Track Listing

1. Jimi
2. Ricky
3. I Saw an X-Ray of a Girl Passing Gas
4. John E. Smokes
5. Rocky
6. Julio Iglesias
7. Backass
8. Fart Song

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16972 in Music
• Released on: 1999-08-03
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Original recording reissued, Original recording remastered
• Dimensions: .12 pounds

Amazon.com
As you descend into Hairway to Steven, Butthole Surfers' last studio recording before their ascent to major-label... status, there are few handles to orient you. You get dropped, headlong, into Paul Leary's moaning, shrieking guitar, Gibby Haynes's megaphone-grown growl, and the thundering two-drummer rhythms that throb and contort this classic 1988 mind-bender. There are no song titles, and as for the songs themselves, they're layered so thick that teasing even a thick strand from any of them is a task. In the late 1980s, when they recorded Hairway (and Psychic... Powerless... Another Man's Sac, Rembrandt Pussyhorse, and Locust Abortion Technician), the Buttholes were in the midst of an endless road show full of freakish displays--Gibby with clothespins on his nipples, Gibby shredding feather pillows on stage amidst pounding strobes, the ever-present mix of sex-change films and naked women dancers gyrating as the band screamed through their set. Hairway catches the sensory overload of it, the fire walk over structure and total chaos, the incipient humor of what was a fantastic, outrageous, vitally important stage in the career of one of punk's most whacked bands. And dig the fifth cut, the single the Buttholes could never have gotten any credit for in the S&L drenched 1980s, with Gibby doing some bouncy "Nah nah nah's" and "Hey, hey, hey's" and believably opining, "Well all of our friends, baby / They're going insane, now." --Andrew Bartlett

Customer Reviews

Ten feet tall, with a KNIFE!
This is my favorite Buttholes album by far, and I'll tellsya why. You've got pieces of the sick brilliance of the oldest stuff, mixed in with hella-solid "real songs" like what would take over subsequently... and, of course, none of that electronic Beck-ripoff crap that came way later. Track 1 is great, especially once the pitch-shift sodomy gives way to the heavenly acoustic part with bowling pens and sheep. "X-ray of a Girl Passing Gas" is terrific, and the story of Johnny, the little crippled midget lesbian boy who stood 10 feet tall with a KNIFE, may make you wet your pants. And WHAT was Julio Iglesias doing in outer space? Take the Hairway and find out. It's the deepest Butthole there is.

An all time great......
Having not heard the remaster of Hairway to Steven yet, I can only tell you that in its orignal version on Touch and Go (1988), this was where I felt the Buttholes were most together and its a creative high point of their career. Capturing their full 5 person lineup, this is a tight, demented and rocking album, featuring little of their previous albums sound colleges and more straight up, blistering rock. This album alternates between humorous and terrifying, with terrific lyrics and great interplay between guitar, bass and drums. The packaging was confounding and inspired, from the cover photo of the "band", to the fact that no song titles are listed, just little pictures that represent the songs. I always felt that Janes Addiction's entire sound was stolen from this record, but with out any of the Buttholes demented humor. A classic that you should not be without! Ron Hill

A Twinkie with a Halo Storm In It
An exhilirating, merciless, death defying leap of rock'n'roll derring-do which, for all of the album's shrieks and groans, somehow refines that slab of crude, turgid gold that was Locust Abortion Technician. On Hairway to Steven, the Buttholes have revealed their whole bag of dirty tricks - tortured guitarwork, lyrical acrobatics, psychobilly call-and-response, mangled sound compressors - in all their stupendous glory. This delicious, undigested smorgasboard of musical mayhem features many spooky and majestic bits, but for me the part that puts the spice in the chicken is the gently winding melody of the second half to 'Jimi,' where the dwarves whisper to chanting birds, a cock crows languidly, and bowling pins crash to the meter of a gently ebbing tide. HTS is an album well worth a Cadillac drive through the desert southwest on a bellyful of mescal, volume cranked to the big swirling sky, as you hallucinate ten-foot tall Johnny on the dashboard.