(((O))) : The Butthole Surfers – Live at The Leather Fly

Hey. Those of you who keep your eyes on the hole, as it were, will know that Tom Stern’s long awaited documentary The Hole Truth… and Nothing Butt launched at SXSW in Austin recently. It’s no doubt making its way out in to the world to charm and appal us even now. The release of Live at The Leather Fly seems an ideal way for the band to have something new out there this year to join it. Captured at an unknown location somewhere, sometime in the early 90s, it’s a wonderful document of just what a great band they were.  

Meanwhile, back there in the good old days we just pulled off the interstate in to a Texas truck stop of the mind. Some kind of beat up psychedelic clown car sits out front of a shady looking bar. A fat leather fly hangs above the door, emanating a low electric buzz. A broken signal calling out to those who can hear its music. Born of the damaged psyche of Gibby Haynes, The Leather Fly was an imaginary venue previously confined to the internal fantasy landscape of The Butthole Surfers. It now leaks into ours as host to this stray tape.

The first we heard of it was ‘The Annoying Song’ which is descriptively titled and sounds like it’s being sung by The Leather Fly on account of Gibby using a toy loudhailer to distort his voice. It’s not their finest moment, sitting there grinning in its own mess at the ‘cartoon idiots’ end of what they do. It’s also at the end of the record, although leading with it for the album release feels like a typically “fuck all y’all” move on the band’s part. It originally appeared on Independent Worm Saloon and judging from the amount of other material from the album that’s the tour this comes from.

These are their allegedly shaky major label years. It would not be controversial to call Independent Worm Saloon ‘unloved’ by fans, it faced a fair amount of scorn at the time for being shiny and corporate and produced by a classic rock dinosaur. Or for the perceived influence of Ministry following Gibby’s buddying around with Al Jourgenson (as if ‘Jesus Built My Hot Rod’ ain’t a chrome plated killer.) The worst offenders on this tip ‘Who was in My Room Last Night’ and ‘Goofy’s Concern’, do not feature. ‘Dust Devil’ gets some unfair jabs in this vein too but I love it, channelling the Texas of ZZ Top and Roky Erickson cranked up to amphetamine jabber. It’s only the second song, imagine they come out battering you in the face with this absolutely fuck off rock ‘n’ roll and that huge wall of strobes going behind them. Awesome.

A new Buttholes live album has a lot to live up to. PCPPEP is a formative release and Double Live has a real claim to being their best album if you ask me. There’s also already one with the same title as the film, a collection of recordings from across the career up to about this point. Possibly by flame scorched accident but probably by design there is limited overlap of material with those previous sets. This most likely means your favourites are missing but offers a chance to appreciate a later version of the band. The Worm Saloon songs all sound better and there’s great versions of ‘Blind Man’, ‘P.S.Y.’ and semi lost gem ‘Nee Nee’ plus a smattering of older songs.  

Whenever the Butthole Surfers lurch back into focus it provokes a good deal of wonky hyperbolic reminiscing about their power as a live act. Little of which is much help as it tends to focus on a theatrical level of chaos and bright lights a lot more than the unique and unstoppable band that made that show work. Collapsing thirty odd years of underground rock weirdness into something powerful and sticky they offered a psychic escape hatch from the relentless disappointment of life. If you can’t be part of the full sensory overload of the event, you want it to be worth listening to and Live At The Leather Fly shows them to be a formidable force. Being neither psychedelically enhanced, wet, naked, or on fire it is perhaps a shadow of the real experience but you could choose to be any combination of them while listening.