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Ryan Butler was 19 and playing guitar in two touring bands on the heavier end of the musical spectrum Wellington and Unruh when he lost his mother to Wilson s disease, a genetic disorder in which excess copper builds up in the body and eats through the liver.
He had just turned 43, the age at which his mother died, when a doctor confirmed what Butler had already long suspected.
He, too, had contracted a disease so rare a liver doctor told him he would more than likely be the only Wilson s patient the doctor s staff would ever see.
This was in August 2019, after six years of regular visits to a hematologist for what he says were really low platelets, a sign of a liver disorder.
Phoenix has a history of strange, left-of-center bands: groups like The Beans in the late 1960s, who later morphed into the Tubes; the Spiders, who would become Alice Cooper. Even the often-copied guitar sound of Duane Eddy in the late 1950s was considered to be weirdly revolutionary in nature at the time.
When punk rock came to town, a whole new tribe of musical miscreants became standard-bearers for weirdness, and bands like Sun City Girls, Meat Puppets, Jody Foster’s Army (JFA), and Our Neighbors Suck (ONS), just to name a few, let their freak flags fly in the 1980s and beyond. Is it the desert sun, the water, or our penchant for mind-bogglingly dimwitted and self-sabotaging politics? Who knows. Whatever it is, though, the music of Phoenix and its surrounding suburbs is, and probably always will be, different.
“We ve always been noisemakers. I mean, even in the studio, you know, we ve got so many things to play with. That s how [
The Fickle Finger of Fate, Crover s first solo album] started with the little weird things and this one kind of has the same stuff, but I made them a little bit different,” Crover says over the phone.
Diehard Phoenix fans may recall hearing Crover s band play many of the songs off
The Fickle Finger of Fate when they opened for Redd Kross at Last Exit Live in December 2018. It seems, though, that revisiting the solo world was a foregone conclusion for the Los Angeles-based drummer.