“I was just amazed”: The band that made Paul Leary pick up the electric guitar
In a move that Paul Leary could never have seen coming, the Butthole Surfers were suddenly performing on The Late Show with David Letterman after years on the Texan punk fringes.
They “sold out”. As Leary recently told Far Out with some mirth, the farcical journey from LSD-soaked volatility on the hardcore underground to, albeit cautiously, being welcomed with open arms by the mainstream was a spectacularly surreal turn for the band’s guitarist and co-founder.
Like many bands that had been plugging away in the alternative subterranean, the grunge explosion suddenly propelled the Butthole Surfers to the heart of MTV’s alternative heyday.
In no time at all, Leary and the gang were signed to the majors, enjoying John Paul Jones in the producer’s chair for Independent Worm Saloon, and the later ‘Pepper’ topping Billboard’s US Modern Rock Tracks. The Butthole Surfers were suddenly wandering the heights of rock and pop stature, an elevation perfectly symbolised by their taking the Letterman stage on the exact same spot where a certain Merseybeat outfit ushered in the British Invasion over 30 years earlier.
“That was really something for me,” Leary confesses to us. “I was playing with an acoustic guitar from the age of five years old, and then I saw The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show – I guess I was probably seven years old – and I was just amazed. I saw the girls screaming, and I was turning to my dad, going, ‘I gotta have an electric guitar, I gotta get in on some of that!’”
Beatlemania’s lightning strike on US television screens in February 1964 was witnessed by as many as 73 million households, all tuning into CBS that night in pop history. Among them were the kids and young adults, all eager for a gateway into the whole rock business, artists as disparate as Mark Mothersbaugh, Steven Van Zandt, Geddy Lee, Billy Joel, Tom Petty, and Gene Simmons, all stating that the Fab Four’s grace on the Ed Sullivan stage was a life-changing moment.
The Beatles may well have lent their touch to the Butthole Surfers’ trajectory deeper than just by watching that immortal TV spot. They’d signed to Capitol Records during their 1990s explosion, the same US distributor behind Meet the Beatles! and their Stateside LP revisions, plus the studio trickery coating the likes of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ would imbue Locust Abortion Technician and Hairway to Steven, coated in their distinctly acidic grime.
The moment The Beatles strummed ‘All My Loving’ as their opening number, the seven-year-old Leary would never be the same again. Before long, a swap to electric would later find a role in his elementary and high-school band projects, then later be forged in the bowels of punk and psychedelia, but the Fab Four would prove Leary’s foundational big bang, making the later Letterman show at CBS’s old Studio 50 in New York all the more pertinent.
“To go on the Letterman show, and play on that very same stage that the Beatles had performed on?” Leary looks back with a wistful glint in his eye. “I mean, that was an indescribable feeling.”
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