Butthole Surfers: Irving Plaza, NY

SORRY, THRILL SEEKERS, unlike the Butthole Surfers’ recent Danceteria appearance, there were no Live Sex Acts Onstage this time around. At Irving Plaza April 26, lead singer Gibby Haynes confined his kinkiness to a strobe-lit free-for-all in which he mangled a stuffed bear–a totem Teddy. Haynes seemed much more interested in fooling around with a new tape-loop gizmo that made his often guttural rantsong less coherent while more atavistic. In other words, I’d submit the Butthole Surfers as the musical equivalent of Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing: (Though with Haynes’s penchant for non sequiturs, perhaps Bob Burden’s Flaming Carrot Comics is a more apt comparison). Like Moore’s decomposed hero, the Buttholes used to be normal young men, but now they’re something less than that, and hence more primal, squishy, and …brown.