The Ballad Of Buttery Cake Ass

by Aug Stone

Two music obsessives embark on a hilarious quest to track down Buttery Cake Ass' Live In Hungaria, an album as legendary as it is obscure. Their pursuit of one of the greatest bands ever unknown takes them down many a bizarre path teeming with grand ideas and grander egos in this ode to record shopping and what it's like to be in your first band.



"Aug Stone's The Ballad Of Buttery Cake Ass is like being taken on a rock-n-roll road trip by Holden Caulfield with a head injury in the best of ways. I hate when people say things like 'resistance is futile', but I can honestly say I tried to resist this book and it was futile. And I am all the better for diving in and enjoying the ride. Please do the same or I'll freak out." - DAVE HILL, comedian, rocker, awesome dude "The Ballad of Buttery Cake Ass is thought from the future or what Brian Massumi calls thought in becoming. Reading a book featuring a character called Cookie (a song I wrote that made me who I am) I might worry about how my mind, trapped in sclerosis of social media's steel box, could bullet around in the pinball of personal apophenia but BBCA kneads digression into the temporal substance of an emerging truth far richer than anything baked in the ovens of Pynchon completists. It is the really real of the event itself. Reading about music really ought to be full of all kinds of felt intensities and a longing for this fruity tapestry of vibrant matter is the reason that The Ballad of Buttery Cake Ass came into being and must be read by your eyes."- MIKEY GEORGESON, David Devant & His Spirit Wife, Mr. Solo, awesome dude

Genres: Music, Fiction

272 pages, Paperback

First published August 21, 2014

Reviews

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

Right kids, gather round and listen to this story of the insane apocalyptic life your parents lived when they was young, in the days before the Internet, when a mate tells you about this cool band they’ve heard and you actually have to leave the house and travel around record stores trying to find a copy, this was all the more stressful if the band was slightly unknown. These days the only things you have to worry about is if your phone has enough charge left in it to open Spotify and your abnormally large thumbs have enough energy to type the band’s name (as I type this I realise you can probably use some kind of fancy voice command to save having to type, whatever!). This book is a celebration of that great hunt us oldies went on as kids, I remember looking for albums by Scarfo, Tribute to nothing and Sick of it all and getting blank looks in many stores and then when I found it taking it home and hoping I would like it as all I had to go on was a tiny write up in NME or Kerrang!

If you haven’t heard of Aug Stone before then I highly recommend looking up Young Southpaw on YouTube, it will give you an idea of the tempo you need to read this book and an understanding how the wild tangents work. Next I recommend googling Buttery Cake Ass, you’ll get some tasty results for sure.

So for the actual review…this is one hell of a fun trip, Aug has written a fantastic musical documentary which is somehow full of auditory sensations, I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced anything quite like this; when the band play live the writing matches the tempo and I felt I was there, I could hear the music and see the lights, the band were suddenly with me…and then it ended and I have no recollection of what I had heard. I suspect these pages have been coated in something. We have two sides to this story, Aug and Trig going around the record shops looking for records by this mysterious band they had never heard of and as they interview somebody with a connection to the band the story seamlessly cuts away to the band and you gradually start to see their life play out. It was interesting reading about Buttery Cake Ass, how they formed, settled on a name and gradually found their sound, there is a lot of discussion about the band’s influences and I found this affected the playlist on my commute to work. I don’t know if it was intentional or coincidence but I spotted the odd musical link now and then, my favourite was the character called Brouce, the way I read this made me sing that line in the ELO song Don’t Bring Me Down.

This is a great book, loads of fun and an amazing amount of effort put into creating this, including a discography of all materials by the band members…I think what this now needs is to be made into a movie and for Band T-shirts to be available, man! I’d love one of them. If you’re old enough to remember that hunt for a record, or are a young historian investigating life from the 80’s then pick up this book, with a name like The Ballad of Buttery Cake Ass you know you’ll not be disappointed.

Blog review: https://felcherman.wordpress.com/2023...

[Liis]

This is one of those titles, I think, that will split the readership. It either does that magic thing for them, or doesn't.
In essence, The Ballad of Buttery Cake Ass is a trip down memory lane, spurred on by nostalgia. It's the kind of fun and exciting that kept the younger versions of us bright-eyed. The discovery of music, the bands, the vibe.
The book is, I completely agree, an ode to how things used to be - you went to a record store, you spent hours shifting through records, picking out the next album to play as your life's backing track. It's an ode to music that was... Because by heck, it was different back then, even some 20 years ago compared to most of the drivel that's being published nowadays, so I can stand by this book to keep the vibe alive. It's a title that anyone looking to chase that nostalgia should try.

Personally, I'm afraid, the style of delivery did not work, so I called it a 'cut' at 21% in- I hadn't a clue what was going on most the time.

It's chaotic and for many it's of the fun type, so try this book and judge for yourself!

[Alex Sarll]

A couple of weeks ago, ahead of a gig by Stars – a band whose name is both brilliant and terrible – I was discussing various other acts with one friend, and past a certain point the other friend present flat out asked us if we were just making these names up now, as part of some elaborate wind-up. We were not (honest), but that did remind me to read this, because that's pretty much how the world first heard of Buttery Cake Ass. That joke now extended to novel length, which might sound like a questionable gambit, but in all the time I've known Aug I think this is the thing he's written which best captures how funny he can be. On one level it works by sheer silliness, the narrator and his friend Trig trying progressively less sensible strategies to find their way to a copy of Buttery Cake Ass' lone, elusive album, Live In Hungaria, and every lead they do find kicking off some ludicrous new juxtaposition or string of free association. But underneath that is a love letter to music, to all the bands who never got played on the radio, to the grand quest that was trying to track down rare releases in the pre-internet age. And also a celebration of the inherent absurdity of writing about music, and of doing it anyway; whenever Buttery Cake Ass are compared to another band, we're reminded that they didn't really sound anything alike, and mostly the descriptions of what they did sound like operate on the most oblique, synaesthesiac level. Early on, too, there's an extended reminder of how ultimately every band name begins as a made-up band name, with the flailing musical masterminds knowing the initials B C A are right, but getting through a couple of dozen other attempts before finally settling on what's almost certainly the stupidest of the lot. And let's not even get into the logos... By the end, a note of melancholy has inevitably taken hold, because of course this is not a band who made it, who are still going, or even whose scant output can be found. But set against that, always, a burning belief in the life-changing power of music, whether or not more than ten people were ever there to hear it.

All of which said, while I would love to hear Buttery Cake Ass, I suspect I'd be a much bigger fan of Nightingale Court.

[Tim Lane · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a Gen X writer and reader interested in humorous narrator-driven storytelling, I enjoyed Aug Stone’s comedic novel, The Ballad of Buttery Cake Ass. Cake Ass, as I affectionately call Stone’s book, is a wild, hyperbolic ode to vinyl, record shops and the new music of the 80s—a period in time when teens and young adults spent hours in record stores searching for vinyl which would keep them lit for weeks, would connect them with friends, would expand their convoluted knowledge of bands and extend their sacred record collections. As others have mentioned, Cake Ass belongs on a table or shelf with Kurt Vonnegut and Robert Coover. And This Is Spinal Tap and High Fidelity definitely come to mind. I found myself chuckling a lot. Loved the idea of a zany quest for an allusive album instead of a holy grail. Appreciated references to Joy Division and so many other bands. Stylistically, I give Stone props for pushing the form. An extremely digressive narrative such as this isn’t for everyone, but I enjoyed the enthusiasm and quirky insight’s of Cake Ass’ narrator and found myself willing to go wherever he felt like going. It took a while to read, but I didn’t get hung up on trying to maintain a timeline or list of characters and connections in my head. It was all there. I enjoyed the ride. I mean like rock ‘n roll, man. C’mon! Let’s go! The book, to quote a phrase of which the narrator is fond, was a total freak-out. Published in 2022, I was a little late to the party, but glad to finally arrive.

[Dan Billings · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you enjoy a rock and roll story that flows in and out of timelines with a nice doze of humor, pick up this book. Recommended for people who enjoy being the first to know about a band or who dive into record stores looking for a lost classic. Enjoy the prose and the fast pace of the story and just have a good ride.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Something about being a guy at one point in the last century meant that, if you liked music, you would buy it. Obsessively. It was a great obsession for teenagers and adults of little means and became an exciting hunt when a tantalizing obscurity dangled before one’s covetous consciousness. The hunt for these rarities was just an excuse to visit new record stores, which might not have just what you’re after but if you’re lucky will have what you didn’t know you needed until now. In addition to the tunes themselves, matters of more or less equal importance had to do with the cover art, the name of the label, the name of the album, the people thanked, the song titles, the song sequence, the lyrics, the conditions in / under which the album was recorded, song lengths, alternative versions, and other trivia whose knowledge of can engulf a guy’s life.

The Ballad of Buttery Cake Ass is a cross between Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments and the film Spinal Tap, an ode to ‘80s-era record-collecting fetishes, with the band Buttery Cake Ass as the focus of a grail-like pursuit of their only two recordings, a 45, “Formaldehyde Hydro,” and a live album, Live in Hungaria, decades after the bland flourished, by some ardent later-day collectors. Part of the band’s schtick is use of an abacus player (abacus connected to foot pedals and other sound-altering devices) while the drummer doubles on a pinball machine. During one of their recording sessions, a microphone is placed in an open refrigerator to catch the echo. Puns, references to song lyrics, and ‘80s bands about here. Included among the weird tics of the fanbase are the far-fetched interpretations of lyrics that purportedly capture deep or hidden connections between the band’s songs and allusions to people who influenced them. (Do such recording techniques as placing a mic in a refrigerator allude Frank Zappa’s unconventional techniques for recording Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica, or is that a far-fetched interpretation?) The story follows the path of the band from origins and rehearsals to playing in bowling alleys; tensions rise and are resolved; romantic partnerships are struck up and marriages occur. The band may not make it, but their lives have been oddly enriched by the experiences.

https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...

[Gavin Hogg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Blimey! One of the most singular books I've read - hard to describe but an amazing journey to take. Insane in the membrane. The DVD boxset of a particularly odd dream.