By Jan Beecher ~~

On a gentle west coast evening, Todd Butler is opening the Islands Folk Festival at Providence Farm near Duncan, BC. I have just arrived along with a thousand or so other people for a weekend of music and festival-like festivities. It’s Butler’s job to get the show started and get the crowd “in the mood,” and he does it extremely well. By the end of his set a full audience has gathered and we are dancing, clapping to the beat and, of course, laughing.

Butler is funny. He hits on hippies and parents and wrestlers. In all honesty, my mp3 isn’t loaded with parodies, but who doesn’t enjoy good a laugh?

And then the jester on the stage plays “Home.” It’s about moving from the prairies to Vancouver Island. It isn’t funny — it’s strong and emotional and it blows me away.

That’s the thing about Todd Butler: he isn’t just another funny guy.

He isn’t even just another festival act. This month, Vancouver’s Firehall Theatre premieres Debt –The Musical, a spoof on the theme of bankruptcy written by Vancouver playwright Leslie Mildiner, with songs by Butler. His migration from concert stage to the theatrical variety has been a long time in the works — 19 years, to be exact. The two started collaborating on the project while working as street entertainers in Whistler, BC in 1991. Maybe their dedication to the subject has something to do with the fact that both have lived it.

“There’s a song in the musical that’s called ‘Down Under Ground,’ says Butler, “and it’s about basement dwellers, people who live in basement suites. You buy a house, mortgage up the ying-yang; then you fix the basement suite up and rent it out to some college student or some young couple; and they pay your mortgage. So this is happening all over, and then the economic downturn comes and the house value goes way down, and the young couple in the basement can now afford to buy a house and become above ground dwellers and get their own basement dwellers. Then people get so far in debt that they lose everything and they end up back in the basement. So it’s kind of like this circle.

“And I lived that. So did Leslie.”

Now living in Courtenay, BC on northern Vancouver Island, Butler isn’t a complete stranger to theatre. His father sang with the Edmonton Opera and also ran the Alberta Opera Touring Association, which toured the province, performing productions for schools and communities. Todd toured in The Mikado with them, and also performed in musicals in high school. “I did Oklahoma, Kismet, Carousel, and, in grade 12, I played Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof,” he remembers. “[Musicals were] the reason I stayed in high school.”

But it’s his pickin’ that first brought him professional notice. Butler may have made his name as a satirist, but it’s his prowess on the guitar that earns him praise from his peers. “He’s a nimble fingered maniac,” says Spirit of the West Drummer Vince Ditrich, who also drums for Butler’s band. “It’s both his blessing and his curse that he is clever and funny.” Ditrich has known Butler for a long time. “We’re both ‘recovering Albertans,’” he says. Ditrich had heard of Butler long before he met him, “because he is a brilliant musician. People see him on stage and they go, ‘Oh yeah, that’s Butler, he’s the comedian,’ then they go, ‘Holy shit! he can play!’”

Ditrich compares Butler’s conundrum to that of Steve Martin — a famous comedian who is also an exceptional banjo player. Did you know that Steve Martin used to play for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band?

Butler has never worked at anything but music. Well, almost never. “I worked three weeks as a construction schlepper. That’s it. I’ve always made a living as a musician, mainly in bars and pubs. When I got out of high school I went on the road with a rock n’ roll band and just never looked back.”

The comedy came naturally after that. “I guess I have always been able to write satire,” he says. In the late ‘90s, Butler got his big national break thanks to the Vancouver Comedy Festival, where he was a street performer. “I was doing a one-man satirical comedy show — some impressions, some parodies, some satire and stuff — and playing the guitar.” When CBC Radio producer Brian Hill turned to the festival for talent to put on the west coast leg of the radio show “Madly Off In All Directions,” its director gave him Butler’s name.

“Brian called me and said, ‘Would you like to be on ‘Madly Off In All Directions’ with Lorne Elliott?’ and I said, ‘Sure, I’d love to.’ Hill called him every year after that, for the show’s duration. “Whenever they were in western Canada, he would call me and I would be on the show. There were years I did it twice.” He even hosted the show when Elliott took a brief sabbatical. Butler boasts, “I actually hold the record — the show’s been cancelled now, so the record is untouchable — I hold the record for the most appearances on ‘Madly Off In All Directions.’”

Around the same time Butler started with “Madly Off,” he sent a parody he’d written to CBC’s morning show in Vancouver. “It was when Chretién choked that guy? I wrote a parody of a Steve Miller song called “The Joker,” and I called it “The Choker.” And I sang it as Chretié n.” Butler assumes a frighteningly accurate Chretié n voice and croons, “Some people call me the space cadet/ Some call me the gangster of Hull.”

The producers loved it. They invited him in to do a piece about Vancouver and before long they were calling him on a regular basis. “I did a show just about every week — some of them live over the phone,” says Butler. “They’d call me: ‘Todd, you know the salmon are blah, blah, blah . . . do you have any ideas?’ They made it sound like it was off the cuff, but actually they’d phoned a couple of days before. I’d put the phone down and sing into the phone.”

Another CBC connection was a co-producer for “Madly Off In All Directions,” Tracy Rideout. She moved on in her career to become head of comedy acquisitions for the national radio network and brought Todd’s music with her. “I’d produce something, record it, and send it to her and she’d send it out to all the bureaus across Canada.” Early in 2009, Butler sent her “Turkey Gravy,” Billy Bob Thornton’s “Q” debacle, “and it got played all over the place; the whole country was playing it. So the door’s still open for me there. I backed off a bit because it’s fairly time consuming and I’m working on other things.”

“Other things” include his less comedic ventures.

“I‘ve tried to get into the major folk festivals and I haven’t been able to crack it. They just won’t hire me yet. I don’t know why that is, but I think it has something to do with my penchant for parodies. I do a lot of the local festivals like Powell River. I’ve done Powell River eight years in a row and Vancouver Island Music Fest. I did the Calgary Folk Fest too, actually.” Some people would say that the latter is a major festival, but them are mere prairie folk. Apparently Butler has his eyes on even bigger stakes. He wants to be recognized as a guitarist and songwriter, not a musical satirist.

“Home” is perhaps Butler’s most well known song outside of the parody genre. He calls it his micro-hit. “And that’s thanks to one man, David Grierson. Unfortunately, he passed away. David had a morning show in Vancouver, and he asked me to come in when he heard that song, “Home.” And I thought ‘Okay, do comedy,’ because they always wanted me to do comedy, and he said, ‘No, I want you to play that one.’ So I did, and then he was really instrumental in getting that song out.”

Grierson included “Home” on a CD compilation of all his guests, including Canadian favorites like John Mann and Spirit of the West. “All these artists who are serious artists — he put me in there with them, and that really helped to expose people to the fact that I [do other music]. So now I’m really pursuing that.”

Witness his last couple of albums, Idle Canadian and Hamburger Soup. In addition to two CDs with slide guitarist Doug Cox, Butler has released another three of his own, of which only one, Todd Butler Goes Madly Off – Live, a compilation of songs and stand-up from his radio gig, is strictly comedic. Idle Canadian, on the other hand, is a collection of, as Butler describes them, “socially conscious songs.” Social consciousness, mind you, sometimes requires an even bigger sense of humour than parodies. Consider these lyrics from “Bushed”:

I’ve been terrorized, been hypnotized
I’ve been Osama lobotomized and I’m Bushed
From getting’ Dicked around
I been Rums-felled, been Colin-poled
Been Saddam down that rabbit-holed, and I’m Bushed
From gettin’ Dicked around

Socially conscious? Yes. Funny? I’m afraid so.

Next page: “I’ve dug myself into — like everyone else — a financial situation that needs to be fed. It’s this monster that’s in the corner”

On his latest, Hamburger Soup, Butler has tried to further squelch his laughabilly half by making the album strictly instrumental, but again — consider the title. He’s still fighting off the ha-ha’s. Looking at the track list on the album still wasn’t enough to convince me this wasn’t just another collection of parodies: “Drooling Idiots,” “Funky Mormon,” and “Mr. Bumpy” to name a few. But once I listened to “Squirrelly,”, another cut off the album, my opinion changed. He calls this music his own genre, Frazz: a mishmash of jazz, folk and rock.

Cox and Butler have known each other since they were both 18. They met at the Edmonton Folk Festival. (Is Edmonton a “Big Festival” I wonder?) I asked him about Butler’s “music versus comedy” conundrum.

“Todd loves to get a response from his audience and he’s a master at soliciting a response,” says Cox. “I think music often takes a little more time to reach the crowd than his [parodies] and he has a bit of a hard time fully trusting his musicianship when he can reach out and grab his crowd faster with a funny bit.

“His comedy routines often overshadow his musicianship,” Cox continues, “But they have also allowed him to maintain a career while living in a fairly isolated place, so I think it’s both a blessing and a curse for him.”

In other words, being funny has paid the bills for Butler. This may seem surprising since much of Butler’s fame has come from working with the CBC and we all know that isn’t going to make anyone rich. But Butler’s main income is from the corporate entertainment circuit, where he puts together shows for conventions and meetings. It’s easy money.

“I customize a few songs for these things,” he explains. I just did the Canadian Association of Engineers. So these big engineering companies – their CEOs and their wives – are having this big conference up in Whistler. I spent about three days working on songs for the engineers: researching their vernacular; what the issues in the industry are and how I can make that funny; talking with them on the phone, finding out who can I pick on in the crowd.”

“That takes priority for sure,” Butler confesses. “That’s my bread and butter. ‘Cause there’s no cheque comin’ in unless I get out there and do something. And I’ve dug myself into — like everyone else — a financial situation that needs to be fed. It’s this monster that’s in the corner that, if I don’t feed it, is going to eat my house.”

That financial monster is the same one that inspired Leslie Mildiner to write Debt, around the time he met Todd in Whistler “I had a tune back then called ‘You Got a Degree,’ Butler recalls. “It’s basically about over qualified people who can’t find jobs in their training. You know, professors pumping gas, that kind of thing.” Mildiner heard the tune and shared his idea for a musical inspired, in part, by his own experience of bankruptcy. They started work together. Mildiner would write a scene and send it to Butler and Butler would write up a tune to go with it.

They performed a workshop version of Debt at the Vancouver International Comedy Festival, with five actors and three musicians. The show was well received, but not well enough. Though Mildiner recorded the performance and worked hard to promote it, there were no takers. In 2007, they tried another line of attack.

“We re-tooled some of it and did a workshop, literally just a reading of the show, and invited a whole bunch of people down to see it,” explains Butler. “We videotaped that as well — made a DVD of it.”

Finally, Firehall decided they wanted to put it on.

Butler admits it was hard to keep excited about Debt’s success when it took so long to be picked up. “It’s frustrating. Almost to the point where I thought, ‘Well, Debt’s not going to happen.’” This was one of the few times in his life that his comedy hadn’t provided instant feedback.

In retrospect, Butler is grateful for the long wait. He’s had a chance to be away from the songs he wrote for Debt and now can take a fresh look at them and give them a final polish.

“Since I found out they were going to re-do the thing in an actual theatre, I’ve been re-visiting all the songs. And I’ve matured as a musician quite a bit in the last 10 years, so I’m just making it a little better. Taking each tune and playing with how I can improve it. Working with the more experience that I have now: on the harmony, the delivery, the timing, and all that.”

This is Butler’s first venture into writing musicals but he likes it enough that he has others in the works and is even considering writing one of his own.

“I’ve been writing notes on the first five years of my touring life. Like when I first got out of high school, playing the northern Alberta bars? Some unbelievable experiences — people just would simply not believe them.

“I saw some things that were so funny and so ridiculous, playing in Fort McMurray and Grande Prairie.” He shakes his head as he recalls, “I remember watching people get knifed — some of the most horrendous violence you could imagine at some of the biker bars.” Sometimes he’d be the act following the strippers. And he slept in some pretty scary places too. “You wouldn’t put a dog in some of the accommodations I was put in.”

And so begins another stream of the Todd Butler consciousness. Will he perfect musicals as skillfully as he has guitar and comedy? Perhaps.

Doug Cox sums it up best when he asks, “What happens when the class clown has a deep, talented artist lurking inside?” Todd Butler.

“Debt – The Musical” plays January 8-30 at Vancouver’s Firehall Theatre.