the elite 8

(5) butthole surfers, “pepper”
buried
(6) everclear, “santa monica”
851-734
and will play on in the final four

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 24.

Watch the World Die: melissa faliveno On “Santa Monica”

I am still living with your ghost
Lonely and dreaming of the west coast

Not long ago, a writer I know from Portland called Everclear “the Nickelback of the 90s.” I was horrified by this news. Growing up in small-town Wisconsin, where the influence of the coasts hit us late, if it hit at all, I loved Everclear with everything I had in my hard Midwestern heart. As far as I knew, they were as cool as it got.
In 1995, the year Everclear’s first major-label record, Sparkle and Fade, was released, and “Santa Monica” hit alt-rock airwaves across the country, I was twelve. At the time, my favorite records were Green Day’s Dookie and the Offspring’s Smash. I had the t-shirts, oversized and plastered with album art, purchased at Hot Topic in the West Towne Mall in Madison. It was here, twenty miles from my hometown, that I would weave my way on any given Saturday from that black-lit den of lava lamps and mass-produced alternative culture to Claire’s, spinning wire racks of cheap yin-yang rings and yellow smiley-face necklaces on ball chains and black cords, to that most hallowed mecca of the mall: Sam Goody. And afterward, just across the parking lot, Best Buy. 
In 1995, and in the years to follow, these big-box stores and their endless rows of cassette tapes and CDs in shiny jewel cases were all I knew. This was where I bought my Dookie and Smash; my Sixteen Stone and Tragic Kingdom; The Downward Spiral and Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Where I bought Garbage’s self-titled debut and Everclear’s Sparkle and Fade.
Just a few miles away was Madison’s legendary Smart Studios, where Garbage and Everclear recorded those albums, at the very same time. The same studio where Nirvana recorded Nevermind. But I didn’t know this yet. I didn’t know who Butch Vig was, or what a producer did. I didn’t know the thrill of recording to tape, creating a document through music. I didn’t know about scenes, or zines, or house shows. I didn’t know the sticky floors of dark clubs, or gig posters tacked to dive-bar doors. I didn’t know there were cooler record stores too—dusty places run by punk kids and old hippies, where I would learn to thumb disaffectedly through used vinyl before I even had a record player. I didn’t know that two of my favorite records had been made in a city I loved, which I would soon call my second hometown.  

“Santa Monica” is a song about a hometown. It’s a song about leaving the place you come from and wanting to go home, even when you know you can never really return. And maybe what I mean is it’s a song about nostalgia—about longing for a place, and a time, that looks better from a distance. 
It’s a simple song, in some respects: basic chords, nothing fancy. Its complexity lies in the nuance, the slow build of tension and release. The heart of it, though, is the man who sings it.
Alone in my apartment, I work on the chords. It’s not an easy song to sing and play at the same time, but I’m trying. My guitar is plugged into a Fender Prosonic, a 90s tube amp made to be turned up loud. It sits beneath my living-room window, below a 1970s Fender Bassman. It’s a handsome stack, silver-faced and vintage (because the 90s, somehow, is vintage too) but it’s out of place here. It belongs where it once lived, in places where loud music is made. Before friends left town and bands broke up, before a rehearsal space was torn down. Before the music, like everything else in New York, went away.
I play low, at first, to not piss off my neighbors. But in this year of pandemic half the neighbors have left, and no one has moved in below us. So I turn up the volume and play to the living room, empty except for my cat, who hides beneath a chair because she hates the guitar, but who, unlike everyone else, doesn’t leave. I turn the distortion up too, till the notes are dirt and fuzz. I always sound better this way, the further I get from clean. 

It’s no surprise, really, that a band like Everclear was uncool in a place like Portland in the 90s—the kind of scene whose depths of cool I can’t even fathom. It was the next Seattle, or so the old alt-weeklies tell me, though I suspect it was a scene more like Madison’s at the time—small and weird and eschewing stardom, doing its own thing. A band that wanted to make it—a band that wasn’t even from there—was perhaps the furthest thing from cool.
“Everclear remain out in the cold among Portland’s band circles,” wrote the Rocket in 1994. A year later, Portland’s Willamette Week crowned frontman Art Alexakis “the most hated musician in Portland,” and “the most unpopular musician in Portland.” These words were echoed by the Portland Mercury fifteen years later. It’s a title, and a sentiment, that stuck.
“We basically got every door shut in our face here in Portland,” Alexakis told the now-defunct music site Addicted to Noise, in a 1995 interview titled “Loser Makes Good.” “‘Cause we weren’t from Portland. If you’re not part of the clique, it doesn’t happen. And we did happen, without any help from those people, and they resent the hell out of us.”
The tension between art and commerce (see what I did there?) is an old one, but I would wager it was most acute in nascent indie scenes in the 90s, that slacker’s beating heart of the grunge era. A band that did the damnable—sign with a major label, hit the charts, tour the world—were not just uncool; they were sell-outs.
But when you grow up without much money, you learn early that you can, indeed, buy yourself a new life. That working hard, and selling things—whether it’s paper or car parts or music—is a way to stay alive. No one knew this better than Art Alexakis.
“We were one of the first, really, to jump to the major labels because it wasn’t really deemed very cool,” he told Oregon Live in 2015, at the twentieth anniversary of Sparkle and Fade. “Me, I just wanted to support my family.”
With apologies to a city I like a lot, it’s hard, as an outsider, to think of Portland in the 90s and not imagine Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen, dressed in plaid, hanging out at an indie record store on Hawthorne (how am I doing, Portlanders?), rolling their eyes at some bleach-haired kid asking for the new Everclear. It’s hard not to feel the kid’s shame as she scurries out the door—a feeling I’ve had in record stores so many times, including a few weeks ago, when I finally bought a copy of Dookie on vinyl. For every record, every band, every song you hold up as the pinnacle of cool, there is some much cooler kid who will tell you it sucks.
“We weren’t the hipsters,” Alexakis said. “We never have been.”

Being an outsider—being uncool, being weird—is something Art Alexakis writes about a lot. He’d been an outcast long before moving to Portland, in 1991, and by then had already begun to wear his weirdness like a badge, like a chip on his shoulder, like armor.
“I was always treated like an outcast by other kids at school,” he told Addicted to Noise, which in 1995 named Everclear Band of the Year. “Their parents would find out where I lived and they’d send me home. And I couldn’t go to those kids’ houses anymore.”
Alexakis was born in Santa Monica, California, on April 12, 1962. When he was five, his father left (and did sometimes send his son a birthday card with a $5 bill), and the family moved to a housing project in Los Angeles. When he was twelve, his brother died of a heroin overdose and his girlfriend committed suicide using the same drug. Not long after, he attempted suicide by jumping off the Santa Monica Pier.  
By age thirteen he was shooting heroin, cocaine, and crystal meth. At twenty-two, after spending time in juvie, he overdosed. He got clean, and after a few failed bands, a failed record label, and the first of three failed marriages, he moved from San Francisco to Portland, in the hopes of starting over. On public assistance with a kid on the way, he started Everclear—named after the alcohol, which he calls “pure white evil”—a drug that will fuck you up more than most but has a pretty name. (Anyone who has taken flaming shots of Everclear, like I did in college, understands this.)
In 1993, they put out an EP called Nervous & Weird. Their first full-length, World of Noise, recorded in a basement for $400 and released on Portland’s indie label Tim/Kerr, followed the same year. In 1995, Sparkle and Fade marked the band’s jump to the majors; they signed with Capitol, solidifying their reputation in Portland as opportunists, selling their collective soul to the devil. 
Still, the AV Club gave the record an A- and Rolling Stone a coveted four stars. More than twenty years later, in 2017, Willamette Week—the same publication that gave Alexakis his infamous title—called Sparkle and Fade “the best album ever recorded by a Portland band.”

With my big black boots and an old suitcase
Do believe I’ll find myself a new place

In late 1994, Art Alexakis was twenty miles away from my hometown and having a bad time. In the two weeks spent in Madison recording Sparkle and Fade, he couldn’t sleep. He was plagued by panic attacks, having nightmares about falling off the wagon. One night, he woke up in a sweat and wrote “Strawberry,” a song about a relapse that made it on the record. 
“It’s my biggest fear,” he told Addicted to Noise, “and by facing it like that and putting a face on it I think I deal with it a little bit.”

As a writer, it’s something I’m still learning: to put your fears into words—by recording them as an album, or an essay, or a book—is a way of letting them go.
While Alexakis was recording Sparkle and Fade downstairs at Smart Studios, its cofounder Butch Vig was upstairs producing the debut album of his own band, Garbage. Madisonians claim Garbage with an unparalleled fierceness; Shirley Manson of course is Scottish, but Garbage is a Madison band. I like to think, in some small way, that we can claim Everclear too. The record they made in Madison would launch the band to international fame. It went gold, then platinum, and spent thirty-five weeks on the Billboard charts. Harder, punker, and far more grunge than the polished pop-rock of their later records, it was an album that embodied the alternative ethos of the time. But it was also doing its own thing. Alexakis, whose background was one of cowpunk and country, sounds a little more Tom Petty than Kurt Cobain. But he also sounds unlike anyone else. When he sings—and the dude can sing—you hear something true in his voice. And that, I think, is part of what makes this record so good: It’s a document of a life. It is, in the end, something real. 
“Sparkle and Fade was kind of my escape route,” he told SPIN in 2015. “It was dealing with a lot of stories about people going through tough times and trying to find their way out of it, trying to find the light at the end of the tunnel.” 
Of “Santa Monica,” he told the same magazine in 1996: “I knew the song was a good song, but you can never tell when a song is going to connect. This song, for some reason I’ll never know, connects.”

I was not a cool kid. I was, in fact, a hairy only child with a lisp. In 1995, when I was in middle school, girls started getting pretty and I just got hairier. I attempted to disguise my weirdness in band t-shirts and flannel, but it was no use. On the bus, bullies spat in my frizzy mane and called me “beast.” I pulled loogies out of my hair-sprayed bangs. In high school, I was a curious combination of band nerd, art kid, and athlete. I was never popular—I played the wrong sports, wasn’t blonde, and, despite having lived in the same town my whole life, wasn’t considered from there. In a Midwestern farm town, my Italian father (and our shared hirsute bearing) marked me an outsider. But such is the remarkable brain chemistry of the band nerd—who marches across a football field on Friday nights in their spats and feathered hat, convinced their soaring trumpet lines are admired, not mocked—I eventually stopped caring so much. 
In the deeply uncool tradition of small-town and suburban kids in middle America, where the only mixtapes pressed into my hand were recorded from alt-rock radio, I often found the early albums, the cooler albums, after I found the hits. I found Kerplunk after Dookie, Dude Ranch after Enema of the State. Like loving Nirvana after I loved the Foo Fighters, I was obsessed with So Much for the Afterglow before Sparkle and Fade. And I’m not sure about this (memory can be an excellent tool of self-preservation), but it’s possible I found Everclear—along with Garbage and Radiohead—on Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet soundtrack.
Regardless, I found Everclear when I needed them. Or maybe, as is the way of music, especially when you are young, Everclear found me. When I first heard “Santa Monica,” on Madison’s alt-rock radio station, WJJO, I heard, in Art Alexakis’s voice, things I’d never heard spoken aloud. He sang about depression and isolation and suicide. He sang about addiction. He used words like “poor” and “white trash.” He sang about things I was starting to understand, but had thus far carried alone. And in a time when to be earnest was perhaps the most uncool quality, Art Alexakis pulled his heart out of his chest and gave it to us. 
So Much for the Afterglow was my album of anthems, thirteen tracks of catharsis. I drove around my hometown at night, dreaming of escape. I played Afterglow, then Sparkle and Fade, in my Chevy Cavalier, its speakers blown out so badly the whole car rattled. I turned the volume up anyway. I drove out to the country, rolled the windows down and let in the smell of cow manure, and sang along with Art, who sang about how trauma has a way of making you weird. It’s a deep kind of weird, he tells us—the kind that doesn’t let go, that you carry your whole life. But that, if you’re lucky enough to stay alive, you might learn to wield like a weapon, or make into art. 
Walk right out to a brand new day, he sings in “Santa Monica,” and by this point in the song he’s screaming, insane and rising in my own weird way.

I’ve played in a few bands, but I’ve never fronted one. I’m not sure I’ve ever wanted to. Like most altos, I’m all harmony and never melody. I like it there. What I love about making music, and what I miss, is creating something collectively.
My band’s rehearsal space was in a warehouse in Greenpoint, between a motorcycle garage and the Gutter, a bar and bowling alley where we played few shows. It had a weird smell, the bathroom was heinous, and we made music there for eight years, playing in friends’ bands and our own. We were a collective, kind of, in a way I didn’t realize then. Two years after the building was torn down, the lot is still empty. There’s a high-rise going up next door, but where our space once stood is a graveyard of broken cement, the remnants of walls that once held music. I walk by sometimes and look into the plastic scaffolding window, then press on past the places we used to drink—the Diamond, Jimmy’s—that are gone now too. In a year spent living with so many ghosts, this walk feels particularly haunted.

The year before we released our record, our bandmates left Brooklyn. They left, as people do, for places where they’d find more space, have families, make new lives. My partner—our frontman—and I stayed. 
But the previous summer, in 2017, before we knew an era was ending, we went to see Everclear. The show was my birthday present, and the four of us went to Irving Plaza on a weeknight. Everclear had played the same venue in 1997, on the release of Afterglow, when we were all in high school. This was the twentieth anniversary tour. Our bassist and I had connected over Everclear, reminiscing at practice about deep cuts like “White Men in Black Suits” and “Pale Green Stars.” I said, at least once, that I wanted to cover an Everclear song someday. I thought we had all the time in the world.
On that warm night in June, Everclear played to a sold-out crowd. Mostly made of people like us—thirtysomething and giddy with nostalgia, very far from cool. Art’s voice was raw and plaintive and breaking, just as it had been twenty years before. We stood in the crowd, packed in and sweating, leaning close to shout in one another’s ears, our lips close to skin, the slick bodies of strangers pressing against us. We drank $15 beers from plastic cups, and we spilled some on ourselves, and our shoes stuck to the floor, and the hum of the amps rattled in our teeth, and we danced around like kids, and we sang along to every song, as if no time at all had passed.

I just want to see some palm trees
I will try and shake away this disease

Like pretty much everyone on the planet, I’ve been sad lately. I spent much of the past year alone, in the shadow of disease, haunted by old ghosts and new ones. It would be so easy, I’ve thought, to find that old oblivion; to swim out toward the breakers and let them pull me under.  
Some days, music keeps me afloat. When I started thinking about this song, and what I might say about it, I remembered an old idea. What better way to inhabit a song—to feel connected to it again, like I did when I was young; maybe discover something new about it—than to play it? What better way to tell you how it makes me feel? I asked some friends if they wanted to record a cover of “Santa Monica.”
“I’ve been waiting twenty-five years for someone to ask me that,” one said.  
We recorded the song ourselves. After a night of practice, we spent a Saturday in a rehearsal space not unlike the one my band once had, and ran a motley collection of mics into a multitrack recorder. A jumble of cables snaked across the floor. I’d forgotten what it felt like to be in a hot room with carpeted walls, making something with other people.
Historically, I’m self-conscious about the way I sing. My voice is weirdly low, my mouth moves in a strange way. Sometimes, on soft esses, my lisp comes back. As when I play guitar, I prefer distortion—afraid of what I’ll sound like on my own. I always stand too far from the mic. 
But this time, I got up close. For the first time, I stood in front and sang the lead. I laid down my guitar lines, then turned to vocals. On my last take, I screamed it more than I sang it. For the outro, rather than take Art’s iconic ohhs and yeahs and whoas myself, we recorded gang vocals. We sang wearing masks, screaming together into one mic. I listen to what we made—faster, looser, a little more punk than the original—and I like what I hear. It sounds like what, at its essence, a recording is: a document. Not just of sound but of energy, of a feeling, of a moment in time. When I listen, maybe what I hear is catharsis.

We can live beside the ocean
Leave the fire behind
Swim out past the breakers
Watch the world die

I’ve never seen the Pacific Ocean. At least not up close. I’ve never been to L.A. either, unless you count Anaheim, which as far as I can tell is made entirely of strip malls, Disneyland, and the Mighty Ducks. Growing up in a place where we called lakeshores “the beach,” where the closest we got to California was Pacific Sunwear in the mall, the west coast was a fantasy. A place where kids rollerbladed in short-shorts and tube socks, ice cream dripping down their arms. It was MTV’s Spring Break, a season of Real World. It was a place that seemed, to my cold, landlocked heart, like paradise—a place no one ever leaves. When I left Wisconsin, I moved to the east coast in no small part because I was sure I wouldn’t stay. 
I can’t write about “Santa Monica” without mentioning the photos my friend sent me last spring from L.A. The sky was orange. She said she was afraid to leave her house, not just because of the virus, which was just starting to take hold in L.A., but because the air was full of ash, poison in another way. That it might fill her lungs, or the lungs of her daughter, or of her son, who was still inside her and would be born in July. The sky, she said, was on fire.
In New York, where I’ve somehow lived for twelve years, I think of last summer, when the ash reached us here, our own skies hazy and orange. Now, I look out my window at a gray and endless winter. I see a brand-new building in our backyard. It’s been done for months, but one has moved in. It’s a hideous thing, made of floor-to-ceiling windows and cement that blocks out our sun. The lights burn all night, illuminating empty rooms—a ghost ship that never had life inside. And I can’t help but wonder, if we could do the things “Santa Monica” suggests—if we could shake away this disease, if we could leave the fire behind, if we were to swim out past the breakers and watch the world die, what might we find in its place?

We often talk about the importance of writing from a distance—when we’ve had time to heal, when retrospect helps us make sense of things. But lately I’ve been more interested in writing from inside a struggle, a still-fresh wound. When we don’t know how we’ll make it through, or what waits on the other side. When time hasn’t made a feeling fade. Whether it’s music or essays, maybe writing from a place of uncertainty, of fear or rage or grief, can help us find a greater truth. Sparkle and Fade, “Santa Monica,” are like that. 
“So Much for the Afterglow feels like the work of a man who’s dealt with his demons and is ready to dispense wisdom,” the AV Club wrote in 2015. “Sparkle and Fade follows someone in the midst of them, a flawed figure who wants to be better but can’t follow through. The latter almost always makes for more compelling art, if only because the stakes are infinitely higher.” 
Art Alexakis has been called a jerk, a dick, an asshole. He has said, “I am Everclear. Everclear is me,” a sentiment that, understandably, has pissed people off, not least former bandmates Craig Montoya and Greg Eklund, who were with him when the band got big. But Art Alexakis has also been called “the nicest musician in Portland.” Friends whose bands have opened for him offer similar reports. I think maybe he’s just an artist, a complicated human, who turned his pain, his trauma, his weirdness, into something we could feel.
“It’s not the band we relate to,” the AV Club writes. “It’s the heart beating at its center.”

I didn’t listen to any Everclear records beyond Afterglow. I heard some singles, but never bought another CD. I’ve listened to a few tracks off Alexakis’s solo record, Sun Songs, released at the end of 2019, but it’s a hard record to hear. Not long ago, Alexakis was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. On the record, he sings of fear and death and disease—things he’s sung about before, but this is different. Now, he sings about the fear of falling apart, of a new disease he can’t shake away. At fifty-eight, though, his voice hasn’t changed much since he was thirty-three. And when I hear him sing these songs, I can’t help but hear “Santa Monica.” So many years later, he’s still trying to find the sun. 
In 2012, Alexakis founded Summerland, a music festival named after a song on Sparkle and Fade and composed entirely of alternative bands from the 90s. The festival has been called, derisively and not, a “90s nostalgia tour.”
“Liking stuff from the 90s is really about nostalgia,” Alexakis told Diffuser in 2015. “And I think a little bit of nostalgia is a healthy thing.”
Nostalgia is a funny word. From the Greek -algia, or “pain,” and -nostos, “return.” In the ancient epics like The Odyssey, Nostos means, specifically, “a return home from sea.” Some linguists have interpreted the word to mean, simply, a homecoming.
“Santa Monica” is a song about leaving, and it’s a song about going home. It’s a song about jumping off the Santa Monica Pier, but it’s not a song about dying. It’s about swimming out to sea, past the waves that might pull us under, to find what might exist beyond them. About watching a world on fire die behind us, but looking to the horizon with the hope. It’s about looking back, too—toward the places that made us, that once held us, that we long for even though they nearly killed us, and seeing both darkness and light. Maybe even perpetual summer. 
“Santa Monica,” Alexakis once said, “it’s just about—I was in the rain and I grew up in the sun.”
There’s a reason I haven’t listened to Everclear’s later stuff. I heard it got too poppy, yes, that it recycles the same old groove. But this is not the reason. In the 90s, when I was twelve, then fourteen, then sixteen, Everclear was more than just a band. They—and what I mean is Art Alexakis—spoke to me in a way that nothing had yet. They spoke of things I was struggling with then, that I’m struggling with still. When I was most alone, “Santa Monica,” and Everclear, found me. And maybe this is the nostalgia talking, but I prefer this song, these records, this band—this more-than-band, this beacon, this catharsis, this shock of connection, this beating heart, this hand reaching out in the darkness and pulling us into the light—to exist as it existed then, and where it might live forever, in the globulous glow of a lava lamp, suspended in some golden sunlight of the California coast I’ve never seen.

Melissa Faliveno is the author of TOMBOYLAND: ESSAYS, named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR, New York Public Library, O Magazine, and Electric Literature. She is the 2020-21 Kenan Visiting Writer at UNC-Chapel Hill, and her wardrobe has not changed much since 1995.

WE WERE ALL IN LOVE WITH DYING: DAVID TURKEL ON “PEPPER”

Love and life only appear to be separate because everything on earth is broken apart by vibration of various amplitudes and durations. —George Bataille, “The Solar Anus”

I dropped acid on Valentine’s Day in 1988, when I was a senior in high school. It was my very first drug. I smoked cigarette number one (of probably well over a hundred thousand) while tripping that afternoon—pulled it out of a stranger’s mouth at a sub shop on Woodward Avenue, took a puff, pronounced it “disgusting,” and dropped it back onto their table. The acid cost me three bucks. I remember holding the tiny piece of paper in my hand and thinking it was going to be a bigger dud than grocery store fireworks. You just can’t conceive of losing your mind until you do, I guess. You can’t use your brain to imagine a you that’s still you even after everything you thought of as yourself has vacated the premises. I think Foucault said that.
I remember it was Valentine’s Day because I had to take my girlfriend to a dance that night. Before that, I had to have dinner with my parents. I was sitting on the bathroom sink, staring at myself in the mirror, my face as red as a baboon’s ass, my eyes fully black to their edges. I was by this point clear-headed enough to know that it was a problem, yet still deranged enough to have settled on the following solution: I would simply stare directly into the lightbulb above our kitchen table to make my pupils shrink before looking at either of my parents when we spoke. So that was our dinner. Them: “Why is your face so red?” Me: (stares at lightbulb) “We went sledding.” Them: “Where did you go sledding?” Me: (stares at lightbulb) “The...library?” My mother had made soup that evening, and that I remember almost thirty-three years later because of the pepper. She cracked fresh black pepper over the soup and the whole thing started to spin.

Paul Leary—guitarist and co-founder of Texas punk legends Butthole Surfers—explained the non sequitur title of his band’s one and only hit song this way: Teresa Nervosa, one of the band’s drummers, was out walking her dog when a stranger approached and asked her, “What’s your dog’s name, Sonny...Pepper?” Can’t quite tell if the joke here is that the stranger misgendered Nervosa (the literal poster child of Richard Linklater’s 1991 film Slacker), or that he seems to have thought he could actually guess the dog’s name. Of course, it’s really not possible to trust anything Leary says. It’s his story, for example, that the band’s van broke down during their first road trip in 1982 on San Francisco’s Bay Bridge and merely coasted to a stop in front of the Tool and Die on Valencia where a punk show was in the process of loading in—a show the Buttholes not only crashed (talking themselves onto the bill for three songs), but where they met Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys, who agreed to put out their first EP on his Alternative Tentacles label. What a magical shitcan of a van, huh? Which is not to say that Leary is a liar, simply that Butthole Surfers are inscrutable by design. Nervosa puts it this way: “there was this unspoken code, and this is sort of what happens in a dysfunctional family, but we had a code among us that nobody told what the deal was.”

I didn’t want to go to college when I finished high school, but I couldn’t figure out how to explain that to my parents, so I did the next best thing: I enrolled at Wayne State University in Detroit and moved into a house with the guy who had sold me my Valentine’s Day acid. In short order, he became the guy who got me drunk and stoned for the first times, as well. He also, as it happens, provided my introduction to Butthole Surfers. The song was “Lady Sniff” off their first, full-length album, Psychic...Powerless...Another Man’s Sac (1984). That album, like the majority of their seminal 80s output, was released on Touch and Go Records, unofficially headquartered in Detroit at the time, and the band was treated there like local heroes. Their full-length concert video, Blind Eye Sees All, was shot over two nights at Detroit’s Traxx club in 1985, one of which was an all-ages show I think my new roommate had actually attended as a high school freshman. By the time we moved in together, he was a skilled drummer who played with a band that opened up for the Buttholes. The experience changed everything for them. They began employing male and female dancers clad only in raw steaks tied around their waists and shooting homemade pornography to project against their gyrating bodies.
“Take me back to DEE-troit, Paaauuullll—Yeah heh heh!!” Butthole front man, Gibby Haynes, hollers on “Lady Sniff.” My roommate hollered along with him, playing the song for me and leering above the cassette deck. “Gibby’s a god,” he said and proceeded to describe the 6’5” Texan prowling the stage at their last performance, lipstick scrawled across his face, in a pointy bra with his dick out, waving a shotgun at the crowd. At the time, I thought my musical tastes were adventurous—I liked Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart—but I was unprepared for that song. It wasn’t that it was so challenging to listen to; it was weirdly the opposite.
“Lady Sniff” rocks. Leary’s guitar tone is blistering, and the dual drum attack of Nervosa and the band’s longest-serving drummer, King Coffey, is thunderously propulsive. In seconds you imagine everything the song could be if it wanted—you can hear the boot-stomping, ass- shaking Texas roadhouse party starting—but then it downshifts. And shits. And spits and vomits and arm-farts all over itself. “Lady Sniff” is a song that flushes the talents of its own makers down the john and hocks an enormous loogie at its audience’s every expectation.
I had never heard anything that seemed to care so little about what it was supposed to be. The punk music I knew at the time was frantic and hostile, but weirdly precious, too. It seemed so concerned about what it was and what it wasn’t and who it was for and who it was against. Butthole Surfers, by contrast, clearly didn’t give a fuck.

Performance artist Kathleen Lynch was working her job at a peep show in Times Square, sick as a dog, when she accidentally defecated on the stage and then uttered the words that would become her new name: "Ta da!” Or, as she was known at their shows, “TA-DA the Shit Lady”—the Butthole Surfers’ naked dancer. Whatever pact or wordless code the Buttholes adhered to that banned any serious reflection on their musical intentions doesn’t seem to have extended to Lynch, whom Leary refers to without reserve as “the true artist of the band,” citing in particular a months-long vow of silence that TA-DA observed during her three-year stint as a Butthole Surfer. And here, despite the obvious irony, is the thing about Leary, because this time I believe him—not only that one might know a true artist by her silence, but that the raucous cacophony of a band like Butthole Surfers could in fact revolve around a mesmerizingly silent center. “A seaweed boa wrapped around her neck, and teeth covered in tinfoil, and dressed only in a loose-fitting diaper, when dressed in anything at all,” James Burns writes in the wonderfully informative Let’s Go to Hell: Scattered Memories of the Butthole Surfers, “[TA DA} was the complete embodiment of the band itself. Impish: childlike, grossly horrific, yet somehow tantalizingly beautiful....it was as if she sprouted out of the stage.”
Silence, or at least an interest in absence, had been in the band’s DNA from the start. They’d chosen a name unspeakable on the radio and released their albums without any liner notes (or even, on one occasion, song titles). They spent years homeless, living out of a succession of beat-to-shit vans and busses--one of which was rumored to have been equipped with a custom gas tank that allowed for fewer stops between shows—and the result of that road warrior spirit, matched with their speed- and acid-fueled mania, was that the band seemed to be both everywhere and nowhere throughout the 80s: barely escaping the federales in Tijuana one minute, playing a New York City opera house with some of the most esteemed experimental musicians in the world the next. All the while refusing to “let on what the deal was.” They were too absurd and immature to be serious, too fanatical and outright dangerous to be a joke. Yet, even transgressive Murder Junky, GG Allin, offered more explanation for his outrageous behavior; Butthole Surfers were mum.

Being a teenager in the 80s felt like being Charlton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes—only it was the 1960s, not Lady Liberty, shattered to pieces in the surf. For all that was captivating about that decade’s counterculture, the evidence of its ultimate failure was undeniable in Ron and Nancy’s America. And that tension, more than anything, is what Butthole Surfers captured for me. They were a parody of the 1960s in many ways: punks who played in the wreckage of that decade’s demolished architecture. They gobbled acid and jammed like the Grateful Dead, lived a commune lifestyle like MC5, were as cultish as Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, as arty and profane as the Velvet Underground. They sported the cock-rock guitar- worship of Grand Funk Railroad and were as trippy at the controls as Funkadelic and as homebrewed and wrong-headed as their Texas forebearers, psych-rock pioneers the 13th Floor Elevators. But they gutted the whole enterprise, turned it all on its head.
This is how they smuggled the music of the 60s (and early 70s) past the militant gatekeepers of the American hardcore scene: by serving it up empty of meaning, idealism or any belief system whatsoever. In the process, they exposed the naivety of that scene and redefined what it meant to be punk. Because ultimately, the bands and fans of hardcore that so rigidly structured their aesthetic as an uncompromising rebuke of all things Hippie still clung to the one core tenant of 60s counterculture that the Buttholes rejected: the idea that any of it fucking mattered.
Butthole Surfers brought extended guitar solos, studio trickery, eight-minute-long songs, theatrical stage shows and direct homages to Jimi Hendrix, Black Sabbath, Blue Cheer, and Led Zeppelin past the purity-policing of punks who were so reactionary, they wouldn’t even let Black Flag fool around with an alternate tempo on their second album. And they pulled it all off because the Buttholes clearly cared less, looked worse and went harder than anyone else around. In their wake, punk became not a style of music and a haircut, but an actual lifestyle— an orientation and attitude which could be applied to anything, or nothing at all.
It’s not uncommon for lovers of Butthole Surfers to talk at length about the band without ever mentioning their music. Mannequins full of hamburgers, cymbals full of fire, and a band and audience full of drugs predominate. This shouldn’t suggest that the music itself was inconsequential, simply that it soundtracked a broader, more transformative experience. In this sense, their shows were closer to happenings than concerts. But unlike Hippie lovefests, these shows, as you might suspect, were pulled inside out. Rather than wash the stage in trippy gobos and art films, they showed multiple movies at once—often sped up and in reverse—featuring graphic car wrecks, scatology and, most famously, penis reconstruction surgery. Instead of triumphantly smashing a guitar at the end of a set, the Buttholes were as likely to break four guitars on their first song. Their stages were swathed in smoke and bombarded with strobe light so intense, Nervosa eventually had to leave the band due in part to the seizures they induced.
Fans frequently fell ill. After one concert, Daniel Johnston—the brilliant but disturbed Austin-based singer/songwriter that the Buttholes helped launch to international attention—suffered a psychotic break so severe, he had to be institutionalized. But perhaps their most infamous performance was a 1986 concert at Manhattan’s Danceteria, in which TA DA and her friend Kabbage sprayed the audience with “piss wands” (plastic toy bats they’d filled with urine), Leary destroyed the PA system with a screwdriver, and Gibby and TA DA apparently had sex in front of the drum riser. That show lasted all of five songs, but catapulted the band to a new level of notoriety. Within days they were earning twice as much for performances—fans now adding the possibility of a live sex show to an already dazzling list of perverse thrills in store for them.

Though I couldn’t know it at the time, this incarnation of the band was coming to a close when I first heard them in 1988. But the world around me seemed to be only then catching on. These were the NEA Four days of chocolate-covered performance artists, sculptures made from human blood, urine-submerged crucifixes. There was a growing sense that art shouldn’t just push boundaries, but dissolve them altogether. GG Allin was arrested in Ann Arbor for assault and pledged to kill himself on stage at a Halloween performance. It felt impossible at the time not to hear an echo of the word “artificial” in any so-called art that failed to trouble the notion of its safe confinement. Audiences wanted the window into real psychosis that Daniel Johnston provided, the real truth about the street as told by Ice-T and NWA. Which is another way of saying that artists were expected to be their art, not just make it. And Butthole Surfers delivered on that premise in spades. They made genre-defying music in their kitchen and toured it while eating out of trash cans, but we were just as likely to discuss rumors—that they had been stalking Michael Stipe, or were wanted by Interpol, or had set the ceiling of a Philadelphia club on fire—as we were to talk about their lyrics, performance chops, or even their D.I.Y. ethos. This was the demented monkey’s paw they offered: the idea that the music itself was somehow only a byproduct of that lifestyle, not its aim. That art was ultimately the measure of one’s willingness to go too far.

There’s a tyranny to Butthole Surfer lore. If you’re not careful, the stories take over and you end up sounding like a carnival barker shilling a freakshow. But there’s one more chestnut which I will relate, if only because no one ever seems to say what it’s actually a story about. This is the fact that Gibson “Gibby” Haynes (son of Texas’s beloved children’s TV entertainer, Mister Peppermint) was an MBA at Trinity University voted “Accountant of the Year” before graduating to take a job at Pick Markham—then the largest accounting firm in the nation. Journalists enjoy the irony but fail time and again to pick up on a larger point, which is that Gibby and Paul (also a Trinity student on track to becoming a stockbroker at the time of the band’s formation) weren’t outcasts; theirs isn’t the story of rock-and-roll salvation, of two misfit kids headed nowhere until the day they heard their first electric guitar. No, the story of the Butthole Surfers is a story of self-exile: two highly functioning adults who simply decided one day to throw themselves into a gigantic fan blade to make splatter art.
At the same time, it’s the story of their band’s almost preternatural competence. Yes, their shows were chaotic beyond measure, but amidst all the fire, nudity and gunplay, the core rhythm section of King Coffey and bassist Jeff Pinkus remained in lockstep with Leary’s spiraling, spastic guitar; and the music—barring any intervention from the authorities—never stopped. And while it’s true that they would go 15 years before a hit song, the success of their catalogue anchored Touch and Go Records for much of the 80s, fueling that label’s rise to become one of the most adventurous and influential indie labels ever.
Though much of the audience that met the Buttholes through their 1996 smash hit “Pepper” would come to regard the band as just another of Kurt Cobain’s obscure obsessions, the actual fact is that when Nirvana formed in 1987, Butthole Surfers were the most successful independent rock band in America, fetching as much as fifteen thousand dollars for a single performance. They began the decade opening for bands like Minutemen, TSOL and Dead Kennedys, and finished it headlining sold-out concerts with warmup acts like Nirvana, Soundgarden, Screaming Trees, Green River, the Flaming Lips, Jesus Lizard, and L7. If grunge can be defined as the music of the 60s and 70s lensed from a post-punk perspective and laced with a nihilist, “oh well, whatever, never-mind” spirit, then Butthole Surfers are clearly the progenitors of that dumb baby. Or, at least, they are the primordial ooze from which it crawled. With the release of Electriclarryland—the album containing “Pepper”—they would become grunge’s undertakers as well.

I was back living with my parents in 1996, finally finishing up at Wayne State after a series of misadventures. I’d returned to discover that my old poetry professor, an avid sailor, had gone missing on Lake Michigan; my favorite bookstore on Cass Avenue was shuttered following the grisly murder of its owner; and my old college roommate—the Butthole Surfer fanatic—had graduated from experimentation to full-blown heroin addiction. I was working at a record store in a mall and I remember when the promotional copy of Electriclarryland arrived—we got the “clean” cover at our store with the prairie dog—thinking that the band’s name, redacted as “B***H***”, simply ended up looking like a series of buttholes pressed to the jewel case.
Some fans of the band thought it had been the ultimate betrayal when they signed to Capitol Records in 1992. I never felt that way. To me this was always part of their deal. Is betrayal even possible when you don’t know what something or someone stands for? Leary answered the accusations with his typical absurdism—they were never an independent band, he said, they were instead “a co-dependent band”; had never been punk, but, rather, “schlock rock,” even “pop,”—“we rhymed love and dove on our first record.” You’ll never get anywhere talking to a guy like that.
Their first Capitol release, 1993’s Independent Worm Saloon, had been decent enough, but it was never just about the music. The band themselves had seen to that. All shrugs aside, the Capitol deal pretty much destroyed them. They were sent on an arena tour as the opening act for Stone Temple Pilots. None of their old fans wanted to see them that way, or share a seated venue with the STP bros who hated Butthole Surfers almost as much as the Buttholes were rumored to have hated STP. Gibby succumbed to heroin addiction and took STP frontman Scott Weiland along with him, according to Weiland’s own very public accusations.
Throughout the 1990s, Gibby became the sort of Slenderman of Grunge. Everybody knew that Kurt and Courtney—grunge’s homecoming couple—had their meet-cute at a Butthole Surfers show. That’s his drunken voice playing the maniac preacher in Ministry’s “Jesus Built My Hotrod.” Later, Gibby lurked in the background of one public disaster after another: onstage at the Viper Room the night River Phoenix died, bunking with Kurt Cobain at the rehab center a week before Cobain’s suicide. Witnesses claim that it was under his hero’s influence that Cobain jumped the facility’s wall and abandoned his final attempt at treatment.
More than three years lapsed between albums and by the time of Electriclarryland’s release, the real news in Butthole Surfer-land was that the band was suing Touch and Go Records. Now the band’s peers and even heroes, like Ian MacKaye and Texas punk’s founding father Biscuit Turner, leveled accusations of betrayal. The Buttholes had only a handshake agreement with Touch and Go all this time—it was a very punk thing to do, but if you didn’t just hear Leary, they were never punk—they were a pop band founded by an accountant and a stockbroker.

Even STP bros know the words to Pepper’s chorus: I don’t mind the sun sometimes, the images it shows. For George Bataille, the sun itself is a butthole. As he explains in “The Solar Anus,” his 1927 parody of a manifesto, the entire world is “purely parodic...each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form.” To me, the Capitol deal, the lawsuit—it was all just one more evolution in Butthole Surfers’ parody of the 1960s. They’d simply reached the sell-out phase. As with everything else, they were going to do it in their own inimitable style.
A lot has been said over the years about the comparisons between “Pepper” and Beck’s 1993 hit “Loser.” Both songs alternate spoken word verses with psych-rock choruses in roughly equal measure, both backmask those choruses into the bridges, both use a sitar. And while defenders of Butthole Surfers are correct in arguing that the band had done virtually all of those things long before Beck ever set foot into a recording studio (or had hair on his gonads, for that matter), I would like to do my part here in setting the record straight. Yes, quite obviously, Butthole Surfers stole the song. For my evidence, I simply submit the fact that the band vehemently denies these accusations. I mean, seriously, when have these guys ever given a straight answer about their music to anyone? It’s 101-level B.S. detection.
I have to question the instincts of fans who wish to defend the band on this score. It’s like thinking you have to defend racoons against accusations of dumpster-diving. Butthole Surfers were just doing what they’d always done—playing in the wreckage—and by 1996, that’s what was left of grunge. There sat “Loser,” Beck’s admittedly half-assed track, like a house with a broken skylight, which the Buttholes just sort of pried open, to shimmy inside and ransack the refrigerator. This happened to a friend of mine (with actual racoons) while he was away on vacation—the racoons couldn’t get out of the house and they ended up tearing the whole place apart and he came home to discover them in his bathtub. That’s basically what went down here, too—the Buttholes got stuck inside the song, only they’re radioactive racoons and so they ended up tricking the thing out, made it a lot cooler.
The real comparison that needs to be drawn between “Loser” and “Pepper,” in my opinion, has nothing to do with their structural similarities or relative merit. Instead, it’s a study in perspective. “They were all in love with dying, they were drinking from a fountain, that was pouring like an avalanche, coming down the mountain,” Gibby intones in the flat, disaffected patter of his song’s verses. Not “I”—as Beck implicates himself in “Loser”—or even “we.” They. He’s singing as an observer, casting his mind’s eye back on real figures from his Dallas upbringing: nutbags, freaks and weirdos (and the “ever-present football player rapist”) who fell to car wrecks, stabbings, viruses and sordid accidents. But when the chorus rolls around and things turn “cinnamon and sugary,” we hear what anyone familiar with 60s psychedelia knows right away—this is a drug song, and the names in the verses could just as well be Kurt, Scott, River, Hillel. The music has gone loopy and an “I” emerges, tasting and scenting sweet traces.
Then, yet another shift in POV: You never know just how you look through other people’s eyes. Of all the chicken-fried lunacy to come out of Gibby’s mouth over the years, this line may have my vote as the looniest. The only thing I feel that I can say with any certainty about Gibby is that he has always known exactly how he looks to others. Gavin Bowden, director of the song’s inspired music video, puts the lie to it right away, casting Gibby as the wild-eyed perpetrator of a seedy, unspecified crime (and Eric Estrada, of TV’s C.H.I.P.S., as its victim). Guilty is how the Butthole frontman looks here. And he knows it. He keeps his head down, buries his face in his hands. He’s tired, almost relieved to be caught:

Some will die in hot pursuit and fiery auto crashes
Some will die in hot pursuit while sifting through my ashes
Some will fall in love with life and drink it from a fountain

In almost every story about Gibby, there’s a moment when those on hand see the demon arrive and know things are about to go sideways. He could turn that certain look on and off like a flashlight. It happens palpably for one breathtaking instant in the video at minute 1:16. You can feel the wheels beneath you hitting black ice. It’s a look that dares you to cross the line: between music and mayhem, art and crime, freedom and madness. He’s flashed it from a thousand stages, and as one-time Butthole bassist Kramer attests in a 2020 Believer interview, in every other location imaginable, as well. Gibby has always known how he appears to those around him and what his effect on them will be. So, for me, the thing that’s most fascinating to consider about “Pepper’s” use of pronoun: the possibility that in his own mind, Gibby was never one of “them.” Like his infernally competent band, was he always a bit more in control than it seemed?
Gibby recently wrote a YA novel about a magic dog and claims to devote most all of his time these days to his sons. The band has reunited and even Nervosa (aka Teresa Taylor) is back onboard—the Buttholes having turned out to be not quite as dysfunctional a family as it once seemed. King Coffey won a “Yard of the Year” award from his Austin neighborhood committee, for god sake. Pinkus, when not busy as a Butthole Surfer, is steadily at work with his band Honky and on projects with the Melvins. And Leary has parlayed the tricks he learned recording Butthole Surfers songs in his kitchen into a successful career as a producer of acts like Meat Puppets and Sublime. And though Kathleen (TA DA) Lynch is not part of the reunion, Leary has this to say about the “true artist” formerly known as the Shit Lady: “I saw her about seven or eight years ago, and she was doing great...turned out to be a pretty normal person, with a normal kind of job, which made me real happy.”
Since I started writing this, I’ve spent more than a few nights staring at my old roommate’s Facebook page, weighing the pros and cons of reaching out, even just to ask a question or two about those early shows. I want to know if it was the Traxx show he attended or an earlier one at Paycheck’s Lounge in Hamtramck, and how their shows evolved with the lineup changes over those years from the mid to late 80s. And I also want to know if he remembers a certain night in May of 1996, when I followed him from a bachelor party to a crack house on Cass after he said to me, “You want to be a writer, don’t you?” It’s not that I don’t think he’d remember. Most of the pictures on his page are actually from those days. It’s just, how should I put this? Most of the pictures on his page are from those days.

David Turkel is a playwright and bartender--which, in pandemic, means that he is a cat-dad and personal chef. He teaches screenwriting at Oregon State University.