“Gibby and Siouxsie Sioux were at my feet, wrestling around with a shotgun pointed at my head.” Butthole Surfers' guitarist Paul Leary looks back on the excitement of the first Lollapalooza tour

Gibby Haynes, with shotgun, 1991 — (Image credit: Steve Eichner/WireImage)

In the summer of 1991, Jane's Addiction pulled together America's first touring alternative rock festival, Lollapalooza, with a bill which included Siouxsie and the Banshees, Living Colour, Nine Inch Nails, Fishbone, Rollins Band, Butthole Surfers and more. Only one of these bands felt the need to bring a shotgun onstage daily, however, and that band, inevitably, was the Texan noise-rock experimentalists fronted by the eternally unpredictable Gibby Haynes.

“Our light show wouldn’t work in daylight,” guitarist Paul Leary explains, quite reasonably, in a new interview with Pitchfork, so “Gibby got a 12-gauge pump shotgun and he’d load it up with what’s called popper loads - they don’t shoot bullets, but they’re used to train dogs, by having a louder, more violent explosion than a regular shell.

“Siouxsie and the Banshees was on that first Lollapalooza bill. At one show, I was playing a solo and I looked down - there’s Gibby and Siouxsie at my feet, wrestling around with a shotgun pointed at my head, trying to grab it from each other. That was like seeing a rattlesnake - I jumped 10 feet in the air.”

Looking back on his band's wild stage shows, Leary adds, “We were really lucky, because we set fires every night for a decade, but we never got hurt. One time, Gibby got injured by an exploding coffee pot, but that was when we were staying at a house in Georgia. His skin was falling off his arm for a month. In those days, we couldn’t afford a doctor. But we never got injured on the actual stage.”

Despite regularly receiving "six-figure offers" to reform for live shows, Butthole Surfers told The Guardian earlier this year that they won't be re-emerging from their eight-year hiatus, for both their own safety, and the safety of their audiences, which might be for the best for all concerned.

“I just don’t want to do it,” Leary said. “We’re really lucky to not be in prison and I don’t want to push that any more. I don’t want to be sending a bandmate home in a body bag or for a venue to burn down. We were some genuinely fucked up people. We’re good people, but we’re fucked up – we’re damaged.”

For his part, vocalist Gibby Haynes took responsibility for pushing the band into some inadvisable territories.

“We’re not as good as we could be today, and that’s because I lost my shit,” he acknowledged. “I did too many drugs. I totally screwed up the deal. It’s my bad. It’s on me.”

A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne's private jet, played Angus Young's Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.