How Did I Get Hear? #5 - Fraser Lewry on Butthole Surfers' "Locust Abortion Technician"

My first love was rock music with a capital R: AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin. They're all bands I adore to this day, but the mid-1980s found hard rock moving in ever-diminishing circles, refining itself to the point of ridicule. Glam Metal. Hair metal. Sunset Strip. As anyone who's watched Penelope Spheeris's brilliant documentary "The Decline Of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years" can attest, it was in real danger of becoming stupid.  

At the time, I was working in a second-hand record store in North London, with colleagues whose tastes were much cooler than my own. They liked Krautrock and West African highlife and folk singers from the 1960s whose names I didn't recognise. And one day, one of them played a Butthole Surfers album on the shop stereo. 

The first track on "Locust Abortion Technician" was the one that did it. Right out of the blocks. "Sweat Loaf" parodied Black Sabbath's "Sweet Leaf" riff, so I liked it right away, but it spiralled off into craziness. It was demented, and psychedelic, and somewhat frightening, and quite possibly dangerous, and it was unlike anything I'd heard before. 

The rest of the album was just as grotesque, from the harrowing ("22 Going On 23") to the hallucinatory ("U.S.S.A.") via "The O-Men", with frontman Gibby Haynes jibber-jabbering frantically above a chaotic, acid-addled backing track, and "Kuntz", in which the band lifted an entire song from Thai folk singer Phloen Phromdaen, ran it through a homemade effects unit, and called it their own.      

Shortly after, I saw the Buttholes live. I met Gibby, and he told me a wild-eyed story about Lydia Lunch. To this day it's the craziest show I've been to, with Haynes repeatedly setting himself on fire and a riot at the entrance to the venue. I still don't know if it was people keen to get in or desperate to get out.

"Locust Abortion Technician" boggled my mind, but it also opened it. It's not the greatest album ever made (that's actually "Bat Out Of Hell"), but its complete disregard for notions of genre or order pointed me in the direction – in one way or another – of everything I've subsequently been obsessed by, from Volcano Suns to Fela Kuti, from Fiona Apple to the Mutton Birds, from Rammstein to Ros Serey Sothea. It's wild.

Fraser Lewry edits Classic Rock magazine online, and can be found online here