Butch Willis & The Rocks has been played on NTS in shows including Henry Rollins, featured first on 29 September 2015. Songs played include The TV's From Outer Space.

In the mind of Butch Willis, he and his group The Rocks are the fledgling equivalent of Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, Bruce Springsteen and the E-Streeters, or even the latter-day Rolling Stones. They are straight-ahead AOR hard rock, with a lot of sheen and only a little tiny bit of gristle.

To just about everyone else, however, he and The Rocks are closer to a poor man's 13th Floor Elevators, Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band, or 1/2-Japanese when they were first starting to tackle the rudiments of chord formation. As evidenced by the two albums he released on his own Love label in the mid-1980s, Of and Forthcomings, Willis and his revolving-door band of D.C.-area musicians are anything but pedestrian. They are, in fact, extreme outsiders in the world of pop music, about as outside as you can get and still be breathing. Like the aforementioned gods, Willis lives more in the universe in his mind than in the physical one. After all, would Seger ever think to hire a full-time band member whose sole duty is to stand there and chop at his throat while warbling vocal tones?

The range of Willis' material extends from the sublimely ridiculous ("Kitty Cat," "TVs From Outer Space," "Pizza On My Jeans") to the ridiculously sublime ("The Girl's On My Mind," "Everything's Alright," "The Garden's Outside"), with not many alternate modes in between. At their best, The Rocks are capable of generating a surging undertow of rhythmic noise over which Butch can pour out his distended psyche and "throat guitarist" Al Breon can uvulate like there's no tomorrow, contributing a warp factor along the lines of Tommy Hall's electric jug playing with the Elevators.

Willis' skewed perception of his own artistry notwithstanding, he clearly fits into the realm of the classic outsiders of modern music, and while his output might not yet find him on the same plateau as Tiny Tim or The Shaggs, surely he is right up there alongside the likes of Bongo Joe and Shuggy Rodelle. The songs are exciting, the lyrics entrancing, and Willis' quavering voice and wavering posture are like watching a hobbled old lady trying to cross a busy intersection against the light. Add to that a Maryland twang ready-made for a John Waters Dreamland production and -- should you be lucky enough to catch him live, or at least on videotape -- his unabashed sartorial splendor, and you've got the makings of one of the great ones.

(From songpoemmusic.com's interview with Butch Willis