Matt “The Tube” Crowley and the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow

I have known Matt Crowley since 1992, and I’ve always wondered: how did a pharmacist from Montana end up touring the world in a circus sideshow?

The Jim Rose Circus Sideshow rose from humble Seattle roots to a 1992 featured slot at Lollapalooza, and would eventually tour the world. Fusing traditional geek acts with high-intensity performances, its original members helped define that gleefully deranged subculture. The Human Enigma swallowed swords and ate crickets. The Amazing Mr. Lifto swung objects from his pierced body parts. Matt “The Tube” Crowley used an outsized gavage to pump out bile from his stomach, and brave volunteers came up onstage to drank it. Torture King punctured his body with skewers, and electrocuted himself on a Tesla coil. Jim Rose ate razor blades and provided a steady stream of hilarious carny-barker stage patter: “It’s science! I am riveted!” 

The new documentary Circus of the Scars (dir. Corey Wees) rolls out the troupe’s up-and-down history via vintage clips and new interviews, and it’s just as entertaining and gross as you remember. I caught up with original member Matt Crowley, to find out how and why he ditched a career in pharmacy to join the sideshow. We cover a lot of ground, from Richard Linklater to Loompanics, Bigfoot, Planet of the Apes, Montana, Fortean Times, stomach bile, Fakir Musafar, Billy Gibbons, and how to light a cigarette in a sparking grinder. Matt is currently retired and living in the Seattle area.

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So, Matt. Let’s just get into it. Madonna’s pap smear. I recently watched a YouTube clip from the 1990 film Slacker, where people are hanging out on a sidewalk in Austin, and someone is selling what she claims to be Madonna’s Pap smear. A voiceover is from the director Richard Linklater, and he says he got the idea from this guy in Montana named Matt Crowley. I think we need to hear this story first.

In the early ‘80s, I knew a gentleman whose name was Jim Goodwin, very intelligent person. He had a strange fascination with Frank Zappa, to the effect that he wanted to be called “Frank Zappa.” He said, oh, my best friend is this guy named Rick in Texas. And he’s coming up to Missoula. So I met his friend, Rick Linklater, and Rick brought an 8-millimeter camera and he's making this film. Which later became his first film, which is a very strange title, It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books. I had no idea who this guy was. I just thought, okay, he's Frank's friend. 

Rick discovers that I had done all this research on the strange subject of autoerotic asphyxia. And he's like, wow, cool, man, I'm interested in weird stuff. This is 1985. So I had collected most of the world's primary literature on the subject. And I thought, that is the weirdest thing I've ever heard of. Individuals, mostly males, who during masturbation will generally hang themselves with rope ligatures nearly to the point of passing out. And some of them screw up and end up dead. So we went down to Kinko's and Rick copied the whole goddamn thing. And we get to talking about pornography and I made the suggestion that, you know, pornography seems like it has a tendency, for closeups and closeups and closeups. So what's the logical result? It's like, they're gonna use microscopes. And so I thought, the future of pornography is gonna be Madonna's pap smear. This strange riffing weird anecdote I then forgot about. 

Years later, a friend of mine said, hey Matt, there's this movie out there called Slacker and apparently it has that Madonna Pap smear joke that you made. It's in the movie. And I'm like, really? So eventually, I see Slacker, and it does have this scene with Teresa Nervosa, the drummer of the Butthole Surfers, delivering the line. Linklater later published a book about the making of Slacker. And he had a little sidebar that said, “I get asked about that Madonna pap smear thing all the time.” 

It was so popular. Her face was on the poster. When most people immediately think of Slacker, that's the scene they remember. So let's backtrack a little. Once we met, we both realized we were from Montana. I went to Montana State University, which was in Bozeman, and people in Bozeman called people in Missoula “lettuce heads,” because they were more liberal and probably vegetarian. It was totally stupid. But I've only been to Missoula a couple of times. Maybe you could describe briefly what it was like to grow up there. 

Sure, I grew up in what you might call a bubble because my father taught law at the University of Montana. We lived a block and a half from the university. So my entire childhood and orientation was, you grow up and you go to university. Politically, it took me a long time to figure out the political nature of Missoula. Some people call it a little blue dot in a big red state, and that is true. The state does vote Republican in federal national elections. But by the time I got to college, I kind of had a dim awareness that the ‘60s hippie thing was still alive and well. They had food co-ops. There was a supermarket called the Good Food Store. My mother used to shop there. People would wear Birkenstocks very seriously. I'm not a right-wing person by any means, but I just couldn't quite relate to that mentality. As I've gotten older and taken psychedelic drugs, I understand a little bit better where that mindset is coming from. 

Part of the thing about Missoula, and in my opinion, the entire state of Montana, is it's very wilderness oriented. If you're not deeply ingrained in hiking and fishing and hunting and skiing and floating down the Clark Fork River in your inner tube, there's really no reason for you to be in a place like Montana. The weather is really bad in the wintertime, unless you're into skiing. I just didn't fall in love with the wilderness as many of the Montana residents do. 

I cannot agree with you more. I mean, at least you grew up in a part of Montana where there were mountains and trees. So you  experienced an academic sort of household. Got your degree at U of M, in pharmacy? 

A degree in pharmacy, yeah. It was just inconceivable not to go to college. It was like, you're gonna end up dealing cards at the Oxford downtown if you don't go to college. So I'd better do that. 

What were the sort of escape routes out of Montana that you recall? When I was a kid, if somebody went to college and left the state, they typically went to Seattle to work for Boeing, or they went to Denver to do something. And then their parents would talk nonstop about how great their child was. 

Right. That's a great question, because as a kid, I was fascinated with science. I really didn't have the same interest in law as my father. And on the other hand, I was fascinated with all kinds of sensational things. Like the Guinness Book of World Records, Ripley's Believe It or Not. My father didn't care about any weird stuff. My mother, on the other hand, was much more freewheeling. She would read things like Fate, Argosy, and Saga. Even though they were news magazines, they had articles by Ivan T. Sanderson, things like that. I discovered those magazines, sort of pre-pubescence. It was like, wow, cool article about this weird shit.

So when you got your degree, did you then work in pharmacy in Montana, or did you leave? 

No, I left for Seattle because the job market was saturated for a place like Missoula. But I was told, they're hiring in Seattle. I'm more urban oriented. Sure, Seattle made good sense to me.

And what did you like about being a pharmacist? 

Not much. The money was good. The hype is that every year pharmacy magazines would publish a survey of the most trusted professions, and pharmacy would almost always come out on top. But the reality is that you are treated like a retail worker. If there's any kind of hangup, you're immediately the subject of abuse. And if customers don't like the encounter, they'll call up the corporate office and bitch about you. So you wear this white jacket, but it doesn't really mean anything. Maybe I'm just a vulnerable person, but I certainly experienced significant episodes of anxiety and even depression. That was the reason that pushed me to escape into the world of sideshow. 

You're in your early 20s, right out of college, getting to know a different city. There's a lot more going on. You're also reading more adult esoterica now. It's not the Guinness Book of World Records, it's Loompanics and Amok Books. But you're also working in this allegedly well-respected professional day job. So you would be a pharmacist, and then you'd run home and read a book on how to build a speed lab?

Yeah. I saw several Loompanics books, like the ones that give you the formulas for sarin gas. I encountered RE/Search books. I just thought, this is fantastic. It shows how if you intensely research a weird topic, you can create this amazing product. Whether your topic is William S. Burroughs or J.G. Ballard or Modern Primitives. These kind of underground obscure arcane subjects. 

After I got to Seattle, I went to a party, and a friend of Tim Cridland, who later became the Torture King with the sideshow, introduced me to a gentleman named Michael Hoy, who ran Loompanics Books. This would have been 1987, before the internet. 

So Michael Hoy walked up to me and said, “I'm really interested in autoerotic asphyxia. I heard you know all about it. I'll pay you a hundred dollars to write an essay for Loompanics on this subject.” I'm like, wow, cool, man. So I wrote this article on autoerotic asphyxia and it was published in the Loompanics catalog. 

So you're getting this reputation outside of pharmacy, but you're not performing on stage. And there is this little sideshow that’s starting in Seattle, hosted by a guy named Jim Rose, at a belly dancing place. Pretty quickly, other people join the act. Lifto was the first, hoisting objects up with the piercings. And then Paul/Enigma was next, swallowing swords. And then Tim was next. Did you watch these early shows? Were you in the audience and think, oh, I'd like to do that?

I was friends with Tim Cridland and I had participated in a Subgenius Devival. Tim was doing a Subgenius performance as a “faith healer” and he needed a little intermission to set up a stage prop for his performance and he said, Matt, would you like to do this tube act that you've got? 

This was the notorious gavage act, which became the highlight of the Jim Rose Circus, and gave you the nickname “The Tube.”

At that time it was with a tiny syringe and a piece of tubing. I'd put the tubing in my nose, it'd go to my stomach. and just pumped this liquid into my stomach. And very, very simple compared to what it became later. But I did this, and it was videotaped. So Tim Cridland told Jim Rose about this. I met Jim, at the first performance that I was in. At the Cafe Sophie, which is no longer there. 

Did you think, oh, I can't wait to do this in front of a thousand people? Or were you going to see how safe it is, and what to watch for and all that? 

Well, I conceived of it as a bar bet. I thought what you could do is put a stopper in a beer bottle, and a tube on the end of the stopper, and then put the tube into your nose and your stomach. and then shake up the bottle and the pressure would force the beer like an IV in a hospital, into your stomach. That didn't quite work. The physics, the pressure. So I thought, well, I'll just use a syringe, right? I was then given a number of genuine gastric lavage units. I just conceived of it as a joke. Kind of a bar bet, hanging out in bars, like, I can do this. 

Right, Apparently, gavage originally was designed as something to force-feed patients. 

I believe so. Yeah, that was the initial use.

So the documentary shows a trajectory of the circus once everybody's in and how it grew. I noticed that unlike the rest of the performers, you weren't the kind of person who did bed of nails, or piercings, or sword swallowing. You were the guy who did unorthodox physical stunts. Was this an offshoot of you having a background in science? Or was it like, what could I bring to the table that nobody else was doing? 

I really. had no historical connection to sideshow. When I started with the gavage act, I thought of it as a bar bet. But then I realized, that does tie in with the history of sideshow, as a new stunt. So I thought of myself as being someone imaginative enough to create new stunts.

This is the early 90s now. And the AIDS epidemic was freaking everybody out and everybody's fascinated with condoms. Oh, I bet there's something funny I could do with a condom. So I'll put it in my nose and make it come out of my mouth. And then put it in my mouth and make it come out of my nose. And then put it over my head and inflate it. And that worked out pretty well. 

I made a brief list of some of your stunts. You smashed a ravioli can on a volunteer's hand. 

With my own finger. 

With your own finger, right. You blew up a hot water bottle until it exploded. The condom, which you just mentioned. You broke a cinder block on someone’s chest, with a sledgehammer. You super-glued a bowling ball to your hand. You taped firecrackers to your chest. And then you stuck your face into a grinder to light a cigarette. 

Right. A number of these stunts I created. The can smash I did not create, I'd seen it performed by a drunken lawyer, a friend of my father's. I thought, that's a sideshow stunt. As far as I know, I'm the first person to bring that stunt to sideshow. 

The grinder. I got interested in lockpicking, and I realized I can make lockpicks myself. So at home in my apartment, I would clamp a Dremel tool into a vice, with a little cutoff wheel, and I would hold a piece of hacksaw blade against this rotating wheel. It would grind away at the blade to create a lock pick. And I noticed that it's shooting sparks toward me. But the sparks did not hurt. I thought, I bet you could scale this up with an angle grinder, a big piece of metal. I hate cigarettes, hate smoking, but I thought, this is a cool visual. 

So we'd take a cigarette and I gaffed it. I would take a firecracker fuse and turn it into a spiral, and I would super-glue it to the end, so that sparks would light the firecracker. I've seen other performers do that cigarette stunt since then. And I am honestly not aware if it can be done with a regular non-gaffed cigarette. After I created it as a two-person stunt, Jim Rose kept on doing it with his wife. And then it migrated to television. There was a gal on David Letterman who called herself Grindr Girl. If you go on Instagram today and you look under #GrindrGirl, you will discover about a dozen female burlesque artists who do my act. I just want to be acknowledged as the guy who created the act. That's all. 

I became aware of you in 1992. This guy wrote The Nose magazine and said, there's this circus in Seattle that's really popular right now, it might be a good story. There wasn’t much media buzz yet. And so we said, yeah, great, write it. He sent the story in, and then we sat around our magazine office and we're like, what if we brought the Jim Rose circus to San Francisco? And so we booked it at the DNA Lounge. You guys came down from Seattle, and we drove you around for media appearances. I think Tim ate a light bulb on the radio live. You and Tim hung out in our office, because we had a lot of weird books and zines and stuff. And Paul, who ends up being the Enigma, he used our office phone to call a pet shop to find live crickets. Because he needed crickets to eat on stage. And we were like, this is so great. 

Oh, I thought The Nose was absolutely fantastic. I thought, damn, this is the perfect magazine for the perfect time. Where has this magazine been all my life? 

We did these two shows in San Francisco and they were completely mad. The first one was maybe 400, 500, and the second one was seven or 800. The energy in the room was so amazing. People were fainting in the crowd. It was spectacular. I was on the balcony watching your show, I turned and almost poked my eye out on a sharp bone. And standing next to me was Fakir Musafar with this bone in his nose that was probably a foot long. I recognized him instantly. The father of modern primitives and body modification. We started talking and he was very cool. But what I didn't realize until later, is that you and the members of the circus met him after this show. Talk about that. 

The whole troupe. We went to his residence. His wife was French and was very pleasant and accommodating. And we were taken into his, I guess you'd call it a dungeon. Now you think of a dungeon as a dingy place, but the dungeon was covered in pink shag carpeting. We were shown all the S&M, dungeon-esque things. I dimly recall that Jim Rose wanted to lie on the bed of nails. So the bed of nails got put on the carpet, and Jim laid down on it, and that was pretty cool. And then Fakir's wife said, “Oh no, now I will have to vacuum up the entire carpet. The wood slivers in the carpet, I will have to vacuum the whole thing.”

It's amazing what you remember. Did anybody take photographs of this? 

No, we were idiots. We were idiots. 

So you were definitely doing outre performance in cities that probably had more stringent laws against nudity and things like that. Did you get busted? Were promoters telling you, hey, you cannot show Lifto's dick? Or was that part of the larger appeal?

Sure, it was part of the appeal. To my memory, it was never a problem in Seattle. Lifto would do his thing, and we never got threats. However, our first tour was across Canada. And when we were approaching Toronto—so remember this is the Stone Age. This is 92, before the internet, right? We got these telephone calls, that the mayor was sending the vice squad to our show in Toronto, to watch if there was gonna be any vice. I believe we were there for two nights. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure we did our whole show, including Lifto's act, with no censorship. We did have this goofy sheet, the shadow play thing we sometimes did. I think we took the sheet away and just did it. And no problem. During my tenure, there was never an arrest, or even a legitimate threat of arrest. We just did it. 

The Lollapalooza tour in 1992 was 25 or 30 cities. You toured all over the US and Europe. Rolling Stone magazine called the circus “the absolute must-see act” of that tour. The documentary covers this period very well. For three years, you were going a thousand miles an hour, and it had to be exhausting. Not just the stunts, but touring that hard. Driving in a van filled with cigarette smoke, trying to sleep, trying to figure out where to eat a non-greasy meal. 

Laundry, clothes, cleaning. Right, right. A big fucking problem! 

Enigma, Torture King, and Lifto all continued performing in sideshow after leaving Jim Rose. But you were different. You just completely stopped. This was a huge transition, from touring the world and being on stage with rock stars and all the media attention, to going back to work as a pharmacist. What was it like to return to your old job and put on a white coat?

Well, there's a great book entitled The Status Game by Will Storr. I actually listened to it as an audio book, but it's excellent because you can really interpret human behavior in terms of the quest for status. Being a sideshow performer, and with the status that we had at that time, was just like a rocket ship of status. So then going back to being a pharmacist, that'll do a number on your head. You wonder about these aging rock stars. They play the Native American casinos, and they're 60 years old. The band has no original members in it, but they're just kind of limping along, playing Blue Öyster Cult tunes. 

Right, wearing wigs. 

Yeah, wow, why are they doing that? Well, it's because they're addicted to the status. They're addicted to the adulation that they had back in the 70s, or whenever it was. So it was a real crash for me emotionally, because of perceived loss of status. I don't deny it. I went through periods where the stress of the job created a continuous low-grade anxiety, and untreated low-grade anxiety will lead to depression. And it shouldn't have. I mean, I'm the same human being I was before I was a sideshow performer. The good news is, that was a period, and now I feel great. I've never been happier at any other time in my life. 

Were you still in touch with the original members? You guys were kind of like brothers, touring around the world. Or did you have to pull back and go, okay. they're gonna do their thing. 

I was friends with Tim Cridland from very soon after I got to Seattle. So our friendship continued after both of us had left Jim Rose. Tim continued on as a sideshow performer, Zamora the Torture King. He was traveling a lot, and now is currently in Las Vegas. But I didn't really stay in touch too much with Lifto or Enigma.

Did you stay in touch with Jim Rose? 

I did not part on real good terms with Jim Rose. There was no confrontation or something. To his credit, he gave me an air compressor as a parting gift. My girlfriend at the time said, Matt could really use an air compressor. So, you know, a gesture of reasonableness. 

But from the very beginning Jim Rose would just say all this stuff, and you knew that some of it was true, but that was the problem. You never know what was true and what was just complete bullshit. He would talk about our future plans and you'd go, well, maybe it's true, and maybe it's just riffing by Jim Rose in his fantasy mindset.

You gotta really scratch your head. Okay, [road manager] Jan Gregor left, Tim Cridland left, Matt Crowley left. Why have they left this high-status situation? Maybe Jim's a complete asshole. Yeah, Jim Rose is a complete asshole. He's just an abusive human being. 

So since this documentary came out, you’ve reunited with most of the sideshow original members at festival screenings. About five years ago, I remember being in Austin, Texas and someone said, oh, that guy who’s behind the bar there, he used to be in the Jim Rose Circus. He had the big carabiner earrings, and it was Mr. Lifto. I stopped and said hello, and reminded him about the DNA lounge shows, and he gave me a huge hug. Very sweet guy. 

Yes, absolutely. My domestic partner Angie and I went down to Austin and visited him. He bartends at a place called the Casino. And he was absolutely warm, polite. We had completely reasonable, warm, thoughtful conversations. He was the most gracious host. 

I've always felt that, like growing up in a small town, your brain gets molded in a different way. You're not necessarily an avid consumer of pop culture because there isn't much. When we first met, I was kind of stunned at your background. I very rarely meet anybody from Montana. Especially anybody who joined a circus. We started talking and I was like, oh my God, here's another one. Like you, I grew up reading UFO books, Bigfoot books. My friends and I once went to a screening of all five of the Planet of the Apes movies. We watched the whole thing.

They had that at the Wilma Theater! I was just telling my girlfriend this morning about that. I shit you not. All five. 

Ten hours of apes. 

Yeah, they all went downhill as time went on. Battle for the Planet of the Apes. Conquest. Yeah, they deteriorated. 

You end up learning how to create your own entertainment. I remember seeing older kids stop their car in front of my parents' house. It was at night, they were probably drinking. And one of them got out, and he peed on the rear tire of his Camaro. Then he got back in and burned rubber in the piss all the way down the street. I remember thinking, maybe I should leave. 

Yeah, you're fighting for a quality distraction because there isn't one. Like the Bigfoot thing. I was given a copy of On the Track of the Sasquatch by John Green when I was nine, and that blew my mind. I thought it was the coolest fucking thing ever. None of my friends at school were into Bigfoot. I'm just like, why isn't everybody fascinated with this shit? As a kid, you'd watch the fucking Beverly Hillbillies and Hogan's Heroes and The Brady Bunch. There's a level where you go, this sucks. It's far away. It's lame. 

And it's far away from where you live. Whereas Bigfoot, it could be right outside town. Seeing this documentary brought back a whole bunch of memories for me, as I'm sure it did for you. You're probably sick of talking about it, but there was something at the very end where you said, “If I had to do it all over again, I would.”

Oh yeah. I think I would do it. I look back at other periods of my life during the 90s, they're kind of hazy, nothing really spectacular happened. So much stuff happened in this brief time. We were in London and Tim invited Paul Sieveking to our show. I'm like, this is the guy who runs Fortean Times. That was a big deal to me. ZZ Top came to our show when we were in Scandinavia. They came backstage, and we’re talking to Billy Gibbons. And Billy Gibbons is a very smart guy. He knew a lot about sideshow, back in the day when they toured through Texas. I didn't really know much about the history. It's one of those things where, why didn't I bring a camera? Shit like that would happen all the time. Intersecting with amazing people. There's no other way those kinds of things would happen if I was not a sideshow performer. 

All right, Matt, it was great talking to you. Thanks again!

Anytime, man.

Circus of the Scars is currently streaming on Prime and Tubi.

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