Will Butler (To Live a Lie Records)
SPB: What’s your favorite music-related film or documentary?
Butler: Most of the time I respond to a question and ramble off all the potential ones until I arrive at a conclusion. To save you me actually mentioning ten movies before I get to the one I've chosen I'll just go ahead and give you the most influential music-related film that I discovered in my early years. I want to remind you that there are some very un-PC parts of this movie but I never thought they were done to glorify what they were showing, but more to just show parts of life. Either way I don't condone those parts of the movie. The movie is 1983’s Suburbia. It was done by the same director who did Decline of Western Civilization but I never ran across that movie as a kid and, to this day, have only seen pieces of it. Anyway, Suburbia always made me think of a more punk version of Lost Boys for some odd reason and it was my first time hearing the band D.I. and gave me a deeper look at T.S.O.L., who I thought were awesome at age 14. The Vandals are also featured in this movie but not very prominently and this era of the band was definitely the best. Overall, an influential movie that showed punks as punks and was way better than what other major movie chains offered as “punk” movies that were more on the cyberpunk edge like Hackers. Don't make the mistake and watch the 1996 movie with the same name and don't waste your time seeing the very unrelated SLC Punk.
