It's said that everyone has a price, but not even six-figure sums are enough to reunite Butthole Surfers for live performances.
Bandmates Gibby Haynes, Paul Leary and King Coffey confirmed as much in a recent interview with The Guardian, diving into their influential Texas outfit's early history of exceptionally chaotic, "travelling freakshow-like" live gigs.
Those included the creation of "percussion fireballs" through dumping lighter fluid on a cymbal, a "wall of airport grade strobe lights," a nude dancer and screening accompanying visuals "of autopsies, explosions, and penis reconstruction surgery."
Haynes told The Guardian, "We're not as good as we could be today, and that's because I lost my shit. I did too many drugs. I totally screwed up the deal. It's my bad. It's on me." Leary added, "We were some genuinely fucked up people. We're good people, but we're fucked up — we're damaged."
In spite of their condition, Leary told the publication how the band have "been getting six-figure offers to play live." He says, however, "I just don't want to do it. We're really lucky to not be in prison and I don't want to push that any more. I don't want to be sending a bandmate home in a body bag or for a venue to burn down."
As for Haynes, he told The Guardian that his life outside of music includes his 13-year-old son, "who is the fucking light of my life," sharing, "I've got an actual family and it's awesome. Little league baseball and middle school basketball? Dude, it's the shit."
"It's way better to be underrated than overrated," Haynes tells The Guardian in reflection. "And I can tell you this: the Butthole Surfers are not overrated."
"I hope to be misunderstood," Coffey said. "When you have to justify your art, you're reducing it. So I hope people get their own impressions about what we were or weren't doing. Somebody once said our music was a front for us to manufacture and distribute LSD across the country. It's like [adopts sarcastic voice]: 'Sure, yeah, it was all a convoluted way to do that.' But I'd rather encourage that than try to explain the influence of Yves Klein in our music."
Butthole Surfers drummer Teresa Nervosa passed away last June.
