Butthole Surfers – Hairway To Steven (Vinyl)

Matador’s Butthole Surfers reissue series continues with three of the Texas band’s most insane slabs – ‘Cream Corn from the Socket of Davis’ (1985), ‘Locust Abortion Technician’ (1987), and ‘Hairway to Steven’ (1988) – all originally released on the Touch & Go label. The period during which these records were first issued parallels the Buttholes’ transition from weirdo Texas outcasts to internationally recognized smut-kings of the American underground. In 1985 they were still the sole province of hallucinogen-soaked punk rock freaks. By 1988 they had toured Europe, had records licensed internationally, and bought a house in Driftwood Texas to serve as their home base. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. ‘Hairway to Steven’ was recorded after the band relocated to Driftwood, at a studio in Dallas. The sessions went fast because the band was more or less laying down new songs from the live set they’d been touring for a while. And although those songs now have actual titles – when the album was first released, the tunes were denoted by small cartoon drawings, in an attempt to assure the impossibility of radio play – the music is a blast, ranging from the blood-smeared guitar-overload of “Jimi” to the acoustic guitar-based sing-along sweetness of “I Saw an X-Ray of a Girl Passing Gas” to the Fugs-like ranting of “John E. Smokes.” Yet somehow, the record managed to get the straight media to actually notice. For all its strangeness, Hairway got rave notices in places that had never paid the band any attention previously. It was the Buttholes’ last album of the ’80s and marks the beginning of their ascendance into something akin to commercial success. Not that the band actually imagined anything at all like that occurring.