The Evolution of Buttered Ass

When I go out for a ride in my car, I’ll turn my iPod on, hit shuffle, and start skipping through the near two-thousand tracks stored. Sometimes I skip twenty songs in a row before I find something I like for my own personal consumption. In those two-thousand tracks, Sometimes I land on one of the nineteen that are of the greatest band that never made it out of a living room. They were called “Octothorp”.

I was in the band.

Octothorp was Mike Meyers (guitars, vocals, keyboard), Jason Davidson (guitars), Joe Sweeney (drums), and me (keyboard, piano, lead vocals). If you’re wondering just what the hell “Octothorp” is, it’s the official name of the # symbol. Eight fields with a center field. Mike offered it as a name early on, nobody cared, or took it seriously, so we just ran with it. I wish I had a better story for the name of the band.

I met Mike Meyers during the second half of freshman year of high school in Mr. Huber’s music class. Mr. Huber had a habit of showing up to class drunk. He kinda looked a cross between Homer Simpson and Don Music from Sesame Street. He would try to show us “magic” tricks like when he would hold up a finger in each hand, bang them together, and one finger would “magically” move to the other side. That kinda shit. Drunk. When he wasn’t bombed, it would be a very good music history class. He could sure play our school song though. That’s burned into my brain since we had to sing it everyday before class started.

It was during these drunk times, Mike and I would talk. We shared the same music interests and he began showing me music he had written on his own. I remember a title of one of his songs, “The Sands of Time Against the Wind”. If that doesn’t scream “Fifteen year-old shitty poetry”, I don’t know what does. As we talked, he encouraged me to write and so I did. You talk about shitty teenage poetry/lyrics? I was full of them. I usually just unloaded on a spiral copybook during my rides home on the SEPTA bus. I only put one or two songs to music, but mostly it was lyrics. Awful, awful lyrics. I also rarely showed what I had written to anyone, except, maybe, Mike. He wrote, so he understood. He wouldn’t judge or laugh, which are the normal things your friends would do. We had classes from time to time during our high school run. During the times we hung out, I met one of his friends, Jay Davidson, who knew Mike for a while. Eventually, we began discussing jamming together. Mike and Jay were very good on guitar. I’m terrible at piano, but better vocally than them. I know chords to piano and try to play it like a rhythm guitar. I can read music, but not well. I can’t read and play at the same time. I was never like that. I only know enough to amuse myself. Still do. But my knowledge, or just my general interest was enough to get together.

We first jammed in the fall of 1997 in the basement of Jay’s apartment building in Center City, after school. I had told my mom I was staying after school, I just didn’t mention where. Going to Center City by myself on the subway would’ve given her a heart attack. We only gathered there once, but when we did jam, we recorded everything on cassette tape. We did this, “for the eventual Anthology”. It was only myself, Jason, and Mike. We played in a dank basement with cockroaches falling on the drum cymbals and water dripping everywhere. It was awful, and even worse playing. It was awesome. Although we only played for a couple hours, we decided we would have to do this again, but maybe at a better location.

I believe we got together the following spring in ’98. We convened at Mike Meyers’ dad’s place on Castor Avenue in the lower northeast. he was at work for most of the day, as were the neighbors. We all had off on a weekday, as it was Spring Break for all of us in college. I was going to Penn State Abington at the time, so I had not yet moved up to University Park. I brought along Joe Sweeney, who worked with me at Genuardi’s, a local supermarket chain. He brought his whole drum kit, and I remember going over some Billy Joel songs we were going to play, along with maybe Pink Floyd, or Genesis, whatever was vaguely familiar to us. We had the whole day to jam.

The living room setup was a drum kit, two or three guitars, keyboard, microphones everywhere, and all feeding into a four-track mixer and a two-track cassette recorder. I don’t know where Mike got all the equipment, but he had it. It took about two hours to setup once we arrived around 8:30am. Not fun at all, especially that early in the morning when you’re supposed to have the week off from school. We ran through a bunch of songs. I sang on most of them, even though I barely knew the words. When the other guys started to jam, I tried to follow along on the keyboard, but if not I made sure we were recording in case we could overdub something on it later. Mostly, it would either be a jam, or try to bang out a song. At the end of our first jam session, either Mike or Jay started playing a riff and I got on the mic and crooned, “Buttered aaaassssssss, came into the store today...” I started ad-libbing lyrics and nearly made Joe choke on his Gatorade.

The term “buttered ass” was coined by a guy Joe and I worked with at Genuardi’s. His name was John, but we all called him “Sauce” because he always showed up drunk or half in the bag. One day, he came into work, fresh off from vacation in Jamaica. He said, “Man, you should’ve seen all the buttered ass on the beach!” That became the term du jour, in the grocery stock room, for the hot women that would come into the store from time to time. A guy I’d work with would say, “Spilled butter in aisle 12. Go check it out.” And I would to find a piece of ass, buttered ass, in the aisle. One notable female was Mel Toxic’s wife. Mel Toxic was a jock on 94 WYSP at the time, and his wife (or so I was told it was his wife) would come into the store once every two weeks or so. When she came in, the grocery back room was in a frenzy. It was the highlight of our day. The guys in frozen food would shamelessly flirt with her, especially Phil Saurman, who looked like Adam Sandler’s friend in The Wedding Singer.


So after I had nearly ad-libbed a whole song based on the term “buttered ass”, we rolled tape and did it again and came out with nearly a fully produced song. That was the last thing recorded on our first jam session. Over the next year and half, we got together three or four more times, just making stuff on the spot, covering songs we knew (or barely knew) and recorded just about everything along the way. All in Mike’s dad’s living room. We recorded a bunch of stuff and came up with some good songs. A lot of the songs were instrumentals or covers. We always did come back to re-recording “Buttered Ass” as the structure of the song became more and more refined. By the end, it turned into a nearly seven minute song. We had only gotten together a few times, since our schedules with work and school never aligned. The last time we got together was in 2000 where my roommate Erik joined for an acoustic session (Joe couldn’t make it, so no drumming was had). Once again, everything was committed to tape.

In the copies of the cassette tapes I have (I lost one of them over the years), we covered and made up a few songs, which I eventually made into a compilation called, “The Evolution of Buttered Ass” where four takes would go through the album and you’d hear how the song progressed. I then recompiled it for iTunes a little over a year ago. I still love listening to the songs. It’s a reminder of the fun I had doing it ten years ago. Here’s the tracklist and some songs we did that got left off my compilation (yes, the links will provide you with the mp3... listen at your own risk):

1. “Ready to Rumble” - An intro I did during a session where I did my best Michael Buffer to the day of recording. It also made a good test to see if we were actually recording
2. “Buttered Ass” (take one) - The take we did after I ad-libbed the song and decided we needed to commit it to tape. The song’s story is about a woman walks into a grocery store, and the stock boy follows her while she’s shopping.
3. “Sometimes A Fantasy” - Billy Joel cover that I did a decent job singing. It finishes with a long guitar jam.
4. “Linus & Lucy” (Peanuts Theme) - Does EVERY band cover this at some point? I didn’t do a thing on this track, so I made sure we were rolling and did nothing else.
5. “Disco Song” - Some jam we did where afterwards I gave it that title since it kinda-sorta reminded me of a disco beat. It really doesn’t. Instrumental jam where I’m on keyboards. Mike made up lyrics to it, but we never tried to tack them on. I often sing nonsense words over it in the car.
6. “Buttered Ass” (take two) - Added a guitar solo, but still had rambling lyrics as I tried to name something for every aisle of the store. Added the lyrics, “What’s a poor stockboy to do/I’m just a part-time guy looking to full-time love you” Genius.
7. “Going Solo”
8. “Bullet the Blue Sky” - The first part of the track, I threaten to quit the band and go solo recording all the instruments. That segues into the U2 song. I never heard the song before and was told how it basically goes. I did my best Load-era James Hetfield on the track. I now use the song as my “Off the Air” podcast intro music.
9. “Jam Session I” - I took the best bits from two of our long jam sessions. This one featured the Spy Hunter Theme, a band intro, and The Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction”. I ddin’t know the lyrics to the song, so I made some shit up.
10. “Buttered Ass” (take three) - Added an instrumental intro and it was our first time through the final structure of the song.
11. “Instead of A Hinge, It’s A Spring” - Jay Davidson instrumental recorded in between songs.
12. “Jam Session II” - Cobbled together bits of songs we did into a medley, since none were good enough for it’s own track. In pieces, it works nice. “You Don’t Know How It Feels”, “The Joker”, “Pressure”, “The Ocean,” and “Down on the Corner” were represented in the jam.
13. “15 Minutes” - A song I made up at Genuardi’s when I noticed I had fifteen minutes left in my shift. The song lasts twenty seconds, but also signifies there’s fifteen minutes left in the album.
14. “Rocker” - Joe, Mike, and Jay go off in a instrumental jam.
15. “White Flag” - One of the originals Mike and I made up. He was strumming something in between songs when I filled in a melody on the keyboard. It took off from there. I wrote lyrics to the song, but it sounded awful in every way when I tried to dub them over. I hated the lyrics (the title came from those lyrics), but love the song itself. It’s on the songs I can play on the piano today.
16. “Buttered Ass” (final) - The last, best, complete take of the song in the last jam session we had together. I’m pretty sure we closed the session with the song, as I said in the beginning of the track, “Ok, the one that started it all...”
17. BONUS TRACKS from "Acoustic Jam 2000"
    
    
    • “Oregon Trail/Down On the Bayou” - During the acoustic jam session, we recorded this original instrumental. I started on the piano with this riff that sounded a little like the Old West, so it go the title of the old computer game we all played. That went into this swamp-rock thing we just dubbed “Down On the Bayou”, before it closed with the Old West theme.
    • “Hey Hey What Can I Do” - Instrumental version of the Zep song. Never got around to overdubbing lyrics
    • “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” - We did record vocals to this song along with the acoustic backing, but for the life of me, I can’t find either version. Good thing, since my vocals were way, way off.

I’ve had these recordings for over ten years. I can’t speak for the others in the band, but I rarely ever played those songs for anyone. I’m not sure if I need two hands for the number of people that have listened to most of these tracks. I don’t want to go into the psychoanalysis of myself yet again, but I guess unless I only wanted to share it with people who played instruments. They’d understand better. Plus, I’m my own worst critic, since all I heard was how it could’ve been better. So don’t feel bad that I never played any of these for you.

It’s not you, it’s me.

Really.

I’ve only begun to appreciate it for what it was, which was a whole lot of fun. I’ve jammed and played with other people since, and that was fun, too, but it wasn’t the same. Sure, we wern’t a real band. We never had gigs, but it was fun, and there’s physical evidence of said fun! It’s quite an experience when you can have three, four, five people on the same page hammering out a song. It happens all the time in garages, so you can imagine how hard it is when you get to the point of playing that it actually sounds good. But when it happens, even for just a few moments, that’s the kind of magic you’ll remember for a lifetime.