While the Red Devils may not have been hugely successful, they had a lot of industry heavyweights
in their corner including ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons, Mick Jagger, Johnny Cash and Rick
Rubin. With only one album to their name the Red Devils history would be full of, drugs,
in-fighting, betrayal and death, Today let’s take a look at the history of legendary blues
act the Red Devils.
The Red Devil’s history can be traced back to a mid 80’s band a roots/punk rock group
The Blasters that included drummer Bill Bateman.. But Bateman grew tired of the Blasters inactivity
and soon put together a loose collective of blues musicians in 1988. They’d go through
a few name changes including the stumblebums and subsequently blue shadows with Bateman
telling the LA Times he wanted to make a rowdy presentation of the blues.
One of the musicians who started playing with Bateman’s new band would be future Red Devils
frontman and harmonica player Lester Butler who had been playing music since he was 6.
Butler, who once referred to himself as “Spicolli’ sean penn’s character from fast times at
ridgement high used to play for crowds in parking lots and took inspiration from musicians
like howlin wolf, muddy waters, ccr, aerosmith and jimi hendrix. Butler would tell the LA
Times in 1992 “I always loved music,” “And ever since I was a 6-year-old kid,
I used to play harmonica. I heard blues one night, like everybody does, late in the evening
on the radio, and I loved it. I played a lot in high school, but I quit for a while.”
If there was any foreshadowing of what trouble butler would get himself into he would tell
a journalist according to loudersound “Remember in the seventies when they said cocaine wasn’t
that addictive? I was a good argument against that bullshit further elaborating to the indianpolis
star in 1992 “During the ’80s, the reason I didn’t play music was I was severely addicted
to heroin and cocaine. I had to learn to get off that, you know?” I think people who
come to near-death experiences do learn a little bit from that. Hopefully, I can pass
a little of that on through my music to everybody else who’s either at that point or might
be going to that point in their life. By 1988 Blue Shadows would get a weekly monday
night residency at a former chinese restaurant turned bar in west hollywood named King King
where they’d play a dozen or so blues covers. The gig paid $200 per musician. Rounding out
the lineup was Bateman’s roommate bassist Jonny Ray Bartel, his elder brother Dave Lee
Bartel and a variety of lead guitar players who sat in with the group. Soon enough news
spread about how good the performances were and even the LA Times were writing about the
group. Their shows soon attracted sold out crowds and famous musicians and celebrities
including bruce willis, members of motorhead, red hot chili peppers, zz top, black crowes,lenny
kravitz, ac/dc. Billy Gibbons would tell Loudersound about the band. “Oh man, they were quite
an outfit to be reckoned with,” “I was running hard at the time with one of the ZZ
Top dancing girls – they called her the Alley Cat because she was always crawling
about. She lived close by the King King, and I became a regular there on a Monday night.
And who should I make friends with in those days but Rick Rubin. He was hanging out and
took an interest in the band.”
Rubin had split from his New York based label Def Jam in 1988 with whom he had famously
signed Slayer and Run DMC to and headed out west. Where he stablished new label called
Def American. The band would sign several high profile acts including the black crowes
and Danzig, and soon enough the Red Devils would join the list.
Rubin would end up seeing the band upwards of 60 times before signing the group, but
his offer of a recording contract came with two conditions: they had to change their name
(it wasn’t commercial enough) and they’d have to find a permanent lead guitarist. The
bartel brothers took the name Red Devils from a bnd they had previously played in when they
were kids and Rubin thought it would be commercial enough and through the grapevine they heard
about a blues nerd from Texas guitarist Paul ‘the kid’ Size. Size would tell the LA
TImes “For the last five years I was a blues nerd, man,“I didn’t play nothing but blues,
didn’t listen to any other kind of music. I came out here and started playing with these
guys, and now I’m into all of these other kinds of music.”
Bateman would add the LA Times upon being signed “We’re aggressive with the music
that we play,“We don’t lay back and play it like the other white blues bands of our
era, who play it with a smooth, jazzy swing feel. The black men of yesteryear were very
aggressive and on it. There was no laying back.
“Elmore James screamed his guts out. Now Lester Butler screams his guts out. We play
it tough. Rick Rubin liked that, saw some potential there,”
The band didn’t do note for note recreations of these covers playing them loud and hard
with Butler adding to Tulsa World “A lot of blues players are such (adjective deleted)
purists that they lose the whole idea of the music,” said Butler in a recent telephone
interview. “The idea of the music is not to recreate it, but to make it evolve, like
Muddy Waters did.
Rather than cutting their first studio album Rubin wanted them to cut a live recording
which they did a 12 song live LP called “King King”. The recording was culled from three
live performances by a truck parked outside the the king king from the summer and fall
of 1991 and featured blues classics and some original tunes with a mobile .. The LP would
be released in the summer of 1992. It was in the spring of 92 Rubin was working with
Mick Jagger on his third solo record Wandering Spirit. Rubin would convince Jagger to go
see the band perform at King King and the frontman even joined the group on stage. Soon
enough Rubin caled Red Devils to join him and Jagger in the studio for an improtup recording
session yielding 13 cover tunes during a marathon 13 hour session. The project would however
be shelved by The Stones frontman who thought it sounded too rough and instead wanted to
pursue something more commercially viable. But the band’s label thought The Red Devils
would be the next big thing. The des moines register who did a profile on the band in
1992 would write “the group fears falling into the jaws of overpromotion. Bartel says
the label’s management has visions of the band as something like the next rolling stones.
Bartel says he tells them humbly ‘we don’t write songs that good man, please don’t
hype us like that. We really just want to play on the road and be musicians, instead
of the next big thing.” To promote their live LP Red Devils paused
their residency at King King and hit the road supporting acts including ZZ Top and The Allman
Brothers. The band’s friendship with actor bruce willis resulted in the group being the
house band for the old planet hollywood restaurants. But the band quickly ran into trouble with
Bateman telling Loduersound “We were rowdy guys,” “We went out for 120 days straight
and there were all kinds of illegal things going on – drugs, fights, hookers, cops,
jail, you name it. One of us was bound to end up dead. Lester had actually clinically
died four times in previous years. On one occasion he woke up in the morgue with a sheet
over his head. It was his opinion that he led a charmed life.”
To his bandmates Lester was mean spirited perfectionist drug addict. At one point he
told Rick Rubin he wanted to replace every member of the band, but the producer wouldn’t
have it.. Soon enough disputes over how the band members were compensated resulted in
Dave Lee Bartel leaving the band during a gig in Dallas They would find a temporary
replacement. and limped through the rest of the tour with a friend of Paul Size filling
in, but the bad blood was still in the air. Bartel would end up rejoining the band and
they would do a 1993 trek through Europe but the end was near. Lead guitarist paul size
quit having had enough of butler’s behavior, but Rubin still had one last project in mind
for the band, being the backing band for Johnny Cash’s upcoming album. Bartel would tell
loudersound about those sessions with Cash “He was a proper gentleman,but the tracks
sounded better with just him and his guitar, and that’s how Rubin put them out.”
In-fighting, drugs, bitterness, jealousy and a lack of ability of the band to put together
a proper studio album led them and to losing their recording contract with Bartel adding
to Loudersound “Lester stole a bunch of money off us and
wiped the band out,” claims Bartel. “We were broke and having to sleep on our fans’
couches. It was strictly his greed that took us out – that and drugs.”
In the subsequent years the former members found day jobs while still playing music.
Butler would start the outfit 13 who put out a a sole record in 97 and did some shows and
achieved some fame in Europe, but he was worse for wear according to those close to him as
he further went down the rabbit hole with his addiction. In 1997 he would be interviewed
about a new zealand music mag the real groove and railed against rehab stating I spent every
penny I had to straighten myself out without going to rehab.to which the magazine asked
RG: Rehab is a rich man’s prerogative? LB: Oh, it’s pathetic. I love my brothers
in NA, but I’ve lost more friends coming out of rehab because of its spring effect.
Rehab crushes that spring down, and then they get out, and booiinngg! It’s really sad.
I mean, I can laugh about it now, but… Butler would credit his last overdose which led him
to seeing God who told him to keep creating music as being the inspiration for getting
clean.
By 1998 he was crashing at Bateman’s with another woman using hard drugs and alcohol
and while the exact story of what happened is unclear, he would die due to an overdose.
However Butler’s sister would contend her brother overdosed because he was clean for
a long time and had a low tolerance to drugs. In May of 2017 The red Devils would reform
with a Dutch blues singer named ‘big pete’ touring europe opening for ZZ Top.