In the annals of music there are many cliches used by writers – mainly this one – to describe legendary bands and musicians. Phrases such as ‘Unique’, ‘Timeless,’ ‘Unlike Any Other’, can be applied to acts as diverse as Robert Johnson all the way through to Slayer, and they are banded about like cheap whiskey to let you, the reader, know just how important and impactful these artists were in helping shape the musical landscape as we know it today.

These are just the facts, chopped up into easy bite-sized chunks, so that people – who undoubtedly already know all of this – can nod and agree with the person writing the article and mutter such things as ‘Ah yes, wise words’ and ‘This man is a genius, I wish to let him sleep with my sister.’

However, when you scratch beneath the surface, these are just obvious platitudes, handed out to groups or solo artists that anyone who has even a passing interest in the history of music knows all about, but what happens when you search the sewers and the gutters for those who are looking at the stars? What or who do you find?

In this – the first of a brand new series called the ‘Heroes of the Underground’ – I would like to introduce you to a band that many have heard of, but hardly anyone really knows, and trust me, brothers and sisters, when I tell you that there has never, ever been a band quite like the Butthole Surfers

To give you a rough idea of the insane genius you are about to be exposed to, let’s just take a moment to appreciate this following quote from the Butthole Surfers Wikipedia page, discussing their live performances;

“At another particularly wild concert in 1986, (singer Gibby) Haynes and (dancer Kathleen) Lynch, by now completely bald, reportedly engaged in sexual intercourse while on stage, as (guitarist Paul) Leary used a screwdriver to vandalize the club’s speakers. This came after only five songs, during which time Haynes had started a small fire.”

Now, most of you might read that and think ‘Oh sure, Wikipedia is always so reliable’ but the fact of the matter is that this is the Butthole Surfers we are dealing with here, and the story is true.

The Butthole Surfers were notorious for their live shows, which they treated more as a living, breathing art instalation than they were a rock concert. This was down to the band being heavily influenced by the Dada movement, with Leary telling the Guardian newspaper back in 2024;

“We were playing for punks but not playing punk music – we were more informed by modern art… Our first couple of shows were performance art with music as a background. We were more into the art side of it, and then music kind of took over. We had no plan whatsoever. We were into dadaism and loved the random nature of how things turn out… People would be running out of our shows throwing up, we were punishing these poor souls.”

The Butthole Surfers’ live performances are the stuff of underground legend. To merely call them “wild” would be a profound understatement; what they unleashed onstage was a deliberate, multi-sensory assault designed to disrupt expectations, rattle psyches, and challenge the very framework of live rock performance.

Audiences were plunged into an environment that resembled a dystopian circus filtered through a drug-induced hallucination. The stage would often be drenched in smoke, strobe lights would flash incessantly—sometimes for entire sets—and behind the band, a screen would loop grotesque and disturbing film projections: surgeries, pornography, car crashes, dismembered animals, and archival footage designed to unnerve. One concert in Georgia reportedly ended with the band setting parts of the stage on fire and Haynes vomiting into a prop mask, then putting it on and continuing the show. Then there’s those times that Haynes would pull out a shotgun and stage and start firing it into the air…

But – and this is the most important but in the history of ever – none of this was done just for the sake of shock value, it was done to prove a point. As Haynes himself said many times over the years they were attempting to:

“…force people to have a reaction, any reaction, even if it was running out of the building in horror.”

They wanted you to experience, to feel, to leave your worries and troubles, your drab nine to five lifes, at the fucking door, and just give yourself over to the moment as it happened. Even if that meant you ended up walking – or running as Haynes said – out of the building after the show, feeling as if you had just escaped a hostage situation.

Yet, none of it would make a blind bit of difference if they couldn’t back it up, musically. Which the Butthole Surfers could, and then some.

Over the years the band have played down their abilities when it came to the music they have made, with Paul Leary going as far as stating about the legacy the band have left, in an interview with Louder:

“I shudder to think about it. We never started out with any intention of having a message or influencing anybody. We made a living off of being stupid and I don’t know if there’s a legacy to be taken from that. Maybe, stupid stupid stupid people can make it too if you just keep at it. Stupid, lucky people.”

But the fact is that the Butthole Surfers were far more talented than they let on.

Their early albums pretty much laid down the blueprint for the ‘Grunge’ movement – something confirmed by Kurt Cobain himself who named two of their albums in his Top 50 of all time – being majestic walls of sonic noise that maintain a beauty and raw energy that at first seem impenetrable, but once your ears adjust to it, open up a whole new world of sound that stretches out in front of you in a surreal highway of twisted, tortured chords, two tone drumming, and screaming, demented vocals.

Their recording history in these early days are – like nearly everything surrounding the band – the stuff of legend. The were signed to Alternative Tentacles after they managed to blag their way onto a show they weren’t booked for. They were allowed to play three songs and that was all it took for label head, Jello Biafra, to be convinced to offer them a deal. This, however, wouldn’t be as simple as it seemed, and they used to have to break into recording studios after other bands had finished for the day, to lay down their magic. Because of course they fucking did.

As they grew as artists – and fell out with every label they worked with – they ended up on Capitol Records, and even though their music changed and became more… accessible for want of a better word – though they were never truly that accesible unless you wanted to allow them to be – it always maintained a sound to it that was pure Butthole Surfers. They may have been more focused on writing actual songs – even if they did that by going into the recording session and making a lot of it up on the spot, never losing their spontaneity in the process – but they always knew who they were, and who they were – in their souls – was a group of artists, always looking to push the boundaries, both musically and visually, like nobody had ever pushed them before.

Though, as always, Leary would disagree, as he explained to Vice:

“Sometimes it’s hard for me to even think of our music as music. I’ve been playing guitar since ’63, but I’ve never been a good musician. We aren’t good musicians. It has been more of a platform to express ourselves, even though we don’t know what we are trying to express. I was pretty mad at the world for a while.”

Mad at the world or not, the Butthole Surfers will leave behind an influence on music they’d never admit to, and no matter how much they try to deny it, it’s still one that resonates with to this very day and will carry on long after we’ve all shuffled off this mortal coil. Good musicians or insane bastards just railing against life, it doesn’t matter. The Butthole Surfers will outlive us all.