Walk Away

Butthole Surfers - Whirling Hall of Knives

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of my favourite movies, half-assed Halloween theme or not.

Butthole Surfers are one of my favourite bands, and they pair with that movie as well as peanut butter & chocolate (again, trying to stick to a half-assed Halloween theme here).

As a kid growing up in Texas, I gave myself over to both at the same age, and approached them with equal wariness, like when I was also a kid at Astroworld, looking at that enormous white wooden behemoth, The Texas Cyclone (one of the scariest looking roller coasters I’d ever seen).

They say everything is bigger in Texas (yawn, cliche), but I’d say it’s more like everything is a bit crazier in Texas. A state overflowing at the waistline with a deranged self-pride, a place eclipsed by its own outrageous mythology, where everything is somehow tied back to Texas because to Texans nothing outside of Texas is as valid and may not even truly exist. Texas hardly exists, at least as a singular thing. Everyone, inside and out, has their own idea of what it is, like all great places, and its greatest quality is that it maintains that wonderful negative space for anyone to fill in how they see fit.

What soars in Austin, doesn’t quite fly in Houston; what works in Dallas no funciona en El Paso.

But Texas is full of weirdos, all across the board.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre on its surface is a horror movie, sure, but its strength is in the savage satirizing of the end of the 60s (and Texas culture). Butthole Surfers are / were a punk band (arguable, really) but their strength is in the savage satirizing of everything, from punk pretension, to all standards of “good” taste. Both seem crude at first, but reveal their artistry with repeated exposure.

There are way too many great songs by Butthole Surfers I could post, and I’ll have to one day sit down and really dig my claws into my brain and explore the band in text, as well as my deep, dirty love for their insane brilliance. I recently revisited this release (which often gets eclipsed by the 2 records in their discography it comes between, Psychic, Powerless, Another Man’s Sac and Locust Abortion Technician) after watching some really primal footage of them playing the following song, recorded around 1986. Rembrandt Pussyhorse is a much funnier, stranger and scarier record than I remember on the whole. Another song on this album that I’d been contemplating for today, Perry, is a more apt comparison for this whole Texas Chainsaw Massacre idea I was banging on about - a song where the mind either retreats or crosses the threshold of full lysergic lunacy as Gibby starts rattling off a life lesson to a young man named Perry over a background of psychotic howling laughter and a sludgy clown show riff- but I chose this one, because its emblematic of the more remarkable truth of The Butthole Surfers: a dangerous and deft band behind that acid-fried brain.

Truly one of the most unique bands to come out of the 80s American underground.

Like what I’m doing here? Let me know by suggesting it to someone else that may like it. Not into this song? Stick around for the next one, it may be what you didn’t know you needed! Remember, there are only two genres of music here at SERMONS!: good and bad, and I have too much to do to waste time on bad music