High summer, a heat that takes your breath away and kills you (metaphorically and otherwise… maybe if human beings thought about planting more trees and pouring less concrete we’d all be better off, climate included), heat that wrings out body and spirit alike, mosquitoes, flies and ants everywhere, you sweat out your own baptismal water, you can’t sleep, you switch on the radio, you open the socials and you have to swallow the garbage of the summer’s novelty hits hammering your brain and busting your balls (or, alternatively, your ovaries); you switch to television and all you hear about is migrants, “security”, families living in the woods, jewellers, “self-defence” and the legitimising of a do-it-yourself Wild West justice, the morbid details of crime stories used by the mainstream media and the politicians in government as weapons of mass distraction to keep the little people quiet (and to set them on the “foreigner”, and get them cheering for the coming of future strongmen and the next “saviours of the Fatherland”, still swallowing the fairy tale of the one hard man in charge who solves everything) and to bury their own glaring failures at home and abroad, complicit as they are with the military-financial bosses (stars and stripes, or Star of David — starred either way) in the genocide of a people unfolding on the other side of our Mediterranean, and which by now barely gets mentioned at all.
Where will it all end? Here petrol is pushing towards three euros a litre, poor bastards exploited for two euros an hour die of heatstroke, victims of that most Italian of institutions, the gangmaster system, billions of euros go to the rearmament and war lobbies (instead of to public schools and public health, a universal basic income, measures against the cost of living, raising average wages to the European average, or a serious, large-scale programme to make safe a country at extremely high hydrogeological risk), and yet people think only of tending their own individualist little garden, of frying their brains on three thousand TV series and going into debt for an “Instagrammable” holiday.
In this black hole into which every glimmer of hope and (mis)placed trust in our “Bel Paese” has collapsed, the one bright spot — genuinely the only one — is access to the flood of new music releases which, if on one hand they have clogged the streaming platforms and shredded the sanity of reviewers (it is practically, humanly impossible to keep up with the thousands of songs uploaded every day, let alone listen to the tens of thousands of albums put out over a calendar year!), on the other hand keep us company and make us feel less alone.
Among the umpteen thousand records seeing the light this year, we’re glad to flag a return — even if the material isn’t strictly new or recent — from US alternative/experimental rock band Butthole Surfers, the visionary project founded in 1981 by guitarist Paul Leary and frontman Gibby Haynes. Above all in the Eighties they were the protagonists of an outlandish, avant-garde sonic adventure that started in the cyclone of hardcore punk and then mutated into an iconoclastic, chaotic synthesis of noise rock, psychedelia, punk and dark humour, especially on the Touch and Go records (the self-titled EP, then the debut full length “Psychic… Powerless… Another Man’s Sac”, then “Rembrandt Pussyhorse”, “Locust Abortion Technician” and “Hairway To Steven”), all seminal for the development of American alternative rock. A mad, gaudy trajectory built on chaotic, destructive, controversial live shows, its importance frequently underrated (it would peak with the band’s appearance at the first edition of the travelling Lollapalooza festival, and the subsequent move to a major in the early Nineties, which handed them unexpected mainstream popularity with “Pepper”, from 1996’s “Electriclarryland”) and only widely reassessed with the passing of the years.
The Texan group — which alongside Leary and Haynes features Jeff Pinkus on bass and King Coffey on drums, and which some years ago suffered the painful loss of its historic former drummer Teresa “Nervosa” Taylor — has finally managed this year to release, via Sunset Blvd Records, “After the astronaut”, a lost album originally slated for 1998 but binned by the major that had them under contract, Capitol Records. Several of its tracks and ideas were partly reworked and recycled for “Weird revolution” in 2001, which remains, to date, the last official studio album by the Butthole Surfers, a band that a decade ago entered an open-ended hiatus, notwithstanding last year’s documentary on their misadventures, “The Hole truth… and nothing butt”.
The Record Capitol Buried
The story of “After the astronaut” begins in 1998, when the Buttholes were deep in their major-label period and enjoying their greatest moment of fame after the aforementioned “Electriclarryland”, which had shifted a lot of copies. The band handed Capitol the master tapes of the songs they wanted out on the follow-up, intended to be titled “After the astronaut”. The material immediately became a bone of contention between band and label: Capitol had signed the Butthole Surfers to cash in on the alternative rock gold rush kicked off by the Seattle grunge boom, and rejected the songs outright as difficult and “unsellable”, lacking a hit single to drive sales (and generous receipts into Capitol’s coffers) and to earn the BS radio and TV play.
Against that stood the determination of Haynes and company to refuse compromise and outside interference in their art (artwork, awkward subject matter in the songs), and their wish to move away from the sound that had made them a sort of “weirdo” and “freak” celebrity in the mainstream of the MTV generation. The standoff led to the album’s outright cancellation and to the Butthole Surfers being dropped, wiped from Capitol’s roster, their contract passed on to Hollywood Records, a Disney subsidiary (!) which demanded Leary and co. rework the masters of “The last astronaut” to make them more commercially “accessible”. Forced to eat shit, our heroes regrouped and in 2001 produced the LP “Weird revolution”, which contained eight tracks (out of twelve) lifted from the “The last astronaut” tapes and re-recorded.
What the Album Actually Sounds Like
Today the original mix of the record, remixed and remastered, is finally available in full, and you can clearly hear the band’s urge to answer the decline of grunge/alternative rock by experimenting, contaminating their own background with new routes and sonic solutions. The album showed a strong push towards electronics, industrial leanings (“They came in”) and a fascination with atmospheres drawn from rave culture and the dance movement that was tearing it up in the second half of the Nineties — something that could well have thrown anyone who had come to the Butthole Surfers a decade earlier, in the days of underground shows in punk clubs (to which only the closing track, “Turkey and dressing”, seems to reconnect, as a bridge of attitude).
Loops and drum machines everywhere, the trip hop of “Yentel” and “Junkie Jenny in Gaytown”, the bizarre hip hop/noise of “Weird revolution”, the Prodigy-style big beat of “Embuya”, the crossover of “Intelligent guy”, the delirious cacophony of the title track, oriental fragrances (“Mexico” and “Venus”), hallucinated psychedelic nightmares (“I don’t have a problem”) and melancholic pop surrealism (“Jet fighter”): the clear signal of a band that had decided to chance other paths, at the risk of losing the hardcore old guard of its fanbase. Either way it remains a snapshot of the spirit of a certain Nineties, perhaps the last decade in which stuff this strange could still find the backing of a record industry giant and hope to reach a few million people — unlike today, where at a certain level everything is preset, prepackaged, precooked, clean and prettified, where the bet is on tidy, reassuring music (even in “roooock”) that no longer feels the thrill of danger in trying to break the mould, and where so many new bands seem stamped out by the same harmless talent-show cookie cutter, recording music that sounds made only to chase the logic of social media reels, in the hope of going viral.
“After the Astronaut” could pass for a sci-fi record, a parody of American spirituality and an invitation to weirdness, made at a point when the boys had been absorbed and co-opted by the music industry, mired in disputes with a major and in legal battles (with Touch and Go and its founder, to get back the masters of the albums they’d released on the label in the Eighties — a move that earned them plenty of criticism from the independent community, Ian MacKaye’s above all), and in turn taken for a ride by mainstream glitter and the media visibility a multinational guarantees, the kind that pushes you towards “success” while asking you to sell off your soul in exchange. A story that might serve as a warning and a lesson to today’s young independent bands: don’t chase impossible dreams or chimeras, do things only on your own terms, and tell anyone who wants to bend you to the ruthless capitalist logic of the music business to go fuck themselves.
Tracklist
TRACKLIST Butthole Surfers After the astronaut
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Weird Revolution
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Intelligent Guy
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Jet Fighter
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Mexico
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Imbuya
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Venus
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The Last Astronaut
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Yentel
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Junkie Jenny in Gaytown
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They Came In
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I Don’t Have a Problem
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Turkey and Dressing
Butthole Surfers After the astronaut Streaming