The Dark, the Loud, and the Crazy
Towards an aesthetic of extreme psychedelia in contemporary music
As long we’ve had music and intoxicants, thinkers have sought some unifying theory. Plato, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, William James, your metalhead cousin, your ketamine-dealing roommate — they all sensed Dionysian promise of tonality, pulse, and chemistry, sought some sympathetic vibration of sound and substance. And as both music and pharmacology have expanded, so the varieties of druggy music have been cataloged, delineated, annotated, and, often, gravely mislabeled for the consumer. (Ask anyone who first dropped acid expecting Sgt. Peppers and instead got Throbbing Gristle’s “Hamburger Lady.”) Kudos, then, to those brave perceptive souls who discern a genuine, fruitful interaction between a certain compound an music genre.
In a recent essay, our premiere writer on psychedelic culture, Erik Davis, does just this, floating a sub-genre of psychedelic music he calls “toad,” which, if it sounds a bit niche, just wait.
The genre connotes music that’s either inspired by, or created under the influence of, the crystalized toxins secreted by the Sonoran Desert Toad (Bufo alvarius). Toxins whose active ingredient, 5-methoxy-dimethyltryptamine (5-MeO-DMT), is a close cousin to NN DMT, the visionary component Ayahuasca, although toad users don’t consume the substance in a beverage like Shipibo-Konibo folk healers but smoke it in a glass pipe like fiends.
Before we get into its aesthetic dimensions, let’s consider the experience itself. For this, I’ll cite Michael Pollan’s psychedelic-historic travelog How to Change Your Mind, since it renders extreme states with rare lucidity. In the relevant chapter, the author reclines on a mattress as a guide holds his loaded pipe over a butane flame and instructs him to take a few short pulls to fill the chamber with smoke, draw all of it deeply into his lungs then “hold it as long as [he] can.” Pollan has no memory of ever exhaling.
“All at once I felt a tremendous rush of energy fill my head accompanied by a punished roar,” he writes. “Terror seized me — and then, like one of those flimsy wooden houses erected on Bikini Atoll to be blown up in the nuclear tests, ‘I’ was no more, blasted to a confetti cloud by an explosive force I could no longer locate in my head, because it had exploded that too, expanding to become all that there was.”
From here, things proceed without improving. While no narrative could truly parse this kind of sensory and cognitive shitstorm, the general vibe comes through in phrases like “the terror didn't disappear”; “there was no coherent thought, just pure and terrible sensation”; and the one-sentence paragraph, “It was just horrible.”
I have to say this tracks with everything I’ve heard about freebased DMT, which Pollan's friend called “the Everest of psychedelics,” and which I ruled out decades ago, because, to paraphrase Thoreau, I mistrust all drugs that require a change of underpants. All that said, if we’re proposing a music corollary to freebased DMT, I’m pretty isn’t jam-rock only with more distortion, extra wah-wah, and a little Andre 3000 flutie-hoo.
So what is it?
For his part, Davis sketches out a convincing lineage of avowed toad enthusiasts in underground music, mostly post-punk American groups, with an unsurprisingly high distribution in the Arizona desert. Along with the ’90s drone-noise act Bardo Pond (who took the toad’s scientific name, Bufo alvarius, as the title for their studio debut), he cites the famed experimental outfit Sun City Girls, whose bassist Alan Bishop recorded a collection of twangy, affecting acoustic-guitar Dust Bowl drones titled Avarius B. under the artist's name Alvarius B.
But while I trust that Bishop, members of Coil, and other artists in Davis’s brief survey have indeed smoked toad, I have a rough time discerning how their music — dense, involving, abstract, even plaintive — is perceptibly in conversation with the screaming, face-melting void of an instant 5-MeO-DMT hit. I get Davis’ point, that a toad experience influences rather than dictates creative output, but, as I read the prose and listened to the sound files, I found myself casting decades back through my own musical experiences, trying to come up with something that actually approached the explosive derangement an actual 5-MeO-DMT brain blast.
After all, we’re not talking about something “trippy,” “far-out,” or “wild.” We’re well beyond the province of Pink Floyd Laserium, Jefferson Airplane liquid lightshow, or really any psychedelic music I’m aware of. Whether it’s the Flaming Lips, Shpongle, Godspeed You Black Emperor, or Sunn O))), the pace and arc of music performance roughly aligns with that of your standard hallucinogen trip: it comes on slowly and just keeps coming until you realize you’re adrift in the tsunami, whether thrashing or floating calmly, unmoored from constraints and compulsions, ideally relieved of the bondage of self. Even the bad-trip version of this — a descent into enveloping darkness or drift into a psychic maelstrom — still proceeds through recognizable stages and leaves you the option of remaining vertical from beginning to end. Unlike smoked DMT.
I realized, as I flashed back through my own most sense-disordering musical experiences — which at late-’90s, early-’00s Spin were something of a house specialty — I can come up with a whole range of ecstasies and horrors but nothing like the sudden, terrifying overthrow of all sense and reason. I realized that for this kind of experience, I have to think way, way back. Back to before I ever thought to write about music, back to before I had a handle on what genres even were. (Punk-rock? Hardcore? Indie?) I have to go back more than 30 years to an experience that couldn't have lasted more than 90 minutes but that, like certain psychopharmaceutical misadventures, I can’t quite assimilate into the university life surrounding it.
The event in question took place at a rustic San Francisco venue beneath a major freeway interchange. It took place on Halloween night, in a scene that observed this less by donning sexy-cat costumes than drenching oneself head-to-toe in blood. I was not yet of drinking age, hadn't ingested a single illicit substance that night, and nonetheless, just after the opening acts, underwent a violent, instant sensory derangement. Which I have a hard time believing anyone there escaped.
By this point, any attempt to reconstruct this show from memory would be filled with inaccuracies and distortions. “A hallucination implies a reality and a point of reference and an entity to have it,” Pollan writes, listing factors DMT instantly erased. At 19, I had limited points of reference and a less-than-stable entity from which to bear witness. I remember disconnected flashes and soundbites from the deafening, pungent room. I know that afterwards my friends and I were exhausted enough to try sleeping on park benches, but soon found it impossible because we were buzzing as if we'd been in a fistfight, which two of us had.
Most of my account of the actual show would be reconstructed from reportage about the band, who recently reissued two of their seminal albums, decades after having one radio hit and aging into a loose approximation of normal people, guys who were once in a band that was most famous for its punchline name, the Butthole Surfers. But on Halloween night in 1986, you might as well have called them 5-MeO-DMT.
It's not just that they were loud as fuck. Or that they were naked. Or that they used dry ice and an entire wall of actually, genuinely blinding strobe lights. Or that, after drenching a ride cymbal with lighter fluid, one of them lit it and bashed away, sending flaming droplets into the crowd. It wasn't just that there were a number of actual boot-stomping racist skinheads in the venue-filling throng, or that this throng erupted into a surging volcano of bodies within seconds of the first downbeat, or that the band’ primal deconstruction of heavy-metal somehow managed to keep this infernal vortex churning for most of the set, the majority of which I unwillingly spent within said vortex.
I guess it was all this, plus the occasional glimpse you’d get of the performers’ faces: cold, hard, thousand-yard stares that were either gravely serious, regally disdainful, or as vacant as an animated corpse’s. These were the kind of people whose reckless experimental urge drives them to stick forks into electric outlets; they weren’t supposed to have lived this long. For some reason, I see the whole event in frozen black-and-white snapshots: screen-caps from shaky footage of a covert MK-ultra experiment, production stills from the set of 1973’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
It helps that at time, even publicity shots you’d see of this group projected some kind of authentic backwoods mental illness. Not so much Gibby Haynes, the rangy, drawling, vaudevillian presence who’d become a post-punk folk hero in a decade. No, Haynes was a matinee idol compared to founding drummer King Coffey, whose shockingly blonde, eyebrow-less appearance was more Gummo avant-la-lettre, drummer Teresa Nervosa, who appeared to be Coffey’s sister, cousin, and/or wife, and to the blasted-eyed guitarist Paul Leary, who you might say was serving proto-Silence of the Lambs realness back then. And apparently, this impression wasn’t so far from the truth.
Judging from The Guardian’s recent retrospective (pegged to Matador’s rerelease of the albums Psychic... Powerless... Another Man’s Sac, Rembrandt Pussyhorse, and Live PCPPEP), this band really was living the life of a depraved Southwestern sect. “We lived in a van for years and none of us had a life outside the band,” Coffey tells The Guardian's Daniel Dylan Wray. “It was like we’d signed up for this cult and there was no turning back.”
Were they shamans? Were we blessed congregants elevated to transcendent consciousness through an intentional ritual of sound and light?
“We had no plan whatsoever,” Leary tells Wray. “We were into dadaism and loved the random nature of how things turn out.” Haynes adds: “The whole thing was an attempt to get attention. We made art for money and attention.”
Just because they’re playing up their crass motivations here, it doesn’t mean they’re quite lying. There's some great American story — of drugs, art, spectacle, ambition — that runs straight through the two San Antonio, Texas, college buddies who formed the Butthole Surfers. Like the one whereby Jerry Cazale and Mark Mothersbaugh formed Devo, Haynes and Leary's earliest connection was more conceptual than musical, their earliest collaboration a zine they titled “Strange VD” and filled with photos and descriptions of invented diseases. It's also significant that these guys weren't groovy art students but a would-be accountant and would-be stock broker. That Haynes was apparently voted "Accountant of the Year" adds a sublime grace note to the sense of a psychic fissure running just beneath the surface, from which untold forces might soon explode.
Although I've never met Haynes or his former bandmates, my friends report seeing the tall figure roaming around Brooklyn, where he's married with a kid, walks a dog, executes large abstract geometric paintings, and does occasional film and vocal collaborations. While The Guardian suggests that years of chemical abuse have taken a toll, in their account he comes off much sounder of mind and body than he should, given the kind of spectacles he conducted through that mid-’80s-’90s period. In fact, it’s hard to square him or any member of this group with events like the ones my friends and I witnessed.
There was no magic tech or psy-op mastery involved. These were carnival stops at mid-sized venues, with basic sound systems, crude lighting, no IMAX, no VR headset, and, nonetheless, an experience to which it was impossible to give informed consent. Can we retroactively call this toad music? Did these musicians unknowingly perform — as Erik Davis suggests Alan Bishop does as Alvarius B — as the toad?
Other first-hand accounts sure are suggestive.
The Guardian on ’80s Butthole Surfers shows: “Many would turn up after hearing word of mouth tales of these LSD-soaked crazies, hoping for their own psychedelic experience, but would come out more in a state of shell-shock than a higher state of consciousness.”
Pollan on smoking toad: “Whatever allowed me to register this experience, the post egoic awareness I'd first experienced on mushrooms, was now consumed in the flames of terror too.”
The Guardian on ’80s Butthole Surfers shows: “The band turned venues into scenes of horror, showing videos of autopsies, explosions, and penis reconstruction surgery as noise wailed, fires burned, smoke churned and lights popped.”
Pollan on smoking toad: “Only afterward did I wonder if this was what the mystics call the mysterium tremendum, [what Huxley described as] the fear ‘of being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind, accustomed to living most of the time in a cozy world of symbols, could possibly bear.’”
Last Friday an X/Twitter thread request for “your indiest moment” prompted 500 testimonials of gigs by cult heroes and ascending stars at Williamsburg lofts, Berkeley all-ages shows, and other potential echoes to the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester, UK, where the Sex Pistols played in 1976 — an event some wiseacre at history.com said has enjoyed the greatest “retroactive audience growth” of any gig in recorded history.
As coordinates in a cultural matrix, “Butthole Surfers at the Farm, 1986” won’t bring a lot of retroactive audience growth. I bet some members of that audience would prefer you forget they were there. A guitarist friend of mine was in The University of North Texas’s famed jazz program when he dropped acid one night with a notebook handy to record his enhanced output. Two days later, he was flipping through page after page of inscrutable scribbles and aborted drawings before he came to one two-page spread that was filled with giant, shaky block letters reading: NEVER DO THIS AGAIN. In a fonder way, I think of this Butthole Surfers concert the same way.
I never repeated the experience of that Halloween night. I’d buy subsequent Butthole Surfers albums, see subsequent Butthole Surfers tours, but I suspect this early show came at the very tail end of a period in my life when music could actually scare me. Kiss scared me, Ozzy Osbourne scared me, the Sex Pistols scared me, and so forth until at some point, fright became frisson, and I guess, childhood was good and truly over. Not that these early terrors aren’t in some unclear way foundational.
Michael Pollan leaves us with one bit of palpable impressionism from his short, timeless ride upon the toad. He describes a moment where he perceives himself on outside a rocket after launch, hands and legs desperately clenching the fuselage, g-forces pulling his face into a taut grimace, the cylinder hurtling through clouds, “shuddering on the brink of self-destruction as it strains to break free from the Earth’s grip, while the friction it generates as it crashes through the thinning air issues a deafening roar.”
It’s been 37 years and yet today, in the back of my mind, I know just what that roar sounds like.
Great piece, Chris! If I could only score some toad. Loved listening to Alvarius B.
And then this moment ... such an interesting moment of life. There's no going back: " ... but I suspect this early show came at the very tail end of a period in my life when music could actually scare me. Kiss scared me, Ozzy Osbourne scared me, the Sex Pistols scared me, and so forth until at some point, fright became frisson, and I guess, childhood was good and truly over. Not that these early terrors aren’t in some unclear way foundational."
There was something nice about that charged moment of being afraid. I remember being afraid of David Byrne and Blondie and David Bowie watching them on Saturday Night Live as a kid. Scared in such an interesting way. Like I just had to open that door and go into the basement ...
This is a tour de force. I never saw the Butthole Surfers but you capture the terror and insanity of their live, psychedelic experience at what must have been their height (despite their later "success" as an alt-rock band lassoed by the majors and 120 Minutes). I recall pawing through the racks at my local record store in the mid-to-late '80s and coming upon their albums, the covers of which always caused me to break out in the very technical medical condition known as the heebie-jeebies. Not just weird, but purposely repulsive, essentially daring you to pick them and put them on the turntable, whereupon a new, ugly, phantasmagoric vortex would swallow you up. Or whatever. Just legitimately and darkly freaky. But then, in 1989 or so, my college radio station hosted a Butthole Surfers Corndog Roast one midnight during their annual indie marathon/fundraiser. One of the deejays manning the ones and twos that night was none other than David Berman. I've never forgotten the frisson (yes!) of dark magic I felt coming through my stereo speakers when he dropped the needle on one of their records, the one with a spoken word intro that mimics a father talking to a child about the nature of regret and ends with him loudly intoning something like "Oh, and when you see your mother, tell her—SATAN! SATAN! SATAN!!!!!!!" Anyway, thanks for this, Chris. I plan on getting a custom silk-screened T-shirt made with your mantra emblazoned on it: "I mistrust all drugs that require a change of underpants." I can't stop laughing at that one...and yet, so true.