Austin dance band did the accidental boogie.

By Michael Corcoran AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF Thursday, July 03, 2008 Confessed Harry Potter fan Scott Butler, who sings, plays guitar and wears lead mustache for Austin pop/dance band Black & White Years, is either taken with flights of fantasy or his band, not yet two years old, has a most incredible history.

Here's some of what Butler expects us to believe during a 45-minute phone interview:

1. The band attracted the attention of producer Jerry Harrison (ex-Talking Heads) during a South by Southwest 2007 showcase in which Harrison and his wife composed 40 percent of the entire audience.

2. The band's first drummer was Steve Ferrone of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, who's also backed Black & White Years faves George Harrison and Duran Duran. (This is a little like losing your virginity to Scarlett Johansson.)

3.And here's the whopper: The quartet once got a music industry crowd to dance.

Astonishingly, these claims all check out. The SXSW show was in a big tent outside Opal Divine's on West Sixth Street, with only the band's managers, Butler's girlfriend and the soundman in attendance when Jerry Harrison strolled in at the halfway point.

"We looked up and there he was," says Butler, 25, a native of Longview."He looked exactly like he did in 'Stop Making Sense.' " The rumor is that Harrison read a review of the Black & White Years that compared them to Talking Heads and so he turned up to see whether that was accurate. But Butler thinks Harrison simply listened to the band's self-produced demo, which had been mass-mailed to anyone in the music industry who might be interested.

Two months after SXSW, Butler, guitarist Landon Thompson and bassist John Aldridge were in California laying down tracks with Ferrone for their self-titled album, which features the regional radio hit "Power to Change." A mix of disco, ska, new wave, surf guitar and angular funk rock, Black & White Years sounds like no other band in Austin and, truly, only a little like Talking Heads.

"I think the main comparison is that David Byrne set out to write songs about subjects that songs weren't being written about," said Butler. "That's kind of what I try to do, though I lean more toward anthropology and world history."

The band used programmed drum beats in the beginning, but Harrison wanted a live drummer for the record and tapped Ferrone. To better duplicate the record live, B&W hired Tyler native and human metronome Billy Potts to play drums.

Potts' first show was at the MIDEM music conference in Cannes in January, where the band was one of the surprise hits of the festival. "When the band before us came off stage they said, 'Good luck, fellas,' " Butler recalled. "The crowd was pretty dead." But after the B&W gang busted out such rock/disco numbers as "A Wetter Sea," with its series of "whoops!" coming from the early days of MTV, and the melodic knee-bender "Zeros and Ones," the show inspired a sea of dancing badges.

"The thing we kept hearing over and over was that we didn't sound like a Texas band; we sounded French or Irish," says Butler, who had never heard of MIDEM, the SXSW of Europe, until the band's management said they were accepted. He was also unaware, he said, that there was a growing indie dance band movement overseas.

B&W started sounding like a trendy band quite by accident. The three members, who met in 2002 while attending Belmont College in Nashville, moved to Austin together in 2005 and formed a Beatles-inspired folk/rock band called the Trees. After a falling out with their drummer, Butler, Thompson and Aldridge bought a Roland synthesizer and started using programmed drum loops. They called the new project the Black & White Years after an encyclopedia entry about the early era of television. The name has caused several reviewers to remark how "colorful" the sound is.

"When I write songs, I don't write them to be dance numbers," Butler says. "I write them to be songs." Indeed, such tunes as "Lighten Up the Letters" and "A Dense History" could work in a coffeehouse set. And the lyrical darkness of "Hysterical Sickness" is a bit heady for feet music.

But the drum machine took them in a whole new danceable direction. "First of all, the tempos went up in every song," says guitarist Thompson, a native of Plainview. "Plus we were forced to think about our music in a more loop-based way."

The band was so wedded to keyboard drums that they were reticent about using a live drummer, even one who once provided the beat for the Average White Band. "It was a little dicey in the studio at first," recalls Butler. "It's really hard to listen to your sound being changed, but we're Texans. We're polite. We figured, 'Let's just go along. These people know what they're talking about.' " After all, the record was being mixed by E.T., the noted Eric Thorngren.

After five weeks of recording, the band came back to Austin, where they received the new mixes by e-mail. "It sounded so different from the Black & White Years," Butler says. "It was a trying time for us." Butler flew back to L.A. to have a heart-to-heart with Harrison. "We were happy with 95 percent of Steve Ferrone's drums, but we wanted loops instead of drums on some tracks." Butler was able to persuade Harrison to switch to a drum machine on "Power To Change," and he rerecorded his vocals accordingly. "On that song and on 'My Broken Hand,' I think we were able to mix our aesthetic with Jerry's aesthetic. We were able to walk that fine line where we all felt happy (about how it sounded)."

Butler sums up the sessions with Harrison as "a really amazing experience, overall. It's not how we would've done it, but we're happy with how it turned out."

This incredibly prolific and positive-thinking band, who already have enough material for the next record (which they'll probably self-produce), will celebrate the two-year anniversary of their first gig (at Rockin' Tomato pizza parlor on South Lamar Boulevard) from the stage of the Austin City Limits Music Festival in September. That month also marks the two-year anniversary of Butler's furry upper lip, which, coupled with Aldridge's 'stache, has become a bit of a band trademark. The thought makes Butler groan. "There was absolutely no forethought. I just grew a mustache, and my fiancée likes it," he says, laughing. "We're not trying to be trendy or ironic or anything."

Yeah, right. It's amazing the stuff that Butler expects us to swallow.

mcorcoran@statesman.com; 445-3623

picture by Xavier Mascareñas