Thirty years ago this year, a band with a name among the least likely to ever make it onto radio or MTV suddenly, inexplicably, found themselves with a huge pop hit thanks to the song “Pepper.” Two years later, with all that unexpected success pouring like an avalanche coming down the mountain, singer Gibby Haynes, guitarist Paul Leary, and drummer King Coffey settled in to record their follow-up, to be titled After the Astronaut, building off of the template that “Pepper” set (still lots of simple hip-hop style programmed beats in lieu of live drums) but as off-kilter and downright weird as, well, everything else in the Butthole Surfers discography. And…their label hated it.
It took another three years of tinkering before the official follow-up, the decidedly less weird Weird Revolution, arrived in 2001, sporting reworked versions of 8 of Astronaut’s 12 tracks. Making up the rest of the tracklist were newly penned songs that felt like obvious stabs at radio-friendly unit shifters to make the suits happy, like the simplistically riffy “Shit Like That,” the jangly “Dracula from Houston” (which, despite a pleasantly weird title, has the half-rapped verses and bouncy college rock chorus of a Stroke 9 song), and “Shame of Life,” a song that was basically “‘Pepper,’ but make it butt rock” with a chorus by no less of a butt rock connoisseur than Kid Rock. (No, seriously, Kid Rock co-wrote a Butthole Surfers song.) The song was a moderate radio hit (#24 on the Modern Rock chart) but the album was a dud, earning a brutal 0.4 from Pitchfork. It would be (at least so far) the band’s last album of new material.
Finally, a quarter century later, the original version of After the Astronaut has been unleashed into the world, and, well, let’s just say that in the battle between original albums that artists were passionate about making versus the watered-down versions the labels insisted on because they “didn’t hear a single,” the original albums remain undefeated. Weird Revolution was cobbled together from songs written years apart, and it felt like it. After the Astronaut has more natural flow to its sequencing. The song “Weird Revolution” opens both, but not only is the earlier performance more fiery (particularly when it comes to Haynes’ religious revival-style vocals), it also works better as an album opener when it’s immediately followed by actual weirdness rather than two big pop moves. “Venus” here has a hip-hop beat paired with the mystical swirl of a raga plus a bit of funky organ; the WR version had many of the same ingredients but dialed back the weirdness, basically turning it into a Beck song. The WR version of “Intelligent Guy” made it sound like a Chemical Brothers-style block-rockin’ beat; the Astronaut version is pleasantly mellower, and feels more like a spiritual successor to “Pepper” without straight-out aping it.
The songs that ended up on the cutting room floor are the more avant garde ones, and every one is a welcome addition. “Imbuya” rides an agitated beat punctuated with soccer chant backing vocals and Leary’s menacing guitar riffs straight out of the Prodigy’s “Smack My Bitch Up.” Coming later in the album, “Junkie Jenny in Gaytown” has a chiller vibe, with Indian-inspired grooves à la Thievery Corporation crossed with a horror movie score, “I Don’t Have a Problem” is a trippy five-minute collage of samples and burbling synth atmospherics, and “Turkey and Dressing” wraps up the album with some fuzzed-up punk with Leary and Coffey locked in full Stooges mode.
Is After the Astronaut a great album? That’d be overselling it. Was it a more suitable follow-up to 1996’s Electriclarryland, taking what worked on that album to expand the band’s audience and taking it in interesting new directions, than what we got at the time? Absolutely. | Jason Green
