The opening scene of the now-streaming documentary “Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt” pans across Trinity University’s Murchison Tower. In a voiceover, band cofounder and lead guitarist Paul Leary ’80 talks about his days as both a Trinity business student and a self-described weird kid developing a connection with punk music.
It was at Trinity, where he met accounting major Gibby Haynes ’81, a standout on the Tiger men’s basketball team with a shared taste in music and avant-garde art. The two would ultimately form the one-of-a-kind punk band known as the Butthole Surfers that would influence the likes of Kurt Cobain and Dave Grohl and become known for its legendary live shows.
“It was so much fun, man, in those days–late ’70s at Trinity,” Haynes says in the documentary.
The university, both then and now, was the kind of place where you could plot a career in one field and explore many other interests. It’s no surprise it was fertile ground for budding rock musicians with a taste for the offbeat.
A Campus Where Creativity Crossed Disciplines
San Antonio artist David Elizondo ’78, M’86, who ran in the same friend circle with Leary and Haynes and is featured briefly in the documentary, shared what it was like at Trinity when the band was just starting out. “A lot of universities put you on a path, and you have to stay on that,” Elizondo said. “Anything outside of that, you’ll cause problems. Nobody wants problems.”
For Elizondo, Trinity was a place to explore his own interest in art after returning from service in the Vietnam War with the U.S. Navy. At the time, Trinity’s art department was led by professor Robert Tiemann, whose artwork was on display all over the world. “For me the best choice was Trinity because they were more serious in the art aspect,” Elizondo says.
Elizondo got to know Leary and Haynes in an electronic music class taught by Trinity’s music department chair at the time, William Thornton. The three students shared an interest in the abstract expressionist work of artist Marcel Duchamp, which ultimately influenced the band’s concept of bringing performance art into their live shows. “We did guerrilla art on campus,” Elizondo recalls about the group of friends. “We would do art and just leave it somewhere to get reactions.”
From the Classroom to the San Antonio Punk Scene
Michiko Sakai Smart ’83 also came to Trinity for its arts focus. Working on costumes for local theater groups exposed her to the San Antonio music scene. At one point a friend asked Smart: “‘Have you seen Butthole Surfers?’ and I said ‘Butthole, what?’ She said ‘It’s a band at your school.’ I said ‘My school? Trinity?’” She went to her first Surfers show and was hooked right away.
Smart recalls that punk rockers of that era were political and made aggressive statements with their music. The Butthole Surfers were cut from a different cloth.
“This band just wanted to be ridiculous, artistically, and they behaved so badly!” says Smart, who later married one of the band’s many bassists, Terence Smart ’84. She didn’t mind that Surfers’ lyrics were confusing: “It’s not a matter of understanding. It’s a matter of experiencing. Just to be there, breathing the same air is the most important aspect. It made me want to see them live again and again.”
Elizondo remembers the band’s very first concert, held in an artists’ space on Austin Street in San Antonio. The crowd, made up of mostly Trinity students, was the perfect group to appreciate the wildness of what they encountered, which included nude dancers wrapped in cellophane. “The audience was geared for that type of stuff,” Elizondo says. “When you have all these people doing this crazy stuff on the intellectual side, you call it ‘avant-garde,’ not ‘punk’.”
On to the National Stage
Adopting the name Butthole Surfers from the title of one of their songs, they started playing gigs in Austin, then eventually toured all over the United States and Europe, too.
Between 1982-83, the band was gaining popularity and recorded its first album in a studio on Broadway in San Antonio. Smart lived near the studio and her apartment became a crash pad and hang out for the band and their groupies.
Leary and Haynes also invited her into the studio to record her scream for their song “Cowboy Bob,” an element of the song that became an important part of their live performances. Smart traveled with the band as a “screamer” for a handful of shows. “I really wanted them to survive and carry on because I believed in them. I really enjoyed the underground time of the Butthole Surfers,” Smart says.
The Surfers went through numerous lineup changes over the years and ultimately released nine studio albums–“After the Astronaut,” a long-shelved album, was released this year. In 1991, the Surfers’ song “Pepper” became a number-one hit. But it was the Surfers’ chaos-filled live shows they’re most remembered for.
Preserving Creative Legacy at Trinity
For Elizondo, preserving the history of Trinity’s arts community in the late ’70s and early ’80s is important. Elizondo is offering his stories to Trinity through the Conmemorando a la Comunidad: Latinx Experiences at Trinity University digital humanities project. He donated 129 pieces of his artwork – flyers, photographs, collages, zines, music, videos, and photographic slides – to Trinity’s Special Collections and Archives in 2024.
“Having my work archived here at Trinity – it’s the foundation,” Elizondo says. “I devoted my whole life to this work. It should be documented.”
Smart has also donated digital reproductions of a collection of candid photos to Trinity’s Special Collections and Archives that she took of the Butthole Surfers with her point-and-shoot camera in 1983. The grainy images are a small sampling of the off-beat style that made the band’s shows so memorable. “To me, the Butthole Surfers had to be seen live because what they did was remarkable,” she says.