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The saga of the profoundly twisted and extravagantly crude Butthole Surfers, who debuted at Duke’s Royal Coach Inn (formerly Vulcan Gas Company) in 1981, has often smacked of historical hyperventilation. This was a band that huffed and puffed weirdness from the dives to concert halls to Lollapalooza to MTV without any concessions to common decency.

But in 1996, it was the deep breath of relief that defined the mood of Austin’s musical Manson Family. It's not just that Electriclarryland (Capitol), with #1 modern rock hit “Pepper,” had broke the band to the mainstream and drew appearances on Late Night with David Letterman and The Larry Sanders Show. The reason for the thankful exhale was that the group was still together at all. Just a year or two earlier, guitarist Paul Leary, who founded the band with Trinity University classmate Gibby Haynes, had deep doubts that the Butthole Surfers would ever make another record or play another show.

"It got real ugly there for a while," Leary said, sitting in the back yard of his house off Enfield Road. "I was so depressed that I didn't even want to get out of bed.” The studio has long been his sanctuary, where he was in control, “but I couldn't keep it together under those circumstances." He was referring to the substance abuse problems which had overtaken singer Haynes. "It beat me up to see my best friend like that.” Leary wasn't interested in giving many details. In fact, after completing the interview for this story he asked that the drug issue be veiled. But to ignore the downward spiral would be like profiling Quasimodo and not once bringing up the hump.

Portrayed in the indie rock press as psychedelic folk heroes, the Surfers exemplified that old Hunter Thompson line about not condoning drugs and alcohol, "but they've always worked for me."

By the end of 1994, however, drugs had started taking the band, instead of the other way around, and anyone who cared knew that Haynes was so far into a funk of heroin and crack that it would take either a search party or a search warrant to bring him back. 

But the singer’s performance on Larryland" showed a return to top form. Rehab took the drugs away, but not that brilliantly chaotic mind. "Gibby is the heart and soul of the Butthole Surfers," Leary said, between puffs on a cigar. "My role is to play guitar and work my ass off, but Gibby's the focal point. He's probably the most gifted person I've ever known, but that talent comes with its own set of curses."

The downfall seems to always follow the peak. Haynes had his best year in 1992, when he put his trademark Gibberish on a Ministry steamroller for the hardest single of the summer. “I love ‘Jesus Built My Hotrod’, man,” actor Johnny Depp said in introduction to Haynes at a late ‘92 party the actor threw at his Sixth Street apartment during the filming of What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? Attracted to crazy geniuses, Depp sought out Gibby for late night hangs. With Al Jourgenson of Ministry also in town, not to mention Hollywood hangers on, hard drugs were getting easier to find in Marijuanaville. Former T-Birds bassist Preston Hubbard wrote about that time he was Austin music’s prime dealer of pure black tar heroin.

I was up in Dallas working for the Morning News, and one day in ‘94 Gibby’s father Jerry Haynes called to invite me to lunch. His revived Mr. Peppermint kiddie show was taped at WFAA, next door to the Morning News, and we shared a cafeteria, where I’d run into him occasionally. We usually talked about what was going on with the Butthole Surfers. Jerry suggested meeting at the Bishop Grill, a touted downhome cooking cafeteria in Oak Cliff. He arrived with a solemn look, and after we sat down he told me that he’d received an anonymous letter that said if his son didn’t receive help he’d be dead before too long. There were some details about Gibby showing up at some function in a catatonic state, peeing against the wall at Steamboat, and other drug-induced transgressions. The father was as mortified as you could expect.  (It turned out Paul Leary had sent that letter.)

I don’t know what got Gibby into rehab in the spring of ‘94, but Johnny Depp reportedly paid for it. His roommate was former BHS touring mate Kurt Cobain, who climbed the exterior wall of the California treatment facility and killed himself four days later. Before that, Haynes was playing at the Viper Room with Depp’s vanity project P on the night River Phoenix died of a heroin overdose on the sidewalk. Curses indeed.

When I came back to Austin in ’95, Gibby was drinking O’Doul’s. After hearing him do hilarious play-by-play at the SXSW softball game one year (repeatedly introducing bearded Geoff Himes of the Washington Post as David Allan Coe, for instance), I’d told him he’d be a great broadcaster, and he said it was his dream job. That came true in the summer of ’95 when Gibby was hired to be morning drivetime DJ on the new 101X (KROQ-FM). It was great radio if you were a Butthole Surfers fan, but not if you loved Alanis Morrissette or Goo Goo Dolls, played in “puke chunks” to fulfill the station’s playlist minimum. After sidekick Robbie Jacks was sacked and Gibby moved to nighttime, it slowly became party time once again. On Sunday evenings, I had a rock crit show with Don McLeese called Critical Mass, and Gibby would follow. But first, his assistant Sean would wheel in a cooler of beer, which resulted in some inspired radio… for the first hour or two. Budweiser was better than heroin, at least. 

Meanwhile, Leary had become an in-demand producer after his work with the Meat Puppets yielded that band's first platinum album Too High to Die in ’94. Leary also helmed the six-million-selling Sublime LP in ’96.

To splinter the band's collective even further, drummer King Coffey was devoted to his Trance Syndicate label, which put out records by Bedhead, Sixteen Deluxe, Crust, Ed Hall, Trail of Dead and more. Add all this to the fact that the band was without a bassist after Jeff Pinkus quit in early '94, and it seemed as if Independent Worm Saloon could be the last studio album.

But the Surfers came together in the fall of '95 for recording sessions in Bearsville, N.Y., with producer Steve Thompson, whose credits included Metallica and Madonna. All seemed to be going well until the band came back to Austin and decided they didn't like the Electriclarryland they just made. "We hated about half of it," said Leary, who produced new tracks during a marathon month at Austin's Arlyn studio. That’s where the Surfers had pieced together ideas, wrote songs, and fell back in love with the band that made Locust Abortion Technician, probably their best album, in 1987.

Though 1993’s Independent Worm Saloon was the Butts' best seller at 300,000 copies (Beavis and Butthead loved “Who Was in My Room Last Night”), Leary didn't like the way producer John Paul Jones (ex-Led Zeppelin) made the group sound, so the process was loosened up on ‘larryland. "I'm kinda down on the whole idea of pre-production," Leary said, "because it means that most of the creative work gets done before you even start recording. We like to improvise, to find that state-of dumb-ass, and I think that's what was missing." (“Pepper” came from the Bearsville sessions).

"A lot of people thought that when we went off in different directions (after opening on Nirvana's last US. tour in January '94), that was the end of the Butthole Surfers, but it turned out to be a real boost for the band," Leary said. "For so many years our identities were wrapped up in this band and I think we were desperate to have our own lives. I mean, we toured for five years straight because we didn't have anywhere else to go or anything else to do." The band created a lot of memories and destroyed a lot of brain cells in The Van Years, when they were truly the world’s most dangerous band.

Ten years later, the Butthole Surfers milked a hit with a world tour, and stopped being cool, at least until nostalgia revived their name two decades later.

The Paul Leary I interviewed in ’96 was not the one who screeched “The Shah Sleeps in Lee Harvey’s Grave” at the end of every show. That was a time and place for the young and driven, when rage was confusing, as it should be. On that perfect sunshine day, Leary was content to sit in his back yard and savor his cigar.  

Before the Surfers, nobody thought you could fill 3,000-seat venues by playing in front of a movie screen showing autopsy films. Despite the disturbing visuals, this was a band of ideas. And when they ran out, like season 12 of Curb Your Enthusiasm, it was time to hang ‘em up.

The band reunited in 2009, with Teresa Taylor back on sisterly skins, but the inspired chaos was minimal. The Butthole Surfers played for the last time in Dec. 2016 at the two-day Day for Night festival in Houston.

Shotgun Gibby became a visual artist in New York and wrote a children’s book for his son. Paul Leary continues to produce. It’s not important that these two ever play together again because they already took that insane Jagger-Richards shit as far as it could go.

Austin on the Map: Musicians Who Made Austin Cool to the World is the working title of a book in progress with over 30 profiles, from Joe Ely and Jo Carol Pierce to Ghostland Observatory and Charley Crockett. It’ll be the third of a trilogy, following Austin Music Is a Scene (TCU Press, fall 2024) and Overserved (Wittliff Collections 2025). Then I’m all done!

MORE READING: Baptized by the Buttholes

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