The Buttertones: Walking Up And Rocking Out

Elizabeth Flores – The Buttertones
The Buttertones just played two nights at The Fonda in their home market of Los Angeles Oct. 10-11.

Garage rock band The Buttertones has been toiling out on the road since forming in 2012 but, with its high-energy show gaining steam and some added touring muscle from ICM Partners, momentum has picked up to the point where the band had to add a second show at the Fonda and is seeing big crowds as far as Denmark.

“In a year’s time between two album cycles we grew this artist from playing small clubs in their niche demographic in SoCal to closing the Sonora Stage at Coachella, selling out the Regent (Theatre DTLA) in 72 hours to putting up this tour in the fall, their first headline national tour going across the country,” said ICM Partners’ Brandon Zmigrocki, who also books colleges and clubs in the Northeast U.S. for the agency. 

 Those two album cycles were for 2017’s Gravedigging, released on indie label Innovative Leisure, whose sales and marketing head Chris Werner is also the band’s manager, and the latest album Midnight In A Moonless Dream, which dropped in May to positive critics response and comparison to classic garage bands like The Cramps and The Sonics as well as contemporaries like King Gizzard And The Wizard Gizzard and prolific axe-man Ty Segall. 

 “It’s just been a great story to watch them develop in this way,” Zmigrocki said. “It’s not about gimmicks and there hasn’t been a lot of radio. It’s been literally completely music- and- tour- driven.”

 The Buttertones kick off another tour leg at The Masquerade in Atlanta Nov. 23 hitting venues including Exit/In in Nashville, Crescent Ballroom in Phoenix and Barracuda in Austin, before winding back to the West Coast with four more shows in Southern California. 

 Buttertones bassist and co-founding member Sean Redman previously handled a lot of the band’s booking and, while he says they developed some good relationships in the process, routing a tour wasn’t exactly their forte. 

 “We played some pretty grimy places but it was worth it to get out the door,” Redman told Pollstar. “About a year and a half of go, when our album Gravedigging came out, ICM came calling and said, ‘Hey do you guys want to do this?’ We said, ‘Yes, thank you, please.’ An artist booking their own tour is a pain in the ass, let me tell you.”

Getting a dedicated booking agent was a big weight off the band’s shoulders. 

“There were actual contracts involved, and guarantees, not just walking into the show and hoping to walk out with 100 bucks or something,” Redman said, laughing. “It’s just the business is straight this time, working with an actual agency. That takes a lot of stress off of us. They have great ideas when it comes to where do we go and when to do it, and coming back to places we’ve already been and growing the business in different ways.”

The band has proven it can sell a hard ticket, but the fans may take a minute to get around to it, Zmigrocki says.

“They did their first show in Las Vegas this summer,” Zmigrocki said. “We pretty much sold it out and on the day of show about 300 people walked up. The audience the band has across the country is very dedicated but they buy last minute. Once we get to two weeks out, sales grow exponentially.

“When routing the tour, we say ‘This will be fine, this will go. We’ll do this!’ And I feel great about it. But then I start to get nervous, every single time. We just get together with the marketers and the band to make sure everyone is hitting it hard,” Zmigrocki said, mentioning two shows sold out at the Troubadour in Los Angeles as an example. 

“We couldn’t go into a second show if not at 75 percent sold by Thanksgiving,” Zmigrocki said. “I knew we would get that second show.”

Regarding one recent highlight, Redman says Coachella can impress even the most jaded touring musician.

“It’s Coachella, and not necessarily just another festival,” Redman said. “It’s a beast of an operation. Just being on that lineup is a huge achievement for us and something we don’t take for granted. It was just fantastic. It’s the best production value you can get, really, out of every concert I’ve seen and played. No one brings that many experts to one place to run a good show.”

 For 2019, the band is looking to grow its audience, perhaps as part of a package tour or support slot for a major artist. 

“I think for 2019 we’d like to try to start the year off in the support slot for a group that’s kind of beyond us, I guess,” Redman said. “We’ve been doing headlining tours for two years now, growing really well in that department, but I think it’s time we break into some bigger rooms and bigger audiences. It’s exciting because I feel like there’s a pretty broad array of bands we could fill a bill with.”

 While touring can be a slog, even with nicer venues and better deals, Redman says he’s all about life on the road.

“I can only speak for myself, but I personally love it,” Redman said.  “I kind of grew up in the tour life anyway, being in a different city every night. It’s brutal but healthy, too, in a sense that you learn not to get too attached to things and be able to just grab [your stuff] and go at a moment’s notice. “It’s like chaotic structure, there’s structure where you know you need to be in, say, fucking Denver the next day,” he says, laughing.