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Hot Butter

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

Hot Butter was an American studio group from New York, active from 1971. The linchpin was keyboard player Stan Free, a trained jazz pianist who had previously played in Gershon Kingsley's First Moog Quartet. Kingsley had written Popcorn in 1969, a short instrumental piece for the Moog. In 1972 Free recorded it again with Hot Butter. That version became a worldwide hit and brought the sound of the synthesizer into the charts of half of Europe.

Music and breakthrough

Popcorn lasts two and a half minutes. The Moog plays a bouncy melody of short, clipped notes, one note at a time. Underneath, drums, bass and guitar play like an ordinary pop band. The single was released in July 1972 in the United States on Musicor and reached number 1 in the Netherlands, West Germany, France, Switzerland and Australia, among other countries. In England it reached number 5, in the United States number 9. In France and Switzerland it was the best-selling single of 1972. The group then also recorded Apache and Tequila with the Moog.

Influence

Popcorn kept coming back. Jean-Michel Jarre recorded a version of his own under a pseudonym in 1972 and drew inspiration from it for Oxygène (Part IV) (1976). Aphex Twin made a techno version of it in 1992 as Caustic Window, and in 2005 the Crazy Frog version spent seven weeks at number 1 in France. The song shows how the synthesizer entered pop: first as a cheerful sound on top of an ordinary band, later, with Kraftwerk and the synth-pop of the 1980s, as the band itself.

Listening

Listening tip. In Popcorn, listen to the Moog: it never plays a chord, only single notes one after another, because the synthesizer was monophonic. Because of the short, clipped attack, each note sounds like a popping kernel of corn, while drums and guitar simply carry on as in any pop single.

Discography

Studio albums

In School of Rock

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Mentioned in other articles

See also

Sources

  1. Wikipedia (en): Hot Butter
  2. Wikipedia (en): Popcorn (instrumental
Categories: ArtistsMoog and the first synthesizer pop