Widely considered one of the most infamously named bands in rock music, Butthole Surfers built their legacy on defying convention and getting under the skin of the uptight. Rising to the challenge of capturing that madness, Sunset Blvd. has dropped the band’s third live record, ‘Live at the Leather Fly’, today. Pulled from deep within the band’s archives, this 21-track set is shrouded in mystery—its time and place of recording still hotly debated. But as always, the band leaned into the weird. “Back in the ’80s, Gibby Haynes (vocalist/guitarist) used to imagine a club called ‘The Leather Fly’—with a giant stuffed leather fly hanging out front,” recalls Paul Leary (guitar/vocals/‘art master’), reflecting on the bizarre dream venue where this surreal performance supposedly took place.
Known for albums as chaotic as they were catchy, Butthole Surfers brought that same unhinged energy to their live shows. Red Hot Chilli Peppers bassist Flea even says in their SxSW-premiered documentary (trailer), “The Butthole Surfers have created this, like, sonic, visual world. You went into it, and it was just completely absorbing. I remember just being hypnotized and lost in it.” Director Richard Linklater (Before Sunrise, Dazed and Confused, Boyhood) adds: “There is kind of a before and after. When you wander into a Butthole Surfers show, that is a changing point in your life. It’s like, ‘holy fuck!’”
Unpredictable, brash and, in typical Butthole Surfers’ fashion, so in-your-face that it penetrates your skull, their live performances pummel with the tight rhythm section of Jeff Pinkus’ pounding bass and King Coffey’s hale and hearty drums, Paul’s searing guitarwork, and Gibby’s frenetic and eccentric vocal stylings. Deeply gonzo and often psychedelic, their hallucinogenic-soaked punk rock is sludgy yet melodic, like a fudgesicle made of sewer mud and Belgian chocolate. It’s this gritty scuzz-rock that defined them and propelled their legacy far beyond the underground, even dabbling with Top 40.
But they never lost sight of what made them notorious. UK’s The Guardian described their live shows as “Nudity, raging fires, belching smoke, blinding strobes, nightmare-inducing surgical videos, fights and firearms: these are some of the things you may have encountered at a Butthole Surfers show while being pummeled by a squealing cacophony of acid-fried psychedelic noise-rock, as a man tripping wildly in his underpants screams at you through a megaphone.”
‘Live At The Leather Fly’ captures that grittiness, which The San Antonio Current likens to a “potent fusion of post-punk, performance art, Texas psych and theater of the absurd, cementing it as one of the era’s most enigmatic and compelling musical ensembles” and Rolling Stone hails as “the American underground’s most notorious live act, a nomadic carnival of terror.”