There’s a photo you’ve seen before.
It’s of Willie Nelson, the late psychedelic rock pioneer Roky Erickson, and Gibby Haynes, singer in the Butthole Surfers. It was taken in Luck, Texas, by photographer Scott Newton in 1995.
There is straw on the floor and they are in front of a Texas flag, which looks huge but is the size of a flag you might see flying at a car dealership. Willie is a mere 62, Roky has not yet emerged from the mental illness that dominated too much of his life, and Gibby is gesturing to the camera, being … Gibby.
Even with the subjects, right to left, being Gibby, Willie, and Roky, it is impossible not to look at it and think: three Texas musicians we admire most, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost (God’s in the middle, duh). The man who came to Austin and codified outlaw country, the inventor of psychedelic rock, and the chaotic weirdo who, with his fellow travelers in the Butthole Surfers, embodied psychedelia at its most outlaw.
There’s a good documentary series about Willie (Willie Nelson & Family, streaming on Paramount+), and a terrific doc about Roky (You’re Gonna Miss Me, and good luck with finding a DVD under $80). And now, debuting at SXSW, Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt, in which director Tom Stern unpacks what made this curious and influential collection of musicians tick, what combination of skill and substances got them there and how it all fell apart.
Fact(?): The Butthole Surfers were the best live underground rock band of the 1980s. Some would contend you don’t even need “underground” or “rock” in there.
Seeing the Surfers, “that is a changing point in your life,” says Richard Linklater in the doc. In Aaron Tanner’s nifty art book, Butthole Surfers: What Does Regret Mean?, everyone from Stephen Malkmus to David Yow declares them the best live band of the epoch. A panoply of rockers (Dean Ween, Flea, Dave Grohl) say as much onscreen.
Stern would agree. He first saw them with fellow Tisch student Alex Winter (yes, from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and an excellent filmmaker in his own right) in the mid-Eighties and was converted instantly. “There was no precedent for it, for me,” he says. He met guitarist and co-founder Paul Leary (“nice normal guy to me”) and Gibby (“not a normal guy”).
Stern is calling from the road; he and his family are going on a quick ski trip, a calm before the SXSW storm. He is rushing to lock his movie in time for the festival but his family also needs a bit of a break, he explains; they lost their house in the Altadena fires, which means that the director lost virtually everything related to the movie: his home production studio, props, papers, all of his possessions, the whole shebang.
“I love Altadena, we are going to rebuild there,” he says, but he and his family are still living in someone else’s house as he wraps up the film. Still: oof.
Back when he was a student, in 1986, Stern cut together a video, on spec, for the Butthole Surfers song “Cherub.” (Sharp-eyed readers will note that Austin noise rock savants Cherubs were named after the song.) The band dug it and they worked together on and off throughout Stern’s career as a writer, director, and producer. About five years ago, Stern got the bug: “It was time to enshrine their legacy.”
He talked to most everyone from the band: Gibby, Leary, drummers King Coffey and the late Theresa Taylor, and nine bassists, including “classic era” bassist JD Pinkus. Look for nifty animation and plenty of puppets. You don’t even have to look very hard to see puppet dick.
Stern also talked to detractors, with beefs large and small, some mixed with respect, some not. “If you’re around [Gibby] long enough, something bad is going to happen,” Melvins guitarist Buzz Osborne says in the doc.
The late musician/engineer Steve Albini went to his grave thinking they were awful people for the grubby way their relationship ended with Touch and Go Records, which put out the band’s most powerful records in the mid-Eighties. “Albini loved to trash-talk them,” Sterns says. “Not every voice can be positive.”
And there is plenty of negative in there. The Surfers were the opposite of the Reaganite morality cops; musically, they were at the other end of the rock spectrum from, say, R.E.M., whose appeal to the New Waver and frat guy alike made them gods of the underground, then global stars. The Surfers were more like the underground Grateful Dead: Both had two drummers, a devout following that gave the band life-changing properties, a belief in the power of the psychedelic mind state and a fondness of consciousness change. Speaking of, drugs are a huge part of the Surfers’ story. Forget the acid, weed, and beer that powered a lot of the Surfers’ work and fandom; Gibby became a heroin user and, well, a lot of people looked up to Gibby. (He is now clean, married, and a father.)
To its credit, “The Hole Truth” doesn’t shy away from these complexities. It can’t get into everything (hardcore Surfers nerds might blanch at the absence of the Rough Trade Records period – “the movie was getting pretty long,” Stern says). Some of the discussion around drugs is perhaps revisionist. But it does explain their weird major label period and focuses long and hard at the creative love story between Leary and Gibby.
“The core human story is the partnership between these two guys,” Stern says. “It’s not the Surfers unless those two guys are involved.”
Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt
24 Beats Per Second
Documentary Feature, World Premiere
Wednesday 12, 3:30pm, Paramount Theatre
Thursday 13, 9pm, AFS Cinema
This article appears in March 7 • 2025.