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Matador Records has put the remasters of Butthole Surfers’ “piouhgd” and “Humpty Dumpty LSD” on streaming services and will press both on vinyl on 11 December. “piouhgd” is the Texas band’s fifth album and came out in 1991 on Rough Trade, carrying their version of Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man”; “Humpty Dumpty LSD”, from 2002, gathers demos, outtakes and unreleased tracks recorded between 1982 and 1994, the bulk of them from the 1985 “Rembrandt Pussyhorse” sessions.
The remastered compilation goes from seventeen tracks to nineteen, and the two additions are precisely the ones that in 2002 appeared on the double LP and not on the CD: “Sinister Crayon” and “Sherman (Backass Alt.)”. Of the latter the label says it is available digitally for the first time and that the band later re-worked it for “Hairway to Steven”.
Matador describes “piouhgd” as catching the band “in a moment of transition – moving from underground freakshow to unlikely ‘120 Minutes’ mainstays”, the MTV programme. Gibby Haynes and Paul Leary started the band in 1981 and King Coffey joined in 1983; the three have never been absent since.
Both records are up for pre-order. The label has not said how many copies it is pressing.
Text by Marçal Bonastre