Psychic... Powerless... Another Man's Sac by Butthole Surfers (1984)
The Butthole Surfers, which began in San Antonio, Texas, is a band that hasn't had much mainstream commercial success, with the exception of their album Electriclarryland (1996), which featured their hit song "Pepper." Aside from that, they've mostly been known within the context of fringe-element alternative rock and experimental music. They're the kind of group you might find at your locally-owned hipster record store run by people "in the know." You might occasionally hear their songs on your college radio station during programming slots when independent-label artists are featured.
I first heard this album a year or two after it was released. I listened to my copy quite a lot throughout the 1980s. I associate the music on it with those teenage years, with the crowd of people I used to hang out with, and especially with the type of live punk music we used to listen to in a variety of settings, whether at clubs or in the basements of our parents' homes.
It's fair to call it a punk rock album, but it's also characterized by a healthy dose of psychedelia, and not the hippy-dippy type from the 1960s, but something else entirely. Rather, it's a morbid, gross, filthy, lewd, disturbed, ridiculous, trashy, smelly, idiotic, uneducated, ignorant, juvenile, smeared, blurry, rough-edged, low-rent, low-income, low-class, brown-phlegm, bathroom-humor kind of psychedelia, the type that emerges as a result of living in a tool shed in Texas for an extended period -- as two group members said they were doing when the album was being recorded -- and ingesting way too much LSD and psychoactive mushrooms, no doubt. Also, the sound quality is not all that good, which makes me wonder if they recorded the album in that same tool shed as well.
Now, normally I find it hard to sustain the idea that drug usage can have an appreciable effect upon the creation of a rock album. A lot of people have told me that Pink Floyd's releases could never have come into existence without lots of recreational drug use. I just don't buy that. Generally speaking, human beings -- as opposed to mind-bending chemicals -- create albums.
However, in the case of this first studio album by the Butthole Surfers, I'm going to have to revise that premise. If ever an album owed its existence to drug experiences, this one is it. In fact, they might have just completely taken the band off the instruments and away from the microphones, and let the drugs make the album all by themselves, because that's pretty much what happened here.
As a case in point, take a look at the album cover. Come on, now, what the hell is that? Those are photos of decaying nineteenth-century corpses, for crying out loud, and someone has doodled lots of bizarre crap all over them with florescent pens of different colors. Then, on the back, you've got this freak-out image of a graveyard cherub surrounded by suffocating darkness, as if the members of the band had dosed you up on acid, then brought you out to their favorite rural graveyard in the middle of nowhere at the stroke of midnight on a moonless evening. Don't tell me that whoever came up with that album cover wasn't tripping his tail off.
And as for the title, what's that supposed to mean? Why psychic? Why powerless? Why the suspension points? What is "another man's sac?" A testicle sac, maybe? Why another man's? From a nineteenth-century corpse? What's going on here? Do I really want to know? Heh, heh, heh -- maybe not, maybe not...
I have found certain songs on the album to be absolutely hilarious. There are several snort-your-milk-out-your-nose moments here, provided that you can appreciate the kooky, repulsive and politically-incorrect sense of humor. Other tunes are not so much funny as they are compellingly odd and unique.
Here are some of the most noteworthy tracks:
"Concubine"
If you look up the word "concubine," you will find that in the strictest sense, it just means a woman you live with and sleep with who is not your wife, a fairly common arrangement these days, of course. But in its historic context, such as in ancient Roman society, the term tended to refer to unmarried women who cohabitated with affluent married men, and were basically used as love slaves. Playing upon the historically negative connotations of the term, the Butthole Surfers mix in a bunch of pseudo-Latinate babble spoken in an evil tone, punctuated by a few moments when the singer, whose voice seems to be put through a bullhorn, graphically moans as if he were a woman in a porno video, and then wretchedly howls out, "I love my concubine!" Just the kind of thing you want to say to your girlfriend on Valentine's Day, I suppose.
"Dum Dum"
This is one of the more serious tunes on the album, as well as one of the band's staple songs for live performances. It's an interesting adaptation of the drum part from the Black Sabbath tune "Children of the Grave" from the Master of Reality (1971) album. I think that it nicely captures the feel of early 1980s garage punk. When I hear the song, I can easily imagine a bunch of teens thrash dancing counter-clockwise in a mosh pit.
"Negro Observer"
I like this piece because of the curious, stripped-down guitar sound, and the strange lyrics, which seem to portray a sci-fi world in which Negroes (already a completely outdated term in 1984) descend in space ships all over the planet as extraterrestrial observers. Is this a racist, politically-incorrect song? Probably so. Were the Butthole Surfers members of the Klan at the time? No! Are they weird as hell? Yes! Alright, folks, let's keep everything in perspective here.
"Butthole Surfer"
This song, eponymous with the band's name, pretty much condenses all
"Lady Sniff"
This is really the funniest song on the album, and certainly one of the strangest pieces of music I've ever listened to in my life. The electric guitar sounds completely out of tune, with the strings at least an octave below standard tuning. Here, the guitar is more of a rhythmic instrument than a melodic one, and conveys an attitude of supreme absurdity and degeneracy. The singer comes across as a deranged and drunken rural white and/or black Texan, hoarsely bellowing out: "Murray, bring me my bacon!" and "Take me back to Detroit, Tyrone -- hey boy, I tell you!" He sings about his "stinky pinky," and exclaims: "When I see that tea bag baby, don't know what I do." Vomiting and farting noises are mixed in, along with chirping birds and a second or two of Mexican radio announcers. At the song's end, it sounds like our berserk, repellent, and incomprehensible protagonist is hauled away in a garbage truck, undoubtedly a fitting end for him.
"Mexican Caravan"
Different from so many American songs in English that extol the typical pleasant tourist experience in Mexico, the singer here goes on about how he can't wait to get south of the border and score himself some good old brown heroin so he can get wasted. The track only has a faintly Hispanic flavor to it, as if the band just couldn't be bothered to incorporate a foreign style any more than that. Here, Mexico is not so much a country with a society, culture, language and people, as it is the ineffectively-regulated zone where our protagonist can go to inject a bunch of garbage into his veins. "Teach this white boy to be Mexican!" he moronically bawls out, as if being a smack-shooting junkie in Mexico would be enough to do the trick. I can't tell whether or not this is meant as a parody or as a genuinely perverse celebration, but either way, it says a lot about the United States' debased and hypocritical relationship to its southern neighbor.
"Gary Floyd"
This is an effort by the Butthole Surfers to try a little country flavor, but in this case, it sounds like a ranch-riding cowboy who has taken a punk-rock side road. The singer, acting as if he were Gary Floyd (a likely reference to a member of The Dicks, a punk-rock band from Austin, Texas that was active during those years), talks about having a gun and knife, mentions that "the color brown is coming down" and that his head is going "round and round and round," yet another reference to heroin, and that he and his friends are "gonna shoot all day." Shooting guns or heroin? Maybe both. The song sounds innocent enough if you don't read between the lines, which I suppose is the whole point.
So, is this album for you? I would say that it's definitely not for most people. But if you are one of the select few who can handle intense doses of weirdness, revoltingness, and sophomoric asininity, and appreciate it as such, you might like it. Also, if you are looking to complete your collection of 1980s punk-rock classics, this would be a must-have for you. As for everyone else, stay away from this release for your own good, or you might end up feeling offended or disturbed. Hey, you can't say that I didn't warn you.
Reviewed by Somebody Else 1/1/12
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