You are now entering ELECTRICLARRYLAND. Population?!?!?!?!?!

You are now entering ELECTRICLARRYLAND.  Population?!?!?!?!?!

“Have you ever heard of the Butthole Surfers?”  One time I asked my buddy Jeremy this question when we were about 12 years old and we both had a good laugh and it became a running joke.  When we were in high school there was a Butthole Surfers song on the radio and Jeremy asked “What band is this?” and I said “It’s the Butthole Surfers”.  Then Jeremy asked “Really, what band is this” and I again said “The Butthole Surfers”.  Jeremy was a little shocked and said “Brent, I thought you made that band up!”

I had first heard of the Butthole Surfers in the mid 80’s when I was growing up in Sandy, Utah.  They got no airplay in Salt Lake City and finding indie punk albums in my hometown was fairly difficult, but the name had my attention.   By the early 90’s other than the occasional video on MTV’s 120 minutes and very rare airplay on Salt Lake’s X96, I still did not know much about these guys other than stories about their live shows, but the very few songs I had heard by them I at least liked.

I got my introduction to the Butthole Surfers when I was serving as an LDS missionary in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania in the summer of 1997.  I had a new companion transferred into the area and he musically was a fan of industrial, punk, ska, and alternative rock and had a soft spot for swing (the Squirrel Nut Zippers were starting to happen at that point).  One day when we had finished working for the day we arrived back at our apartment and a box had arrived from BMG for my companion and ELETRICLARRYLAND by the Butthole Surfers was in the box.  We were playing the board game Axis and Allies when my companion put this CD in the player.  From the beginning the song “Birds” immediately got my attention, “Cough Syrup” was the coolest song I had heard in ages, and “Pepper” was so different than anything I had ever heard and we were only three songs into the CD.  While we listened to ELERTRICLARRY land my companion ended up kicking my butt at Axis and Allies while I was more paying attention to the music coming out of the CD player.  When the CD ended I asked my companion what he thought and he said “it’s ok”.  I said back “What do you mean it’s OK?! This is freaking awesome!” we gave it a couple of more listens and he still didn’t like the CD all that much and it just got better and better when I was listening to it.  The Butthole Surfers had taken the basic vision of punk and added elements from psychedelic, heavy metal, electronica, classic rock, as well as the bizarre and abstract (Zappa-esque) and created a punk/alternative album that had an amazing amount of depth in its sound and finally the Butthole Surfers received some commercial success for being that weird punk band from San Antonio, Texas.

When I returned home from my LDS mission in 1998 ELECTRICLARRYLAND was one of the first CD’s I bought.  I was starting to learn how to play guitar (I am a self-taught guitarist) my approach was to put on a CD and just play along with it and ELETRICLARRYLAND was a CD that I played along with regularly.  I still remember how thrilled I was when I got “Cough Syrup” figured out completely on my own and this album was crucial in my evolution and development as a guitarist.

Where ELECTRICLARRYLAND became especially endearing to me is when I was attending the College of Business at Utah State University from 2003 to 2005.  I was one of those rare college students that would wake up at 5:00am to study until about 1:00pm on the days I didn’t have class, go to work, in the afternoon, and then go to the gym or do something fun in the evening.  I hated having to study or do homework in the evening and I went to great lengths to avoid it.  But when midterms and finals started to approach I would buy some two liter bottles of Mountain Dew and study into the wee small hours for a few days completing those last minute semester projects and cramming for midterm and final exams.  The recipe of ELECTRICLARRYLAND with Mountain Dew and sleep deprivation in the name of University education was a pretty magical combination and got me through some pretty intense all night study and project work sessions.  After I graduated college I later found out that Gibby Haynes and Paul Leary of the Butthole Surfers met when they were Business students at San Antonio’s Trinity University (Haynes graduating in Accounting and Leary was one semester shy of completing the Master of Business Administration Program).  Perhaps that is part of why these guys sounded so good when I was in the College of Business.

The audience of the Butthole Surfers is a very unique one.  In October 2009 I went to see the Butthole Surfers at the Urban Lounge in Salt Lake City.  As I walked from my apartment to the concert I couldn’t help but think about what kind of people would be at the concert, since I was pretty used to being the only weirdo in my group of friends who was a fan of the Butthole Surfers I wasn’t sure what to expect.  When I arrived at the concert there were three other guys were in line with me.  Slowly, but surely the other 200 weirdos showed up and got in line.  I felt a very odd and strange sense of community.  The one factor all of us had in common is that all of our musical tastes were very odd and went all over the place (I got a lot of complements for the King Crimson shirt I was wearing.  I was not expecting one person at this show to even know who King Crimson was).  Because the stage at the Urban Lounge is only 1.5 feet high getting into position by the stage is very important and was able to get right at the front of stage.  Paul Leary and Gibby Haynes were directly in front of me the whole show and it was a lot of fun.  Above all this is one of the most unique concerts I have ever to and the audience at the Butthole Surfers is one of the most unique groups of people I have ever been around.

And now the most controversial part of this blog.  In my opinion ELECTRICLARRYLAND by the Butthole Surfers is what I consider to be the best album of the 90’s (I’ve had several of my friends debate with me pretty intensely over this).  The 90’s were a decade where being alternative and non-mainstream was the train of thought in the music scene.  Some bands were able to pull this off and became legends (in my opinion bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden, Beck, Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, and Offspring), but when alternative became mainstream to me it lost some of its edge and the bands did not have the depth that the bands I view as legendary did.  But in 1996 the Butthole Surfers, a band that had been strange, unique, non-mainstream, and had definitely been doing their own thing since the early 80’s emerged with ELECTRICLARRYLAND and to me definitively define what the heart of grunge and alternative rock was all about in a way no other band could without sacrificing what makes them unique.