Teresa Taylor, Butthole Surfers drummer and face of Generation X, dies at 60 years old

Teresa Taylor, a drummer for the Texas acid-punk band Butthole Surfers who became an emblem of Generation X aimlessness and anomie with a memorable appearance in Richard Linklater’s 1990 film “Slacker,” died Sunday. She was 60.

Her death was announced Monday in a Twitter post by the band. The cause was lung disease.

Cheryl Curtice, her partner and caregiver, wrote on Facebook that Taylor “passed away clean and sober, peacefully in her sleep, this weekend.”

“She was so brave, even in the face of her horrible disease.”

Taylor, also known as Teresa Nervosa, addressed her long battle with what she called an “end stage” lung condition, which she did not identify, in a 2021 Facebook post.

“I don’t have cancer or any harsh treatments,” she wrote, detailing her daily use of an oxygen tank in a small apartment that had a television mounted on a swivel fed by “mega cable,” and that she lived with her cat, Snoopy. “I know I smoked like a chimney and this is to be expected,” she added. “My spirits are up.”

Taylor was born Nov. 10, 1962, in Arlington, Texas, to Mickey and Helen Taylor. Her father worked for IBM as a mechanical engineer. In her youth, she honed her skills with the drumsticks performing with marching bands in Austin and Fort Worth with King Coffey, who would later join her as part of Butthole Surfers’ distinctive twin-drummer approach, each playing in unison on separate kits.

She never considered drumming as a career. “It was like, because you were a girl, you didn’t think of having any future in it,” she was quoted as saying in the 2007 book “Women of the Underground: Music” by Zora von Burden.

She eventually dropped out of high school and met singer Gibby Haynes and guitarist Paul Leary, who had founded Butthole Surfers in San Antonio in 1981. In 1983, they invited her on a tour of California.

During Taylor’s tenure, which lasted much of the 1980s, the band never scored a hit record although they eventually found success atop Billboard’s Modern Rock Tracks chart with the song “Pepper” (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 naked dancers, flames, bullhorns and slideshows that included morbid films of surgeries and garbage fires. “Their live shows were an assault on the senses,” observed music site Rock and Roll True Stories in a 2021 retrospective.

As the decade drew to a close, Taylor left the band after experiencing seizures she attributed to the strobe lights the band used onstage. In 1993, she had surgery for a brain aneurysm.

Despite her exit from the band she had made her name with, her biggest taste of fame was yet to come.

In “Slacker,” she made a memorable appearance playing an addlebrained opportunist wandering the streets trying to sell a jar from a medical laboratory with purported pop-culture significance.

Premiering in the early days of “Seinfeld,” it was a movie about nothing that captured the spirit of 20-somethings who, according to the cliches of the day, cared about nothing and aspired to nothing.

The film’s title became a nickname for a generation, and with her indelible appearance on the movie’s poster and other packaging materials, Taylor became a face of it — a slack-jawed youth, her skinny arms thrust into her pockets in a gesture both bored and rebellious.

She would go on to work at the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired in Austin, according to The Austin Chronicle, and was writing a memoir about her time with the band. Information about survivors was not immediately available.

As the years rolled by, her rock star swagger may have faded but not, it seemed, her sense of irony. “I am the ultimate slacker,” she told the American-statesman. “I’m on disability for depression, I get a check every month and I watch a lot of TV.”