…but the voice is familiar

In 1966, Butch Engle, local actor and director of Sonoma’s Reader’s Theatre, was just one hit single away from genuine Rock Star status. He had his own psychedelic rock band: Butch Engle and the Styx, a powerful clear voice, a recording contract with Warner Brothers Records, and he couldn’t walk a block down Fourth Street in San Rafael without signing autographs.

Butch Engle and the Styx had won the “Band Bash” at San Francisco’s Cow Palace, placing first out of 200 Bay Area bands, and a review of his performance that night described him as a “combination of Jimmy Cagney and Mick Jagger.”
Fast forward 45 years, and Butch Engle is one of the top voice-over actors in the Bay Area, performing in radio commercials for the San Francisco 49’ers, and featured in a large variety of video games where he’s been typecast as the “Nasty Alien Overlord.”

In between he never gave up his dream of a show-business career, and now happily living in Sonoma, he’s getting more gigs than ever before.

Butch isn’t the sort of man to have regrets, but as he describes his close brushes with fame “back in the day,” it’s easy to develop proxy nostalgia. “I was close to hitting the big time on three separate occasions,” Butch told me, “once a big recording contract was down to two local bands, my group and the Doobie Brothers. Well, you know what happened.”

Butch was born in an Army family in Oakland, and moved all over the Bay Area, ending up at Fort Baker in Sausalito during high school. He attended Tamalpais High School in Mill Valley, and sang in the choir with Bill Champlin and George Duke. Butch quit the choir to form his first rock band: the Showmen, and a year later received a recording contract from local Bay Area producer MEA Records. He was only 18 years old.

“I probably should have hung out with the other bands more,” Butch says, “but I was an anomaly for the time: a good Catholic boy who didn’t drink or do drugs.” None of his three singles clicked, and in the early 1970’s Butch jumped into a new life. “I had a good eye for clothes,” he says, and he began a haberdashery career, eventually owning his own men’s clothing store in San Rafael: The Image. He also married Janice; they are just a few years away from their 40th anniversary.
Still, show biz wasn’t finished with Butch, and he began acting in the 1980’s, taking classes and appearing in independent films. He started doing voice-over work, got an agent, and has kept at it ever since.

Butch began Reader’s Theatre in Sonoma 12 years ago, and the summer seasons are more popular than ever. Local actors Jamie and Rick Love, and Richard Holsworth are regulars in his casts that perform intense tales in front of appreciative crowds at Reader’s Books and other local venues.

Butch Engle can also be heard on Radio Theatre of the Wild West on SUN FM, 91.3 in Sonoma and available on the internet at sunfmtv.com every Sunday night at 6 p.m.

For readers desirous of a life spent on stage and the recording studio, here’s Butch’s advice: “You’ve just got to step over bodies and keep on walking, even if you’re the dead guy.”

By George Webber | Special to The Sun