Butthole Surfers, trips in the air – Libération

Punk

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From Texas, drummer Jeffrey “King” Coffey and guitarist and singer Paul Leary recall the early days of one of the most important bands on the American indie scene in the 80s. On the occasion of the reissue of their albums, we look back on an epic of extreme madness and saving noise.

“The singer was gigantic, comatose, wearing only his underpants, his hair full of clothespins. Sometimes he blew into a saxophone and made the most horrible, unbearable sounds I had ever heard. He was accompanied by a guitarist who stared at the ceiling with a terrified look, as if the whole building was threatening to collapse on him. They looked stupid, grotesque. But very, very scary.” Sitting at his living room table in Austin, Texas, Jeffrey “King” Coffey recalls that night in 1982 when, in the middle of a scorching summer, he took a three-hour bus ride to see the band that had the entire Texas punk scene talking and for which he would soon become the drummer: the Butthole Surfers.

The singer on the saxophone is Gibson “Gibby” Haynes, a seven-foot giant who, a year earlier, was a model student at the University of San Antonio, captain of the basketball team and a brilliant economics student named “accountant of the year” at his graduation – which he graduated with the highest honors and earned him an immediate hire at the prestigious firm Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co. A boy with a future all mapped out – until an encounter spectacularly derails everything: Paul Leary, an art student crazy about Yves Klein and Frank Zappa.

Fired on the spot

Both shared a taste for loud, outrageous music, and soon published a fanzine together, Strange V.D.