Chris Butler

Chris Butler

Chris Butler is a US rock musician, writer and artist, born in 1949 and associated with several bands including The Waitresses, Tin Huey and Life in a Blender. He grows up in Ohio and studies sociology at Kent State University, where he is among the students present when the Ohio National Guard fires on demonstrators on 4 May 1970.

Band work

He first gains attention as guitarist in Tin Huey, an experimental rock and new wave band from Akron, Ohio, which forms in the mid to late 1970s. Butler later leads The Waitresses, an experimental new wave band active in the 1980s, and is credited with writing all of the band’s songs.

His songs for The Waitresses include “I Know What Boys Like”, “No Guilt”, “Christmas Wrapping”, “I Could Rule the World, If I Could Only Get the Parts”, and the theme tune for the television sitcom Square Pegs. The Waitresses become his most commercially successful project.

Other work and projects

Butler holds a Guinness World Records title for the longest pop song recording in history, a 69-minute piece called “The Devil Glitch”. The project later expands online under the name The Major Glitch, with the aim of adding to the song over time.

He produces Freedy Johnston’s 1989 album The Trouble Tree and plays guitar on some of its tracks. He also runs Future Fossil Music/Future Fossil Records, which releases his first full-length solo album, I Feel A Bit Normal Today, in 1997. He lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Instruments and later activity

In 1987, Butler sells his musical gear, including “Bebe Blue”, a Vox Teardrop electric guitar used on “Christmas Wrapping”. More than twenty years later, he buys it back from a music shop after it has passed to a buyer in Belgium, although he is not fully convinced it is the same instrument.

He also plays with The Cranks, Half Cleveland, Purple Knif and the reformed Tin Huey.