Label: Music Video Distributors Format: DVD (Region 0, NTSC)
Blind Eye Sees All is a true classic of the live music video genre, and now receives a long-awaited DVD release via those thoroughly hardworking people at Music Video Distribution. So why is it essential? Apart from featuring the world’s most wigged-out, demented and occasionally evilly silly band back in the days when they were busy redefining Psychedelic music from the bottom up, the film combines some of the best live footage of a gig around with some lysrgically weird interviews pretty much guaranteed to leave the viewer in head-scratching mode for years while simultaneously offending any passing parental figures along the way.
Filmed over two nights in February and March 1985 at Traxx in Detroit during what appeared to be a freezing cold winter (this is demonstrated by Gibby Haynes popping outside for the intro and outro to the film, stark naked apart from a drawing of a penis in a strategic location), the thirteen songs find the Butthole Surfers in an exquisitely full-tilt state of dementia onstage. Gibby starts each show in a different costume each night, and it’s hard to decide which is the less flattering – outrageously back-combed hair, bra and skin tight white trousers, or a voluminous tent affair with a tripped-out head full of pegs. As the shows and disc progresses, he loses more and more of the clothes, while appearing naked again and again, including some non-sequitur snippets of audience banter which appear to have been filmed at other gigs.
Then there are the eminently-quotable interviews. The band mostly sit undressed in bed with their pizza, beer, and other substances while dogs do their canine thing and the interviewer cowers in the foreground. Hardly a question is answered, let alone lucidly, and it’s left to Gibby to explain things. The truth about the Etruscans, the Bolivians, the Artesians and the Wallhonklers for example, or the Chinese men tied to walls showing worm movies through their penises into the air “in apparent disgruntle and dismay”. Some of the images Gibby grasps from his addled stream of consciousness are stunningly odd, drawing out an LSD epistemology which includes the Fartholes who “had VW buses that they had designed like they were cathedrals of GOD!” All of this is merely the edited highlights of the first interview section alone, and the rest are as insanely inventive. Even though Paul Leary and the others join in with the laterally-fried badinage (“I told him ectoplasm! It’s the thing today”, extended fits of spluttering or slow self-echoed chants of “LS.D…P.C.P…smashed his head against the wall…” which morph via baaing into a tremendous all-band singalong of “Blow The Man Down”), it’s Gibby’s pickled pearls of anti-wisdom which linger. By the end, the interviewer is pelted with bottlecaps and is left to cower under his jacket in the face of unremitting oddity before asking weakly “So, you guys are from Texas?” Naturally they reply, “Canada”.
The original Touch & Go VHS tape has been remastered into 5.1 Surround Sound, and while not being able to report on how successfully, the stereo recording option is crisp and well defined, especially in comparison to the murky depradations of video tape. Old Buttholes favourites like “The Shah Sleeps In Lee Harvey’s Grave” and “Bar-be-que Pope” are delivered by a gurning and raging Leary while Gibby amuses himself torturing a saxophone or performing weird activities with a stuffed object made from pillows. The clattery stand-up drumming by King Coffey and Theresa Nervosa allows them plenty of room to cavort wildly as they bash out the rhythms during energetic renditions of “Hey” and “Tornados”.
The band’s onstage presence is magnetizing, lit by strobes and intercut with semi-subliminal images of upsidown baby dolls, skulls and out of focus faces in agony and/or speed-driven ecstacy. A pounding charge through the the vibrato-laced “Dum Dum”, the scorching spasmodic chug and toilet-roll vocals of “Mexican Caravan” and an equally rasping megaphone take of “Cherub” make way for a quick display of Gibby’s leg mole – “There it is, kicking ass, sorta brown, got two hairs today. Sometimes I tremble, sometimes people throw money at it….”. He growls and splutters through the arm-fart and vomit-sound punctuations of the joyously raucous stroke of growled-out genius which is “Lady Sniff”, provoking some of Leary’s most outrageous guitar strangling recorded. However, the opening dual-drum pounding of “Something” gives way to one of the better stage entrances yet devised – with a Sousaphone wound around the staggering bass player’s shoulders, a moment of baffling hilarity which is soon offset by the thunderous parping which underpins what is one of the more vicious songs in an equally twisted band’s repertoire of interpersonal hatred.
The end comes in two instrumental trips; “Mark Says Alright”‘s gurgling, throbbing nightmare, and the uplifting space rock cruise into overdrive on sinuous guitar harmonies in the shape of the tremendous rambling jamathon “P.S.Y”. In these two tracks, the Butthole Surfers show that, despite all the entertainingly-addled lysergic silliness and outrageous obsession with the gruesome side of life, when they set themselves to performing full-tilt escapist psychedelic rock music they’re more than capable of blowing their own antics off stage in a welter of whammy-bar and recursive delay effects. Once the strobes have flickered out, a nude Gibby steps gingerly outside to chuck a snowball at the camera before loping off into the night, secure in the knowledge of a job well done on all fronts, musical as well as mind blowing.
Bonus material includes a spirited live romp through “Negro Observer” from 1991, but despite a typically busy light show, doesn’t really compare to the Blind Eye recordings. There’s a gallery of photos, posters and flyers accompanied by a rare 5″ single version of “American Woman” – most disturbing of which are Paul Leary’s sleazily scatological phallic clown sketches which bring nightmarish comparisons with John Wayne Gacy‘s paintings to mind. Apart from a briefly-entertaining Buttholes Karaoke option, which allows watching of several tracks with singalong subtitles, that’s it for extras; but they’re hardly needed – Blind Eye Sees All stands as a unique work of concert video lateral lunacy all by itself, and one which has yet to be bettered.
-Richard Fontenoy-
(Cf. Gyrus‘ article “100 Million People Dead”, inspired by Blind Eye Sees All)
