The Butthole Surfers built their reputation on chaos — a hallucinatory collision of noise, punk and performance art that helped redefine the boundaries of underground rock. And all of that glorious weirdness started right here in San Antonio.
On Sunday, Oct. 11, coffee-and-cocktails spot Sunset Brews will host a free panel discussion and improv event celebrating The Butthole Surfers Movie: The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt, a documentary that digs into the band’s history and unlikely rise to stardom. The film also received South By Southwest’s 2025 Best of Texas award.
The event is organized by David Elizondo, a San Antonio visual artist who attended Trinity University alongside Surfers founding members Gibby Haynes and Paul Leary in the late ’70s. Elizondo, who was interviewed in the documentary about his early involvement with the band, said he wanted to create an event that highlights the act’s San Antonio start.
The afternoon will feature an interactive improv session and panel discussion so that fans can hear directly from the people who shaped the band’s earliest experiments.
“The event is user-friendly,” Elizondo said.
Haynes and Leary formed the Butthole Surfers in 1981, finding an audience in the burgeoning DIY punk scene. In those early years, Elizondo managed their fan mail.
While at Trinity, Elizondo witnessed how Haynes’ and Leary’s undergraduate educations informed their band’s conceptual framework. Through the school’s curriculum, the pair encountered thinkers such as avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp, who left a stamp on the band’s embrace of nonsense.
At Trinity, Haynes and Leary pursued degrees in accounting and business, respectively, according to Elizondo. That gave them crucial skills to help scale up their project from a niche art concept to a national phenomenon.
Initially, the Butthole Surfers were more of an art project than a conventional rock band, Elizondo added.
“They were artists first before they were musical,” he said.
Even the film’s title carries a bit of Surfers lore. Elizondo said director Tom Stern borrowed it from a bootleg album that circulated in the band’s early days.
For Sunday’s event, Elizondo said he’s most excited to see how the audience responds. For him, the event’s improv element is an experiment much like the band’s own work, and one that will help as he develops his own film concept about the band. He’s less concerned with commercial success than with pushing the Surfers’ local legacy forward.
“I’m looking forward to audience feedback. I’m always doing something, creatively, so I might as well do something constructive,” Elizondo said. “With these kinds of projects, I tend to focus on the actual show rather than the commercial side: keeping the concepts fresh and not working with the same concept just because it may have worked in the past. Either it’s a flop, or it’s not, but it will be a show.”
Free, 3-5 p.m., Sunday, Oct. 11, Sunset Brews, 1904 Fredericksburg Road, (210) 331-3967,
instagram.com/sunsetbrewssatx.
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