Music Preview: Gene Butler prepares to showcase his ‘Outlaw Americana’
Bandleader Gene Butler may have experienced a full professional career in Hollywood, making guest appearances on everything from “Quincy, M.E.,” “Charlie’s Angels” and “CHiPs” to extensive theatrical work, but the get-around artist is as driven as ever.
“I’ve always been a little off,” Butler said. “As a title, ‘actor-playwright-director-musician’ just sounds deluded, all those hyphens seem weird, like ‘What is it you really want to do?’ And I’ve had steady work and some successful plays but I always keep coming back to music.”
When his Gene Butler Band sets up at Altadena’s Coffee Gallery Backstage next Sunday, it will be a jubilee of his own high-quality country-based compositions. It’s an engrossing sound, with Butler’s smoky, rumpled but expressive vocals atop a fluid traditional approach that shifts from beery neon-lit honky-tonk wallop to gorgeous three-part mountain harmonies to thumping rockabilly.
“Gene calls it ‘Outlaw Americana,’” fiddler Brantley Kearns said. “But I call it interesting, very original stuff that covers a very broad spectrum, from ballads to up-tempo country.” Butler’s music rings with Bakersfield attitude but also displays a solid Deep Southern foundation — Butler, after all, is a native of Macon, Ga.
“When I was a kid in Macon, about 7 years old, we’d sit outside the black churches and listen to the singing,” Butler said. “I can still hear those voices, and there’s nothing more beautiful than the human voice. It was a great music town: Otis Redding, the Allman Brothers, Little Richard — his mother lived above a liquor store near us and I used to see him when he’d visit. He was already famous, and he’d be walking around in full make up. He was so different, wearing lipstick, eyeliner. That really stuck with me.”
“I was determined to be a singer,” he said. “So I bought a P.A. system, one of those old things that’d shock the heck out of you if you didn’t have the ground wire just so, and I saw an ad in the paper for a rock band that need a lead singer. I got the job because I had the P.A. That was my first full-on band.
“I picked up the guitar not long after,” Butler said, “formed a band with my brothers and we’d play the clubs. That was about the time that I started writing songs.”
Butler arrived in Los Angeles in the 1980s, when he and acclaimed roots musician Gurf Morlix teamed up.
“Gurf Morlix is a really wonderful player, and we started the band together. We were country, but edge-country. I called it ‘Concrete Country’ — you don’t step in any cow dung playing this music. It’s urban, with a strong traditional country base to it. And sometimes Lucinda [Williams] would come and sing with us. It was Gurf who insisted we call it the Gene Butler band because, as he said, ‘You don’t know long these musicians are all going to stick around.’”
Morlix was right. Before long, he departed with Williams, whose star was on an aggressive ascent. Then, fate intervened. “One night I went out to the Palomino to see Dwight Yoakam,” Butler said. “And that’s where I first met Brantley; he was up there with his fiddle wearing a pork pie hat and those old overalls. All the girls were staring at Dwight but I couldn’t take my eyes off Brantley — I went back after the show and introduced myself. We were talking and I said ‘How’d you like to join a good band and make a lot less money?’ And he did!”
“The band works,” Butler said. “It’s like a great first date, you can’t pinpoint exactly why it clicked but it did and you want to go on another one. I write all the songs on my own — I have 108 in the repertoire now and it’s great to be there, just alone in a room full of something I want to feel.”
With the new “Outlaw Americana” album, which Butler described as “music with teeth and lyrics with a bite,” coming out next month, the singer-songwriter is fired up all over again. “I am still pursuing the dream,” he said. “I want to struggle up that hill. I never thought about not dreaming. I don’t look for “happy” — that’s the same as ambition. And when I’m up there playing, surrounded by the band, then it’s the greatest thing in the world, it’s the safest place to be, wrapped up in in this world that you have created.”
“There’s so much more to do, so much that’s undone, so much in my head that hasn’t come out. I enjoy waking up every day because I know that I’ll get to work at it, that I have an adventure to pursue, somewhere to go. It’s the music that really counts. It’s all that matters.”
--
What: The Gene Butler band
Where: Coffee Gallery Backstage, 2029 Lake St., Altadena
When: Sunday, July 24, 7 p.m.
Tickets: $18
More info: (626) 798-6236, coffeegallery.com
--
JONNY WHITESIDE is a veteran music journalist based in Burbank and author of “Ramblin’ Rose: the Life & Career of Rose Maddox” and “Cry: the Johnnie Ray Story.”