P's Quirky And Curious Self-Titled Album

From the archives: 'P' presents a wide range of musical variety and coarse, crude humor

(This review, written by Carl E. Baugher, originally appeared in Issue 7, Spring 1996.)

P is Gibby Haynes (Butthole Surfers), Johnny Depp (Edward Scissorhand), Bill Carter and Sal Jenco. Also, as it says on the back of the LP jacket, “P is a land, not a liquid or a fruit.” Uh, ok. Not by any means the discordant thrash you might expect from this Gibby-led bunch, this quirky, curious album is consistently engaging, with a wide range of musical variety and coarse, crude humor.

Of course, with Gibby’s lyrics at the forefront, how could this record be anything but strange? Anybody out there ever heard The Butthole Surfers? “Zing Splash” ends with the proclamation, “Nikita Kruschev wiped on my penis,” closely followed by, “Oh God, I feel so good about myself.” And why not? There’s enough skewed insanity and lunatic musical curves here to fill a nuthouse.

But, don’t let the craziness fool you. There’s also a few genuine pop hooks like the one on the chorus of the absurd “Michael Stipe” to give evidence of P's musical inventiveness. “Oklahoma” sounds like a mutation of Canned Heat, Captain Beefheart and Ministry while “John Glen (Mega Mix)” is sci-fi reggae all the way. Then, when you least expect it, you’re hit with a bizarre, otherworldy version of ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” that would provide the perfect accompaniment for film director David Lynch to dissect a cat (which he’s been known to do). And those lyrics! Gibby’s attention to detail is impressive but do we really need to know that “the Cheetoh loogies had attracted worms”?

The piss-colored vinyl sounds pretty damned good, lacking the hard, raspiness of much digi-rock. Could it be—gasp!—analog? Dunno. But, dynamics and detail are excellent and the spatial qualities, especially on side two’s long, ambient noodle, “Scrapings From Ring,” are impressively well fleshed out.

Rock fans with a taste for the bizarre who can appreciate the willfully perverse lyrics (which have more than a touch of homosexual imagery in them) and who enjoy music which never stays long in the same stylistic channel should grab a copy of P. Gibby himself sums up the message, if you wanna call it that, in the album closer: “And so the moral of this story is/Never cross an angel with an ass/Never treat the tiny one to ice cream cones/Never pinch a sweaty, mean cop’s ass.” Who’s to argue?