butthole surfers: my first looper experience!

[Tom Ritchford <tom@swirly.com>]

the reason I didn't get the looper stuff out yesterday is that
I saw the Butthole Surfers on Friday -- and partway through the
show, I realized that the first live looping I ever saw was
by them!

If you don't know this band, you should.  The lead singer, Gibby
Haines, runs his voice through a small rack of effects that
he has complete mastery over, so his voice goes from a booming
demon to a petulant child to "sounding like he's gargling his
own phlegm" as one reviewer said.

But his classic trick is catching loops of part of his voice
for a few moments and then throwing them through delays or
playing with the speed of the loop for a second before going
on.  He does it so well and clearly that I refer to that
effect as "Gibbyization" to people and if they know the
band they know exactly what I mean.

They were in fine form on Friday night, not playing much
of their new, rather commercial material, but mostly
old weird heavily affected songs.  I was very interested
to see how often Gibby uses an effect that would fit
into our Looper's category -- it's almost every song,
whether he catches a long note at the end of a phrase
and plays with it for a moment or catches a long
phrase and throws it around for a long time...

somewhat loop-related story:  at Lollapalooza,
Gibby comes out with an authentic shotgun over
his shoulder and explains that "some black dude"
is following him around, claiming Gibby owes him
money.  As he says this, a simply huge African-American
man runs out with a liquor bottle and smashes it
over Gibby's head really hard.  Gibby falls to the
ground as if poleaxed, the man rifles his pockets,
pulls out some money, waves it to the crowd and saunters
off.  Gibby gets up and staggers around and starts
blasting the shotgun over the heads of the crowd.

And the bottle hitting his head was the downbeat
of the first song!

All an act of course but it REALLY makes you jump
when an apparently crazy person starts firing
(even blanks) a few dozen feet from where you are at!

At the end of the show, Gibby put up a long loop of
his voice, almost understandable, that said something
like "Danger, something something EVERYONE something
leave auditorium" like an evil emergency announcement,
and left.

Of course, we were outside, but he managed to completely
confuse the crowd who milled about in a splendidly
incoherent fashion wondering what to do!

        /t



http://whatGoes.com  ................ extreme NY calendar.
http://ax.to/fortune ......... a new fortune every minute.
http://clikTrik.com  .................. Many, many photos.