Butthole Surfers - Booze, Tobacco, Dope, Pussy, Cars
Ha. It’s almost impossible to reconcile why I like the Butthole Surfers. Or, punk, really. I mean, I like punk, I guess. But, in many ways, it irks me. It’s one of those things that was better in concept than in execution, I think. When making Emma watch a Throbbing Gristle show a few years back, and her being utterly appalled at how bad at was, and me looking at it through the yes of a millennial, I sorta realized it was bad. I blurted out “but we didn’t have as much music then!” as a sort of defense.
And it’s sort of true. When I was 17 I was crawling every publication, every rumor for new music. We were in Alaska, there were no gigs, there was no internet, the record stores would order something for us, but we had to know what to ask for. We scoured what we could get - Rolling Stone, Spin, and, astonishingly, The Face. A few punks had moved up to Fairbanks after growing up somewhere else, and their insights were golden.
It was through a few of these uprooted punks that we learned about Oi - The Exploited, GBH, Cockney Rejects - as well as - much more intriguingly, Crass and the Butthole Surfers.
And, it was for this reason that despite me having some doubts about the aesthetics of punk, and not really comprehending the infinitely-more-intriguing politics of it, that I still harbor a love for some old punk bands. Because there was so little interesting music we could get our hands on up there, we just consumed everything we could.
I have this theory about bands. There are the albums that came out before you liked the band or learned about the band, there are the albums that came out after, and there is that one release that was the first release that came out that you bought new. So, in this case, with me, that first new release for the Butthole Surfers was the Widowmaker EP. Their last independent release before they were inexplicably signed to Capital (and seriously, how weird was the music industry in 1992 that the Butthole Surfers got signed to a major?).
Plus, BTDPC is just such a great song. Short, to the point, and wonderful. Encapsulates so much, don’t you think?
So, I guess that’s why this song instead of something else - the obvious one would be Sweat Loaf - doubled by the fact that the ATP Djs inexplicably play it sometimes, so it’d be good for Emma to know it - but when I think of the Butthole Surfers, I always think of this song first.
