Aug Stone writes for The Quietus and The Comics Journal and his latest novel, The Ballad Of Buttery Cake Ass, recently made Vulture’s Best Comedy Books of 2023 list. The book is his ode to obsessive record collecting and what it’s like to be in your first band. It’s very funny but also a love letter to music. Comedian Dave Hill has said it’s “like being taken on a rock n roll road trip by Holden Caulfield with a head injury in the best of ways.”
Aug Stone will be in Portland on Thursday July 20th to do a reading at Music Millennium at 6PM.
Here’s a plot synopsis for The Ballad of Buttery Cake Ass:
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.”
