Butthole Surfers Reunite for First Performance in Eight Years

Butthole Surfers’ long-awaited official documentary, The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt, finally landed on Tuesday with a West Coast premiere at Beyond Fest. Presented at Los Angeles’ Egyptian Theatre, the film’s first screening was set to include a Q&A session with director Tom Stern and the band. Through the authoritative film and the gloriously chaotic run that inspired, it should have been clear that when Gibby Haynes, Paul Leary, King Coffey and Jeff Pinkus are together on stage, anything can happen.  

Shortly after last night’s screening, the post-credits conversation morphed into a surprise Butthole Surfers reunion, first reported by Stereogum. The quartet’s performance was their first since October 2017, and though treatments of “Cherub,” “The Colored FBI Guy” and “The Shah Sleeps in Lee Harvey’s Grave” only went on for nine minutes, it was everything anyone could ask for: a snarling, pummeling, disjointed, overdriven, megaphone-powered display of screeching feedback, strung-out drones and looped grunts and shouts. Watch a fan-recorded video of the resurrection below.

“I started documenting the Butthole Surfers in 1986 at CBGB’s as a film student when I checked out a camera from NYU, and I have been collaborating with them ever since,” the filmmaker offers, “This movie, produced with the full collaboration of the band, will be the culmination of my close relationship with the Butthole Surfers… It’s a story I’m uniquely capable of telling because of the trust the band and I have built over the years.”

When The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt was first announced in June 2024, Stern avowed that despite his long history of collaboration with Butthole Surfers and the musicians’ participation in the project, the film “won’t be a hagiography,” promising to shine a light on “sex, drugs, rock and roll, the beautiful, the ugly, and the weird” alike. With such a double-edged legacy of unbelievable and deeply stirring stories of the relentless iconoclasts on hand, he aspired to make something “irreverent and funny, but also sincere and heartfelt at times as we get these post-punk rock legends to look back on their strange and extraordinary lives.” To this effect, the film fits archival footage and animation with commentary from legends like Dave Grohl, Dean Ween, Henry Rollins and the late punk legend Steve Albini, who states, “I regret getting involved with them, because I don’t want to be associated with people that awful.”

Learn more about The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt at buttholesurfersmovie.com.