Remembering Teresa Taylor, Stand-Up Butthole Surfers Drummer With a Memorable Role in Slacker

Teresa Taylor, one of the “twin drummers” in what many consider Texas acid punks Butthole Surfers’ classic lineup, passed away after a long battle with lung disease on Sunday, June 18. She was 60.

"Everybody believed that King [Coffey, her Surfers co-drummer] and I were brother and sister,” mused Taylor, whose nom de Butthole Surfer was Teresa Nervosa, to The Austin Chronicle’s Austin Powell on the occasion of the band’s 2008 reunion, touring with the Paul Green School of Rock All-Stars. “I don't even know what I'm supposed to tell you right now. We may very well be. There used to be a consensus."

She joined the band upon their 1983 relocation to Austin from San Antonio, shortly after Dead Kennedys’ label Alternative Tentacles released their debut EP, Brown Reasons to Live. Singer Gibby Haynes, guitarist Paul Leary, Arlington native Coffey – fresh from Ft. Worth snot-punks the Hugh Beaumont Experience – and then-bassist Bill Jolly subleased rehearsal space from Taylor for $40/month in a downtown warehouse she rented. Then a University of Texas Radio, Television and Film major, she already played drums in a stand-up style similar to Coffey’s. He was a three-show veteran of the band at that point, and they thought a second drummer could toughen the tribal rhythms underpinning the sonic and visual chaos.

“I was 22 years old when I joined the band,” she told Joe Nick Patoski and John Morthland for their 1996 SPIN magazine oral history of the band, “Feeding the Fish.” “We traveled three years straight. We never came back to Austin. We literally did the whole country that way.”

Haynes later described this period to Powell as “pure performance art with a musical soundtrack.” They built a rock & roll bridge from hardcore back to Austin’s lysergic late Sixties glory, hinging on Leary’s queasy guitar, the faux twins’ tribal rhythms, and Haynes’ scatalogical bullhorn exhortations. Meanwhile, strobes flashed furiously, smoke machines belched impenetrability, and 16mm traffic accident and penis reconstruction films Taylor borrowed from the RTF department projected atop it all, overlapping.

“The full-on shows would make people puke and scream and run out, that kind of thing,” Taylor told SPIN, obviously proud. “It was what we’d always wanted.”

What the Butthole Surfers wanted later engendered risky consequences.

“After leaving the band,” she informed SPIN, “I learned I had an aneurysm, and I’ve had brain surgery, and now I’ve come to find out I suffer from strobe light-induced seizures.” Her laughing reply when her neurologist asked if she’d been “exposed to a lot of flashing lights”?

“You’ll never even imagine, in your wildest dreams, the shit I’ve flashed.”

Taylor was born to Mickey and Helen Taylor in Arlington, Texas, on November 10, 1962. The family was fairly itinerant, her father being a longtime mechanical engineer at IBM after serving in the military. She drummed in Fort Worth-area high school marching bands – as did Coffey – and continued at Austin High upon the family’s relocation here. As a teenager, she was an extra in the Texas-shot 1980 film Roadie, which featured Taylor's idol Debbie Harry.

Alongside a brief stint drumming in Eighties art punk act Meat Joy, she served three Butthole Surfers terms, having briefly left from late 1985 to ’86, leaving permanently in ’89, then returning for the School of Rock tour in 2008. In 1991, she enjoyed a small but memorable role as the “Madonna Pap smear girl” in Richard Linklater’s Slacker. Taylor’s image from her sequence became part of the film’s iconography, appearing in advertising, posters, T-shirts, and home video boxes. Slacker’s trailer was edited around that key scene, which she later claimed she performed drunk and high.

Coffey informed the SonicNet website in 1995 that Taylor worked at the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired and was writing a memoir about Butthole Surfers life. In 2007 on the Butthole Surfers website, it was noted she was still in Austin, working on recording projects with Haynes.

In a post dated November 14, 2021, she informed Facebook friends she was in home hospice.

“[The doctor] gives me one to five expectancy, end stage lung disease,” she indicated. “I don't have cancer or any harsh treatments. I know I smoked like a chimney and this is to be expected.”

Her longtime companion and caregiver, Cheryl Curtice, posted yesterday morning that Taylor passed “peacefully in her sleep, this weekend.”

“She was so brave, even in the face of her horrible disease,” wrote Curtice. “We were all fortunate to have her beautiful, strong spirit in our lives. She will be forever missed.”

“We'll always love you, Teresa,” Coffey wrote yesterday afternoon. “You could make things better by simply walking into the room. Everyone was drawn to your charisma, talent, and wicked sense of humor. I learned so much from you (like how to play drums, and which Robert Altman films to watch). But mostly, you made what should have been tough times fun by simply being yourself.”