Long-running San Antonio artpop- rock band Buttercup is known for staging unconventional performances. Over the years, the trio has performed on a float, in a dive bar at 7 a.m., as mannequins in a window and on a bed in their pajamas.
For one of the more memorable shows, its live performance was shown on tiny convex TVs at the bottom of four oil drums for a show called Buttercup in a Can. Now, 20 years later, the group will recreate the approach for an event it’s calling Can/Cant, scheduled for Monday, Oct. 28, at La Zona Art Everywhere Popup Gallery.
Like last time, Buttercup will place TVs inside 55-gallon drums, and the crowd will be prompted to mill about the containers to see small, isolated segments of the live show. Also like last time, the band will play its set on premises in an undisclosed location.
Buttercup is comprised of singer Erik Sanden, guitarist Joe Reyes and bass player Odie. The band has been producing what NPR called “jangly art rock for the left side of the brain” since 2004.
The act’s first canned performance was in its early days. The process of hooking up the notoriously finicky technology and what Sanden described as “making it work right up to the moment” was captured in the documentary Goodbye Blue Monday by Charlie Roadman with camera assistance by Adam Lyons.
Speaking with the Current, Sanden said he didn’t realize it had been 20 years since the iconic performance until he purged an accumulation of stuff in the band’s practice space, including DVDs of Goodbye Blue Monday.
Odie, who also plays in NASA Country with Garrett T. Capps, salvaged the DVDs from the garbage. Noticing the date on the sleeve, the members of Buttercup realized the anniversary was coming up.
Odie spearheaded the project to recreate the performance, even obtaining grant money from the city to make it happen, according to Sanden.
Unlike last time, when the project came together over a chaotic couple of weeks, the band has been slowly working on the process for the past few months.
“I’ll be able to get sleep the night before,” Sanden said. Sanden pointed out that he and documentarian and collaborator Alejandro De Hoyos have been driving around on bulk pickup days to gather old TVs.
Instead of the four TVs used last time, Buttercup will have considerably more this go-round. On one particularly fruitful scavenging expedition, they picked up seven TVs in one day.
Even so, the TVs can’t be more than 14 inches wide or tall or they won’t fit in the oil drums. The band plans on activating the entire space at La Zona by utilizing other types of containers, including coffee cans, in unexpected ways.
Sanden said he originally got inspiration for the performance from artist Bill Viola, who created a piece in which a TV at the bottom of a trash can displayed video of him sleeping.
The band also owes a debt to artist Chris Burden, Sanden noted. Unbeknownst to attendees at one of his gallery exhibits, Burden hid in an on-site loft the whole time, hoping that his presence would somehow be felt and imbue the space with an uncanny feeling.
Buttercup took this alchemy of inspiration, but filtered it “through pop rock, taking a band’s performance and dissecting it,” Sanden added.
Need to perform
For Buttercup in a Can, each TV showed a live feed from a separate camera, trained on a separate band member. Cameras periodically zoomed in on someone’s foot, hand or mouth, isolating body parts. The desired effect was to make the performance feel “alien, distant and voyeuristic,” Sanden explained in Goodbye Blue Monday.
“We were interested for a long time in how we can change how you listen to a band,” Sanden said of Buttercup’s unconventional approaches to live performance. “We wanted to provide different kinds of shows. We thought this could be a way we could fracture the experience.”
Sanden said performance has always superseded almost everything for the band. For example, it released the Buttercup in a Can DVDs before dropping its first album. When live shows dried up during the pandemic, so did Sanden’s desire to write music.
The singer-guitarist said he sees music as a Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs pyramid, composed of writing the song, recording the song and performing the song.
“They feel like separate things but if you take out the performance, the whole pyramid falls apart,” he said.
Sanden added that he loves to perform and feed off the crowd’s energy. Performing on radio shows, for example, makes him even more nervous, because of the absence of an audience.
Of course, that begs the question why someone who craves an audience connection would deliberately alienate and separate his band from its audience via video screen.
“Maybe there’s some perverse flagellation, because it does sort of hurt me,” Sanden said.
Though much of Can/Cant will repeat elements of Buttercup in a Can, things have changed over the past two decades — something the band will acknowledge with this reprisal.
“Since we did this 20 years ago, we’ve lost a lot of people in our friend circle and our band circle,” Sanden said.
De Hoyos’ wife Monica will make an ofrenda in one of the barrels since the performance is so close to Día de Muertos, which is also Sanden’s birthday.
“We are doing this thing that’s slightly preserved in amber,” he said.
Though Sanden doesn’t know how many people attended Buttercup in a Can, he remembers notable attendees.
“Ram Ayala came, the owner from Taco Land. That made me feel so good because he was someone you really didn’t see outside of Taco Land,” Sanden said. “So for him to shut it down and come to our thing on a Monday was really special.”
Just because Buttercup has done its “canned” performance before doesn’t mean it’s not without technical risks. The band has procured most of the necessary gear but still needs to test some of it out.
“I’m pretty confident in our ability to respond to an emergency but not confident there won’t be one,” Sanden said. “We don’t know exactly what will happen, and that’s part of our artistic process.”
$20 suggested donation, 8 p.m. Monday, Oct. 28, La Zona Art Everywhere Popup Gallery, 337 W. Commerce St., (210) 225-3862.
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This article appears in Oct 16-29, 2024.
