When the band Butthole Surfers finally scored a hit, fans never forgave them
When the punk band Butthole Surfers finally scored a hit, their fans never forgave them... Twenty-five years ago, fans accused the band of selling out. The group’s reply still stands: “Yeah, but who cares?”
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They were known for their deranged live shows. 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.
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https://www.texasmonthly.com/arts-en...pper-hit-song/
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Originally Posted by Cotton1
