DS Book Club: James Burns’ “Let’s Go To Hell” Captures the Chaos of the Butthole Surfers

What can you say about the Butthole Surfers that hasn’t been expressed on a bathroom stall of a dive bar? If you’re James Burns, who runs the Butthole Surfers Anal Obsession archive for the band, the answer is Let’s Go to Hell: Scattered Memories of the Butthole Surfers. He has archived nearly every piece of information for the Butthole Surfers since the mid-1990s and initially released Let’s Go to Hell… in 2015. For the book’s tenth anniversary, Diwulf Publishing has released an expanded and updated version of Burns’s tome about one of Texas’s most infamous bands.

James Burns begins by providing a brief history of punk rock. He provides a primer of what our two heroes,  Paul Leary and Gibby Haynes were into when they formed the band. We learn about their meeting at Trinity College in the early 1980s. Well into their twenties, it wasn’t lost on the Buttholes that they might be too old to start a punk rock band, but that didn’t stop them. 

Descriptions of the Butthole Surfers’ shows range from debaucherous to legendary and sometimes both. Things like throwing handfuls of photocopies of cockroaches and vandalizing some of the equipment were tame compared to what the show eventually evolved into. This is a far cry from the band that would eventually have a number one radio hit about ten years later and two founding members who would go on to be revered for other endeavours.

Creating an art show closer to what Devo did in principle, but also nothing like them at all in execution, the Buttholes’ shows were always wild. It was due to this that they caught the eyes of bands like the Big Boys in Austin. They accumulated fans from outside Texas when the big hitters of other scenes would come through Texas, making them a hot commodity. Bands like TSOL, The Minutemen, and the Dead Kennedys would all demand to play shows with them. In Jello Biafra’s case, he would even release one of their albums through Alternative Tentacles.

Burns acknowledges that some of the stories told from the band’s memory aren’t as accurate as they believe, confirming that Butthole reality and objective reality are often at odds with each other. There’s almost a running gag of people quitting the band when they can’t handle the Butthole lifestyle. Most of them were bass players as Gibby, Paul, and drummer King Coffey have remained the core members of the group since 1983. Burns was able to get interviews with the members who had quit, whether on good terms or not, to share stories of their time in the band.

The pacing of Let’s Go To Hell moves fast only to be interrupted by the occasional song lyric and quote from people present during the band’s formation from past interviews. Don’t let the books near 300 pages and oversize dimensions scare you. This book has plenty of pictures.

Partway through the book Burns admits he was not the first one to try and write a book about the Butthole Surfers. His efforts took about twenty-five years and the results are phenomenal. Burns gets the story of the band straight from the Buttholes’ mouths and it’s a damn good one. 

As far as oral histories of bands go, this is one of the better ones. Burns’s ability to get interviews with nearly anyone who has ever called themselves a member of the Butthole Surfers or an adjacent supporter makes this an even more complete document of the band than the first go round. Let’s Go to Hell is essential reading for anyone fascinated by bands that blur the line between performance art and self-destruction.

You can purchase Let’s Go to Hell: Scattered Memories of the Butthole Surfers at Diwulf.com.