blogdisease.com

The editors at the wonderful series 33 1/3 , who publish fantastic books about significant records, rejected my book proposal for the Butthole Surfers’ Locust Abortion Technician. Oh,well. Since I don’t think I’ll ever write the damn thing (no hard feelings, really, it would be tough to explain on my resume anyway), I thought I’d share with you my proposal:

PS I plan to happily read the “winners” who got selected from the 450 proposals that were submitted. So really, no hard feelings!

Butthole Surfers – Locust Abortion Technician

By Antonio Lopez

Child: Daddy?

Father: Yes, son?

Child: What does regret mean?

Father: Well son, a funny thing about regret is that it’s better to regret something you have done than something you haven’t. And by the way, when you see your mother this weekend, be sure to tell her… SATAN, SATAN, SATAN!!!!!!

Thus opens Locust Abortion Technician, and the Butthole Surfers submit the final epitaph for a hundred years of industrial youth rebellion. Locust Abortion Technician is that darkest hour of an acid trip before dawn, when the fractured aesthetic of modernity finally collapses and we enter the networked world in which the loop, sampling and digital fidelity reign. Here is a last gasp of analog, a cheaply recorded car wreck, a concept album with no concept other than mini-vignettes that collide and repel each other like the cut-up letters of a ransom note. Such utter lack of cohesion is cohesion in itself: Locust Abortion Technician, like the words in the album title, is a discordant sonic poem, the last hurrah of Dada, the Beats and whatever else fucked-up montage culture punk resuscitated from the avant-garde undead.

With this record, punk dies. Twenty years after its release, when a veritable, self-organized oral history of punk can be assembled on YouTube, we are at a vantage from which we can shake the kaleidoscope to see who cut the break lines and let this tattered, neon painted Nova careen into the junkyard of Indy Hell. Locust Abortion Technician is the ellipse at the end of a very long stream of consciousness tone poem. BHS were the last art terrorists before avant-garde aesthetic practices became common marketing tricks. Locust Abortion Technician presaged mind control techniques at Guantanamo Bay, serving as a training manual on how to resist psychological warfare in the age of Neocon democracy, becoming a Gen X immune booster to cope with the insanity of the post-9-11 world.

Technorati Tags: buttholesurfers, 33 1/3

Major Points

The Buttholes belong to the canon of the Velvet Underground, Sonic Youth, Captain Beefheart, and Throbbing Gristle. Locust Abortion Technician epitomizes all the good and the bad of the art rock era, and also represents a significant cultural moment when punk transitioned from DIY self-sufficiency to corporate cooptation. Locust Abortion Technician epitomizes Alec Foege’s description of the guitar noise era when he states, “Never again will sounds emanating from an electric guitar provoke terror.”

Set and Setting: The Making of a Punk Acid Cult

Released in 1987, Locust Abortion Technician was a toss-off to the swelling ranks of the Butthole’s cult following. Self-identifying themselves as “Buttheads,” fans were the progenitors of Burning Man’s new edge burners and the modern primitives that emerged from the 1980s music underground. Admittedly, I was one of them. The Buttholes also represented the only serious competition to the premiere cult band of the post-WW II era: The Grateful Dead. If you still wanted to trip at a show but hated hippies, the Buttholes became the one punk band you’d take acid to see.

Granted, the punk label is transitory. I first saw BHS with the Dead Kennedys on New Year’s Eve, 1983 (a stirring moment in which Jello Biafra sang “California Uber Alles” at the precise moment when the lyric “Welcome to 1984…” became a reality). BHS were out of place within the context of hardcore, which was very puritanical at the time. Singer Gibby Haynes stood out as he lathered himself with shaving cream, pinched clothespins all over his skin and wailed into a bullhorn. The Buttholes shared a niche with absurdist art-core groups like Arizona’s Sun City Girls and San Francisco’s Flipper, not giving a shit about the politics or self-righteous ranting of punk. By the time Locust Abortion Technician arrived, their fans were sick of Maximum Rock and Roll inspired Ayatollahs. If punk had evolved into the ideological rock equivalent of Abstract Expressionism’s minimalistic monochrome canvases, then the Buttholes were its Dionysian response and the aural equivalent of William S. Burroughs’ reverse kundalini rants. As products of the Texas milieu, BHS were pure psychotropic collage doused in Blood of Elvis BBQ sauce.

Loop Gurus: Gibbytronix

The record opens with “Sweat Loaf,” one of the heaviest riffs in album history. With two percussionists pounding out its troglodyte rhythm, Paul Leary’s simple Sabbath riff crashes down like airliner engines into a traffic jam. But it’s Gibby’s distinct multilayered, processed voice swirling about that distinguishes the record. Dubbed “Gibbytronix,” Gibby deployed an arsenal of effects devices, which redefined the concept of lead vocals. Just like the various musicians and films going on simultaneously during BHS performances, Gibby’s voice was a wordless instrument that entered the dense mix comprising the BHS sound system experience. Without a distinct voice, the album was decidedly non-didactic. It was like jumping punk ship and falling into a hallucinatory dreamscape.

It’s impossible to talk about Locust outside the context of the Buttholes legendary live shows. At the time of Locust’s production, most of their touring material would be later released on Hairway to Steven, a much more cohesive album that represented their jam-band-from-hell-acid-trip arch. Rather, Locust is the bridge between their punky roots and the Butthead era. Though they were better live than as a studio band, and in many cases their bootlegs are far superior to their studio albums, Locust Abortion Technician remains significant in the secret history in art rock lore. Unlike the digitally recorded Hairway to Steven, Locust was engineered with hand-soldered homemade studio equipments. It lacks the rote pretense that the live shows took on towards the end of the ’80s. Locust was the moment when they were still peaking, in more ways than one.

Locust as a Mediated, Schizophrenic Drug Experience

If you came of age in the post-Vietnam ’70s, chances are most media experiences were training wheels for drugs and noise. Consider Ronald McDonald, Captain Crunch, and the mishmash offered on early cable like the Three Stooges, Japanese anime, Adams Family and The Munsters. Like many great artists from avant-garde movements, BHS were too naive and stoned to consciously have the pretense of forward thinking, but their aesthetic practices, as embodied by Locust Abortion Technician, intuitively incorporated the narcotic experience of media with the cybernetics of feedback and the schizophrenia of modernity.

Guitar Amps and Amping the Senses

McLuhan theorized that modern society suffers from being sucked into an iterating feedback pattern that numbs our senses. Consequently, in order to feel anything we relentlessly over stimulate ourselves with external nerve input from our media environment. In this regard the Buttholes epitomized the overindulgence of the senses. Locust incarnates this perfectly through its loopy structure laden with over-processed vocals and ambient, textural sounds combined with pure noise and rock aggression. Moreover, the band’s behavior was extreme on and off the stage; the record reflects their madness and desire to drive the audience out of the room, thereby ejecting the cartoon voices from our heads.

Bio

My discussion of Locust Abortion Technician combines a deep knowledge of the 1980s punk scene, DIY, media scholarship, and professional journalism. As co-founder of the seminal Los Angeles punk zine, Ink Disease, I was an active participant in the Southland hardcore scene of the early ’80s, and later as a zine journalist, college radio DJ and activist in the Bay Area. Throughout the ’80s I reviewed and interviewed a gazillion bands, including Sonic Youth during their SST days. Zine publishing launched my career as an independent press maven: for first half of the ’90s I had an independent zine distribution company and was intensely involved with the rise of the whole zine phenomena of that era. At that time I self-published a popular booklet, The Zine Publisher’s Distribution Handbook and Resource Guide.

I went on to become an arts and culture reporter for several daily newspapers and a freelance writer for national publications, including LA Weekly, Frontera, Factsheet Five, Hispanic Magazine, Small Press, Folio, Urban Latino, Southwest Art, El Andar, East Bay Express, Big World, In These Times, New Mexico Magazine, Native Peoples, Tricycle, Outpost and Punk Planet. I was editorialist for Progressive Magazine’s “Latino Voices” series syndicated nationally by Knight Ridder.

Additionally I published essays in Puerto del Sol, Travelers Tales: Cuba, In Search of Adventure, Media Literacy Reader, and a chapter in the up-coming MacArthur Foundation series, Digital Media Learning. At the end of 2007, Peter Lang Publishing will release my book on media literacy, Media Mindfulness. I currently write for the Brooklyn Rail, and blog about post-punk Gen X matters such as culture jamming, guerrilla media and punk Buddhism on my two blogs (blogdisease.com and worldbridgermedia.com/blog). I earned my masters in Media Studies at the New School and am currently working on a PhD in Sociology.

In terms of being a Butthole Surfer expert, I saw over two-dozen BHS shows between 1983 and 1993. In an article titled, “The Primal Venting of Buttheads,” I wrote about them for the cyberculture magazine, Mondo 2000. Having transitioned from the world of professional arts reporting to a life of media theory and education, I’m enjoying the latitude of the long-form essay and look forward to an opportunity to explore Locust Abortion Technician and the legacy of the Butthole Surfers for the 33 1/3 series.

Finally, a few words on my favorite 33 1/3 book. I really loved Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis, not just because Erik is my friend, but also because I felt he brought a multidimensional perspective to the material. It was erudite, eclectic and philosophical. Besides, he’s a great storyteller making the journey through the album’s various mystical implications a joy to read. In my wildest wet literary dream, I’d like to emulate Erik’s work.