Art professor Brian Butler was not always on a career path toward teaching. Both Brian and his brother, Steve Butler, attended Rowan University back when the name was Glassboro State College, Steve as a music major and Brian as an art student. Though, initially, Brian Butler used to be quite a different kind of artist.

As teenagers, Brian and Steve Butler started a band with some friends. Almost three decades later, the brothers still record music together.

“My mom taught me,” said younger brother Steve Butler. “I was about 9 years old when I started playing ukulele and moved to the guitar around 10. Our mom was a pianist and a singer/songwriter and also an artist so she taught Brian and I to draw and paint.”

“When I got a little older, my brother asked, ‘can I be in a band with you?’ and I promised him I would,” Brian Butler said. “We were 13 and 18, and we stayed together our whole lives.”

Little did Brian Butler know, it was a promise that would change their lives.

Their band, then called Quincy, featured Brian Butler as the lead singer and Steve as lead guitarist. Quincy was signed to its first record deal in 1980 after being discovered through the iconic NYC club CBGB owned by musician Hilly Kristal. The club became known as the basis for careers of punk rock and New Wave bands including the Ramones, Talking Heads and Blondie.

“We auditioned at his club when he was making a live album,” Brian Butler said.

Various record companies were invited to see the bands and propose offers. The band was signed to Columbia Records, receiving one of the biggest deals the company ever offered to a new band on the scene.

The songwriting duo’s lack of professional experience may have left them feeling bewildered at first, but they had clearly done right by the record company’s standards.

“When we first started out we sort of said, ‘let’s pretend like we’re songwriters’,” Brian Butler said. “We just trusted our instincts.”

There are two kinds of bands: cover bands that play other musician’s work and original bands that perform their own songs. The brothers cited influences that created their unique sound from the British Invasion, including The Kinks and The Beatles.

“With your own music, people aren’t as easily accepting at first,” Brian Butler said.

“If you write a song and it sticks in your head, that’s what any hit song has,” Steve Butler said. “If you have to hear it 10 times before you remember it, it’s probably not a good song.”

In those days, releasing a band’s original work was a vastly different process.

“When an album came out back then, it cost a fortune,” Brian Butler said. “You could barely break even. The most money you made was on tour.”

“Touring is a lot less romantic in reality,” Steve Butler

said. “It’s a lot of hard work. You’d drive to city, play a show, get back on the bus and drive to the next city. So you don’t get to see much. Brian could never sleep on the tour bus so he’d be out of his mind by the middle of the tour. Otherwise it was a lot of fun. We mostly toured with a lot of English bands when the ‘Quincy’ record was out.”

Originally, Brian Butler’s ambition was to simply perform music he loved. The icing on the cake was collaborating with other reputable musicians. Their original A&R [Artists and Repertoire] personal record handler was Paul Atkinson, the guitar player for The Zombies.

Eventually, the band left Columbia Records, but the Butler brothers were far from done with their music careers. With plenty of talent to spare, they founded a new band, Smash Palace. Steve Butler was the one who came up with the name.

“We booked a show at a local club after Brian and I had just left Quincy and the club owner asked for a name,” Steve Butler said. “I told him, ‘we don’t even have a name.’ He needed to know by tomorrow to run the ads. So I looked in the TV Guide and saw the name Smash Palace, a New Zealand film about a junkyard.”

A year later they were signed to Epic records.“It’s like winning the lottery when you get signed,”

Butler said. “But then it’s like you’re on the first rung of the new ladder and you have to go up the ladder again. You have to have talent but a lot of it is luck too, not just talent.”

The band’s first single under the new name, released in 1985, was “Living on the Borderline” and was soon made into a music video shot at the Hollywood Club in California. British director Nigel Dick, who also directed the Band Aid charity super-group, “Do they know it’s Christmas/Feed the World,” as well over 300 well-known acts, directed the video.

Most of Brian Butler’s students found out about his career as word of the vintage music video spread among students. Senior BFA illustration major Ray Urena believes this is because Brian Butler is very humble about the subject.

“He’s very laid back and modest,” Urena said. “It wasn’t ‘smash your guitar on the ground’ kind of thing. He was loose and jamming. He has an easygoing mentality in class and I can see where that comes in seeing the video.”

“In the video he’s full rockin’ out,” said Joshua Olivero, a senior graphic design major. “I was shocked, it blew my mind. He looked like a professional singer. He had the clothes, the purple suit and big hair. It had that old school ’80s feel.”

Despite his passion for music, Brian Butler felt the business end was disillusioning. However, the brothers still continued their auspicious songwriting partnership by signing a contract with BMG publishing in the ’90s without the performance aspect.

After Butler decided to shift his career toward teaching art, his brother stayed with the band, but Brian couldn’t resist coming back to record some tracks in the late ’90s at his brother’s home studio.

“We’ve been writing together since we were kids,”

Steve Butler said. “We usually come up with a hummable tune without lyrics. Lyrics come last. Usually we need the melody and a bit of the structure. We sit there for hours working on lyrics, which is the really hard involved part. You have an inspiration for the song but you have to deal with the structure, things that rhyme and sounds of words. That’s the time-consuming part.”

“When we co-wrote songs together, we could finish each other’s sentences,” Butler said.

“We’re so close and we know each other so well, we can literally finish each other’s sentences,” Steve Butler reiterated. “It’s really a blessing and it’s something I don’t take for granted. Instant chemistry is not always there.”

Smash Palace had a new CD backed on an indie label where Brian Butler was a full-time member until 2003. Since then, they have released an album about every 1-and-a-half years.

Since the older Butler brother left, he’s been working as an adjunct professor in Rowan’s Art Department teaching Intermediate and Advanced Illustration and Digital Media & Techniques.

“I’m a full-time musician, whereas Brian is an art teacher and he’s always been an artist,” Steve Butler said. “He goes back and forth. Brian writes with me pretty exclusively whereas I write with different people. We’ve been lucky that we’re still pretty prolific. We’re always thinking ahead. As soon as you get one done you take a couple months off and you’re on to the next.”

Brian Butler still sings a few songs per album, does backing vocals and uses his other skills to make artwork and design CDs for the band. Shaun Haughey, a senior fine arts major, similarly works on band art, so Brian Butler has offered his input.

“He’s always suggesting music to me,” Haughey said. “I have his CD on my iPod, ‘Unlocked.’ I think one of the students before even had one of his songs as a ringtone.”

Steve Butler continues to promote and perform gigs with the band, even performing in the rebuilt Cavern Club in Liverpool, England.

“It was really exciting. To me The Beatles were the greatest rock ‘n’ roll band ever and that’s where they started,” Steve Butler said. “It’s a very famous club and going to England and playing was great, it was a great reception. The recording contract we have now we got by playing there.”

Smash Palace was recently featured on WHYY’s On Canvas, a music program that records live bands at local venues. The band will be releasing the live On Canvas album as its ninth album since the band began recording again. To get a taste of the music legacy and to see some of Brian Butler’s album cover illustrations, visit the band’s website at SmashPalaceMusic.com.

For comments/questionsabout this story, email

featuresassistant@thewhitonline.comor tweet @thewhitfeatures.

Thursday, February 21, 2013

7

Features EditorSamantha Safchinskyfeatures@thewhitonline.com

Erica AveryAssistant Features Editor

Brian Butler takes center stage as the lead singer at the Tin Angel club in Philadelphia, Penn. -Photo courtesy of Howard Pitkow Photography

The cover for Smash Palace’s seventh album, entitled “7,” was illustrated by Brian Butler and released in the summer of 2010 under Zip Records. It is modeled after the album “Revolver” released in 1966 by The Beatles, one of Smash Palace’s influences. -Photo courtesy of smashpalacemusic.com