Teresa Taylor was born on November 10, 1962, in Arlington, Texas. Known as Teresa Nervosa, she became one of Butthole Surfers’ two drummers, playing alongside King Coffey at a separate stand-up kit. Their partnership helped shape the band’s 1980s recordings, and Coffey credited Taylor with teaching him how much more he could do behind the drums.
Taylor’s early experience included playing in school marching bands in Texas. Her connection with Butthole Surfers began with rehearsal space. While studying radio, television and film at the University of Texas at Austin, she subleased space to the group. She joined in 1983, beginning a stretch of touring and recording that placed her inside both the band’s music and its close communal existence on the road.
Coffey explained the musical relationship in a 2026 interview with No Echo. He had been playing basic hardcore patterns when Taylor began adding rhythms on the toms around him. Her parts broadened what the two could do together. His description gives a concrete sense of what the second drummer brought: Taylor was developing another part within the rhythm, and Coffey was learning from the way she played it.
Her recordings with the band included its 1984 debut studio album, Psychic… Powerless… Another Man’s Sac, and 1986’s Rembrandt Pussyhorse, where she played on “American Woman.” She also contributed drums to “Sweat Loaf,” the opening track on 1987’s Locust Abortion Technician. Those records belonged to a period when the group was finding new ways to record. Coffey told Pitchfork in 2024 that Locust Abortion Technician developed from home recordings, with the songs taking shape as they worked. The band then had to learn how to perform what it had recorded.
Taylor left Butthole Surfers in 1989 while struggling with health problems. Around the same period, she became involved in another lasting piece of Austin culture. She appeared in Richard Linklater’s Slacker, filmed in 1989 and released nationally in 1991, as a woman trying to sell what she claimed was Madonna’s pap smear. The film passed from one Austin character to another, but Taylor’s appearance extended beyond her scene: her sunglasses and upturned baseball cap featured on its poster.
The character was Taylor’s own invention, according to The Criterion Collection, which published a clip with Linklater’s commentary in 2013. Her contribution therefore went beyond delivering the dialogue. She supplied the character behind the encounter, then became the person whose image represented the film in its publicity.
She returned to touring with Butthole Surfers in 2008, bringing her back into the group she had helped build musically. Taylor died on June 18, 2023; the band announced her death the following day.
Coffey’s account also described what her departure had changed in his own playing. With Taylor gone, he had to take on both drum parts, pushing him to become more ambitious. Looking back in the No Echo interview, he put the debt plainly: “But Teresa set the example, which I learned from.”
