The Butthole Surfers used to perform backed by films of gruesome surgeries, flanked by burning trash fires, and punctuated by the occasional shotgun blast from their oft-naked lead singer Gibby Haynes. On August 8, 1996, the most psychotic, scatological band to ever emerge from Austin’s punk scene played arguably the most shocking show of its long career on CBS’s Late Show with David Letterman.
Letterman—who was clearly giddy at the chance to say “Butthole” on network television—introduced the group as a “groundbreaking, talented, and undeniably perverse band from Texas.” As cameras panned over to the band, the group launched into a rendition of its radio hit “Pepper” that found the band members . . . just . . . standing there. Playing competently. Appearing to enjoy themselves. Haynes, fully clothed, even cracked a smile.
To longtime fans, the only thing “perverse” about this was how far off it felt from the Butthole Surfers they’d loved and semi-feared. The group that had eschewed song titles for cartoons of defecating deer on its 1988 album Hairway to Steven—and had seemed so philosophically opposed to commercial appeal that it had, after all, christened itself “Butthole Surfers”—was now following a pleasant chat between Letterman and soccer star Mia Hamm, playing for an audience of people getting ready for bed. Drummer King Coffey had warned Texas Monthly just a few months earlier: “Something is definitely wrong with society when the Butthole Surfers become popular.” Letterman, it seemed, was the beginning of the end.
Despite Coffey’s apocalyptic pronouncement, society in 1996 (with the glaring exception of the Unabomber) seemed mostly fine. If anything, it was the music that was lost, awkwardly stranded between the sardonic grunge that dominated the early part of the decade and the Jeep-rattling rap-rock that defined its later years. Radio and MTV were embracing a lot of broadly defined “alternative” artists making anything that sounded mildly left of center. “Pepper,” released that May, was just weird enough to fit in.
The song was built around a looping hip-hop drumbeat and a droning guitar riff, both of them created by guitarist Paul Leary during the making of the Butthole Surfers’ seventh album, Electriclarryland. Haynes added the verses, a monotone rap about various people he’d known from his teenage years in Dallas—shady characters named “Mikey” and “Sharon” who were hell-bent on sex and self-destruction. “They were all in love with dyin’ / They were doin’ it in Texas,” Haynes intones, before “Pepper” explodes into its anthemic refrain—“I don’t mind the sun sometimes / The images it shows”—surrounded by glints of sitar.
It seems an odd formula for a hit, but in 1996 it was actually a familiar one. “Pepper” slotted seamlessly next to singles like Eels’s “Novocaine for the Soul” and Primitive Radio Gods’s “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth With Money in My Hand” that were similarly built on hypnotic drum loops and laconic vocals. It also sounded a lot like something from Beck, who’d all but minted this type of sound with his 1994 smash “Loser,” and who was concurrently readying to own ’96 and beyond with Odelay.
“Pepper” sounded so much like a Beck song, in fact, that some suggested it was an intentional rip-off or even a deliberate “send-up” of Beck, as one writer for Spike TV would later claim. But for their part, the Butthole Surfers have always denied Beck had any influence. The song’s narcotic rhythms were influenced by trip-hop groups, like Massive Attack and Tricky, that the Buttholes were into at the time, as Coffey told the Hartford Courant. Coffey even traced the song’s roots to Soul II Soul’s club hit “Back to Life,” averring that the Butthole Surfers’ interest in “DJ culture stuff” was genuine.
For many longtime fans, the fact that the Buttholes weren’t kidding only made the success of “Pepper”—which spent three weeks atop Billboard’s Modern Rock Tracks chart—all the more confounding. The accompanying video grappled with this cognitive dissonance directly, winking at the corniness of it all. The band members are clad in natty suits, performing stiffly on an American Bandstand–style stage while beehived women and police in riot gear dance all around them. In several scenes, guest star Erik Estrada literally eats from a can of corn.
Like Nirvana’s clip for “In Bloom,” the “Pepper” video suggested the band didn’t totally mean it—that the Buttholes approached their fluke pop-stardom with sarcastic amusement, even disdain. “Pepper” is a dark song about kids, among them racists and an “ever-present football rapist,” dying in car crashes and knife fights, after all. The music video intersperses its variety-show shenanigans with a faux newsreel of Haynes, doing his best Charles Manson, being arrested at a Texas motel. There’s a brief moment, approaching the three-minute mark, when Haynes cocks his head at the camera and the devil comes out—a flash of danger that reminds us this “cinnamon and sugary” sing-along is just an ironic glaze on the band’s usual abject ugliness. Still, “Pepper” rankled the band’s diehards, who couldn’t understand how the Butthole Surfers went from being the punk scene’s wildest freak show to rubbing MTV elbows with Jamiroquai and the Goo Goo Dolls.
“Yeah, but who cares,” Haynes countered to Texas Monthly in 2015. “We were never a punk band,” Leary concurred. “We were always a schlock band.”
From the moment “Pepper” was released, the group has shrugged off accusations of “selling out,” maintaining that the Butthole Surfers were mercurial by nature, and open to experimenting with just about any kind of song—even something you could karaoke to or put on your gym playlist. Besides, if there was a “sellout” moment for the Butthole Surfers, surely it came several years before “Pepper,” sometime between the band’s run on the inaugural Lollapalooza tour and its signing to the major label Capitol Records for 1993’s Independent Worm Saloon. They’d been criticized for that, too, but by then the Buttholes had spent ten years sleeping on floors and eating out of trash cans, watching as countless other groups they’d inspired and shared stages with—Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden—leapfrogged over them to become rich and famous. Why should they be left out of the alternative rock feeding frenzy, just to assuage some fan’s vaguely defined ethos?
Leary was even more blunt in Michael Azerrad’s 2001 indie-rock history Our Band Could Be Your Life, sneering at “purists” who’d renounced the group for leveling up: “If ever I got any grief from those people, I would just tell them to kiss my ass,” he said. “You go live in a f—in’ van, you a–hole. You go home to your nice mommy-and-daddy little bed there and think about what a sellout I am.”
The success of “Pepper” might have been all well and good—the unexpected payoff for years of perseverance and stubborn, idiosyncratic will—if the band had been able to enjoy it. Instead, success only seemed to make the Butthole Surfers miserable. In December 1996, Rolling Stone caught up with the group on a demoralizing run of dates in Europe, where the members groused openly about the lack of record-company support and playing to crowds who seemed hostile—or worse, indifferent. They sounded exhausted and bitter, quickly coming to terms with the fact that big tours, inflated video budgets, and all the other stuff that comes with scoring a hit meant they’d be going home thousands of dollars in debt, and Capitol would expect them to crank out another one.
The Buttholes would spend the better part of the next two years recording a follow-up, 1998’s After the Astronaut, which chased “Pepper” down a similarly electronic bent of drum loops and vaguely Middle Eastern guitar sounds. They’d already mastered the album and even sent copies out to the press when Capitol abruptly scrapped it. In the ensuing mess, the band and label soon parted ways.
At the same time, the years in and around “Pepper” were shadowed by the group’s protracted lawsuit against its former record label, Touch and Go, where it had released its first four albums. Touch and Go had been underpaying the Butthole Surfers, Leary told the A.V. Club in 2016, and the band’s recent uptick in catalog sales merited a new deal. Haynes went even further while talking to the Austin Chronicle in 1999, saying the label hadn’t been paying them at all. Nevertheless, those same “purist” fans rallied around the scrappy label instead of the newly anointed rock stars, some of them screaming that the lawsuit could kill the entire independent music industry. In one particularly low moment, Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye popped up in the Chicago Reader to call the band greedy and, implicitly, “f—ing jerk[s].”
Leary has always argued that the lawsuit, while personally painful, was the right thing to do, pointing out that it gave the Buttholes control over their own music and set a precedent that will help other bands. Still, the Butthole Surfers’ public image took a serious hit, in a way that wasn’t so easily shrugged off this time.
The Buttholes brand got even murkier when the band signed with Disney, of all companies, and released 2001’s Weird Revolution on the studio’s Hollywood Records imprint. As the band explained to Texas Monthly that year, the lead single, “The Shame of Life,” was explicitly designed to be a “Pepper”-size hit, with Haynes rapping over another programmed trip-hop beat. Its hook was written by Kid Rock, whose boilerplate lyrics about loving girls and money gave Haynes brief pause, before he recorded them anyway: “It’s so, so, what’s the word . . . bad?,” Haynes told Texas Monthly. Pitchfork was even more unsparing in its assessment. It gave Weird Revolution a reproachful “0.4” rating, sneering, “The Butthole Surfers have finally become shocking only in their sheer banality.”
The Pitchfork review went fully scorched-earth, declaring of the band, “They’ve never made a good record. Ever.” It was gratuitous, not to mention ridiculous. But it was also indicative of the general ill will that “Pepper” had created toward the band—a lot of which wasn’t even about them, really. As seen in some of the hyperbolic rhetoric over the Touch and Go lawsuit, the Butthole Surfers became a convenient avatar for the general anxiety about the commercialization of “underground” music; all that free-floating angst seemed to find its purchase in relentlessly dogging the band for daring to get paid after so many years of squalor and sacrifice. After so many licks, perhaps the real tragedy is that the group didn’t even get to reap the spoils of selling out: “The Shame of Life” topped out at 24 on Billboard’s Modern Rock Tracks chart before it quickly disappeared. The Butthole Surfers haven’t recorded an album since.
Then again: Yeah, but who cares? Or, to quote a line from the 1987 album Locust Abortion Technician that has become a sort of epigraph for the band, “It’s better to regret something you have done than something you haven’t done.” Before “Pepper,” the Buttholes had already led the revolution. They were “old and tired,” as Leary told Texas Monthly, their stage antics reduced to a shtick, and they were no longer particularly in love with music. They’d seen and done it all, except the stuff that everyone who picks up a guitar dreams about deep down: signing to a major label, scoring a number-one hit, playing Letterman and MTV, touring the world. To turn those opportunities down, particularly after a decade spent on the brink of self-destruction, would be a huge regret, the kind that no amount of “cred” could ever relieve.
Besides, 25 years later, “Pepper” and its aftermath no longer define the Butthole Surfers quite like they used to. The band’s mainstream stardom now seems more like an anomalous blip—a strange epilogue to an even stranger career. Meanwhile, it’s only had a net-positive effect on their legacy: those who came to the band through “Pepper” either worked their way backward through its discography and became converts in reverse, or they just dubbed “Pepper” onto some mixtape and never thought about it again, except whenever it floats up on classic-rock radio or when they’re waiting in line at the grocery store. Those people likely never think much about music in the first place: yeah, but who cares.
The Butthole Surfers are mostly dormant these days, but Haynes and Leary occasionally drop hints at a new album, one that could be made free from scrutiny or expectation. “Now we’ve kind of got away from all that to where nobody gives a shit anymore, so we can get back to doing things our way again,” Leary told the Quietus in 2017. They’ve reunited for the occasional live show, too, where the band usually plays “Pepper” in a medley with “Lady Sniff,” from its 1984 debut album Psychic . . . Powerless . . . Another Man’s Sac. Now that unmistakable, radio-friendly chorus emerges from one of the most scabrous songs in the Buttholes’ entire catalog—just another thread of the glorious, never-ending noise.
