What’s left to divulge about a band that’s lived as boldly and nakedly as the Butthole Surfers? As the new documentary Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt proves, plenty.
The Tom Stern-directed film contains your standard BHS insanity: Frontman Gibby Haynes firing a shotgun onstage at Lollapalooza, a This Is Spinal Tap-esque rotation of nine bassists, pockets of nudity (more than you’d expect, somehow). But underneath the antics is a fair share of bombshells — guitarist Paul Leary’s admission that his mother was so put off by his career that she removed all photos of him from her home, for instance, or Haynes’ recollection of his earliest memory, which may well double as his most traumatic.
The seriousness sandwiched amid pure absurdity is what makes Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt a revealing examination of a band who’s seemingly already bared it all. After premiering at South By Southwest earlier this year, the new documentary comes to the Somerville Theatre this Saturday (April 26) as part of the Independent Film Festival Boston, which we previewed earlier in the week.
Stern’s relationship with the Texas oddballs dates back to the 1980s, lending him a unique perspective on their ascent from the art-rock underground to the top of Billboard’s Modern Rock Tracks chart. As a film student, he witnessed the band perform at CBGB’s in 1986 — which appears in the documentary — and has a “long history” and friendship with Haynes in particular.
Interviewing the frontman for the documentary took a little shared trust and a lot of “sheer persistence,” Stern says. The revelation about Haynes’ earliest memory, which Stern saves for the film’s final act, was actually the first question he posed to the singer in the summer of 2020.
“I love the man and I think we have a mutual respect, so that gave me a rare advantage that most Gibby interviewers don’t have — a certain trust,” Stern tells Vanyaland. “I think Gibby can be a very difficult interview because he rarely answers questions directly — and frequently turns it around and interrogates his questioner. He has a lawyerly instinct that way — and it can be frustrating. He’s also very performative so he tends to deflect with comedy and it can feel like we are not getting the straight dope. But knowing how tricky it is to get sincere answers from him, I had a plan from the outset to just keep interviewing him over and over again so that I’d get more of those rare moments when he stops being performative and defensive.”
And while the band members themselves are certainly compelling enough storytellers to carry the film’s narrative, Stern also assembled an all-star roster of commentators. Ice-T, Flea, Henry Rollins, Ian MacKaye, Steve Albini, Donita Sparks, East Bay Ray, Eric Andre, and multiple members of Sonic Youth all contribute memories about the band’s impact and trajectory; Dave Grohl even appears and says that he was “happy to find” that Kurt Cobain was also a BHS fan when they first connected.
Stern’s own flair bleeds through in his choice of dramatic reenactments — sometimes via scrapbook-like animations, other times via puppets that are unsettlingly accurate portrayals of their respective band members. Citing John Waters as a formative influence on his filmmaking, Stern says he’s long reveled in the concept of embracing bad taste, and leaned into the group’s innate kookiness when deciding how to frame their creative trajectory.
“I’ve always had an instinct to reject the ‘good taste’ advice I get as middlebrow and counterproductive,” he notes. “How can you create something truly unique and arresting if you listen to people’s advice to tone stuff down and reel it in?” Say, for example, the “puppet nudity,” “puppet violence,” and “regret” that the film warns views of within its first 30 seconds?
“My instinct is to go bananas and try anything that delights me,” Stern adds. “I’ve always been an absurdist at heart — that’s why the Dada aesthetic of the Butthole Surfers resonated so deeply with me. I wanted to make a doc that was in the spirit of this band who always went for it and never seemed to give a fuck what people might think.”
Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt demonstrates that there’s no half-assing that kind of M.O. — either in front of the camera, or behind it. Check out the trailer below.
‘BUTTHOLE SURFERS: THE HOLE TRUTH AND NOTHING BUTT’ :: Saturday, April 26 at 8:30 p.m. at the Somerville Theatre, 55 Davis Sq. in Somerville, MA :: Advance tickets