T: Could we hear the New Dating Game with Elaine Joyce?
G: That’s something we all want to hear.
Jeff: She’s a cutie.
T: Everyone on the Elaine Joyce show is a cutie.
J: He's not. There’s the one Gibby set on fire in New Jeresy. What do you think of Women’s Basketball?
T: He only knows about curling.
N: I used to curl.
T: I know you used to curl, I can see it in your eyes.
I shyly approach Gibby, who is friendly and offers me some acid. He reads Nerve’s Buttholes piece from last November and approves; we may be able to get another interview if we wait around until after the show, when they go eat. “Great, what time do you expect to go on?””About 3:30, maybe have breakfast at 6.”
Backstage, Thurston tells me about the breakfast show experience, which includes costuming in bathrobes, catapulting fried eggs and orange juice into the audience, and playing til the sun comes up.
Nerve: Are you planning any more covers?
Jeff: Not since ‘Wreck Of the Edmond Fitzgerald.’
Gibby: Only on a cold night am I into covers.
J: We only play ‘Tales of Brave Ulysses’ when Teresa will strip down...
Teresa:...I get naked and sing. I love Cream.
N: It seems as if you guys are really into Canadian covers, with ‘Edmund Fitzgerald,’and then ‘American Woman.’
J: We’ll do some Rush.
N: ‘Working Man,’ maybe?
ONCE THE SHOW BEGINS, no movement–from the main part of the club to the backstage or washroom areas–is allowed. The crowd is so thick that bouncers restrict any movement towards or near the stage. Once at the front, there's no turning back. The only ones who move are the bouncers, who plough through violent, tearing holes of space in the crowd.
The concert’s pace is set with ‘Graveyard;’ scary, fucked-up and beautiful. Gibby requests the already dim stage lights to be turned down, leaving the group to be lit only by the strobes set on varying speeds. The Buttholes’ infamous naked dancer is out right away, and performs for most of the show. She moves frantically and passionately, like one of those acid-spaced hippies from old rock festival movies. Gibby, shirtless with his hair down, wanders about the stage doing ‘things.’ He starts reciting a distortion of the oedipal section of The Doors’ ‘The End,’ which kicks into ‘Sweet Loaf,’ and the audience peaks. An enthralling sense of riotousness takes over the room, manifesting itself in spontaneous outbursts of free love.
Gibby: I saw Bob Seger warm up for Kiss in Fort Worth, Texas. So there you have it. It was a moving experience.
Nerve: I missed Kiss in Toronto in 1976 and it affected me deeply. It’s a scar I carry.
G: Yeah, well, the opposite of a scar, which is probably worse; a void.
Teresa: I threatened to commit suicide when I was 14 and my parents wouldn’t let me go to the Runaways. I was totally like, ‘I’m gonna kill myself. I wanna die. I never asked to be born.’
G: See, I avoided all of that shit, man. I never threatened to kill myself, I threatened to kill my parents. Sure, no problem. Pull out the club–‘sure, son, here’s the keys.’
T: It’s a drag being a kid, sort of in the prime of your rock’n’roll years. There are times when your parents and whoever, school, try to convince you that it’s not that big of a deal, but as you get older, bands break up–like the Runaways–and there’s a realization that you’ll never get a chance to see them. That’s when it dawns on you that you really missed something because of your age.
THE HYPNOTIC double-drummer rhythms of King and Teresa form a backbone as the smoke machine, strobe lights, Gibby’s theatrics (megaphone, voice speed distortions, pyrotechnics), and the continuing deterioration of a song structure lead one into a disoriented state. And the dancer, at first just a freakish spectacle, becomes an ambassador for the audience's consciousness. It's a hellish thing, but a classical hell–with fire and torment, writhing naked bodies, noise and disorder.
Gibby: One would have to place Elvis Costello as the role model...
Jeff:...for Bob Mould?
G: For many people including Hüsker Dü.
Teresa: They’ve got those semi-melodic lead vocals and the real catchy back up.
G: I was thinking in terms of direct copying of melodies and things like...
Nerve: How do you hear new music? Do you listen to the radio, or just pick up stuff, or what?
G: Your breath smells really great with that cucumber.
THE BUTTHOLE SURFERS will probably be the subject of a backlash soon, similar to that being unleashed on R.E.M. and Hüsker Dü at the moment. Whether they deserve a backlash or not really shouldn't even be considered, though, unless their worth is overrated in the first place. How seriously can you take a band that includes an Indian song distorted to continually emphasize a word sounding like “cunts” on their LP?
After the show, my traveling partners Dave and Alan hang around with me outside CBGBs on the Bowery waiting for our interview (and breakfast, of course). It's just us and the crack dealers watching the sun come up. We're sure the Surfers are going to slip out the back door to avoid us. I try to convince Alan he’d be glad he stuck around, if only because he could tell his grandchildren about it: Breakfast with the Butthole Surfers. The crack dealers are unimpressed.
Nerve: In your set, you used an allusion to The Doors in ‘Sweat Loaf.’
Gibby: I’m sorry; a cheap ploy in order to capture the audience’s fascination.
N: That’s okay, because Dave and I are going to California to interview Ray Manzarek and Danny Sugerman (author of Morrison’s biography).
T: Danny really grooves on us.
Jeff: He’s friends with our biggest fan, Charles M. Young (famous rick journalist of Rolling Stone, Playboy fame).
N: Do you have any questions we can ask Ray or Danny?
T: Danny, yeah. I thought we were supposed to go to some bar-b-que at his pad but it never happened.
G: Ask Danny why, if he’s so fucking rick, he can’t kick coke. I haven’t talked to Danny in a while; don’t know him very well. He always threatens to come to our shows, threatens to put me in his movies, threatens to do all this shit, but...Do you know how Danny got to be manager of The Doors?
N: He just hung around the office.
G: No, he hit a home run in a little league baseball game.
N: Oh, right; he hit that and then got to go to a Doors concert.
G: Danny Sugerman’s got some killer stories; there’s one about what’s his name from Led Zeppelin?
J: Jimmy Page.
G: There’s a particular incident where they were, I believe, at Danny’s house. He called the Emergency Medical Service and told them somebody had O.D.ed on heroin and they were dead at that address. Jimmy sat there with a rig until he heard sirens coming up the street and he overdosed himself. And he died. Three minutes later they arrived, shot him full of speed and he was up. I'm sure Danny will put it in his book. I'm sure he'll capitalize on all kinds of wild stories like that, ‘cause he seems like a bit of an...
T: Entrepreneur?
G: Opportunist. Talentless, maybe. However, it's really a drag, some of the underground people I know in Hollywood know Danny Sugerman as being a real asshole. He’s been really nice to us, though.
The interview happens over breakfast at the Nightbirds restaurant. We just chat. Alan doesn't even sit at our table, he is stuck with a couple of fucks talking about the effects of this hip drug, ecstasy. The people in the band are actually more friendly and normal than I expected–it is the road crew I am suspicious of.
In Toronto a month later, a friend approached me to confirm Alan's boast that he had breakfast with the Butthole Surfers.
***
Top Image: The Butthole Surfers play CBGB, May 8, 1987. The band was already too successful to be playing this small club, but they owed them a gig and did this overwhelming show. Left to right: Jeff Pinkus, Kathleen Lynch, Paul Leary (doing the opening number, “Sweatloaf.”)
Second Image: Gibby Haynes on guitar, Teresa Taylor pictured on drums behind.
Third Image: Dancer Kathleen Lynch.
Bottom Image: Sample page from the typed story edit.