Experimental punk icon brings rare tour to Oakland's Stork Club
OAKLAND -- Texas punk icon Gibby Haynes brings his current tour playing classic songs by the Butthole Surfers backed by teens from the Paul Green Rock Academy to Thee Stork Club Tuesday.
One of the most notorious bands to emerge from the punk underground during the early 1980s, Haynes and the Butthole Surfers blazed a singular subversive path across the nation during the decade with their unhinged live performances while putting out a string of noisy, highly psychedelic albums. Haynes first met principle collaborator Paul Leary when both were attending Trinity University in San Antonio during the late '70s. While they bonded over a common interest in unconventional music, they wouldn't make music themselves until they both left their studies and careers behind -- Haynes was working for a prominent accounting firm as Leary pursued an MBA -- and started a band in 1981.
By the following year, the band featuring Haynes on vocals, Leary on guitar and an early rhythm section had taken the name the Butthole Surfers and headed to California. A chaotic show at Valencia Tool and Die in San Francisco's Mission District earned the group a fan in Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra, who invited the Surfers to open for the DKs at the Whiskey A Go Go in Los Angeles. He eventually offered to put out an album on Alternative Tentacles Records, provided the group could arrange studio recording time that the DKs' label would later pay for.
The band's warped take on punk rock featuring Haynes' screamed vocals and Leary's feedback-drenched guitar was documented on their self-titled 1983 EP that also featured their trademark disturbing album art and nonsensical song titles. The group's membership would continue to evolve, but by the following year they had shifted to a two-drummer line-up featuring King Coffey and Teresa Nervosa who both appeared on the concert recording Live PCPPEP.
The same year the group would issue its debut full-length album entitled Psychic, Powerless...Another Man's Sac for another independent label, Touch and Go Records. While the studio efforts helped spread the word of the band, it was the Surfers' cataclysmic live shows that made the band legendary. With graphic surgical films being shown in the background and naked dancers in body paint (Haynes regularly stripped down to nothing as well), the group's sonic squall was only part of the complete pandemonium they unleashed onstage.
Though not making much of an impact commercially, the Butthole Surfers continued to build on their cult of fans with relentless touring and more studio releases including the influential 1987 album Locust Abortion Technician (the first to feature longtime bassist J.D. Pinkus) that helped solidify the band's reputation as pioneers who presaged the rise of alternative rock and grunge the following decade. The Surfers were invited to participate in the inaugural edition of the roving Lollapalooza festival that would mark the first farewell tour of kindred spirits Jane's Addiction in 1991, providing the band with its biggest mainstream exposure yet.
The following year, the Surfers made a move that shocked some of the group's diehard fans by signing a deal with Capitol Records. For their major label debut, the record company would pair the band with legendary Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones as producer, who shepherded the Surfers to make their most accessible album yet with Independent Worm Saloon prior to the departure of Pinkus. The follow-up effort in 1996 Electriclarryland shot up the charts on the strength of the irreverent, beat-driven hit single "Pepper," selling better than band's entire catalog of earlier albums and garnering heavy MTV airplay.
Band members would begin focusing more time on side projects and a lawsuit against former label Touch and Go Records, not releasing any new material until 2000's Weird Revolution. The Surfers would reunite with Pinkus and Nervosa for the first time in two decades, touring extensively in 2008 and 2009. While there was another round of dates in 2011 followed by talk of a new album, the group has only appeared at the occasional festival since that activity.
In the summer of 2020, Haynes began playing the band's classic material with a group of teen backing musicians from the Paul Green Rock Academy. The small private music instruction program that was the subject of the acclaimed 2005 documentary Rock School and would spawn schools across the country, Green's all-star students have regularly collaborated live with such established stars as Jane's Addiction singer Perry Ferrell, Guns n' Roses guitar hero Slash, David Bowie guitarists Earl Slick and Adrian Belew and former Yes singer Jon Anderson (who actually went on a short theater tour backed by the all-stars). Though touring efforts have been hampered by COVID, the collaboration with Haynes played a number of shows on the East Coast in July to crowds thrilled to hear Haynes perform live again.
Haynes and his young backing band are being joined on this West Coast tour by co-headlining Bay Area punk veterans Victims Family. With a partnership dating back nearly four decades, guitarist/vocalist Ralph Spight and bassist Larry Boothroyd have been making a uniquely hectic jazz-punk noise as the core of Victims Family since forming the band in 1984 when they were just a couple of scrawny Santa Rosa teenagers.
Bringing together the lyrical venom of the Dead Kennedys and the eclectic punk virtuosity of The Minutemen and NoMeansNo, Victims Family created a ferocious stew of hardcore, jazz, metal, funk and math rock with original drummer Devon VrMeer. Embracing the DIY punk ethos of the time, the young trio booked its first national tour in 1985, honing its chops while sharing the stage with such bands as NOFX, Tales of Terror, the aforementioned DKs and Social Unrest.
The band issued its debut album Voltage and Violets on Mordam Records the following year, unleashing Spight's vitriolic social commentary on salvos like "Homophobia" and "God, Jerry, & The P.M.R.C." in addition to writing likely the only instrumental tribute to jazz guitarist George Benson ever performed by a punk band. Victims' follow-up effort Things I Hate To Admit further refined the group's sound with more ear-pleasing, barbed wire hooks on such future fan favorites as "World War IX" and "Corona Belly."
VrMeer's departure to start a family led to his short-term replacement by Eric Strand before roadie Tim Solyan stepped in and completed what many consider to be the band's classic line-up. Victims Family crafted what still stands as one of the outstanding punk albums of the decade with 1990's White Bread Blues while furthering their reputation as a blistering live act with multiple U.S. and European tours, sharing the stage with the likes of Nirvana and Primus while having future stars Mr. Bungle and Green Day serve as opening acts.
The line-up released a second album, The Germ, in 1992. It was the band's first effort for Alternative Tentacles, but the grind of the road eventually led to a two-year hiatus. A reunion would produce another solid studio effort (Headache Remedy) and a live album that captured Victims' volatile onstage chemistry before Spight and Boothroyd moved on to band projects Saturn's Flea Collar (with the bassist switching to drums) and Hellworms (another trio that featured Bluchunks/Walrus drummer Joaquin Spengemann).
Victims Family put out one more album with yet another drummer — Apocalicious in 2001 featuring My Name drummer David Gleza behind the kit — before the principles moved on to explore other creative outlets. Spight would front his own band the Freak Accident in addition to anchoring Biafra's lauded new band The Guantanamo School of Medicine on guitar, while Boothroyd would tour and record extensively with celebrated experimental outfit Triclops! and the Bay Area supergroup Brubaker, though he eventually would be brought in to play bass with Biafra's band. In the midst of the pandemic, the bassist released the ambitious debut studio album by Specimen Box, a complex project that featured the musician constructing four wide-ranging suites of experimental sounds from 60-second recordings he compiled and edited from over 100 collaborators.
Boothroyd has since constructed a second Specimen Box album entitled Remote Communion, taking a more song-oriented from a smaller pool of musicians and vocalists (working with "only" 60 contributors) slated for release on the Valley King Records imprint in mid-December with a stunning 3-D cover by noted Bay Area artist Alan Forbes. He also played and recorded with violinist/vocalist Emily Palen in the bands KnightressM1 and Othered.
Despite the challenges presented by the drummer's busy schedule as an in-demand drum tech, semi-regular Victims Family reunions that bring Solyan back into the fold often find fans traveling long distances to catch another brutal live set. In recent years, the trio embarked on a brief string of West Coast dates with Portland, OR-based powerhouse punk band Nasalrod in addition to a 35th anniversary gig and an appearance at AT's two-day Tentacle Fest in Berkeley in 2019.
The band served as the opening act for an epic experimental punk triple bill last year at the Great American Music Hall with Oxbow and NYC provocateur Lydia Lunch and her explosive new band Retrovirus as well as headlining an SF concert last May. Victims recently reteamed with Nasalrod for trio of shows in Sacramento, Petaluma and San Francisco. For this sold-out date at Thee Stork Club on Tuesday, the teens from the Paul Green Rock Academy will do double duty, kicking off the show with a set of punk rock standards.
Gibby Haynes and the Paul Green Rock Academy All-Stars with Victims Family
Tuesday, Jan. 3, 8 p.m. $20 (sold out)
Thee Stork Club