Butthole Surfers
River Theater
Guerneville, CA
1984-12-15 (Saturday)
MYTP 23
Source: SBD > Sony D5M > Cassette Master > CD
Cassette > Digital Transfer: Mike Singal
Rerelease extraction: CD > rubyripper 0.8 (cdparanoia secure rip, cdrdoa TOC) > FLAC
Processing: Audacity (level corrections, gap corrections, soft limit -0.1db to remove light clipping, splits) > FLAC 8 > acxi (tagging, checksums, FLAC data)
Recorded, preserved, shared by micgram
Release processing by teetering
FLAC: 16/44.1 (2 channels)
Quality: 3/4 (17khz, very good, some drops/cuts, synthesized ~30 minutes of stereo)
Time: 48:26.36
Size: 237.1 MiB
Average kb/s: 684
Tracks: 16
Setlist:
01. //One Hundred Million People Dead
02. To Parter >
03. Tornadoes
04. Cherub
05. Cowboy Bob >
06. Mexican Caravan >
07. Bar-B-Q Pope
08. Wichita Cathedral > feedback >
09. The Shah Sleeps In Lee Harvey's Grave
10. soundman monitor mix rap >
11. Lady Sniff >
12. Something
13. audience >
14. //Butthole Surfer
15. Mark Says Alright
16. outro >
Band:
Gibby Hayes - vocals, vocal effects, saxophone, guitar, bullhorn
Paul Leary - guitar, vocals
Terence Smart - bass
King Coffey - drums
Teresa Nervosa - drums
Recording notes:
* This recording had usable stereo from 0:57 to about 13:07. No Left channel 0:00-0:57. Damaged right channel 13:07 until end. Various gaps as well. All corrected/handled.
* Track one fades in.
* Butthole Surfer start is cut. I'm guessing a tape flip that just missed catching the start of the song. Or maybe tape was turned off then on again, don't know.
* Paul Leary's mic is quite hot in this mix, plus he tended to scream pretty loudly.
* Very start of track 15 cut. Unknown if there is a missing song there, sorry.
* Sounds like end of Surfers set had a very short break then the DKs started, there's no cut between those two parts that I can detect.
Processing notes:
* Used about 57 seconds of left right channel to fill in empty left channel at start of track 1.
* Merged a few cuts and drops in start of track 1, due to the type of sounds at that point from band, those pulled together quite well.
* Corrected/smoothed recording levels that were fluctuating in start of recording.
* cleaned up and somewhat merged cut at start of track 15, that had a gap/drop, but it came back reasonably well, and it's just right before Gibby talks so it's ok. Also dropped some cable type noise right before track 15 starts to make it less obvious.
* 'From 13:07 to end used left channel to replace right channel, which was present, but low level and distorted. Tried bringing up right channel, but using left channel to replace it sounds better.
* Short fade in of missing start of Butthole Surfer to make transition less jarring.
Notes:
* "I see bodies... maybe... maybe someone is alive!!... hahahhaha"
* "Hey butt, what the fuck!... we don't like you... cause you all suck!!"
* If you never had the incredible good fortune to see the Surfers live during their peak years in the 80s, my heartfelt condolences go out to you. They were hands down the best touring band in the world during these peak years, nobody else came even remotely close to a live Butthole Surfers performance from about 1984-90. Many great bands during this era,, but when it came to live mind-bending insanity, the Surfers had the market 100% cornered. I know I'm supposed to try for some objectivity, but sorry, not gonna happen this time, lol. And Mike did a GREAT job capturing that entire vibe at this fairly early stage of their trajectory.
* Similarly, if you had the vast misfortune to not see Paul Leary as he tried to regain control over his melting guitar that was trying to fly out of his hands, or the 'brother/sister' drum duo, who weren't actually related, but might as well have been since they were like one organic organism as they pounded away on their drums, usually standing, not sitting, or Gibby frantically doing whatever came to his mind at the moment, well... that's too bad.
* Bar-B-Q Pope, Something, is Paul Leary singing, if you're not solid on who is who in the vocals. That's Gibby on the sax, since he didn't have to do vocal duties. Gibby would also play basic guitar, and had a sizable vocal effects box, plus of course the bullhorn...
* Butthole Surfer sets tended to come in blocks of nearly continuous mayhem/songs, with short breaks between each block. This show is no excepptioni to that rule. This was fairly well captured on their live double album, released to make it look like a bootleg since the Surfers were being bootlegged so heavily at this point. For obvious reasons. If you ever saw a Butthole Surfers show and they basically just did 'songs', in a 'normal' way, that means they weren't into it that night.
* One has to feel for the soundman in track 10, when Gibby starts dissolving into some acid drenched rap...
* 'Something' is particularly spectacular, capturing the band at their full psychedelic fueled acid test power.
* Butthole Surfers opened for Dead Kennedys. You'll recall that Jello caught the Butthole Surfers when they basically landed in SF and essentially crashed a gig, begging to play, I think they needed money for a van repair, and Jello was at that gig, and essentially signed them to Alternative Tentacles immediately. Like Jello or not, but you can't deny he had his ears tuned to what was going on. This fortunate meeting.
* This fortuituos meeting resulted in 1983's epic Alternative Tentacles release, 'Butthole Surfers, quickly followed by their first live EP, Live PCPPEP, also on Alternative Tentacles. It was already clear by that time that the Surfers live was a very special thing, and unlike many other bands of this era, they released a live recording very quickly. Which was basically an open invitiation to go see them as soon as possible.
* They signed to Touch And Go records very quickly after this, in 1984, for their first full lenght album release, the classic "Psychic... Powerless... Another Man's Sac". That would be this tour, basically.
* I'm guessing Terence Smart was on bass, since he played with them 84-85, and Bill Jolly played 82-84, and this is last days of '84.
* The wiki article totally fails to even touch the intense swirl that life as a Butthole surfer actually involved. The reason they had churn at these positions was that the musicians were often literally burned out by the intense lifestyle, which included copious amounts of drugs, in particular, LSD. Being a Butthole Surfer was NOT like being in a regular band!!
* If you're still uncertain about what was fueling the Butthole Surfers at this point of their fiery assault on the world, Gibby makes it pretty clear at the start of track 15: "L S D". Paul Leary has tried to downplay this in later interviews, but I think that's him trying to rewrite his past to fit better with his current views. Certainly if you saw them during their peak years, and I do mean peak, there was zero doubt about what the band was doing, and what the audience was doing during these performances.
* If you want to get the full show, without a break I believe between Butthole Surfers and DKs, grab MYTP 24 and they will drop right into place without a break between them as far as I can tell.
* Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ButtholeSurfersMusic
* Bandsintown: https://www.bandsintown.com/a/2497-butthole-surfers
* Songkick: https://www.songkick.com/artists/206012-butthole-surfers
* Rolling Stone on 'new' album (2017 but it does not appear to have been released):
"The Butthole Surfers spent the 1980s as the American underground’s most notorious live act, a nomadic carnival of terror featuring – at different points – strobe lights, footage of autopsies and surgeries, nudity, fire, fake blood, stuffed animal destruction and a wiffle ball bat that flung urine.
...
"We were living in a van half the time,” Coffey says of the scrappy 1986-era sessions for Locust Abortion Technician, “but also in Winterville, Georgia where we didn’t know anyone, and there was no furniture in the house and there were sparks flying across the room because the electricity was so bad. Paul got an ancient 8-track one-inch machine and we began recording stuff in little bits and pieces. Almost all the drums on that are really just one floor tom and one snare, because we only had eight tracks to work with."
"
* About Butthole Surfers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butthole_Surfers
"Butthole Surfers is an American rock band formed in San Antonio, Texas, by singer Gibby Haynes and guitarists Paul Leary and Jonathan Grisham in 1981. The band has had numerous personnel changes, but its core lineup of Haynes, Leary, and drummer King Coffey has been consistent since 1983. Teresa Nervosa served as second drummer from 1983 to 1985, 1986 to 1989, and 2009. The band has also employed a variety of bass players, most notably Jeff Pinkus.
...
Emerging from the 1980s hardcore punk scene, Butthole Surfers quickly became known for their chaotic live shows, black comedy, and a sound that incorporated elements of psychedelia, noise rock, and punk as well as their use of sound manipulation and tape editing.
...
Butthole Surfers formed at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas during the late 1970s, when students Gibson "Gibby" Haynes and Paul Leary Walthall (later just Paul Leary) met for the first time. Though it was their overall strangeness and shared taste in non-mainstream music that caused them to become friends, both appeared to be headed for very conventional careers. Haynes, as captain of Trinity's basketball team, as well as the school's "Accountant of the Year", soon graduated to a position with a respected Texas accounting firm, while Leary remained in college working on his MBA degree.
In 1981, Haynes and Leary published the magazine Strange V.D., which featured photos of abnormal medical ailments, coupled with fictitious, humorous explanations for the diseases. After being caught with one of these pictures at work, Haynes left the accounting firm and moved to Southern California. Leary, at the time one semester shy of his degree, dropped out of college and followed Haynes. After a brief period spent selling homemade clothes and linens emblazoned with Lee Harvey Oswald's image, the pair returned to San Antonio, and launched the band that would eventually become Butthole Surfers.
...
Early years (1981–1984)
Haynes and Leary played their debut show at a San Antonio night club, The Bonham Exchange, in 1981; at that time, they had not yet settled on the band name "Butthole Surfers". By 1982, the band were backed by the sibling rhythm section composed of bassist Quinn Mathews and his brother, drummer Scott Mathews. The band did not gain a following in San Antonio, and purchased a van to return to California later that summer.
During a brief concert at the Tool and Die club in San Francisco, Dead Kennedys frontman and Alternative Tentacles overseer Jello Biafra witnessed their performance and became a fervent fan.[11] Biafra invited the group to open for Dead Kennedys and T.S.O.L. at the Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles, and soon made an offer that would launch their recording career; if they could get someone to lend them studio time, Alternative Tentacles would reimburse the studio when the album was complete. The band then returned to San Antonio to record at BOSS Studios (a.k.a. Bob O'Neill's Sound Studios, a.k.a. the Boss). However, the Mathews brothers did not enter the studio with Haynes and Leary; the two had quit following a physical altercation between Scott Mathews and Haynes. The bass position was taken over by Bill Jolly, who would play on Butthole Surfers' next two releases, and a number of drummers participated. The last of these, King Coffey (born Jeffrey Coffey), is still with the band to this day.
...
Released on Alternative Tentacles in July 1983, the resulting EP, Butthole Surfers (also known as Brown Reason to Live and Pee Pee the Sailor), offered songs with provocatively absurd titles like "The Shah Sleeps in Lee Harvey's Grave" and "Bar-B-Q Pope", alternately sung by Haynes and Leary. (Haynes would become the band's primary singer by the time of their first LP.) The album cover, like the many bizarre illustrations that would accompany Surfers' succeeding work, was designed by the band itself.] Teeming with humor, Butthole Surfers laid the foundation for what was to come. It influenced at least one future superstar in Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, who listed it as one of his ten favorite albums in his Journals.[14] Cobain later went on to list the album "Pee Pee the Sailor" by Butthole Surfers as one of the fifty most influential albums for Nirvana's sound. Cobain would later meet his wife, Courtney Love of Hole, at a Butthole Surfers/L7 concert in 1991.
Soon after the release of Butthole Surfers, the band recruited a second drummer, Teresa Nervosa (born Teresa Taylor), who had played with Coffey in a number of high school marching bands in the Texas' Fort Worth and Austin areas. She and Coffey would drum in unison on separate, stand-up kits, adding to the spectacle of Surfers' ever-evolving stage show. Though Nervosa and Coffey repeatedly referred to themselves, and were referred to, as siblings, it has since been revealed that the two only presented themselves as such due to their similar appearances, and are not actually related. With her arrival, the band's core "classic lineup" — Haynes, Leary, Coffey, and Nervosa — was in place.
...
The band did not begin as Butthole Surfers, although they did have a song of that title, possibly an early version of 1984's "Butthole Surfer". This changed at their first paid concert, when an announcer forgot what the band was called and used the song title for the group's name. They decided to keep the moniker, and have largely been billed as such ever since.[10] Prior to that, Butthole Surfers performed under a different name at every live show. Early aliases included The Dick Clark Five, Nine cm Worm Makes Own Food, The Vodka Family Winstons, Ashtray Babyheads, Ed Asner Is Gay, Fred Astaire's Asshole, The Right to Eat Fred Astaire's Asshole, Zipgun, The Inalienable Right to Eat Fred Astaire's Asshole, and many others."
* Gibby's father was, of course, a tv clown, if I remember right. In case you are wondering about some of Gibby's later album clown references... I share... the secret... of the clown. Indeed he did. I guess you have to be born into it, like a medieval craft guild.
* About River Theater (River Theatre, 16135 Main Street, Guerneville, CA):
http://jerrygarciasbrokendownpalaces.blogspot.com/2012/06/river-theatre-16135-main-street.html
Built in 1947, the River Theatre originally showed movies under the longtime ownership of Dave Williams.
In 1973, it was bought by Tony Mata, and in the late '70s impresario Morty Wiggins began booking it as a live music venue, bringing in the likes of the Jerry Garcia Band, Emmylou Harris, David Bromberg and others, twice a month.
In 1981, Mark Russo took over, and local heavy metal bands played often, with the Dead Kennedys appearing in 1984.
Sometime between 1986 and 1989 it became Club Mann and was new wave disco music.. owned by the Conti brothers... who moved from the club Stargaze in Fremont, CA and the Palladium in SF.
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No distribution in lossy formats!!
No selling!!
No bootlegging!!
Yes sharing. Definitely share.
Support the artists when or if they play, and buy their records/merchandise.
Please correct any errors or oversights in this information in the comments section so the information can be as accurate as possible.
If you can find related materials like flyers, posters, ticket stubs, even photos, etc, please add them in a comment and I will add them to the main release folder, so that can be included on the next re-seeding. Every bit is welcome, and as I am time constrained on this project due to the amount of material, I cannot spend as much time on each release doing research as I would like, so if we can add to and improve the information and release contents during this series, that would be great.
Please make an effort to pick at least one of these MYTP releases and keep it seeded for as long as you can, particularly the lesser known groups. That will really help out long term.
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About Michael Young and the MYTP:
Michael: "I lived in the bay area 1980-92. Being a Deadhead I had a lot of friends who recorded shows, so when I got a nice Sony D5M (in 83, I think it was) I would bring it with me to the Mabuhay Gardens and On Broadway and other places as well. I would ask the sound man if I could plug in and they usually said yes. I did this mostly in 1984 a few in 85. My first punk show was in my hometown of Philadelphia at a place called the Hot Club in 1978. I was hooked on the high energy and the fun of slamming around... I think my first SF hardcore punk show was Flipper at Kezar Pavilion in May of '81. I might have seen some other bands around town before that but that one sticks out for sure."
[teetering: I was also at that Kezar TG/Flipper show. Flipper was great that night.]
TECH:
Michael used a Sony D5M portable cassette recorder, plugged into the soundboard outs, to record most of these shows. This was for the time a very expensive unit, with some advanced features, which probably accounts for why these recordings are so good in general.
* D5M manual: https://transom.org/wp-content/uploads/2005/02/om.tcd5m.pdf
* About D5M: https://transom.org/2005/sony-tc-d5m/
All metal, reliable, simple, and fixable, it runs on two D-cells
* More on the D5M: https://www.cassettedeck.org/sony/tc-d5m
This Sony TC-D5M is a stereo cassette deck with Dolby B noise reduction, it was first sold by Sony in 1979 with a recommended retail price of USD $680 [about $2500 in today's dollars] and discontinued a year later.
The main features of the Sony TC-D5M are: 2 heads, mechanical 3 digit tape counter, manual tape type selection and capable of handling normal, chrome, ferro-chrome and metal tapes, belt driven single-capstan transport.
Typical of this deck is the 70's top loading layout with the cassette compartiment located on the left side of the deck. Tape eject is operated mechanically and the cassette needs to be placed with the side to be played facing forward in the cassette well.
Level meters used on the TC-D5M are analog needle VU reading meters. Mechanical transport controls for reliable TC-D5M transport function selection.
The Dolby-B system reduces tape hiss on tapes recorded on the TC-D5M by as much as 10 dB at the highest frequencies. The 19kHz multiplex pilot slgnal present in FM stereo broadcasts can cause false triggering of the noise reduction system. The switchable MPX filter of the TC-D5M filters out the pilot signal, and assuring proper Dolby processing of FM stereo programs.
To make live recordings this deck has 2 microphone inputs to connect microphones with a jack connector.
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- teetering