13. Thermador

Butthole Surfers: Tejass – Live In Pepperland 1996 (bootleg);
composed by Gibson Haynes, Paul Leary, and Jeffrey Coffey

Before what lead guy Gibby termed “sgurd” got the better of them (or him), the Butthole Surfers had their first real hit with their second major label album, Electric Larryland. Yet aside from the kind of production budget a major label can (sometimes) afford you (and impoverish you later), their Capitol product differs from their prior output mostly in terms of relative quality control – something of a mixed blessing with this band. The fact being I own every one of their studio albums because so much of what they recorded sounds like a lot of dicking around, obvious borrowing, and druggy hooting, but somehow, on at least one cut per album, they do not simply discover fire, they invent it, and it directly follows from this very scattershot methodology. It is as if they could make their own primordial soup - a rude biomass that could suddenly spew forth something weirdly complete but counter-intuitive, like a chainsaw-wielding soul-stealing accountant, or this track which seems so obvious for them: “Everybody knows freedom, you find it inside your head / Everybody knows Jesus, you’ll meet him when you are dead.” The original rocks. On this bootleg, however, Paul Leary’s guitar has your baby.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day during Advent (approximately).