BUTTHOLE SURFERS: PSYCHIC... POWERLESS... ANOTHER MAN'S SAC (1984)
1) Concubine; 2) Eye Of The
Chicken; 3) Dum Dum; 4) Woly Boly; 5) Negro Observer; 6) Butthole Surfer; 7)
Lady Sniff; 8) Cherub; 9) Mexican Caravan; 10) Cowboy Bob; 11) Gary Floyd.
The process of creative unfurling from «probe
EP» to «full-blown LP» level is always nice to watch, provided we are dealing
with real, not faked, creativity — and in 1984, Butthole Surfers were on a
roll, inspired and encouraged by the realisation that they were able to allow
themselves just about anything. Punk
attitude, offensive demeanor, dirty humor, psychedelic arrangements, and limitless
intrusion into the territory of any randomly picked musical genre — these guys
had the advantage of taking nothing
so seriously that it would impose any unbreakable rules of musical conduct on
their career.
Commercial success not being even a distant
objective, they were, nevertheless, not properly «avantgarde» — most of the
melodies on this album respect regular blues conventions, and could be
characterized as pop rock, blues rock, hard rock, punk rock, maybe a little heavy
metal on the side, anyway, nothing particularly out of the ordinary; in any
case, the band members did not have the chops to play something trickier than
that (and how many bands did, anyway?). However, it is not the core melodies,
but the irreverent attitude towards these melodies that counts: the band prepares
a package of hilarious shock value, inspired grossness, and unpredictable
musical seasoning for each song, and have themselves a jolly good time as each
package goes off like a shitbomb in the listeners' faces.
Actually, when I say «hilarious», I need to
correct myself. The stuff that the Surfers do here is neither very intelligent
nor very funny, and if you are even a little bit stuck up or hung up, it will
be very easy to dismiss all these songs as pointless hooliganry. I mean, ʽLady
Sniffʼ? Okay, somebody will be sure defend the song as a nasty parody on the
redneck and/or white trash stereotype, replete with grunts, farts,
expectorations, and verbal wonders like "lady walk that greasy gravy!",
but somebody else will just as easily say that the whole thing is just a sorry
excuse for finally putting some fart
noises on tape, something so often used as a threatening allegory by us
reviewers but, actually, so rarely encountered in real life. And here it is!
The hilariousness lies not in the
offensiveness, though, and not in any alleged attempts at joking: the main
strength is in the synthesis of various influences, or in the emotional
inversion (corruption!) of musical styles. For instance, ʽDum Dumʼ is really a
spoof on Black Sabbath's ʽChildren Of The Graveʼ, borrowing the song's rhythm
section and crossing it with trebly-wobbly, «clucky» lead guitar that sounds
like a cross between Duane Eddy and Adrian Belew. ʽWoly Bolyʼ lifts the
distorted descending guitar intro off some garage classic whose name escapes me
at present (no, it is not ʽWooly
Bullyʼ, as one might probably suggest) and reworks it into the general melody
of the song, but that general melody tends to «melt» and become splattered
against the wall, only to pick itself up and then be smashed again every now
and then (fortunately, the rhythm section is tight enough to allow Leary to do
whatever he wants). And ʽButthole Surferʼ is indeed like surf-punk, only much
dirtier than your average Agent Orange.
If you get offended easily, the first song to
be checked here is certainly not ʽLady Sniffʼ, but the six-minute plus workout
ʽCherubʼ, which alternates between power-chord based sludge-metal sections and
odd «astral» passages where one guitar sounds like a spaceship, plotting a
complex course in an asteroid field, and the other guitars crash and bust
around it like those particular asteroids, collision with which was inavoidable.
And at certain intervals they even play a chord that makes you expect they will
rip into Hendrix's ʽThird Stone From The Sunʼ at any moment, but they're just
teasing you. This is really the kind
of hilariousness I am referring to, certainly not the fact that they use the
word "negro" in a song title or anything.
But the quintessential BS song on this album is
probably ʽCowboy Bobʼ, which was already made available earlier in the live
version on Live PCPPEP; here, the
production is cleaner, but Haynes is delivering his lyrics through a bullhorn,
so you can take your personal pick — anyway, the song has it all: silly
irreverential title that has nothing to do with the lyrics or melody, a nasty,
repetitive, droning hard rock bassline à
la Budgie's ʽBreadfanʼ, supported with a saxophone part for contrast, wild
screaming in the background (and sometimes in the foreground), psychedelic
guitar soloing, and schizophrenic lyrics ("I've always got a knife in my
back!", which could be a good tagline for the band's entire career). This
is what you get, basically, when you cross Iggy Pop with Keith Moon — yes,
that's the very essence of Butthole Surfers.
To call this record an overall «classic» would
be an insult to the band itself, I believe: they are not here to amaze you or
make you rethink your life, they are here to introduce a bit of creativity and
imagination into the old art of grossing-out. But in the somewhat parallel
(and sometimes a wee bit perpendicular) universe of flippy-freaky, it is a classic, unquestionably deserving
its own flippy-freaky thumbs up; I am still trying to imagine how that
would look on brown paper, but perhaps I have not had my proper fill of
ʽCherubʼ and ʽCowboy Billʼ just yet to understand that.
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