BUTTHOLE SURFERS: DOUBLE LIVE (1989)
1) Too Parter; 2) Psychedelic
Jam; 3) Ricky; 4) Rocky; 5) Gary Floyd; 6) Florida; 7) John E. Smoke; 8)
Tornadoes; 9) Pittsburg To Lebanon; 10) The One I Love; 11) Hey; 12) Dum Dum;
13) No Rule; 14) U.S.S.A.; 15) Comb; 16) Graveyard; 17) Sweetloaf; 18) Backass;
19) Paranoid; 20) Fast; 21) I Saw An X-Ray Of A Girl Passing Gas; 22)
Strawberry; 23) Jimi; 24) Lou Reed; 25) Kuntz; 26) 22 Going On 23; 27) Creep In
The Cellar; 28) Suicide; 29) Something.
Double
Live? What is this — the
Butthole Surfers tribute to the Golden Age of Progressive Rock? By all means,
the length of this monster (130 minutes, give or take a few), which has since
1990 been available as a double live CD, not LP set, actually gives ELP and Yes
with their triple albums a good run
for their money. And in a better world, this record might be all the Butthole
Surfers your record collection needs — a massive run through most of their
highlights, a few of their lowlights, some on-the-spot stage craziness and
stage sickness, and even an R.E.M. cover and a Grand Funk Railroad cover
totally out of the blue (okay, so we already new Gibby was a Mark Farner «fan»,
but Gibby playing Michael Stipe is something else altogether). Unfortunately,
the harsh reality is so harsh that I have a hard time not letting my tongue
slip about how this album totally s... okay, we are not being objective here,
so stop it, tongue.
Fact of the matter is, what they say is that Double Live was released primarily as
an anti-bootlegging measure: since the Surfers weren't making a whole lot of
cash from their studio albums (gee, I wonder why?), yet somehow the tapes of
their crazyass live performances were in regular demand, they decided they
would finally take advantage of that — by going all the way and releasing what
really seems like their complete repertoire on this double CD monster. The only
problem was, there was not a single tape in sight on which the Surfers would be
professionally recorded: most of the tracks here are only very slightly above bootleg
quality, and a few are quite solidly below
bootleg quality. Not to mention that this is arguably the most awfully
sequenced live record I've ever heard (granted, I'm not a big expert on
underground live releases) — fade outs, fade ins, ugly sonic seams from track
to track as if they were just cutting and splicing the tapes with glue and scissors.
But the sequencing is really just a minor nuisance next to the consistently
awful sound to which you are going to be subjected for over two hours.
Of course, seasoned fans of the lo-fi sonic
crimes of the 1980's underground scene will not bother about such minor
nuisances as the drums sounding like tin cans and the guitars sounding as if
from under a thick slab of concrete — who knows, maybe some of them might
actually feel that it adds to the experience, although I am not sure that Paul
Leary himself, with his good ear for crazy guitar sounds, would agree. Too bad,
because a track like ʽPsychedelic Jamʼ, which used to be a staple of the band's
live show, features some awesome «guitar weaving» between Haynes and Leary,
with the two occasionally flying off into space with more flash than the
Grateful Dead and more fun than Cream, yet the recording does not properly
capture the overtones to turn this into a truly blissful headphone experience.
Even worse, the mind-blowing sonic textures of
the last two studio records, already seriously weakened due to the band's
inability to reproduce them onstage (as far as I understand, they rely on
backing tapes, particularly for all the distorted sound effects on the vocals),
are further damaged by the sound quality, making this version of ʽJimiʼ nigh
near unlistenable (in the bad sense of the word; not to mention that ʽLou
Reedʼ, into which it promptly segues, seems to be a messy tribute to Metal Machine Music, nine minutes of
dirty, crunchy, abrasive chaos that might have sounded cool back in 1975, or
even way back in 1970 when the Stooges did it on ʽLA Bluesʼ, but hardly by the
standards of 1989). ʽSweatloafʼ gains nothing by having its «regret» spoken bit
replaced by a creative dirty rewriting of Morrison's soliloquy in ʽThe Endʼ,
and loses almost everything by not even having the riff played distinctly, let
alone everything else.
To cut a long story short — inevitably so,
because I've only managed to sit through this once and have no wish to repeat
the experience — if you want a shadow of some proper appreciation of the Surfers as a live band, please refer to Live PCPPEP, which was much shorter,
much better recorded, gave a more distinct portrait of Gibby Haynes as
frontman, and is available as a freebie with their first EP anyway. Double Live, on the other hand, has
them dealing with the problem of reproducing all that crazyass studio
experimentation on the stage, and bad sound quality does not alleviate that
problem. As much as I like about half of these songs (and have little against
most of the other half), the record gets a thumbs down — I am certainly not spending the next several years
trying to get myself to like this attempt to convert carefully crafted studio
surrealism into thin, muffled, wobbly psychedelic spontaneity.
Actually, having watched the excellent live DVD "Blind Eye Sees All," which was recorded before this, I can attest to the fact that the vocal noise was actually done live: GIbby screws around with some type of echo and vocal distortion effects on the ground.
ReplyDeleteThis album can be regarded as a wasted opportunity, though. The DVD on the other hand: aww man. That's the real deal. A band high one drugs eating in a bed as Gibby gives nonsense answers that verge on religious parody. Leary deep throating the mic (like it was funny or something), the bass player honk honk, honking down the highway on a damn tuba, and one shot of his bobbing head popping up repeatedly throughout the damn thing, even during an interview segment.
Confusing and stupid and the Surfers wouldn't have it any other way.
One of the greatest live recordings ever an absolute masterpiece! Incredible stuff!
ReplyDelete