RE: [Harp-L] Worthy Lester Butler video clip

[Ryan Hartt <rhartt1234@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Regarding nascent Red Devils...

I first saw the Red Devils on TV in 1991. I was flipping channels and happened upon a E! channel special for the grand opening of the first Planet Hollywood they should a quick clip of Bruce Willis playing harp so I decided to stick around and see if there was anymore music. Towards the end of the show they showed about a minute of the Red Devils and it blew my 16 year old mind! Lester was blowing a jump in E and playing breaks ala James Cotton et al. I've seen it and done it a million times since but it was something else at the time. At the end of the tune Bruce Willis announces "Lester Butler and the Red Devils". The show was on about a million times that month so I taped it, which I have since lost and I keep waiting for that bit to show up on Youtube. Lester and some permutation of the Red Devils played at a lot of the Planet Hollywood openings and were featured in a few more E! specials. 

I was thinking "Those guys have to have a record out." and filed the name away and kept scouring record stores. One day, about a year later, I was in my local Record Town and there it was "The Red Devils - King King" I was pshyched. As I'm walking to my car and unwrapping the tape I see it on Def American. "Wait a minute. Isn't that a Rock label?" and then I saw it was produced by Rick Rubin. "Wait a minute. Didn't he produce LL Cool J and the Chili Peppers?" I was convinced I had bought the wrong band...until I popped in the tape. That record has a certain mystique about it. It is one of my all time favorites.  
Ryan


> Date: Wed, 7 Jan 2009 02:47:14 -0800
> From: Spschndr@xxxxxxx
> To: harp-l@xxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [Harp-L] Worthy Lester Butler video clip
> 
> Checked the archives and found no mention, so thought I would give the
> list a heads-up on a Youtube clip recently put up, I believe, by Scott
> Dirks.  It's the Blue Shadows featuring Lester Butler in 1991, shortly
> before they became the Red Devils and got a record deal.  Lester looks
> impossibly young, charismatic, and doomed; one can see how he and the
> band could have been mesmerizing to be in the same room with, enough
> so to cross over with their contemporaries in the grunge scene.  (It's
> not often remarked that the Fabulous Thunderbirds were comparably
> popular with their punk, rockabilly, etc. contemporaries; your peers
> in other genres will know if you are really doing something and taking
> chances.)  Remarkable alertness, interaction, and intensity by all the
> players: talk about moving to the groove.  Maybe things were already
> going wrong, but this clip shows what the fuss was about--it's hard to
> do that stuff any better.  If you love the Red Devils record, you've
> got to see this clip.  Hope the URL doesn't get mangled, search Lester
> Butler and Blue Shadows if it does:
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RRXKJOo0xU
> 
> Stephen Schneider
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