Frank Gutch Jr: Flotsam and Jetsam, plus Notes…..

That’s right, sports fans, I have once again rammed the ol’ cranium up against the proverbial brick wall.  Four good starts on this week’s column and nothing to really show except four three-paragraph dead ends, at least for now.  And deadline looms.  What to do, what to do…  After much thought (not really), I have decided to pack together a whole string of odds and ends for you to pick through, if you so desire— flotsam and jetsam, as it were.  Ideas not long enough for a column, musical bits and pieces, brain farts and the like.  Indeed, I looked up the term “flotsam and jetsam” on thefreedictionary.com just to make sure that I had the term right and, for once, I did.  “Useless or discarded objects,” it said.  “Odds and ends.”  Well, I hope I stay away from the former, but the latter seems to fit.  Just remember— no overlying theme.  Whatever comes to (my) mind.

And what comes first comes courtesy of Don McGilvray who in the sixties fronted Fort Worth band The Mods and worked with T-Bone Burnett on a variety of recording projects before Burnett became T-Bone.  I met Don through Julie Taylor Halyard while I was working on the story of Fort Worth rock legends Space Opera (you can read it by clicking here, if you so desire).  Thanks to Facebook, we have been in constant contact since.  Well, just yesterday Don, who is somewhat of a promoter of health, posted that he had broken down and poured black cherry syrup over three heaping scoops of real vanilla ice cream before wolfing it down and me, living my culinary life precariously, asked what brand.  “I got it from the old Dublin Dr. Pepper place,” he replied, and in doing so awakened my extreme distaste for Dr. Pepper itself.  It wasn’t that long ago that the head corporate maggots at Dr. Pepper/Snapple notified the Dublin, Texas plant that they would no longer be allowed to produce “Dublin Dr. Pepper” as Dublin made it with pure cane sugar and violated the formula demanded by corporate dictates— i.e., that they only use high fructose corn syrup.  Well, Dublin immediately tied the severed arm to their boat, middle finger extended (it’s a reference to the movie Sometimes a Great Notion, friends) and drove the boat past the head office’s management and legal teams.  Good old corporate got the drift and cut them loose, which sucked.  Because the Dublin people were famous for standing their ground on more issues than that one.  Because it put the Dublin company (now called Dublin Bottling Works)in dire straits.  Because in these modern times, David seldom beats Goliath (think Monsanto and Blackwater and every major and minor oil company you can name).  Because Dick Cheney is a soulless bastard.  (I threw in that last one as a bonus)  Anyway, long story short, Dublin is still limping along and have added some soft drinks to help cushion the blow.  I support them.  I support their idealism and their courage in standing up to corporate fascism.  Here is a video sampler for what I hope will become a documentary embraced by any and all who see the inherent negative side of corporatism on the whole and of Dr, Pepper/Snapple specifically.  By the way, Don, how was the ice cream?

Meanwhile, way back in 1963, I was a member of the Sweet Home Union High School Band, a drummer— or maybe I should say percussionist for I played all percussion instruments except the glockenspiel.  Every year, the schools in the Valley League of Oregon would get together for a band contest whereby the various schools musical groups would play before music judges and get graded— kind of like American Idol only smaller.  I think that year the event was held in Corvallis, possibly at Oregon State.  It was both a fun and angst-riddled experience— fun to meet and interact with the various musicians from the other schools (and to check out their girls) and angst-riddled due to the pressures of being graded by music “professionals,” as it were.  Mostly, the kids from the bands spent their time ambling over the grounds and relaxing.  Myself, I spent the entire day in the auditorium soaking in the other bands.  The band which ran away with the prize that year was The Corvallis High School Band and for one reason.  One of their competition pieces was a magnificent piece of what I term modern classical music, La Fiesta Mexicana, written by one H. Owen Reed.  It was a work of percussion and minor chords and mood pieces threaded together with themes and I thought it astounding that any high school band could pull off any piece that complicated, given the state of band music and high school musicians at that time.  I was glued to my seat the entire piece and would have given a standing ovation if there had been more than myself and maybe 200 other people in the, to my mind, massive room with a stage on which you could have played basketball.

But here’s the point.  About fifteen years later, I was digging through the racks of one of the many Los Angeles record stores I haunted during my short stint in that city when I ran across this album in a blank white cover.  Sliding the record out very carefully, I was astounded to see that it was a 1963 recording by The Corvallis High School Band performing George Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue and Reed’s La Fiesta Mexicana.  Included with the album were two insert sheets, one highlighting the band’s 1963 experiences and the other with pictures of the concert band and marching band and the band’s director, a Mr. Harvey Brooks.  I remember Brooks.  He was a very kind man who took time during what must have been a very harried day to speak with many of us on a personal level.  It somehow felt personal when I found that record.  It still does.

On a side note, the record was recorded by Graves Recording Service in Eugene.  Graves was one of the very few actual recording companies in the State outside of Portland.  The Critters, a U of O rock band which had to change their name to The Heirs because there was, much to their dismay, already another band called The Critters (remember Mr. Dieingly Sad?), reportedly recorded their first single there (In Time b/w You Better Slow Down) though they released it under a different label.  So did Eugene’s premier rock band of the mid-60s, The Moguls, whose surf/ski 45 Avalanche received massive airplay before selling out and, to my knowledge, dropping off the charts due to lack of saleable product.

Anyway, before I lose my train of thought, I pulled out that Corvallis High record today and played it.  Then I looked on Youtube to see if there was anything listed and sonofagun if there wasn’t.  Here is a video of H. Owen Reed’s La Fiesta Mexicana performed by the Michigan State University Wind Symphony and Spartan Youth Wind Symphony.  Some things are just meant to be.

Before there were compilation albums, there were compilation 7-inchers.  Yup.  “Record companies” formed themselves around the compilation discs, even.  It was a simple matter.  Make a deal for the “hits” after they were hits and you could get the songs for pennies on the dollar.  Record labels popped up all over the country, picking and choosing music they thought would sell.  Some, like Tops Records, basically sold just the songs, recording “knockoff” versions with session men and music star wannabees.  Originally tied into the jukebox business, it became an active label and sold a lot of its records through the mail on a subscription basis.  Rather than give you a link to the story (and because I know many of you would not follow it and I think this is crucial to understand the music business of the times), here is a rundown courtesy of discogs.com:

Formed in 1947 as Tops Music Enterprises by Carl Doshay and Sam Dickerman, two “rack jobbers” who sold used jukebox 78 RPM records to grocery stores, drug stores, five-and-dime stores and the like when they decided to enter the record business by recording and releasing “knockoff’ cover version records featuring session musicians and vocalists at a list price of 39 cents as opposed to 79 cents from the major labels.

By the mid-1950s, the company, now based in Hollywood, hired Dave Pell as house producer and arranger as the company’s success was starting to overwhelm Doshay. It also began recording by then-journeyman artists past their Hit Parade heyday (Lena Horne, Mel Torme, Pee Wee Hunt, the Pied Pipers, Kate Smith, Ink Spots, The) as the 45 RPM single and LP formats began taking hold.

In 1958, Doshay sold the company to Geiger counter manufacturer Precision Radiation Instruments (P.R.I) primarily to ease its tax burdens. Later that year, Tops hired publicist Bob Blythe who promptly ran Tops aground through a series of bad business decisions. A year later, Doshay suffered a heart attack and decided to sell the company for $1 million dollars. Blythe, who wanted to acquire the company to begin with, and a team of investors bought Tops/P.R.I. in 1960. Blythe took over, fired Doshay and overspent the company into bankruptcy. The investor group fired Blythe but it was far too late.

Tops and its catalog were sold to Pickwick and by 1963, its former rival folded the Tops/Mayfair/P.R.I. labels into its own operations.

I’ve changed my mind.  Here is the link to the page.  The page has listed on it the entire catalog of Tops Records, as compiled by bsnpubs.com.  Dig through the pages.  You will see a lot of names lost to history yet names whose music was at one time viable in an amoebic record industry.

You see, one thing you have to remember is that hits were not necessarily hits back then.  Not for the entire United States (or Canada, or Mexico, or the UK).  Hits were regional.  Only the enlightened in Arkansas or Georgia or even New York knew what was happening in Los Angeles or Seattle.  And, yes, some of the enlightened watched very closely and rush-released cover versions of songs which were sweeping areas outside of their own.  Not just the white musicians covering black musicians hits, as in the case of Pat Boone covering Fats Domino‘s Ain’t That a Shame, but musicians covering any song they could to get ahead.  Just the other day, Michael Fennelly (The Millennium, Crabby Appleton)posted a video of Australia’s The Throb doing a version of Fortune Teller, which I thought an original hit by San Diego’s The Hard Times.  Turns out it was a song written by Allen Toussaint and was evidently covered by a string of bands in various areas.  In the South, The Del-Rays had the hit and God knows how many other regions sported their own local or regional versions.  The point is this.  Back then, radio was king and if you couldn’t get a station to play it by one artist, it was possible to get them to play it by another, regardless of circumstances.  On a humorous note, I remember a couple of radio stations in the Willamette Valley of Oregon slipping versions of Louie Louie back onto the charts when The Sonics came out with their belated version.  Nothing like three different versions in your Top Forty.  Those were the days.

But to get back to my point, there were a handful of companies putting out hits on 7-inchers before labels started packaging them, K-Tel-style, on LPs.  The one I most remember was Artistic Records out of Beverly Hills.  I think we signed up for a subscription and for two bucks a pop, they would send us the 7-incher of the month or something like that.  Most were original versions, though I did notice that some were covered by artists I had never heard of (Pete Pike, for instance, was the artist listed for Don’t Let the Stars Get In Your Eyes, a song which Skeets McDonald owned in the Pac Northwest).  Some versions were edited and much shorter than the original versions by the same artists and others were alternate takes.  There were always eight on a disc— four on each side— and I remember awaiting each anxiously.  Many of the songs I had never heard before because of the paucity of good radio in our area, so it was not unlike the adventures in music I adopted as a lifestyle in future years.  Oh, another thing.  They were pretty much packaged by genre, so one month you would get Country & Western, the next you would get R&B and the month after that it might be white bread hits.  No hardcore genres.  The world was evidently not ready for that yet.  Here are the songs on an example disc:  Hollywood Argyles–Alley Oop; Don Julian & the Meadowlarks–Heaven and Paradise; Chuck Hawkins–Pachuco Hop; Jesse Belvin–Goodnight My Love; The Penguins–Earth Angel; Etta James–Dance With Me, Henry; Teen Queens–Eddie My Love; and Marvin & Johnny–Cherry Pie.  Pretty heady stuff for a kid stuck in the sticks.  Pretty heady.

Radio stations are notorious for putting out compilation albums.  One of my friends collects them exclusively— well, those and soundtracks.  He is always on the lookout for comps of hits put together by stations whose call letters start with ‘K’ or ‘W’, the United States codes, but will occasionally grab one beginning with ‘X’ or ‘C’ (I think the ‘X’ was Mexico and ‘C’ was Canada, but I wouldn’t swear by it).   It is an amazing collection to behold.  He has hundreds.

Radio station KGB took the gambit one step further.  They asked for tracks with local interest— songs about and by musicians from San Diego, the station’s home base.  The albums were always, to my knowledge, titled Homegrown, the first being just that and the two others I have in my collection being Homegrown II and Homegrown III (the years being ’73, ’74, and ’75, respectively).  I have no idea if they went beyond the three.  Artists sent in their tapes, from what I understand, and tracks were chosen by someone at the station, though I could be wrong.  I chuckle every time I read the backs of the jackets because it is so local— songs like Mission Beach Boogie, Funky Santee, and Dago From Diego gracing Volume 1;  Black’s Beach (that was the nude beach just north of San Diego), The Last One in La Jolla, and Going Back to Claremont on Volume 2; and Gypsies From Bonsall, SDSU Blues, and O.B. Bop on Volume 3.  The bonus track, for me, is the inclusion of Zoo Song recorded by one of my favorite bands out of SD at that time, Horsefeathers.  One of the nicest bunch of musicians I’ve ever met.

I, like most of the youth of my generation, was an avid Motown fan.  By the time R&B stepped over the line and became soul, labels like Stax, Vee Jay and Motown made inroads everywhere, including the Pac Northwest.  I began to hunger for the sounds of the soul groups, but had to accept what was given because there was just not enough interest outside of the already established hits for radio to delve too deep.  When it began loosening up, though, it loosened up fast.  To me, it seemed like Stax and Vee Jay certainly had artists, but Motown was the label.  When their artists started producing hits, they just kept on coming, it seemed.

That is why I covet my copy of The Motown Story.  It is subtitled “The First Decade” and has five LPs of hits, 58 in all, with spoken word introductions by Motown artists themselves.  There is something magical about hearing Martha Reeves talk about the beginnings of Martha & The Vandellas or Smokey Robinson talking Miracles.  I mean, the beginnings of Motown coincided with the inception of the transistor radio and most of you youngsters would not believe the importance of that little hand-held device.  Or maybe you would.

Not to be outdone by Motown, Nashville had a few tricks up its sleeves too.  One trick was put together by one Lee Cash and was titled The History of Country Music.  It was available on vinyl in a series of volumes and was put together as an audio documentary, of sorts, each segment even introduced with a vocal jingle proclaiming that it was “the history of country music.”  Cash, I assume, was the announcer and the songs are originals, as far as I can tell.  The cool thing is that the series was put together much the same as The Motown Story, interviews by various personages spliced between the tracks and the narration.  It comes off, indeed, as an audio history, and is one of the best collections of this sort I have heard.

One site claims there were twelve in the series, but they only had one copy on the desk when they posted about it.  I know there were six because I have them.  I have never seen Volumes 7 through 12, if they exist.  I hope they do.  The early days and the people who lived them are all pretty much gone now.  We luckily have a certain amount of video which was saved, and some audio.  I hear that country musician Marty Stuart has been archiving as much as he can get his hands on.

I remember listening to the Grand Ole Opry on radio in the early fifties.  I think it came on every Saturday night and the whole family and sometimes friends of the family would gather around the radio and hang on every word and musical note.  My dad loved it.  I think I did too, but I don’t remember why.  Well, yes I do, in a way.  Those were the rock stars of Dad’s day and I think it rubbed off on me.  It must have because I can still remember the day we found out that Hank Williams died.  It seemed like the whole town of Sweet Home went dark.

Which is why I love this set so much.  This was carefully put together with a lot of love.  I am surprised there is so little information about these records on the Net.  I’ll tell you who would appreciate them, and he has probably already heard them— DBAWIS‘s own Doug Thompson.  These records were put together like so many of Thompson’s projects on The Beatles, etc.  Thompson might not appreciate the music (I grew up on it, so it’s nostalgia for me), but he more than anyone I know would appreciate how much care and work went into this series.

Let me give you a short example of the interviews:

Minnie Pearl:  Well, I never knew the exact cause of Hank’s unhappiness.  There have been so many stories told and so many books written and movies made.  As one of his dear friends, I would be unable to say where the source of his unhappiness was.  It’s like the chicken and the egg.  I don’t know what his basic problem was.  Sometimes I think of Hank as being someone who had hold of a tiger and can’t ride it and can’t turn it loose.  Perhaps he was a victim of his own talent.

Roy Acuff:  Through the years, somehow or another he became, it seemed like, a disappointed boy.  We all know he went  to the bottle and he went to pills for some reason, maybe to destroy things he was thinking about.  He had so many fine numbers, like “Did you ever see a robin weep, when leaves begin to die, like me he’s lost the will to live, I’m so lonesome I could cry.”

Those last lines were the lead-in toHank’s hi version of I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.  Death is a strange thing.  It seems to hurt the living more than the dead.  I remember how I used to think the long lines to see the bodies of dead celebrities and royalty were absurd.  When Hank died, I could almost justify such a phenomenon.  Almost.

Just so you know, the series covers a lot of ground and Hank is only a small part of it, as big a part as he played.  It starts with Jimmy Rodgers, the old “Singing Brakeman” and winds its way through the Country & Western era highlighting everyone from The Carter Family, Hank Thompson and George Jones to later day stars like Johnny Cash, Hank Snow, Bobby Bare and even Dorsey Burnette.  If you love the old Country, don’t pass this up if you see it anywhere.

I think for my generation, there will never be a better compilation series for music than the Cruisin’ series.  It does way more than capture the music of the day, it captures radio of the day and anyone who grew up on AM radio will tell you that there has never been and will never be again anything like it.  It was post-war America and everything was on the upswing.  Young families were old enough to remember the war but young enough to have withstood it and the future looked good.  As TV began chipping into radio’s territory, which up to that time was pretty much comedy and drama presentations, the many radio stations found themselves up against it.  Some turned to playing music, something which had been utilized as filler between blocks of sold time, and when R&B and rock ‘n’ roll came along, found that they could support the station doing only that.  AM radio was born.  Country & Western and Blues and Classical music and R&B had their regional successes, but it was the advent of rock ‘n’ roll that made AM radio king.  At first, of course, it was more pop than rock, artists like Bing Crosby and Lawrence Welk and Frank Sinatra and Lefty Frizzell and Red Foley a large part of a stations playlist, but when rock ‘n’ roll got a head of steam, there was no looking back.

The amazing thing about Cruisin’ is that the people involved in putting it together put all of the pieces together.  Like recreating a baseball game in the studio, they tracked down major radio personalities in the various markets, used the actual themes of the different stations and jocks and spliced those among jingles and ads heard on stations throughout the US.  It was, in effect, the sound of an actual broadcast, whether recreated or not.

The youth of today have no concept of how important music was to the teen back in the fifties and sixties.  And radio.  Between car radios and transistors, the teen culture was pretty much covered.  Dribble a little personality on top and you have the soundtrack to our lives— those of us who grew up during that positive but volatile time.  Bob Segarini, without whom this column would not exist, had a record player in one of his cars.  A record player.  I picked beans to the music beamed from KGAL (Lebanon), KFLY (Corvallis) and KRKT (Albany).  You can’t imagine the sound when we could get everyone to turn their transistor to the same station and turn it up.  A whole field blasting the hits of the day.  It was amazing.

I’m really not sure how many there were in this series either, but I know they produced one for each year from 1955 through 1967, a different station and disc jockey each year.  To show you how well they covered the radio of the time, here is a list of the cities and DJs for which the albums were done—–  1955: Jumpin’ George Oxford, KSAN, San Francisco;  1956: Robin Seymour, WKMH, Detroit; 1957: Joe Niagara, WIBG, Philadelphia; 1958: Jack Carney, WIL, St. Louis; 1959: Hunter Hancock, KGFJ, Los Angeles; 1960: Dick Biondi, WKBW, Buffalo; 1961: Arnie ‘Woo Woo’ Ginsburg, WMEX, Boston; 1962: Russ ‘Weird Beard’ Knight, KLIF, Dallas; 1963: B. Mitchell Reed, WMCA, New York; 1964: Johnny Holliday, WHK, Cleveland; 1965: Robert W. Morgan, KHJ, Los Angeles; 1966: Pat O’Day, KJR, Seattle; and 1967: Dr. Don Rose, WQXI, Atlanta.  Those names, my friends, were not just disc jockeys, they were friends.  We had ours in the Willamette Valley, too, though the only name that comes to mind right off is Gentleman Jim Hunter who broadcast on KRKT radio.  If you’ve read my columns, you may remember him as the guy who broadcast from the huge T&R Restaurant sign for that restaurants grand opening.  He was cool.  They all were.  Here’s a taste:

There is a possibility that Youtube has a sample of all of the years in the series.  I believe they are also available digitally and maybe on CD.  If you like this stuff, it might be worth the search.

Notes…..  PR Maven Kim Grantalways has something in her musical arsenal which catches my attention.  This time, it’s a flashback in the form of one Little Lonely whose video takes me back to the days of Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette and Lynn Anderson with a modern nod to my new favorites, Zoe Muth and Amanda Anne Platt (The Honeycutters).  This is an all-star band behind her, folks.  The reason you don’t notice is because they are that f**king good.  And if you haven’t checked out L.A.’s Turnstyled Junkpiled zine (click here), you should.  They premiere many acts the others don’t.  Not to mention that they are a step ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to what they term ‘Americana.’  Little Lonely may be, by today’s standards, but this song is pure sixties Country to me— you know, just after they dropped ‘& Western.’

Speaking of Amanda Anne Platt, here she is with The Honeycutters, live in the studio.  Watch the guitarist closely.  It ain’t easy.

And as long as I’m plugging my favorites, there ain’t no bigger favorite than Zoe Muth & The Lost High Rollers.  New album soon, but I’m getting tired of waiting.  Hint, hint.  In the meantime, here is one of my favorite Muth tunes.

I am always amazed at the number of hits animals in clothes or three-year-olds playing Chopin or Led Zeppelin perfectly (or even cats doing nothing) get when there are wondrous music videos to explore.  Here is one of my favorites.  As of this posting, the video has received a little over 400 hits which wouldn’t be all that bad if it hadn’t been posted in the 1950s.  I love these guys anyway.  The Weaver Twins.

I’m starting to get a bit anxious here.  Too many projects being held up.  Chris & Gileah‘s album will supposedly be ready for a late May release.  Zoe Muth has been delayed but should be out by then too.  I would hope that Sage Run‘s latest album would be out by now, but I’m not really sure.  Is Norrish Reaction back in the studio yet?  Australia’s Bill Jackson is supposedly working on his next, bu t he is notoriously slow, to my liking.  Ollabelle is reportedly working on new tunes.  Drew Gibson, whose The Southern Draw made such an impression, is presently kickstarting his new work (click here to help him along).

…and The Winterpills have had their album of covers put on hold.  Band member Flora Reed mentioned that it will not just be an album of cover songs, but of cover songs the band has played over the years because of the impact the songs had on them.  While we’re waiting, here is one of my favorite Winterpills tracks from their exceptional EP, Tuxedo of Ashes:

Dirtmusic‘s new album is out now.  I dig what they’re doing— very surreal with touches of what we used to call Third World.  This video of Red Dust features Samba Toure:

It’s four o’clock in the morning and I haven’t been sleeping the past few nights.  I saw a repost of this video on FB and watched it again.  I love the soulfulness of this song.  It is written and performed by Chloe Albert with the help of a few friends.  Beautifully recorded.  Beautifully performed.  This, sports fans, is why I love the new paradigm for the music biz.  Back in the day, major labels more than likely would have passed on Ms. Albert (chances were always slim back then), but today you can’t keep a good artist down.  She’s from Edmonton.  God, I love Canada!

While the rest of the world was digging The Lovin’ Spoonful‘s version of Younger Girl, KGAL in Lebanon, Oregon and KASH in Eugene were playing this:

Picture the Ocean put out an album I picked as Album of the Year in 2012.  I am happy to say that it has held up well.  In fact, I love it as much today as I did when I picked it.  They are on hiatus at present.  Here they are playing live at The Wunderbar in Edmonton back in 2012:

Here are some clips of Spooky Tooth I’ve never seen before.  You’re welcome.  And over and out.

=FGJ=

Frank’s column appears every Tuesday

Contact us at dbawis@rogers.com

“Frank Gutch Jr. looks like Cary Grant, writes like Hemingway and smells like Pepe Le Pew. He has been thrown out of more hotels than Keith Moon, is only slightly less pompous than Garth Brooks and at one time got laid at least once a year (one year in a row). He has written for various publications, all of which have threatened to sue if mentioned in any of his columns, and takes pride in the fact that he has never been quoted. Read at your own peril.”