RIOT FEST REPORT: Butthole Surfers, The Bomb & The House That Gloria Vanderbilt - The Metro - October 7, 2009

"I see a lot of girls in the crowd...unprecedented,"  said Butthole Surfers frontman Gibby Haynes midway through his band's set, as they headlined the first night of Chicago's Riot Fest, bastion of all things punk rock, at The Metro on Wednesday night. 

And he was right. There were a good number of girls at the show, something the maniacal singer may not have seen much of in his band's youth. But nearly three decades into their career, a demographic shift was inevitable. And that goes not just for The Buttholes, but for punk rock in general.

Individual tastes in music have broadened beyond what anyone could have conceived possible 30 years ago. It's not just crusty punks headbutting each other at these shows anymore. Yes, I spotted more than a handful of mohawks, studded jackets, sewn patches, and facial piercings. I even spotted a gaggle of hippies, the diametric opposite of punks, matching tie-dye outfits, dreadlocks and all.

But there were also many more "normal" "average Joe" types wandering about. And this diversity was not just taking place in the crowd but onstage as well. Three very different bands took the stage this evening, only one of which could possibly fall under the classic definition of "punk". 

The House That Gloria Vanderbilt (a band name nearly as sublimely stupid as the night's headliner) started things off at 7:15. Before the band came on, there were about 10 people on stage setting up and messing with the gear. My immediate thought was "Wow.  That's way too many roadies." 

Once THTGV (as they will henceforth be referred to) started, I realized they were actually all members of the band. I had to count three times just to make sure I was seeing things correctly, but there were in fact 10 band members (with FOUR percussionists!!!) playing at all times. 

For a band with so many members, though, their sound was fairly straightforward, with a kind of doom-and-gloom mid-tempo momentum.  Lead singer Todd Pot has a great deep, full-bodied voice. The dude could be a crooner if he really wanted to. By his side was a female co-vocalist wearing a black dress and long black veil over her face. She didn't add much musically, as it was hard to hear her over Pot and the clattering of the band, but she added a slinky, sexy visual presence that was pretty damn eye-catching. 

Next up were The Bomb, a band I was not remotely familiar with.  My fear that they were named after the usage of "bomb" as in "This band is the bomb!" was quickly dispelled when singer Jeff Pezzati said "I don't think I've been on this stage in 19 years." 

After the show, I checked the band's MySpace page, and came to realize that Pezzati is the singer in Naked Raygun, Chicago punk legends who would be playing their own headlining set later in the week. That cleared things up a bit. As for their set, the four-piece band played hard-charging rock and punk at a fast clip, even throwing in an "oh ay oh" shout-along chorus to one of their songs. 

The band was good-natured throughout and seemed to be having a blast onstage, which percolated into the crowd. Guitarist Jeff Dean flew himself around his side of the stage as he laid out solos and riffs with abandon, hamming it up for the cameras. Nothing new to see here folks, but when a band does rock riffage this well, there's no need to reinvent the wheel.  

I'm no expert on the music of the Butthole Surfers. In fact, my relationship with the band can be boiled down to a couple of very specific and very different memories.

The first is my driving instructor and me totally grooving on "Pepper" when it popped on Q101 during the middle of a driving lesson back in 1996. I thought we had bonded that day.  Then he yelled at me for going too fast around a turn or something. The second is getting a hand cramp while playing "Who Was in My Room Last Night?" on Guitar Hero II. 

And that's it. I've never owned an album or heard any of the band's music outside of those two songs. I did, however, read Michael Azerrad's book "Our Band Could Be Your Life" a while back and knew that they're completely off their rockers. In a book absolutely full of accounts of on-and off-stage insanity by legendary debaucherers including The Replacements and Black Flag, The Butthole Surfers have hands-down the most nutso chapter. Such antics include setting fire to a club they were playing at, having sex with a woman mid-performance onstage, and the requisite intake of massive quantities of drugs, which might go without saying. (Seriously, read this book.)  But these shenanigans were 20 plus years ago. What to expect now?  Were they still as bonkers as they once were?   

Well, not quite.   

Alas, there was no setting of fire or onstage groupie-fucking. The band relied more on their three projection screens to provide the shock value. In fact, on numerous occasions it completely overwhelmed the music.  The screens played a wide variety of images to disturb and titillate, including but not limited to surgery footage, zombie attacks, writhing naked women, upside-down American flags, and an evil clown montage, which contained scenes from the all-time terrible classic Killer Klowns From Outer Space. 

The music itself was full-on at all times. The Butthole Surfers do not do quiet. Every song, whether it be a quick blast of riffy punk energy or a slow, sludgy psychedelic freak-out, was loud as hell.  Many of the songs were augmented with skronky sax playing by frontman Gibby Haynes, who also used his patented "Gibbytronix" voice modulator to affect the pitch of his voice throughout, going from high-pitched squeal to monster-movie growl at his whim. 

Haynes himself was a fairly genial presence. None of the antagonistic habits of his band's early years remained. He even made some fairly banal comments about how Chicago's pizza and baseball were totally better than New York's.

The band ended it's main set with the aforementioned "Who Was in My Room Last Night?" but didn't stay gone for long. The band came back after only a couple of obligatory minutes and played an 18-minute, mostly instrumental monster of a song that featuring much guitar soloing and ended with about 8 minutes of ear-splitting, headache inducing feedback, backed the entire time by the projectors playing a marathon video montage of exploding-head scenes from a wide variety of horror movies (think: money shot in opening scene of "Scanners" repeated ad nauseum 100+ times for nearly 20 minutes). 

So, The Butthole Surfers still had some of that antagonistic spirit in them. And punk rock lived to fight another day.

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