Teresa Taylor, Butthole Surfers Drummer and Face of Generation X, Dies at 60
Drummer for Texas acid punk band Butthole Surfers, who made a memorable appearance in Richard Linklater’s 1990 film Slacker, a symbol of Gen X purposelessness and anomie. Teresa Taylor died Sunday. she was 60 years old.
Her death was announced in the press on Monday Twitter post by the band. The cause was lung disease.
Taylor’s partner and caregiver, Cheryl Curtis, wrote on Facebook that Taylor had “deceased.” clean and soberShe is sleeping peacefully this weekend. ”
“She was very brave even in the face of a terrible disease.”
Ms Taylor, also known as Teresa Nervoza, spoke of her long battle with a “terminal” lung disease that she did not identify. 2021 Facebook Post.
“I have no cancer or harsh treatments,” she wrote, living with a cat and oxygen cylinders daily in a tiny apartment with a TV mounted on a rotating platform powered by a “mega cable.” I explained in detail that , Snoopy. “I know I smoked like a chimney, but this is to be expected,” she added. “I’m feeling better.”
Ms. Taylor was born on November 10, 1962 in Arlington, Texas to Mickey Taylor and Helen Taylor. Her father worked as a mechanical engineer at her IBM. In her youth, she honed her drumstick skills playing in marching bands in Austin and Fort Worth with King Coffey. Coffey later joins her as a distinctive member of the Butthole Surfers. A twin drummer’s approacheach playing in unison with a separate kit.
She never considered playing drums as a career. “You didn’t think you had a future because you were a girl,” she reportedly said in her 2007 book. “Underground Women: Music” By Zora von Baden.
She eventually dropped out of high school and, while renting space in a warehouse in downtown Austin, where she lived, found herself in San Antonio with singer Gibby Haynes and guitarist Paul Singh, who founded The Butthole Surfers in 1981. I met Leary. In 1983 they invited her to tour California.
The band never produced any final hits during Ms Taylor’s tenure, which lasted most of the 1980s. success It topped Billboard’s Modern Rock Tracks chart with the song “”.pepper,” But as their name made clear, mainstream acceptance didn’t matter at all.
Mixing Dadaism and Nietzsche flavors with a cyclonic roar, Butthole Surfers proved bold even by punk standards. The concert featured naked dancers, flames and loudspeakers, along with a slideshow containing gruesome footage of surgeries and garbage fires. “Their live show attack on the senses’” observed a 2021 retrospective on the music site Rock and Roll True Stories.
A grenade-like musical approach and black humor (1987’s Locust Abolition Technician featured greasepaint inspired by the costumes of serial killer John Wayne Gacy, eerily playful). Featuring a clown on the cover), the band has attracted a cult following worldwide. Generation X ironists and hollow-eyed nihilists (not to mention Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain).
As the decade drew to a close, Taylor had a seizure and left the band, blaming the strobe lights the band used on stage. In 1993 he underwent surgery for a brain aneurysm.
Despite her departure from the band that made her name, her greatest fame was yet to come.
In “Slacker” she made an impressive appearance. Cerebellar opportunist I was wandering around town trying to sell bottles from medical labs that were supposed to have pop culture significance. “I know it’s kind of cloudy,” insists her character. “But this is Madonna’s Pap smear.”
The film was a series of artfully tattered episodes, mostly non-professionals about young weirdos roaming Austin. Released in the early days of Seinfeld, the film captured the spirit of his 20s, when, according to the cliché of the time, he cared nothing and wanted nothing. It was a perfect movie.
The film’s title became a nickname for a generation, and her haunting appearance on movie posters and other packaging made Ms. Taylor the face of the film. He was a loose-jawed young man, gesticulating with his slender arms in his pockets. He is boring and rebellious.
In a 2001 interview with Austin American Statesman, Taylor said, “We were talking about playing a drug addicted weirdo for Madonna,” recalling her on-set experience. “I had a rock star attitude and a big ego. I requested a hat and sunglasses for this scene. I didn’t want people to see my face. And that was the image.”
She went on to work at the Texas School for the Blind in Austin. According to the Austin Chronicleand was writing a memoir about his time in the band.
Information about survivors was not immediately available.
As the years went by, her rock star pomp might have faded, but her sense of sarcasm didn’t seem to. “I’m the ultimate lazy person,” she told The American-Statesman. “I am depressed and disabled, but I have monthly checkups and I watch a lot of TV.”
