Butthole Surfers - Live Performances

Live Performances

In the 1980s, the Butthole Surfers earned a reputation for their disturbing live performances that were both decadent and violent. As a result, they began to attract a wide range of curiosity seekers within a few years of their debut, in addition to traditional fans of punk rock who had supported them from the beginning. A staged reproduction of the band's live show was filmed for 1988's Bar-B-Que Movie, a short Super 8 mm film movie directed by Alex Winter, who is best known as "Bill S. Preston, Esq." from Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. Bar-B-Que Movie is a spoof of 1974's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and the film ends with a music video-style performance of the song "Fast" (a.k.a. "Fart Song"), featuring Haynes, Leary, Coffey, Nervosa, and Jeff Pinkus, as well as dancer Kathleen Lynch. The track displayed many of the band's stage gimmicks, such as the burning cymbal, strobe lights, films, and smoke.

By the time Lynch left in 1989, the Surfers' stage show had become more predictable, with previously random shockers being done at the same point in each night's performance. Teresa Nervosa quit for good around the same time, and King Coffey became the band's sole percussionist. Strobe lights, smoke machines, and even Gibby Haynes' burning cymbal are still part of the presentation, but the chaotic spontaneity of their 1980s performances is no longer on display.