Paul Leary of the Butthole Surfers, courtesy.

Few stories in the annals of rock and roll rival the legend of the Butthole Surfers. The band of mega-misfits from San Antonio, which launched its career in 1981, embodied the ethos of excess in the triptych pleasures of sex, drugs and rock and roll. The band’s stage performances blended amateur pyrotechnics, films of penile surgery and mind-warping psychedelia into an ayahuasca-like potion that broke brains and elicited quasi-religious experiences from audiences in equal measure.

Guitarist Paul Leary was a founding member of the Surfers and witnessed the band’s bacchanalian odyssey from crusty punk clubs in the 1980s to signing with a major label and scoring a No. 1 hit in 1996. Leary, who just released his second solo album, Born Stupid, recalled the band’s struggling early days.

“We lived in Manhattan for a short while in the mid-1980s,” he wrote in an email interview. “We were able to gig around town enough to give ourselves an allowance to spend on food and beer: $3 a day per band member. So the choice to make every day was either two slices of pizza and one beer, or one slice and two beers. I usually went for two beers.”

A broken-down van in San Francisco and some fast talking led to the band’s first record deal.

“Our van broke down on the Bay Bridge and we coasted to the bottom of the bridge, and rolled to a stop in front of an old building in a warehouse district [now a hip area on Valencia Street] called “Tool and Die,” he said. “We noticed punk rockers loading band equipment into the building, so we started unloading ours. A woman stopped us and asked who we were.  She told us we couldn’t play, but we whined until she agreed to let us play 3 songs. [Dead Kennedys vocalist] Jello Biafra was in attendance that night, and he signed us to Alternative Tentacles on the spot. After the show, we got the van running and left. Two blocks later it broke down again. We spent the night sleeping in our van on some train tracks. We’re lucky to be alive.”

The Butthole Surfers’ early records sound like Captain Beefheart backed by a band of orangutans on PCP. But the distorted, swirling musical mayhem oozes with unvarnished, primate emotion. Leary’s ham-fisted blues riffs bark and snarl with a slightly psychotic authenticity that can’t be taught at Juilliard. This point has been made succinctly be a YouTuber who edited Leary into a guitar battle with legendary shredder Steve Vai at the end of the movie “Crossroads.”

“I have to admit that I like that video a lot.” Leary said, “Steve Vai is obviously a great guitar player, much better than me. But his style of music is what drove me to do what I do. Who cares if a guitar player is highly skilled. It’s a guitar. Guitars are stupid.”

The Butthole Surfers were able to combine stupid with weird and trippy to increasingly successful effects, building a fanbase with a string of increasingly ambitious albums. The Surfers’ Hairway to Steven (1987), and 1988’s Locust Abortion Technician cemented the band’s reputation. Both Nirvana and Pearl Jam cited them as major influences, and when grunge broke in the early ’90s, Paul Leary and the gang surprised fans and themselves by signing to Capitol Records and going to work with Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones to produce 1993’s Independent Worm Saloon. 

While the album was modestly successful, its followup, 1996’s Electric Larryland, would spawn the classic Beck parody “Pepper,” which eventually reached No. 1 on Billboard’s alternative chart and went into heavy rotation on MTV. But if mainstream America had a taste for the Butthole Surfers’ weirdness, it seemed to be a passing fad, and the band hasn’t released an album since 2001. They still command a diehard fanbase and are widely seen as one of the most influential noise-rock bands of all time.

True to the Surfers’ tradition, Leary’s latest solo album is weird. From the campy country crooning of Born Stupid‘s title track to the demonic growling of “What Are You Gonna Do?” the album is a funhouse mirror of Americana, bubbling and melting with a psychedelic ooze.

“I never set out to be weird,” Leary said. “But I am a weird guy, so what comes out is weird. My whole life has been spent trying to become not weird. I’d love to be normal. Fortunately I have had enough success to afford a normal life. There was a time in my life when I felt like a circus freak.”

While Leary may have achieved a modicum of well-earned normalcy, the universe seems to have grown much stranger in the wake of The Butthole Surfers’ wave. If you’ve ever seen a Surfers show, you know it might not be a coincidence.

Follow writer David Gill at Twitter.com/songotaku and Instagram/songotaku.