Stone.
Cult band Buttery Cake Ass are playing what might be their final show, and it might be their best. There aren’t many people in the audience, but what they’re hearing is blowing their minds. The saddest songs make them all cry. The songs filled with rage seem like they could set the hall on fire. The band members are engaged in the kind of musical alchemy that maybe only happens a few times in every musician’s life. Somewhere on the soundboard, a tape is rolling. What will it sound like when they take it home?
The mysteries of music, the weird family that is a band, and the obsessiveness of record collectors to find the treasures they drop captured on vinyl are all explored in The Ballad of Buttery Cake Ass, a ripping new novel by writer, musician, and comic Aug Stone. But the seeds for that novel were planted decades ago in the aisles of Cutler’s on Broadway, when two friends decided to ask for an album that doesn’t exist.
The Ballad of Buttery Cake Ass begins with two friends, the unnamed narrator and a guy named Trig, who, beginning as teenagers, go on a quest to find a rare, possibly lost album — Live in Hungaria — by an obscure band with a cult following called Buttery Cake Ass. To try to find the album, it turns out they have to piece together the story of the band itself. This leads them to the story of two young men, Hans Floral Nightingale and Hans Floral Anderson, whose personal and creative chemistry and friction are the engine behind Buttery Cake Ass’s convoluted formation, its adventures in recording and playing gigs, and its eventual gangly, dramatic demise. We meet the rest of the band, including a guitar player who likes to sleep beneath a pinball. We also meet a cast surrounding the bands — friends, acquaintances, fans, a few music industry types, whose population in Stone’s madcap world add even brighter flashes of color to a story with plenty of style to spare.
What really propels the story forward, is Stone’s narrative voice — comic and wistful, shot through with a lackadaisical intelligence, and injected with a heavy dose of the countercultural tone that created both Thomas Pynchon and indie-rock music journalism. Along the way, he deftly conveys the reason for the fanatical search for Live in Hungaria: because the improbably named band managed to make some truly spectacular music, the kind that leaves the few who hear them live awestruck. Something beautiful happened, and because it was music, just movement in the air, it’s gone. Or is it?
The Real Me
It turns out the fantastical novel grew from a prank. Stone dedicated his novel to his “best friend growing up, Brian Ewing,” Stone explains in the “liner notes” to the book.” “When we were 15,” Stone writes, Ewing “asked the clerk at Cutler’s Records and Tapes in New Haven, CT if they had anything by the band Buttery Cake Ass. The clerk looked a bit puzzled, but then asked if there was any particular album we were looking for. Though I was still in shock from Bri’s genius utterance, I immediately replied ‘Live in Hungaria.’ At which point the man behind the counter looked even more confused and asked if we meant Live in Hungary. Bri and I shook our heads no, deeply serious, informing him that it was definitely Live in Hungaria. That feeling of utter joy, as the clerk walked away to go check, has always stuck with me. Laughing with such wild abandon that everything else fell away except the sense that what was happening was truly wonderful.”
On the surface, Ewing and Stone pulled a cheap stunt. But the stunt worked because it pointed to something deeper: the way that collecting records, going to hear live music, and even playing live music, are, over and over, an exercise in cosmic humility. For every record you find, there are a dozen more you know about and can’t hear. For every live show you catch, there are a dozen more you miss. For every note you play, there are the infinite notes you don’t, the phrases that you hear in your head but can’t quite pull off. You get to hear or play something, but even by hearing or playing that, something else always gets away. Learning to abide in that, and to see it for the great spiritual prank that the universe plays on us all, is the soul that holds Stone’s madcap fictional history together.
Teenage Fanclub
As a teenager growing up in Stratford, Stone “always had a huge running list of stuff I wanted to hear,” he said. He scoured the fourth edition of the Trouser Press Record Guide, stayed up until 2 a.m. to catch all of 120 Minutes and Headbangers’ Ball on MTV. Armed with a long list of records he wanted, he and his friends started doing the circuit of visiting record stores across the state: Cutler’s and Rhymes in New Haven, Pheonix Records and Brass City in Waterbury, Trash American Style in Danbury, Secret Sounds in Bridgeport, Graf Wadman in Stratford.
“It was a big deal for us to go to the big city of New Haven, before we could drive. It was a big treat to go to Cutler’s and Rhymes,” Stone said. “When I got my license, seven or eight of us would pile into the minivan” and make a day of it.
Talking to record store clerks was essential, first of all, because of the albums they wanted to buy, “a lot of it was behind the counter” — like cigarettes and condoms — “because they didn’t want people to steal the tapes.” In time, some of those interactions led to genuine acquaintances. “Walter and Fred at Brass City Records was a huge influence on me,” Stone said. In the liner notes to Buttery Cake Ass, Stone mentions that the two record store clerks essentially watched Stone and his friends grow up over repeated visits. But Stone also recalled that the clerks took the time to expand their customers’ ears. “If you like that, then you’ve got to hear this,” Stone recalled them saying, as they played more and more of the store’s hidden treasures.
At the same time, Stone was becoming a musician. His first band, In Between, featured him on guitar, Christian DiMenna (now of Lovecraft Tattoo) on bass, and Jim Psarras on drums. The band recorded a 7″ record that never got released, and played at the Tune Inn. “The stuff we played live, it was very Misfits and Ramones,” he said. But Stone describes them writing songs at all as due to the fact that “we panicked” when the band booked gigs; they thought they needed songs to play. But before that, when it was just the three of them playing together, “it was this wonderful smorgasbord,” an improvisatory approach that pulled from krautrock, Joy Division, and Miles Davis’s electric period.
“It kind of baffles me, looking back,” Stone said, that “it never occurred to us that we could just improvise onstage.” That sound — a sound that got away — stayed in Stone’s head for years, though. When it came time to imagine what his fictional band Buttery Cake Ass sounded like, the sound of In Between was what memory and inspiration provided.
Modern Man
Many people are avid music fans as teenagers but slow down as adults; a 2015 informal study found that most people stop looking for new music by the age of 33. “I don’t understand people like that but I secretly envy them,” Stone said with a laugh. For him, the search only continues. “I guess it’s that excitement, that feeling of ‘I got to hear this,’ all the great music in the world, and it’s such an impossible task,” but “there’s something in me that wants to hear it all.”
In the intervening years, from the mid-1990s to today, much has changed. Vinyl, cassettes, and CDs nearly disappeared, only to see a resurgence. In the middle of all that was first the rise of file sharing, then, in the early 2000s, the rise of file-sharing music blogs posting digitized versions of out-of-print or otherwise impossible-to-acquire records. “When the blogs were going strong,” Stone said, “I’d be up until three in the morning downloading.”
Stone now has hard drives full of music, 10 playlists of music he wants to get around to listening to. Streaming services have made it that much easier to find new music. It’s overwhelming, an embarrassment of riches. He’ll never really have the time to listen to all of it, and a collector who just to hear new music all the time, “in some ways it’s great that you can press a button and hear what you want,” Stone said. But “I miss the way it used to be,” too. “It was so great being in a record store, and I could talk to people.” The record store circuit was about “so much more than music. It was adventure and hanging out with your friends. You have to eat at some point, and you’d meet other people.”
At the same time, those connections to other people still happen, in other ways. There are the live shows Stone is grateful to have seen. He recalled driving to see The Damned in Boston in a blizzards, with “cars were spinning off 91 in front of me,” and arriving just as the show was starting; they were playing his favorite song. In 2013 he learned that Nik Turner from Hawkwind was playing an improbable show at BAR. “I was having a really bad day, but I thought, ‘I can’t miss this,’” Stone said. “I pushed my way up front, and as soon as the music started happening, I forgot everything” that he had been worried about. “You go and realize just how special music is,” he said.
The Ballad of Buttery Cake Ass has allowed Stone to connect to like-minded people as well. On a record-store tour recently to promote the book, “other people told me that they too would prank record stores,” he said. At a reading at Plan 9 Records in Richmond, VA, one attendee told him that “he would adopt a fake voice and ask for bizarre Goth records.”
And Stone has a list of real-life Live in Hungarias, records that keep getting away. “I have a couple of impossible records and I’d be psyched if someone put it up on YouTube,” he said. And the search today can still yield the same sense of serendipity as it did decades ago.
While being interviewed for this article, Stone mentioned reading The Last Bandit, a biography of UK musician Nikki Sudden that he “had to order from Italy,” he said. “In it he mentions a ‘deliciously loony girl band’ in Berlin” that shared a bill with Sudden. The duo was called Vermooste Vløten, which translates to “mossy flutes,” but in German apparently “has a very dirty double meaning,” Stone said.
Intrigued, Stone started looking for Vermooste Vløten’s record. He came across eight people online who had the record. “None were for sale, but I messaged them all just to see if I could hear it,” Stone said. “I got one reply back and it just said ‘arrrrrrggghhhh.’ ”
I asked Stone to double-check the spelling of the band’s name for me. He wrote back:
“This is amazing, I just Googled them … and somebody recently put that first album up on a blog. So I’m totally psyched. Our conversation brought me to it! I’ve wanted to hear them since reading” about then in Sudden’s biography. “That’s all it takes to get me really excited about something.
The Ballad of Buttery Cake Ass is out now. Stone reads from the novel at Redscroll Records in Wallingford, CT, Feb. 26, at 5 p.m.
The internet has killed the whole business of antiques and collectibles.
Please tell me who wants records and how much they can be worth..... maybe it's just my record album taste?!?!? Where are the collectors?