Hot Butter
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Hot Butter was an instrumental cover band fronted by the keyboard player Stan Free. The other band members were Dave Mullaney, John Abbott, Bill Jerome, Steve Jerome, and Danny Jordan. The liner notes to the CD reissue do not indicate who played what, aside from Free at the Moog synthesizer. Indeed, the notes say the band was Free and "a bunch of fellow players". Based upon the photograph and the sound of the album, the group had two additional keyboardists, two percussionists, and a guitarist. They are best known for their 1972 cover of the Moog synthpop instrumental "Popcorn", originally by Gershon Kingsley in 1969.
The group released two albums, Hot Butter (Musicor MS-3242; 1972) and More Hot Butter (Musicor MS-3254; 1973), primarily of covers, on LP by Hallmark Records. The two albums were compiled on CD as Popcorn by Castle Music in 2000 (with a cover from the 1974 Australian release of More Hot Butter titled Moog Hits, depicting the five other band members immersed in melted butter produced by Free's synthesizer), though several tracks, including Roger Whittaker's "Mexican Whistler", were deleted. The only tracks written by members of the band were "At the Movies" (the B-side of "Popcorn") and "Tristana", by all the band members except Free, and "Space Walk", by Dave Mullaney and his brother. "The Silent Screen (Hot Butter)" is credited to all the members save for Free, but it is actually an arrangement of the main theme of the first movement of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Symphony No. 40. Among the other artists covered by the band were Stephen Schwartz, Jerry Lordan and The Shadows, Neil Diamond, Joe Meek and The Tornados, Neal Hefti, Serge Gainsbourg, Robert Maxwell, Piero Umiliani, Jean-Joseph Mouret, Billy Joe and The Checkmates, Joe Buffalo's Band, Teo Macero, Leroy Anderson, Chuck Rio, and Norman Petty and The String-A-Longs. Mullaney and Abbott did most of the arranging. The Jeromes, Jordan, and Richard E. Talmadge produced the albums with MTL Productions for Musicor.
After "Popcorn", their best known track is probably August Musarurwa's "Skokiaan", which was included on RE/Search's compilation, Incredibly Strange Music. Follow-up singles included The Shadows' "Apache", Chuck Rio's (Danny Flores) "Tequila", Billy Joe and the Checkmates' "Percolator", Joe Buffalo's Band's "Slag Solution", and Gene Farrow With G.F. Band's "You Should Be Dancing".
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