SPILL FEATURE: AFTER THE ASTRONAUT – A CONVERSATION WITH KING COFFEY OF BUTTHOLE SURFERS

AFTER THE ASTRONAUT

A CONVERSATION WITH KING COFFEY OF BUTTHOLE SURFERS

The wait is over! Butthole Surfers are finally unearthing their lost 1998 album After The Astronaut. After the Astronaut was supposed to be the follow-up to their 1996 album, Electriclarryland, which featured the massive hit song “Pepper,” but was shelved and never released. Ultimately, an altered version of the album was released titled Weird Revolution. Ahead of the upcoming release of After The Astronaut, I chatted with drummer King Coffey.

“There were some high hopes going into it after the success of ‘Pepper,’ but that was such a fluke thing for us, although the label and I think ourselves weren’t really quite aware that having a fluke radio hit was indeed a fluke,” he recalls. “That album was fun to us because, by and large, it was just made with computers, drum machines, keyboards, samples, and stuff. For better or for worse, there wasn’t that much guitar, bass, or drums. I didn’t do any drums. It was all electronics, samples, and loops, which I was really into… It was experimental on our part. There were pop songs on the record, but also just some weird ambient tracks that appealed to us. We were happy with the record, but behind the scenes, we were having an argument with our management. The management told Capitol that we didn’t want them to release the record, which wasn’t true. That’s what we found out later. We were just a mess. Capitol said, ‘Screw it. We’re not going to release the record, and we’re not going to release you from the contract,’ which meant we couldn’t put out any music at all because they owned future albums of ours, but they refused to release the current one, and they refused to let us go. We were totally trapped.” Weird Revolution was eventually released in 2001 by Hollywood Records. “[Hollywood Records] decided they wanted some hits on it. They jettisoned the weird tracks off it, the stuff that made the album cool to the band and me.”

“The Shame of Life” was one of these hits that replaced one of the weirder tracks. “Kid Rock sampled ‘Sweat Loaf’ on one of his songs [‘Pancake Breakfast’] and applied to get the rights to use the sample, and our management at the time thought it would be better to instead of taking money from Kid Rock, why don’t you have Kid Rock come in and write a song, and that would be a marketable thing,” Coffey explains. “They thought it’d be like a meeting of the minds with Kid Rock and the Butthole Surfers, which sounds like a total nightmare now; it sounded less like a nightmare back then. We all kind of hated the song, but the record label was really excited about it. I had this realization recently that people talked about selling out, and the Buttholes always did what we wanted to do… During this whole Kid Rock saga, I found myself playing tambourine on a Kid Rock song, and I thought, ‘What the fuck just happened here. This is not what I signed up for. Wow, I’m selling out.’ But we had a good run until then.”

After The Astronaut opens with Gibby Haynes delivering a spoken word speech in “The Weird Revolution.” “Gibby just wholesale ripped off a Malcolm X speech, or Gibby was inspired by Malcolm X, maybe I should use that phrase instead,” Coffey says. “It’s really just paraphrasing a Malcolm X speech for our own weird revolution.”

“Imbuya” was heavily inspired by jungle and drum and bass. “I really liked it, but what’s ironic is that I might have been the one to not choose that song by the time Weird Revolution came out,” Coffey states. “I thought jungle might have been played out, and I didn’t want it to sound so dated, but what is ironic is that jungle is back. I have tons of modern jungle and drum and bass records.”

PURCHASE AFTER THE ASTRONAUT

One of the most peculiar songs from the album is “I Don’t Have A Problem.” “Gibby and I were really into trip hop, electronics, and the whole DJ culture, but I was also into bands like Scanner,” Coffey says. “‘I Don’t Have A Problem’ is just basically a complete rip off of Scanner. What Scanner did was get full-range radios that could pick up cell phone calls, then he would take those calls and put them in his music… I got one of those machines and just spent hours and hours recording conversations. It was so fascinating… That has nothing but spoken word from stolen phone calls.”

“The Last Astronaut” features a gorgeous piano melody, a spacey atmosphere, loud outbursts of noise, and compelling narration by Haynes. “I was babysitting my friend’s house and their dog, and they had a piano in their house, and I had a portable DAT machine, so I began goofing around on the piano and recording it,” Coffey states. “Gibby came up with this wonderful narration of it being the last astronaut just out there in space, and Paul [Leary] added a ton of noise. It started off simple, being lonely in a house, playing for a dog. It turned out really well.”

The album closes with the aggressively chaotic punk song “Turkey and Dressing.” “Going back to the roots which we were trying to destroy at the same time,” Coffey says. “It was fun to do after doing so much stuff that was unusual to us, like doing a jungle song or doing a complete ambient song.”

Recently, Butthole Surfers were introduced to an entirely new generation of people after their song “Human Cannonball” was featured in an episode of season five of the television show Stranger Things. “Our monthly listeners went up by over a million in one month,” Coffey states. “It aired on Christmas Day, which is a nice Christmas present, and the idea of trying to save the world with a Butthole Surfers song is so good. Unfortunately, that’s not how the series ended, but it’s still nice to be in the conversation.”

This year also marks the 30th anniversary of Butthole Surfers’ 1996 album, Electriclarryland. “It was a good eclectic mix of songs that I thought captured the band well, but I also kind of realized in a way that it was the beginning of the end,” Coffey shares. “We had a hit with ‘Pepper’ and all of a sudden we realized we are on a major label that now wants us to come up with more ‘Peppers,’ and for a band like ourselves, that was a nightmare. We weren’t a happy band. We tried to cheer ourselves up by making After The Astronaut, the album we wanted to make, but then things just went haywire from there. During the whole era of ‘Pepper,’ it was cool to turn on MTV and see the Butthole Surfers of all freaking bands on MTV, but then, kind of be careful what you wish for in a way. I think we were just happier when we were these weirdos in the underground music scene, just making music we wanted to. All of a sudden, we had major labels suggesting what we do, and then it got to be kind of a drag and no fun.” Coffey recalls a particular memory while filming the music video for “Pepper.” “I had dreams of being a Zen monk, and I spent a few months in a Zen monastery. I was told, ‘You have to go to LA to shoot the music video…’ I [went] from the Zen monastery to LA with a camera on me, making a pop video with Erik Estrada of all things, and then because my mental processing is so strange, I thought, ‘Who is Erica Strada. Is that a drag queen, Erica? Oh, Erik Estrada from CHiPs. Gotcha.’ I was expecting to be working with a big drag queen, which we should have done in retrospect, although Erik was cool, no offence.”

After The Astronaut is set to release on June 26. “We wanted to go back to our weird roots and make a more challenging record in a way, amuse ourselves, and come up with some good songs,” Coffey reflects. “That was mission accomplished with that particular album, but it just never saw the light of day… What came out was a version of the record that scrapped most of the weird stuff and put in all these half-baked pop song ideas that didn’t really go anywhere, and it just made a really crappy record. Whereas the original vision, After The Astronaut, we all liked. We’re glad it’s finally coming out.”

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