Trivia / Butthole Surfers

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• Black Sheep Hit: You'd never know by listening to "Pepper" that the band's repertoire is mostly disturbing lyrics, shrill/distorted voices and bordering-on-surreal riffs. The song dropped out of their live sets entirely for a while ^note along with anything else they released after 1993, but during a 2011 tour, a small portion of it was often played as a medley with "Lady Sniff".
• Creator Backlash:
  • The band were not happy with "The Shame Of Life" and reportedly only recorded it out of courtesy because Kid Rock had gifted them with it in exchange for sampling one of their other songs.
    King Coffee: We were kind of horrified. How do you tell a guy who's doing this out of charity that it's so... well, bad?
  • The band have said that they weren't satisfied with how piouhgd turned out, although they still play "Blindman" at some shows.
• Missing Episode: After the Astronaut was recorded in 1998, but was scrapped after promo copies started surfacing, apparently due to a troubled relationship with their label. About half of the songs were reworked for Weird Revolution, recorded for a new label in 2001. And in the meantime, the back cover of After the Astronaut, painted by artist Mark Ryden and based on an idea by guitarist Paul Leary, ended up becoming the front cover of Marcy Playground's Shapeshifter — at the time Marcy Playground were signed to Capitol Records, the label Butthole Surfers had recently left, and the label had offered Marcy Playground the piece without informing them who designed it or that it was originally intended for something else.
• One-Hit Wonder: The only song commonly played on the radio, and the one everybody knows about, is their first big hit "Pepper" off of Electriclarryland. "Who Was In My Room Last Night?" might be the second most recognizable song of theirs due to appearances in other media: The music video was featured in an episode of Beavis And Butthead, and a Cover Version of the song was playable in Guitar Hero II.
• Similarly Named Works:
  • "Space", a song from Electriclarryland, has nothing whatsoever to do with "Space I" and "Space II", songs that appeared on their rarity/outtake compilation Humpty Dumpty LSD.
  • "Mark Says Alright" shares its name with a Grand Funk Railroad instrumental. This is actually a deliberate Shout-Out — the band owned a pitbull which they had named Mark Farner, after the Grand Funk member, and the song includes recordings of said pitbull growling.
  • "Something" is definitely not The Beatles' song.
• Throw It In!:
  • The name "Butthole Surfers" was apparently originally only supposed to be a song title. They've told two basic variations of the story — one was that they had a friend announce them at their first paying gig, but they had changed their band name so often he couldn't remember what it was, so he just called them by the first song title he could remember; Another had it that fans at early shows would shout requests for the song "Butthole Surfer" so often that other people in the audience thought it was the name of the band itself.
  • The backwards fiddle in "Creep In The Cellar". The band were recording over tapes left behind by the last group to use the same studio, and somehow when they recorded the song a stray fiddle track running in reverse ended up in the mix. By the time they figured out how to remove it, they decided to just leave it in. It does fit into the song surprisingly well.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The cover to the Cream Corn From The Socket Of Davis EP was originally intended to be a drawing of Sammy Davis Jr. with his glass eye removed and cream corn coming out of the socket. The band commissioned an artist to execute the concept, but ultimately rejected the results in favor of a photo of a little girl, which was taken by a photographer Paul Leary had recently met. This made the title a complete non sequitur, but it's not as though their discography wasn't full of Word Salad Titles anyway.
  • Gibby Haynes once described his original pitch for the "Pepper" music video as a version of the Zapruder Film where John F. Kennedy somehow spots his intended assassin and shoots first, surviving his motorcade trip. The director evidently didn't think it would work as a full 3 minute music video. Some vague visual references to JFK's assassination still ended up in the final product.
  • "Human Cannonball", from Locust Abortion Technician, was melodic enough that they considered releasing it as a single — the B-Side would have been a collage of every other original song that the band had released up to that point, all playing at the same time.
• Working Title: Electriclarryland was originally going to be called Oklahoma!, playing off both the musical and the then-recent Oklahoma City bombing. Promo copies were labeled with the original title, but Capitol Records insisted on a change, supposedly fearing a lawsuit from the copyright holders for said musical.

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