The Hole Truth & Nothing Butt - a film by Tom Stern (2025)
It was
December of 2021. Almost five years
ago. I saw a post online from someone
looking to fund the filming of a documentary movie about my second favorite
musical act of all time, the mighty Butthole Surfers. The Kickstarter campaign was very successful. It seems lots of people dreamed of such a
film. I felt great knowing that other
weirdos like me wanted to reminisce and share the impactful insanity that was
our beloved Butthole Surfers. What I did
not expect was that I would wait nearly five years for the film to be produced
and released! It was completely worth
it.
"Like
a tick farm, like a sea horse, like a graveyard, like a moron, like
a girlfriend, like a tissue, like a cardboard, like a brick wall, like a dream,
Waiting to be..." - Sea Ferring
Just
over a year ago, the finished film made its premiere. Since then, the film was screened at many festivals
around the world. I would read the press
clippings from these screenings, deeply envious of anyone who got to see the
film, hoping and waiting for the day I could experience it. That day came on September 29, 2026, thanks to
the good people at the River Oaks Theatre in Houston, TX.
"Something
she said to me last night. Something she said to me. 'I saw the sun rising up over my daddy's
grave. And I ate some cheese and rice today!'" - Something
To give
a bit of background regarding my personal journey with the Butthole Surfers, I
must travel back in time to the glorious late 1980's. Picture it, Houston, Texas. A teenaged RXTT would borrow his parent's car
and drive himself and friends from Alief into Montrose, the eclectic, artsy,
bohemian neighborhood that once served as the focal point for every weird,
oddball, punk, queer, maladapted, druggy freak that didn't feel like moving to
Austin. At the time, there were many
record stores to peruse, and our favorite was Sound Exchange, then located at 1617
Westheimer. It catered to anyone wishing
to find non-commercial music, and it did not hurt that Bliss Blood, legendary singer
for the wildly weird Pain Teens worked there.
Other stores specialized in oldies, or import 12" dance singles,
but Sound Exchange stocked the weird shit.
As a broke teen, the wall of used cassettes was my main draw. I often spent hours perusing the tapes,
looking for something new I could afford. It was there I found Sonic Youth,
Jane's Addiction and many others. Among
the available cassettes were ones from a band called Butthole Surfers. Before the internet, and the ubiquitous data
available instantly on your phone, I relied on word of mouth and articles in
music magazines like Spin or Hit Parader (in my heavy metal days) to learn
about new bands, records, or scenes.
Butthole Surfers received very little coverage, usually just a quick
blurb stating that a new album had come out from these "Texas weirdos"
as they were often demeaned. The name
made me laugh, but the album covers disturbed me in ways that none of the hardcore,
heavy metal, or punk covers ever did.
Looking at the visuals informed me that this was a band of insane
people, very likely true degenerates.
Checking the inside of the album Hairway to Steven, (a title I
found hilarious as it made fun of the "ultimate" hard rock band, Led
Zeppelin), I saw that there were no song titles. Instead, each song was represented by weird,
scatological drawings. Too weird. my love of the Butthole Surfers would have to
wait.
"What do you know about
reality? I AM REALITY. What do you know about death? I AM
DEATH!" - Jimi
It is
1992, and I am living in the Moody Tower dormitory of the University of
Houston. I meet a fellow nut named
Barnaby Struve who had excellent records and great taste in the weird. He introduced me to many bands I grew to
love, the Melvins, Archers of Loaf, Phish, and most of all, Butthole
Surfers. Back then, Memorex made a blank
cassette that held 45 minutes of music on each side. Using one of these, Barnaby made me a
mix-tape of what he called the Butthole Surfers "best nugs." He did not write down the song titles, mainly
because most people could not tell what song had what title. That mix became a prized possession. I took it everywhere, taking over stereos at
parties, playing Butthole Surfers insanity to anyone willing to listen. I found in this mix everything I ever loved
about rock and roll music. It was
strangely melodic, yet wildly dissonant.
Sounds I never heard before, and would never hear from anyone else,
flooded my ears. Nearly everything else
paled in comparison. The lyrics were
inscrutable, but what could be understood was more Dada than polemic. I must have made dozens of copies of that mix
for friends, hoping for them to fall in love like I did. This led to collecting their albums, singles,
VHS video collections, etc., and a lifelong love of the band. Their live concert VHS, The Blind Eye Sees
All, a true masterpiece, was so great, and gave me a good approximation of
what a live Butthole Surfers show was like.
Soon
after, in 1994, I was a member of the Student Program Board's Large Stage committee,
and we brought a national tour to the University of Houston. It was called the "Free Your Mind" Tour,
sponsored by MTV, and attempted to cash in on the then-current obsession with
spoken-word poetry by bringing people like Maggie Estep and John S. Hall
(former singer of King Missile) along with local poets. For some reason, the one and only Gibby
Haynes was slated to be the Master of Ceremonies for the Houston event. My classmates and I set up the show. Gibby came in, rambled some slightly
incoherent introduction to the whole event, and then stepped outside the
Student Center. He walked over to the
Hilton College and lit up a fat doobie, smoking it up. He then walked back to the front of the Student
Center and lit a Marlboro cigarette. After
a few puffs he dropped it and went inside.
I was too intimidated to say hello, thinking I would come off as a dork
ass loser fanboy, but I did go pick up the butt, took a huge drag off it, and
put it out, saving it in some plastic and putting it away in my pocket. I kept that cigarette butt as a memento for
years.
"Well,
there's a creep in the cellar that I'm gonna let in. And he eats in the alley and keeps track of
my sins. When he starts talking
backwards your head starts to spin. And
he really freaks me out when he peels off his skin, yeah!" - Creep In the
Cellar
After
the film was picked up to screen at Alamo Drafthouse cinemas, I messaged the
director Tom Stern, asking when it would be available in Houston, (all the
Alamo Drafthouses in Houston were shut down to a change in retail management),
and was surprised to see him reply with two words that blew my mind,
"River Oaks!" I think I may
have been the second person to purchase tickets. I was so hype. I was even more excited to know that my wife
Elizabeth wanted to join me at the screening.
Her tastes in music are as wide-ranging as mine, albeit in different
directions, and although I knew that the band's music was not to her liking,
(she has mentioned the term "serial killer music" before), she wanted
to better understand me and my passion for these nuts, which was awesome.
"Ten
foot tall and the nurse stuck a needle in my arm. Well, Uncle Doc's nurse used a needle with
ungodly charm. Walkin' down the hall the
dentist loomed through the door... " - I Saw an X-Ray of a Girl Passing
Gas
The
River Oaks Theatre is the oldest in Houston, recently remodeled, and a perfect
venue for a screening of The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt. The theater has a long history of showing the
weird, foreign, indie films not found at average cinemas. Seeing the marquee displaying the film got me
all HYPE. After we sat down in our seats
my anticipation grew and grew, and my wife could see how geeked out I was for
the show. The theater filled up with old
heads, acid-casualties, and countless people I felt I recognized from punk
shows in the 90's. It was a sell-out,
which forced the River Oaks people to add a second screening at 10:15 pm. Being a fan of the Butthole Surfers is a
lonely experience for the most part, so when the film began and the title
screen came up, many of us clapped, mostly at the improbability of it all.
"Thanksgivings
coming on the Fourth of July. In the
form of a girl with a needle in her eye. Well, she come from out west on a
nickel worth of gas. Got her mind on her
money and her dope up her ass." - The Lord is a Monkey
It is
rare indeed when reality lives up or exceeds the dream. In every respect, this documentary surpasses
every single one of my expectations. We initially
see the Butthole Surfers members as they currently are, living amongst us as
pillars of society. Families, children,
homes, dogs, cats, and quiet moments have replaced the miasma of
absurdity. It feels triumphant to see them
achieve such peace, love, and happiness in their lives. From this introduction, we are then
catapulted back in time to San Antonio Texas, where Gibby Haynes and Paul Leary
met at Trinity University, a most fortuitous occurrence. Two exceedingly intelligent, yet severely
disaffected young men with an interest in art and music as performance began a
journey few could imagine, and even fewer could survive.
The
band lived a hand-to-mouth existence for nearly a decade, sharing a large van
with Mark Farner from Grand Funk Railroad, (not the musician, but a dog named
after the musician), touring everywhere in Texas that would have them. Years of sleeping on floors, scrounging food,
drugs, and alcohol, and bringing the ruckus every single gig was as chaotic,
turbulent, and exhausting as one can imagine.
Their fame grew through word of mouth and the underground zines
spreading the good word about non-commercial music. They became a "Must See" show if
they were in your town. Their stage
show grew to include everything and anything they could come up with:
industrial-level strobe lighting, massive smoke machines, surgical and car
crash films projected on the band and a screen behind the drums, plenty of
extremely unsafe fire, clothespins, thousands of photocopied cockroaches,
stuffed animals, a wiffle-ball bat filled with urine, two drummers, a weird
naked dancer (performance artist Kathleen Lynch, also known by her stage moniker
of "Tada, the Shit Lady"), and vast amounts of hallucinogens. It was a total and intense visual, oral,
tactile, and sonic onslaught, and no one in the crowd would ever be the same.
Before
I saw them live, I always assumed that the Butthole Surfers carelessly played
their instruments to sound this deranged, but that was not the case. They practiced and rehearsed and worked very
hard to sound this sloppy and insane, and they were able to recreate it
nightly, mainly due to the greatness of Paul Leary and his guitar histrionics,
and Gibby's never-ending supply of energy.
Their two-drummer attack was a singular feature, visually as stunning as
sonically, for the two drummers looked very similar. In fact, they would claim to be brother and
sister for years. Teresa Taylor (Teresa
Nervosa) and King Coffey played drums standing up, with tribal insanity and no
bass drums. Between songs they would
duck and hide behind the drum riser, popping up in unison to start the next
song to great effect. On one tour, one
of their eight different bassists brought a Sousaphone, "borrowed"
from his School Band, which he would play instead of the bass guitar. This film, with lots of previously unseen
footage of the band's early years, showcases this aspect of the band perfectly.
Butthole
Surfers are an amalgam of the creative and inherently anti-establishment
individuals that formed the band. Gibby Haynes,
the ultimate rock iconoclast, someone so smart as to be a bit scary, inventive
beyond all possibility, filled with mad poetry, super tall and gangly, dangerous
looking, and yet always laughing as if he knew a joke we were not privy to, was
the chaotic May Pole around which the band revolved. Paul Leary, master of guitar histrionics,
bringing the weird every night, perfectly pairing off with Gibby's insanity, the
most stereotypically handsome member of the band, which only accented just how
weird the dude really was, created original sounds unheard of before or since. Jeff Pinkus, crusty hardcore punk bassist,
the last and best in a long line of bass players, always holding down the
bottom end, providing a stability that comes from being 100% bought in to the Butthole
Surfer cause. King Coffey, mad drummer
whose slightly deranged smile always hinted at the fun the band had while
performing, was paired up for the best years of the Butthole Surfers with
Teresa Taylor (AKA Nervosa), a perfect visual pairing with King, seemingly
albinos performing syncopated beats while they both stood at their kits, bringing
a tribal intensity and rhythm along with the bizarre psychedelia of seeing two
very similar humans, possibly twins, drumming like insane people, and hiding
behind the drums like sprites or gremlins.
There was a period in the 1980's
when no other band could compare to the greatness, intensity, danger, and derangement
this group of humans could unleash on their audience. It was glorious. We, the fans, knew what we were getting
into. We were fully bought in.
"I
wet my bed last night. I woke up sad,
boo. They shot the Pope. They shot the Pope's ass. They shot the pope and I feel good! Yeah!" - Bar-B-Q Pope
Tom
Stern edited this film so well. It never
lags, drags, or slags, and all the talking head interviews are sharp,
quick-paced, and hilarious. Many of
their more-famous peers are questioned, and all stand in awe of the majesty
that is Butthole Surfers. Ice T recounts
how, during Lollapalooza, Gibby Haynes would throw beer cans over the crowd and
fire off a shotgun, as if he was skeet-shooting! It scared the shit out of people. The band claims it was always
"blanks," but I have read an interview with Paul Leary where he
states that at one point during Lollapalooza, Siouxsie Sioux of the Banshees
jumped on stage and bear-hugged Gibby.
Paul states that he saw Gibby and Siouxsie rolling around the stage with
the loaded shotgun between them, and all he could think about as he rocked a
guitar riff was "This is it. This
is how it all ends. It ends with Gibby
blowing either Siouxsie Sioux's or his own head off with that shotgun." He claimed it was the most scared he had ever
been on stage. It also seems to imply
that there were actual shells in the shotgun, and not "blanks,"
although a blank at short range can and does kill sometimes. This story, and many others, were best left
out of the film.
I
laughed more than I have ever laughed at any documentary. Too many haters never understood just how hilarious
Butthole Surfers were. It is even funny to see how the mists of time
obscure some memories while enhancing others, leading to many statements of,
"I don't remember that."
Hilarious! The genius of this
film lies in that it focuses on the people in the band, not the songs. Tom Stern did not seek to make a self-serving
movie looking to create a new audience for the back catalog, as so many modern
music documentaries do. He instead
wanted to honor the band that flew their freak flag higher and longer than any
other American weirdo, and he succeeded.
Stern showcases the good, bad, ugly, and plain weird, respecting the
individuals in the band as he does so, even as the film touches on more serious
topics, real human experience, and the tragedies of life. I may have laughed more often than at any
other film, but I also cried harder than I have ever done while watching a
documentary. I care deeply for the bands
and musicians that mean something to me, and I hurt upon learning their
hurts. I found myself reaching out my
hand to my wife for comfort, only to see that she was as moved as I was, which
is a testament to the honesty of the band, and the forthright direction by Tom
Stern. Seeing Teresa Taylor speak about
her life just days before she passed away broke me. While I never met her in person, I did become
her Facebook friend and had many small but wonderful interactions with her,
something I never did with any other musician.
To my mind, Teresa Taylor and Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon were the single
coolest women ever in rock and roll and I am proud to have been even a small
acquaintance of hers.
"And
all the sailors who were junkies, all.
They all went sailing out to sea.
And the white man sold quaaludes to the monkeys. And they all died high up in the trees.
And all the teachers who
were flunkies, now. They all taught you
and me. And the goddamned white men
still selling quaaludes to the monkeys.
And they're all, you and me, dying high up in the trees" - To
Parter
So, we loved the film. I gained new levels of love and appreciation for the Butthole Surfers. My wife grew to know and appreciate this band of misfits as human beings. She has a finely honed bullshit detector, can spot a faker a mile away, (the Butthole Surfers have always been true to their aims and expectations), and deeply appreciates honesty and forthrightness, which, for all their madness, the Butthole Surfers have in spades. I laughed so hard when she told me, as we discussed the film on the way home, that the only "NO" she felt while watching the documentary was aimed squarely at Kathleen Lynch's performance "costume" consisting of nakedness with long hair extensions attached to her armpits and pubic hair along with a deranged reverse mohawk of sorts on her head, a truly insane visual presentation. This is understandable, and probably exactly the response Kathleen was going for. (The film didn't mention that Kathleen would also put aluminum foil over her teeth, creating a very weird reflective effect when the stage lights hit her face.)
The
beauty of what used to be the American music underground was that its bands and
supporters actively sought to be true to themselves, to present in musical form
who they were and where they came from.
It created amazing bands from weird places outside the music meccas of
NYC and LA, (Minutemen in San Pedro, CA, Misfits from Lodi, NJ, Meat Puppets
from Phoenix, AZ, etc.). None of them
made any real money or fame, but they all managed to create amazing music, and carve
out a piece of the musical world, influencing the bands that came after.
"Take me, Mexican Caravan. South of, South of the Rio Grande.
Take me to that amigo town, Where I can score some of that heroin brown" -
Mexican Caravan
As a
long-time fan, the stories surrounding their infamous NYC show at Danceteria
piqued my interest. All I had before
were second-hand stories. There was no
footage of the show that shocked the normally hardened NYC crowds. They had lived through the Ramones, Suicide, Velvet
Underground, and all manner of weirdo transgressive and confrontational punk
bands, but they were not ready for the frenetic performance of the Butthole
Surfers. I was blown away to see the
footage that Tom Stern dug up from that show!
An image is worth a thousand words, they say, and these images certainly
cemented the over-the-top stories I had read.
It was a wonderful surprise.
For a
long time, I assumed the magic and beauty of Butthole Surfers would fade away,
as older fans aged out, and no one played their music on the radio
(understandably so.) The glory of this
film, The Hole Truth & Nothing Butt, is that it captures the band perfectly,
their sound, their vibe, their complete disregard for the musical rules, and it
does so in a most human manner. My wife came
away with an appreciation of the band and the same thought I had when I first
grew to love them. That thought would
be, "They showed us that you can do fucking anything." The Butthole Surfers are inspirational in the
extreme, although to be inspired by them is not the same as wanting to emulate
them! The documentary is a masterpiece
of filmmaking and editing, and I hope it receives a wide audience. On the old TV show, WKRP In Cincinnati, morning DJ
Dr. Johnny Fever once asked, "But who will teach the kids about Bo
Diddley?" I've often wondered the
same about Butthole Surfers, but Tom Stern has provided the answer. I hope the film inspires and frees any and
all young people currently starting bands and writing songs. The future is wide open, if you want it. The Hole Truth & Nothing Butt blew us away
and only increased my love and admiration for the Butthole Surfers. It is a great achievement. I want to see it again right now.
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