Two music obsessives embark on a hilarious quest to track down Buttery Cake Ass’ Live In Hungaria, an album as legendary as it is obscure. Their pursuit of one of the greatest bands ever unknown takes them down many a bizarre path teeming with grand ideas and grander egos in this ode to record shopping and what it’s like to be in your first band. Packed with puns, allusions, and references across a wide range of culture, both popular and not, Stone offers up a big slice of the fun and frustration of playing rock n roll. “When we were 15, my best friend and I used to make up fake bands to ask for at record stores,” Stone recalls, “and the day I heard him ask the clerk at Cutler’s in New Haven, CT if they had anything by Buttery Cake Ass was a moment of euphoric glee that I will never forget. Writing The Ballad Of Buttery Cake Ass was an attempt to capture the sheer joy and inventiveness of comedy back then, circa 1992, before irony seemed to set in everywhere a few short years later and the goal switched to making people groan instead of eliciting genuine full-on ecstatic laughter. In the process, I got to re-examine my own obsessive record collecting through a new lens as well as revisit the ridiculous aspects of playing in my first few bands, bringing me to a greater appreciation and love for both.”
“Aug Stone's The Ballad Of Buttery Cake Ass is like being taken on a rock n roll road trip by Holden Caulfield with a head injury in the best of ways.” – Dave Hill, comedian
“The Ballad of Buttery Cake Ass kneads digression into the temporal substance of an emerging truth far richer than anything baked in the ovens of Pynchon completists. It is the really real of the event itself. Reading about music really ought to be full of all kinds of felt intensities and a longing for this fruity tapestry of vibrant matter is the reason that The Ballad of Buttery Cake Ass came into being and must be read by your eyes.” – Mikey Georgeson, David Devant & His Spirit Wife
“Aug Stone! Top of The Pops! I loved this book.” – Eddie Argos, Art Brut
The Ballad Of Buttery Cake Ass will be available on February 9th, 2023 in all good book and record shops worldwide, as well as online in physical and digital formats
AUG STONE is a writer, musician, & comedian. Author of the memoir Nick Cave’s Bar and the comedy novel Off-License To Kill, his journalism has appeared in The Quietus, The Comics Journal, Under The Radar, and many more sites and magazines. Aug was a founding member of H Bird and The Soft Close-Ups, and has played in countless other bands. He performs comedy as absurdist stream-of-consciousness raconteur, Young Southpaw.
