She eventually dropped out of high school and met the singer Gibby Haynes and the guitarist Paul Leary, who had founded Butthole Surfers in San Antonio in 1981, while renting them space in the downtown Austin warehouse where she was living. In 1983, they invited her to join the band on a tour of California.
During Ms. Taylor’s tenure, which lasted much of the 1980s, the band never scored a hit record. although it eventually found success atop Billboard’s Modern Rock Tracks chart with the song “Pepper” in 1996. But mainstream acceptance was very much not the point — as their name made clear.
Mixing a taste for Dadaism and Nietzsche with a cyclone-force howl, Butthole Surfers proved audacious even by punk standards. Concerts featured transgressive elements like naked dancers, bullhorns, garbage fires and morbid films of surgeries. “Their live shows were an assault on the senses,” the music site Rock and Roll True Stories observed in a 2021 retrospective.
Teresa Taylor, Butthole Surfers Drummer and a Face of Gen X, Dies at 60
In addition to playing with the audacious Texas band, she helped define the image of an aimless generation with her role in the 1990 film “Slacker.”