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DADA DOO-DOO

BUTTHOLE SURFERS The Graystone, Detroit _May 24, 1986_

Dave Segal

Back when your grandpa was a young man, Tristan Tzara wrote “...from now on we want to shit in different colors so as to adorn the zoo of art with all the flags of all the consulates.” Tzara was the spokesman of the Dadaist art movement which was based on deliberate irrationality and negation of traditional artistic values. He would’ve loved the Butthole Surfers, four LSD-gobblers from the great state of Texas.

Truth is, no band today better embodies the spirit of Dada than do the Surfers, though they probably couldn’t give a flea’s fart about art theories. The Surfers simply do their Dadaistic thing on the road nearly all year round. They work harder than James Brown and Sammy Davis, Jr. combined.

A typical Surfers performance assaults and tickles your eyes and ears. Disembodied taped voices, rapidly pulsating lights, fake smoke and the coolest psychedelic guitar sounds since the 13th Floor Elevators induce a state of mind that might occur if one were to smoke Elvis Presley’s toenails.

Last year the Surfers slayed me with one of the most riotous shows I’ve ever seen. Singer/guitarist Gibby Haynes played half the set with his left hand on fire while clad in embarrassingly baggy undershorts. This time he seemed positively sober, with a goatee and a new toy—a gizmo that plays ominous animal noises and that records and distorts any sound it’s fed.

This year it’s guitarist Paul Leary who’s totally zoned-out. Throughout the 80-minute show he’d do this dance in which he’d make wavy arm movements, roll his eyes and walk in circles, as if in homage to Roky Erickson or something. Stick-thin King Koffee was a demon on his two kettle drums (more bands oughta use these things), creating thunderous rhythms that made up for the absence of the other Surfers drummer (King’s sister Teresa, who reportedly “freaked out”). Acid-damaged bassist Kramer is gone, too. The new bassist is known as Jeff the Black-Haired Guy.

For all their absurdist humor, grotesque onstage antics (Gibby once forced a male photographer’s head onto his penis for an

entire song) and legendary acid consumption, you could forget that the Surfers can actually make music of dazzling subtlety and beauty as well as producing awesome waves of sonic power.

They did songs like “Cherub,” “To Parter” and “Bar-b-q Pope,” which can turn your spine into spaghetti with their crushing, repetitive riffs and cyclone-like rhythms. For ludicrous laffs the Surfers cranked out “Lady Sniff,” “The Shah Sleeps In Lee Harvey’s Grave” and “Moving To Florida.”

During the show’s last 20 minutes, Gibby became infatuated with his electronic thingamajig, King drum-soloed everyone

into oblivion and Paul danced and tried to throw his guitar through the ceiling while it was still strapped on. Gibby repeatedly set fire to a cymbal while solemnly intoning “pyrotechnics.”

The two songs I didn’t recognize were the best of the set, which bodes well for greatest Texas band since the aforementioned Elevators (don’t even talk to me about ZZ Top).

There is a great need for the illogical in rock today. It takes a group like the Surfers to dump a truckload of donkey dung on the purveyors of constipated pop and self-serious hero rock stinking up our hemisphere.

SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN

YOKO ONO

Beacon Theater, New York May 22, 1986

Jeff Tamarkin

Outside the Beacon Theater’s backstage door, just after Yoko Ono’s nearly two-hour concert, the faithful are out-faithfuling one another. “I flew up from Texas for this,” says one. “It was worth every penny.” Not to be outdone, another discusses plans to travel to Japan to catch Yoko’s summer tour there.

Just then, a hundred heads turn upward as Sean Ono Lennon sticks his out a window. They wave, yell “C’mon, down, Sean!” There are a couple of squeals, Sean waves back, and ducks back in. Andy Warhol and entourage emerge from the backstage door and no one pays attention; Warhol acts like it’s the first time that has happened. Finally, the star of the Starpeace Tour, flanked by Sean and a bevy of burly bodyguards, makes her way to her waiting limo. The Dakota, her home and the site of John Lennon’s 1980 murder, is all of three blocks away. “I love you all,” she says, blowing kisses. There is applause as the car speeds off.

Would this scene have happened 10 or a dozen years ago? Could it have? Doubt it. Yoko Ono was once the most hated woman in rock ’n’ roll. She was accused of breaking up the Beatles. She was accused of sending Lennon’s mind off to goonyland. She was accused of not being able to sing a note. She wasn’t able to sing a note. But yet, here were a couple thousand willing to shell out $17.50 because all of that was a long time ago. Now Yoko carries on as the messenger of peace, the voice of reassurance to the disillusioned. So what if she still can’t sing a note?

Granted, these were the hardcore. This hasn’t been a good year for Beatle kin. This concert was moved from the larger Radio City Music Hall after lousy ticket sales, and most of Ono’s tour both in the U.S. and Europe was canceled for the same reason. Even Julian Lennon had to bow out of a European jaunt for lack of interest on the other shore. So these faithful were the ones who needed to make that grasp for any tangible remnant of Beatle-breath, the ones too young or too far gone to remember Hair Peace/Bed Peace or Life With The Lions: The Unfinished Music No. 2. These were the ones who needed to believe in the lingering spirit of Beatlejohn, the ones who cheered on this night when Yoko proclaimed, "John said we can make it together.” Maybe they forgot that he also said “Yellow matter custard dripping from a dead dog’s eye.” And that Yoko can’t sing.

She tried, gotta give her credit, and she bought New York’s cream-of-thesessions-crop of studio hands to help her pull it off. That they sounded like hired guns was no surprise. And that Yoko’s voice still conjures up a cuckoo clock on angel dust, a one-woman Jesus And Mary Chain, was nothing astonishing either. But neither was it a shocker that the assembled member of the Loyal Order Of Lennon Relatives loved every second of it, festooned her stage with flowers, gave the two-finger peace sign and didn’t break out laughing when she continually spouted the likes of “Love is love, peace is peace,” and “When 1984 came we found out we were*still humans.”

Actually, it kinda feels rotten to be ragging about someone who’s obviously sincere about what she does. In spite of her singular lack of any apparent talent as a rock singer, Yoko Ono still manages to project all sorts of warmth and niceness and honest concern for the state of the world and all that stuff. As a symbol of clinging ’60s optimism and hope she’s still one of the best we’ve got; maintaining idealism is a tough job, but somebody’s gotta do it. And she is a wonderful communicator; people listen to what she says. It’s just that...well, this was supposed to be a rock concert, not an est session, and the singer couldn’t sing.

Ono arranged her show more or less chronologically, with point zero being 1980’s Lennono Double Fantasy. But first,

a little welcoming speech. “Hi, I’m Yoko,” she said before telling the first of several stories (some even funny!), as if anyone was about to mistake her for Kareem Abdul-Jabar. And then the most famous Japanese-born singer since Kyu Sakamoto detailed the trials and tribulations of the past six years: 1981 was “the most miserable year of my life”; in 1982 “I wondered if it was OK to bring a child into this world” (Sean could not be reached for comment) etc. Between all this, her quasi-dance tunes—“Kiss Kiss Kiss,” “Walking On Thin Ice,” new stuff from the Starpeace album—and introspective ballads (“Goodbye Sadness”) provided an excuse for her to inject the familiar Onoid groans, moans, shrieks, whoops, mumbles and other primal mumbojumbo.

And couldn’t ya just guess which ones ended it all? Why if it wasn’t those old anti-warhorses “Imagine” and “Give Peace A Chance.” Her red Reeboks circling an onstage vaporizer (an anti-nuke symbol? a cheap fog-producing effect? a cold?) Ono led a chant of “No more war!” It brought out the matches, the V-forpeace signs, tears in the eyes of old hippies. Tim Leary and Jerry Rubin did not walk out onstage. It was close to being moving. But for at least one old cynic, all she was still saying was “Ayyyiiiyyyiiiyyaa...”