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Artist
Butch Willis & The Rocks
12+ albums
outsiderrock
about
In the mind of Butch Willis, he and his group The Rocks are the fledgling equivalent of Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, Bruce Springsteen and the E-Streeters, or even the latter-day Rolling Stones. They are straight-ahead AOR hard rock, with a lot of sheen and only a little tiny bit of gristle. To just about everyone else, however, he and The Rocks are closer to a poor man's 13th Floor Elevators, Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band, or 1/2-Japanese when they were first starting to tackle the rudiments of chord formation. As evidenced by the two albums he released on his own Love label in the mid-1980s, Of and Forthcomings, Willis and his revolving-door band of D.C.-area musicians are anything but pedestrian. They are, in fact, extreme outsiders in the world of pop music, about as outside as you can get and still be breathing. Like the aforementioned gods, Willis lives more in the universe in his mind than in the physical one. After all, would Seger ever think to hire a full-time band member whose sole duty is to stand there and chop at his throat while warbling vocal tones? The range of Willis' material extends from the sublimely ridiculous ("Kitty Cat," "TVs From Outer Space," "Pizza On My Jeans") to the ridiculously sublime ("The Girl's On My Mind," "Everything's Alright," "The Garden's Outside"), with not many alternate modes in between. At their best, The Rocks are capable of generating a surging undertow of rhythmic noise over which Butch can pour out his distende
