Drawn from the pages of July’s Relix, here is our feature on the John Butler Trio. In addition, if you haven’t seen it, click here to check out John Butler’s recent solo acoustic performance at the Relix office.

THE SEARCH

In a clearing in the thick bush of Western Australia, John Butler sits alone picking his guitar, playing to the most influential audience he has ever had: the spirit of his long departed grandfather, John Francis Butler, who died at the very spot Butler is playing while valiantly fighting a forest fire in 1958.

In a hotel room in snowy Sofia, Bulgaria, the young Butler looks through the snowflakes at the war memorial that sits on an island in a traffic rotary. The statue is a magnificent testament to the will of the Bulgarian people, but to John Butler, it is personal as his great, great grandfather and his extended family made up part of the original freedom fighters that fired the first salvo of the “April Uprising” against the Ottoman Empire in 1876.

Close to his hometown of Fremantle, Australia, Butler goes on a walkabout through the shanty town where his great grandmother once sang for the pennies that were thrown at her in order to provide for the family of eight that she was raising alone. He discovers that, as a teenager, he was a busker on the same dusty streets.

All of these experiences helped Butler answer a rather philosophical but basic question: If you don’t know where you’ve been, how will you get to where you are going? His genealogical journeys were part of an episode of the television show Who Do You Think You Are? that traces a celebrity’s family tree to reveal their own lineage (the episode aired in November, 2009). Butler, as introspective as musicians come, was profoundly affected by the experience to the degree that it changed his internal compass. He finally stopped his meandering and pulled his career path into focus.

“I got to walk and tread on the lands that my forefathers and foremothers worked hard on and fought hard on and died on,” Butler explains months later in Brooklyn where he’s holed up with family before leaving to go on tour. “That kind of stuff is profound for a human being, especially somebody like me. Cerebrally, we all know the importance of roots. But to feel it in a metaphysical and spiritual kind of way, it was overwhelming.”

While retracing his grandfather’s roots in Australia with his father Darryl, cosmic and unexplainable discoveries unfolded – finding a fresh water spring just feet away from where his grandfather burned to death or realizing that the market closest to where his great grandmother toiled in squalor is where he sold his first recording, which included the song “Searching for my Heritage.” Butler has never followed the beaten path to music stardom, maybe because there isn’t one leading from where he hails.

The tool that Butler used to woodshed his way out of Fremantle was the dobro guitar that once belonged to his deceased grandfather, his namesake. His rise from playing in the streets to selling homemade cassette tapes in the late ‘90s to becoming a platinum-selling artist in his native land in less than five years is nothing short of miraculous. A veteran of Bonnaroo, New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and a mainstay at Australia’s East Coast Blues and Roots Festival, Butler’s made the most of the opportunities given to him.

Butler declares that his newfound genealogical discoveries didn’t sway his artistic vision, but rather supported it. “All of the revolutionary spirit on the album was already there,” he says. "A lot of the songs on the new album like “One Way Road,” were already written. It made sense to call the record April Uprising. I learned that 100 years after the uprising in April, I was born; last year, I changed my band in April; this year, I released an album in April. In the amount of change and transformation that was going on in me and around me, I have revolution, evolution and transformation melded all into one."

The sonic results of April Uprising free Butler from the shackles of being labeled as something he is not. But how to avoid being pigeon-holed required introspection and action.

With April Uprising, Butler set out to be seen as more than a protest singer and jamband picker supreme. He wanted to make his mark as a songwriter who can work effectively in any style he deems fit – from power pop to punk rock.

“As the artist, you think you are the center of the song universe,” says Butler. "I realized the minute I took myself out of the center, I could put the song in the center and I can serve the song.

Butler recorded 23 songs for the record and whittled it down to a still- hefty 15 tracks.

“It made for different music, because there were times when my ego wanted to play something else. My ego wanted to do some finger pick hybrid. But the song said, ‘Can you play G, C, D and A down on every beat, like a thousand and one songs before? But can you do this for me, because this is what is going to work for me?’”

The celestial direction paid dividends for Butler, providing him with a paradoxical departure from his past, more jam-driven works. Tracks such as the hopeful yet brooding opener “Revolution” and the tender album closer “A Star is Born,” are as disparate as anything he’s ever done.

His chance of finally catching one of his favorite bands, Rage Against the Machine, in Lisbon had a direct and immediate impact on him musically-and it’s on full display with “Come on Now.”

“I would hate to see a world without punk,” he says. “I’d hate to see a world without fucking energy. That’s why my music is the way it is. I’ll fucking play an acoustic song and then I’ll wanna fucking rock out. Maybe it’s been to my detriment because I’m not just one thing. But for me, you need fire and you need water.”

Through the making of April Uprising, he learned something that some artists are never open enough to ultimately learn. “Art is not meant to satisfy or serve me,” Butler says with certain sense of enlightened wisdom. “I’m meant to serve the art.”

The week we sat down at multi-purpose concert venue Brooklyn Bowl in New York, the manmade ecological disasters of the oil spill the Gulf of Mexico and the massive oil tanker ramming into Australia’s Great Barrier Reef weighed heavy on minds, not just with “the greenies” but with regular people, too.

Though Butler counts social justice organization Oxfam International as “family” and is a staunch supporter of the Sea Shepherd Society, to be defined as a human being is more important to Butler than any label that comes with being an “activist” or “rock star.”

“I haven’t seen myself as an environmentalist or a political activist or a socialist,” he says dismissively. “I find it really hard to believe the ideas of clean air, clean water, justice, peace, freedom and respect are a political or environmental point of view. To me, it’s just politicizing common sense.”

Butler sits upright, with his long fingernails hanging over his clenched hands and says, “I don’t understand why you have to be an environmentalist, a political activist, a social activist, a women’s lib activist or a peace activist to fucking want those things. I think we all want those things,” he says as he slumps back into the couch, exasperated.

“Maybe why I’m so fucking passionate about it is because it’s from my background. But it comes from that I’m a human being and why wouldn’t I want those things?
“We need these bad things to happen to fucking get it,” he saying bristling. “Man is so arrogant. Why would we not learn from anything but disasters? We think we’re God.”

His vitriolic response is largely tied to his family – that through society’s callousness, his children’s well-being is being endangered. Family takes precedence over everything for Butler, even before he was aware of family-devoted bloodline. Stepping into the role of patriarch is what his great, great grandfather did as a teenager – when he deserted the Australian Army in World War I to take care of his youngest siblings, only to be court marshaled for it later. It’s what his grandfather did that fateful day in the bush, protecting and serving and dying while doing it.

“Raising a boy to be a man – it brought up a lot for me,” says Butler openly. “I started analyzing what I thought manhood was and it wasn’t pretty. It was that old, dark stuff of fucking violent war-mongering politician, male chauvinists,” he relays.
“In having my son Jali, I suddenly had to redefine what manhood was, find a new definition and then stand up into manhood and actually become a man for fucking once. The focus and the power of the album came a lot from just discovering my manhood to a certain degree.”

Butler knows that the most effective and conscientious thing he can do as a father, activist and artist is to be an example to his kids, by constantly doing the right thing by them.

“It made me realize that if you want to be the most potent activist on the planet, you need to raise healthy children who have analytical minds and who are not gonna be another fucking problem on the planet. That’s the biggest thing you can do – the responsible thing to do.”

Photo by Dave VannOn a day when the terror alert level reached orange in New York City after a suspected terrorist tried to denote a car bomb in Times Square and the nastiness of Australia’s racial politics keeps getting uglier over reconciliation with Aboriginal tribes over disputed land use, Butler has channeled his anger. These and other issues have Butler thinking hard and fast about appropriate actions and reactions, and the response he routinely comes to has been said and sung before: “All You Need is Love.”

“The bravest thing to do is to stand up against the fear and hatred, not fight back at it, but fucking love it,” he says moving his arms toward the ceiling. "That’s the biggest fucking thing.
“It’s easy to fight, it’s easy to hate, there’s nothing brave or very inspiring about that. The hardest thing to do is to love. The hardest thing to do is to face your fears and stand up and be brave.”

To himself, Butler’s defined by everything that encompasses his life: his family, his music, his belief system, his story. But he knows he walks a fine line between being an entertainer and a socio-cultural provocateur.

“I’m not a preacher,” he declares. “I’m part of a very sacred and very special ritual. I’m part of that and I use it to change lives and I use it to change my own life and when those people come and have their lives changed and give their love, I’m being changed as well. I’m a part of that transformation and that is the underlying spirit underneath my art.”

He’s not in it for fame. He’s not in it for the money. He’s not in it to satisfy his ego. He’s not in to be the poster child for Australian rock or the jamband representative of Western Oz.

Heck, Butler didn’t even know that he sold close to 500,000 albums in America his last go-round on the acclaimed release, Grand National. His passion for making music and changing lives means more to him than making radio friendly songs (which, by seeming happenchance, he does).

“That’s what gives me energy – knowing that this is why I’m doing it,” says Butler. “If it was for my coke addiction, my sex addiction, my huge ego addiction or for my fifth wife’s breast implants or something like that, it wouldn’t have so much substance for me. I’d probably do something else.”

April Uprising is the record John Butler wanted to make – needed to make. It may sound like a departure from his signature sound to most, but to him it represents a greater artistic achievement and, perhaps more important, the certainty that he will be able to use his art to provide for his growing family.

“I can support myself and my family by doing my art,” he says with a tangible sense of conviction. “Feed them, cloth them, put shelter over their heads – that’s a fucking rare thing. There are millions of artists out there and only one percent of them are able to support themselves doing what they do. That’s how I keep it all in perspective.”