TRIPPING FOR THE GREATER GOOD

SPACE BUTTER

Track Listing

  1. It Comes Tomorrow (feat. Hilary Paige)
  2. You Won’t Hear This Anyway
  3. There Are No Words

Re-released 2019

At least 100,000 people made it to Haight-Ashbury for 1967’s “Summer of Love,” but Space Butter’s bandleader Henry Wilson wasn’t one of them. Originally from Farmington, New Hampshire, Wilson had hitchhiked as far as Keystone, South Dakota by the time Ken Kesey and co. held the symbolic hippie funeral and told seekers like Wilson to stop coming west and to start spreading the social revolution wherever they happened to be. Taking the message literally, Wilson was arrested after scaling Mt. Rushmore, gluing gigantic googly-eyes to each of the presidents and using wire and purple cellophane to turn Theodore Roosevelt’s stodgy stone glasses into hip, round tea-shades.

Eventually settling in Los Angeles’s secluded canyon enclave of Topanga, Wilson met and fell in love with neighbor and future-wife/drummer Cookie Komatsu after unsuccessfully attempting to save her pet cat from a marauding trio of hungry coyotes. The attack, which happened as Wilson was recording an early, bare-bones version of “Dark Blue Star-System,” was captured in full by his still-recording reel-to-reel machine and was later used by Komatsu in her hugely-controversial, blood-soaked gallery show “This Is What Death Sounds Like.”

Space Butter’s single full-length studio record, 1969’s fuzzy masterpiece Galaxy II, was never released commercially in Wilson’s lifetime and was only widely discovered after his mysterious death in 1990.

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