Through the years, Matt Butler taught other famous guitar players their tricks by accident. In the 70's, a bumblebee started chasing him while playing "Red Hot" on a hollow-body Gretch guitar, which he threw down on stage at full volume and it began to feedback. This influenced Ted Nugent to leave his guitar feeding back on stage while he walked off to change clothes. Stevie Ray Vaughan once said he learned his vibrato technique while watching Matt at a show in Austin, Texas where that same bumblebee kept flying around his fingers during the guitar solo and he was shaking the guitar wildly to get it away. He decided to quit touring for a while and work on solo projects and perfecting his playing on "Blackie," his little shaker egg. It was during this period that he wrote the smash hit "I hate that bumblebee" and "Buzz off." In the early 90s, Matt slipped from a 7 octave voice [he was one of Prince's biggest influences which is where the artist idea came from - when Matt played with Mark in his band Bumblefish, he was known as "Matt The artist formerly known as Howard E. Lion Butler"] to a 5 octave voice after years of drinking (mostly 2% or lo-fat).
In the late 90's, Matt finished the 12 step program to kick his moo-juice drinking problem and rejoined with Mark and Doug to form Surrender Dorothy with drummer Greg "Andy Em" Reece. It takes a lot of courage to be the master behind the disaster that is Surrender Dorothy's theme song, but Matt finally finished it's creation during this period. Matt has been tearing up the stage like the old days and only left the band for a brief time in '98 to sharpen his skills at Berklee College of music with songwriter John Mayer (no seriously!). The band helped him propose to his wife and he now has a child that keeps him up so don't confuse him for the scarecrow if you see him propped up on stage with a pole to keep him upright!
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