The Cover Uncovered: Butthole Surfers and the ‘Locust Abortion Technician’ art
A queasy, delirious, and feverishly glorious ebb of mutoid noise rock was plumbed for Butthole Surfers’ third, and greatest, album.
Nobody orbiting the punk underground wrestled such a chaotically psychedelic din as the Texan misfits. Their reputation was legendary. Tales of on-stage arson, a near-daily diet of LSD, nude dancers, and infamous backing projections of surgery and genital medical footage played backwards, eagerly chased a visceral live show both steeped in fetid humour while earnestly attacking the senses.
Suitably scuzzy and acid-fried punk blasts were conjured on Psychic… Powerless… Another Man’s Sac and Rembrandt Pussyhorse, but a retreat to a two-bedroom house in Georgia’s Winterville with just their instruments, two mics, an Ampex 8-track tape machine and a lot of drugs yielded the most electrically scabby material Butthole Surfers would ever pluck from their diseased, backwaters imaginations. Away from the cleaner studio operations, the band lived and breathed the writhing gestation of their third LP, brewing their slimy metal attack with screwed-up tape samples of radio call-ins, bovine livestock, and old Thai folk pieces across their splattered collage.
Dropped in March 1987, Locust Abortion Technician stood as the true aural companion to Butthole Surfers’ fearsome sets, capturing their collective mania with a half-hour heavy lsyergia playing out like a slurried mulch between a Hanna-Barbera cartoon and the Boschian choral documented on the playback of Regan’s possessed howl in The Exorcist. It was a remarkable effort, a slice of weird Americana existing somewhere on the fringes of reality while wavering on the cusp of a dark, bottomless dank.
Such a bastard creation demanded a fitting album cover. The Butthole Surfers’ ‘arts department was already well-versed in bleak absurdism, from PPAMS’ Crayola scrawled desecration of two skin disease textbook subjects to their eponymous EP’s distended human guts, but the band opted for a less gruesomely arresting, but no less unsettling, album cover for their Locust Abortion Technician opus.
It’s the kind of image you’d find tucked away in some cobwebbed corner of a southern US thrift store, beside a wonky-looking painting of Jesus and a vomit green jumper adorned with gaudy kittens with bows. Two clowns in the midst of much merriment are amusing a small dog donned in a Pierrot hat and ruff, seemingly transfixed by the clown to the left of him, balancing a feather upright on his bulbous, red nose.
Where exactly the Butthole Surfers uncovered such an eerie image is unclear, but reports of lithograph copies found in second-hand stores since at least 1980 have circulated among hardcore fans and collectors of the kitsch. What is known, however, is its authorship. Titled Fido and the Clowns, the circus snapshot was drawn by illustrator and veteran of US advertising art, Arthur Sarnoff. His distinctive aesthetic would loom over the world of 1950s commercial landscape, racking up works in American Weekly, Woman’s Home Companion, and Cosmopolitan with his artful snapshot of the suburban idyll twisted with his subtle sense of humour.
Sarnoff’s penchant for understated surrealism and pop subjects would win him critical acclaim and exhibits in New York’s lauded National Academy of Design. For most, Sarnoff’s defining piece will always be 1950s’ The Hustler, the eccentric ensemble of six dogs sporting hats and swigging beer playing a game of pool in some low-key drinkers’ club. You can’t put your finger on it, but beneath its jovial fantasy and anthropomorphic twist on blue collar life is the faint whiff of the disquieting about the canine cue sports watercolour.
Such sensibilities lends itself beautifully to Locust Abortion Technician. Slapping a picture of quaint, clownish innocence atop Butthole Surfers’ fetid projectile punk, somehow the Sarnoff and the Surfers begin to stick and gel together with nauseous marriage, the rancid music casting a dark shadow over Fido’s harlequin captors, and the two clowns spiking the record’s scorching soundtrack with a nervy dose of creepy, children’s show smiles. Butthole Surfers would go on to unleash further great records, but they’d never top Locust Abortion Technician, not beat its eerie image.
