Frank Gutch Jr: Wayne Berry’s Past and Future; plus Spurious Notes of a Curious Nature

 

I woke up this morning and found this at the beginning of my newsfeed on the Book of Face:

Yep.  The Stanky Brown Group.  You don’t see them every day, you know.  You didn’t back then, either.  Not on the Left Coast.  My collection was limited to one promo 45 on Arista and an album on Sire (Our Pleasure To Serve You) and that one 45 was the center of my collection for awhile.  Nothing like road tapes consisting of 45s rattling around in your closet.  No Led Zeppelin or Free Bird for me.  I lived on the edge!  Yes, it is a good day today.  I’ve had more than my share in my life.  Like the day back in the summer of— what was it?  1970?

God knows where I found it, but I stumbled upon an issue of either High Fidelity or Stereo Review— I have no idea how because I did not normally read either of those, being more into music than sound— and a thumbnail review by someone identified only by initials.  Someone dropped this on my desk, it said, and I saw Henry Lewy’s name on it and, well, Joni Mitchell will not even go into the studio without Lewy so I thought I would give it a listen and you might want to pick this up.  The band name was Timber, the album titled Part of What You Hear, and it started me upon a journey I still have not finished, one involving a member of that band— Wayne Berry.

He is from a Nashville long gone— before the phrases “Music City” and “Music Row” took hold.  He grew up in the shadow of The Grand Ole Opry when Country was still called Hillbilly in certain parts of the country before the term Country & Western was coined.  He could have become a lawyer or engineer or preacher, which is what he became later in life, but the music got hold of him and wouldn’t let go.

By high school, he was visiting Felice & Boudleaux Bryant, the  songwriting duo who had penned Rocky Top and Love Hurts and a string of hits for The Everly Brothers, including All I Have To Do Is Dream and Bye Bye Love.  Not long after, he spent a stint with John D. Loudermilk of Tobacco Road, Indian Reservation, and  Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye fame.  He was young, but learning.

When things happened, they happened fast.  A definite songwriting scene began to develop among the younger set.  The folk era had come and was going, he said in an interview. There were folk clubs around and there were maybe half a dozen of us who were writing outside the box. We clearly were not pursuing being country writers and there was clearly no home for us in Nashville. They didn’t want to become Music Row celebs, but they did want to write from Nashville and build a career from here. I didn’t. I was looking for some way out. I finally moved to New York and then to California.”

When Berry told his parents he was going to New York, they weren’t too happy.  To them, as to so many parents back in the fifties and sixties, a musician’s road was a dead end.  But they didn’t keep him from it.

(My parents) were supportive of me because they loved me, Berry explained, but they were real unhappy that I was going down that road. I grew up with beautiful parents. They were supportive in that they would say that this wasn’t a good decision, but they also said if I was going to keep monkeying around with this, they hoped I was successful at it. I remember them on more than one occasion saying, ‘We just never saw this coming. Why are you involved in all of this?’ And my response was, ‘Have you not been paying attention to my life?’ I’d had music around me my whole life. At that point, it seemed to me that somehow they were missing the obvious.

Those were days when so many things were happening culturally, too. Pot was becoming big-time illegal. The environment we were living in here— the whole concept of a counterculture or hippie lifestyle— we stood out like sore thumbs. The counterculture in Nashville in the mid-60s was a joke.  

Peter Paul & Mary at Ohio University 1968 

Berry moved to New York and tied up with a friend, Noel Paul Stookey of Peter Paul & Mary, whom he had met a few years earlier when they toured through Nashville.  Stookey took Berry under his wing, helped him record demos and set up a publishing company.  It soon became obvious it was not working and, anyway, Berry heard the call of California.  So did good friend Tommy Talton who had been spinning wheels since leaving We The People.  They hopped in a car and headed west.  When they hit California, they found a scene in turmoil.

The whole process was very unstructured —- it was the 60’s, you know. At that point, anybody who didn’t have roots in California, which would have been pretty much everybody except Jackson (Browne)…  A pause for laughter  … was doing exactly what I was doing. And the only difference between Jackson and the rest of us was that he had grown up just right down the road from Hollywood. Everyone else was a transplant. It was like Close Encounters of the Third Kind— being drawn to a mountain and not knowing why. Everybody was drawn to L.A. and no one knew why.

(Of course), nobody cared. We were all too loaded to care. Nobody was looking at what we were doing from a sociological standpoint. It was all musically and culturally driven. Now, this was before the Southern California Sound. There were already huge artists there. And I’m not saying there wasn’t already a music business.

There were dozens (of bands), and a lot of these people who were successful were never really successful on the national level. If you want to date it, this was just on the backside of the Buffalo Springfield breaking up and Poco forming. All of us were going, what do we do with all of this unction that’s inside us. And no one at that point was saying I want to be a rock ‘n’ roll star and make a lot of money. Nobody.

It was all about the music. Well, it wasn’t all music-driven but that was the catalyst. I mean, I didn’t go out there to get signed as such. I certainly wanted to be out of the South, but all of that was connected to my music. I just did not want to live in the South.

Berry, one of the lucky ones, signed with Capitol Records as a solo artist and headed back to Nashville to record an album.  They assigned a rising star, Larry Butler, to produce the project.  Berry was very happy when he sat down with Butler and found that they were on the same page when it came to getting things done.

Butler was disinterested in the A-Team players in Nashville because they were so ensconced in country music, he explained.  At the time, Nashville was very exclusive and there was little pop music to speak of. Or R&B music. If R&B came out of Tennessee at all it came out of Memphis. Nashville was this kind of closed universe. But there were these young players trying to break into session work who were influenced by music other than country. They were looking for opportunities to play. Larry wanted to use all of these players and I said that sounds perfect. So he put those session players together and I came back to Nashville and we recorded the album.

The players on the session later became legends.  Fred Carter, Norbert Putnam, David Briggs, Jerry Carrigan.

We recorded the album at a place called Woodland Sound Studios, which was a relatively new studio at the time. What happened, fundamentally, was that I shot myself in the foot by not going to California to pursue an artist’s career as such. I had gone because that was where I was going to. What I really had in my gut was to put a band together. So between finishing the tracks, mixing them and getting the package ready for release, Timber happened. It wasn’t called Timber, but all of the players who became part of Timber materialized over those few months.

When I went to Capitol and started talking about the album release and the tour, I said, well, I don’t want to go out as a solo artist because I am not a solo artist. I want to go out as a band. I’ll front the band, but I want the band I am in now to be my band. That is how I wanted to support the project. The execs at Capitol went crazy. They said, we signed you. We don’t care who you’re playing with but we didn’t sign that band, and we got crossways with each other. I said, okay, but I’m, not going out as a solo artist, so we stalled. My contract lapsed and that album was never released.

While Berry was attending to the album-never-to-be-released, he ran into a fellow Tennessean, George Clinton.  They hit it off musically and decided to look around for other players.  They found what they needed in Roger Johnson, Judy Elliott and Warner Davis. They seemed to mesh well and Berry was satisfied. They wrote songs and rehearsed and not long after Berry escaped the dust from the Capitol implosion, they made their move.

Timber started playing out and it wasn’t long before we signed with Kapp Records, Berry said. “Kapp at one time had been a fairly big label but when we entered the picture had almost gone dormant. At the time, they were a poor stepchild at Universal. They had just changed upper management and a new exec who had just come in had gotten wind of us through Warner Brothers, with which I had a publishing arrangement. I don’t remember the literal playout, but we somehow got signed. We were going to be a startup band for them or something. And that is when we recorded the first Timber album, Part of What You Hear.

When the album was completed, we toured the Midwest and the West Coast up into Canada. We ended up playing quite a bit in Vancouver B.C. and built a small following there as well as in Seattle. There was an area in Vancouver at that time which was being renovated and in the midst of which someone built this really nice club. We weren’t the house band, but we opened the club and played there a number of times. We started building a following out of that.

Timber, though, soon found themselves cut loose.

It wasn’t that Kapp didn’t know what to do with us, Berry explained. It had more to do with their attempt to re-energize the label. While we were out doing what we were doing, this guy from England, this John guy (Elton), got signed. I remember coming back from a tour and meeting with some execs to work out a big promotion on our album. When we went in, they were so excited about Elton John’s album that we ended up listening to it the whole time. I remember thinking that that was probably not a good sign.

Luckily, the band was without a label only a short time.

When Timber signed to Elektra, it was basically a small studio with three offices and an exec office, Berry remembered. It was a really small label but they exploded very quickly. They had artists, for sure— The Doors, Judy Collins, etc.— and Elektra had made a bunch of money. I’m not sure of the timeline, but I seem to think that Jac Holzman (founder and CEO of Elektra Records) pre-dated the whole Clive Davis era. Holzman had the same kind of influence in terms of his savvy. Well, more like John Hammond, I guess. Holzman, on the West Coast with Elektra, was a bit like Hammond had been with Columbia on the East Coast. He just knew how to pick artists, or it seemed like he did.

Somehow, Holzman had heard about me and the band. I don’t remember how we left Kapp— whether they dropped us or we walked away mad. Those were the hallucinogenic years. But Jac signed us. He signed us personally to the label and during that season, everything just exploded. All of the management people— David Geffen and his whole camp— were just starting out and had just signed the pre-Eagles, meaning The Eagles before they were the Eagles, back when those guys had just been incorporated into Linda Ronstadt‘s band. And there was Jackson Browne. Artists were just coming out of the woodwork. Money was flowing hand over fist. The Elektra stable started growing and we were in that mix.

We recorded the Bring America Home album and toured and sold some records and then the band basically imploded, which was also a part of the culture at that time. In fact, by the time we got to Elektra, the band had been beaten up enough with internal squabbles. George Clinton was feeling the need to extricate himself from that as did I, so the band just unraveled.

By that time, I had made a lot of friends in the music business. Everybody back then was playing on one anothers projects or helping out with demos. Some were having hits and others were losing contracts so you never knew who had money and who didn’t. I ended up doing demos of some tunes I was writing. I pulled in a bunch of players for a session. I had gotten pretty close to Henry Lewy. Henry was a key engineer and was at that time working a lot with Joni Mitchell at A&M Studios, so Henry and I ended up doing some demos there.

Not long after, a secretary at RCA called me and said, ‘I hope you won’t be mad at me.’. I asked what she had done and she said, ‘well, I played your demos for someone here at RCA and I didn’t ask your permission. They want to see you.’ So I ‘took a meeting’ with RCA’s A&R staff and that’s how that whole solo thing surfaced. In a way, I walked right out of Elektra and into A&M where I was a solo artist for a short period. I think they only released the one single, though I believe we recorded three or four other sides.

The meeting at RCA did result in a contract. The A&M deal was loose at best and Berry figured it had run its course. When the contract was signed, Berry contact old friend Norbert Putnam, with whom had worked on the Capitol project.

Norbert and I put the sessions for Home At Last together. I was in L.A. and the players I had a relationship with ended up being the L.A. band. In Nashville, Norbert had pulled a bunch of players together. They later basically became Area Code 615.

Between the Capitol project and Home At Last, Norbert had risen in terms of recognition and had opened his own studio. He was producing and had players all around him who were hot shots. So Norbert and I came up with this crazy idea. Why don’t we go where we want to go and use who we want to use? So he flew out to the West Coast and we recorded three or four tracks there with those guys and then we went out to Nashville and used those Nashville players and then we went down to Muscle Shoals where Norbert was from and used the Muscle Shoals rhythm section. It’s an amazing album in terms of what we pulled off. Anyone who knows music history can look at the credits and see that.

Back in L.A. we probably used two or three different studios, but there were some fantastic players who worked on the album. Like Jesse Ed Davis who played on, I think, two tunes. Jesse came in cold one night. That slide solo on Black Magic Gun? He came in, sat down, put the headphones on and we said, we’ll play it down for you. I turned to Norbert and said just hit record. He did. Jesse had never heard the track and did it in one take.

The exact same thing happened in Nashville. We were recording Gene’s Tune and thought we needed a fiddle, so Norbert called Johnny Gimble. When Gimble walked in, Norbert said, I’m going to run the track but I’m going to record it. And that was one take. Gimble just played against the track. If you go back and listen to Gene’s Tune, in the back there is a fiddle ride at the end of the song. You can hear slight hesitation in the notes he’s playing because he had no idea whether the tune was ending or not. (laughs) It was remarkable. I was moved to tears. He was such an incredible player. I was awestruck to have him playing on one of my songs.

RCA was pretty high on the album and put a lot of money into the whole project. I put a road band together, sort of like what happened with Timber. RCA put together a pretty big promotion campaign and even put a big billboard on the Strip.

It was at that point that I got involved with management out of New York— a guy named Peter Rudge. He had been a road manager for The Who and The Rolling Stones and had come to the States to set up an American office. He knew what he was doing in England and knew what he was doing as far as The Who and The Rolling Stones were concerned. He wasn’t a lacky, but he didn’t know what to do with me or how to operate in America. Well, let’s put it this way: It was the wrong time for me to get involved with someone who was just taking on clients. 

Rudge helped ruin that tour. It wasn’t all his fault. On the one hand there was an impetus for this career to break open and on the other, there were situations.

Case in point. You would have thought that it would have been a great fit. You would have thought that I would have gotten a lot of hype out of that relationship. The Who, The Stones and Wayne Berry. But when we went out on tour that Fall, three things happened. We went out to the Midwest and opened for Billy Joel, who was just starting to bust open. The opening night of the tour we played in Kansas somewhere and received three encores. The next day, Rudge’s office called and said that Billy Joel’s management had called them and were dumping us off the tour. The original contract had us supporting him for six weeks.

The next leg of the tour was supposed to have taken us to the South and then up the East Coast. We were scheduled to open for Loggins & Messina. Well, it turned out that Loggins & Messina had the same management as Billy Joel. Evidently, someone behind the scenes called them and said, hey, you don’t want this guy opening for you. So they pulled the plug on that leg of the tour.

We’re literally in the middle of America with the tour supporting the album unraveling. We started doing pickup dates because we couldn’t go back to the West Coast. We did smaller venues and clubs, trying to work our way to the East Coast because we were scheduled to open for Linda Ronstadt in Manhattan. It was late Fall or early Winter of whatever year that was and this absolutely humongous storm front hit the East Coast. The tentative schedule was Manhattan, Boston, Philadelphia and D.C. Linda ended up having to cancel the whole tour because the entire East Coast shut down.

At that point, we crawled back to L.A. and licked our wounds. The label was still solid behind us and there were positive reviews of the album. It was selling. But we lost so much energy. Back then, touring was so important.

And the band was solid, Berry emphasized. Some of the players who really were not yet well known were coming together as my band. A few of the players had played on the album— James Rolleston had played bass on some of it. He had played previously with Tom Rush and Gordon Lightfoot. He was on that tour. We had a solid guitar player. And we had this B-3 player from Canada. He had hooked up with Janis Joplin and played on her last tour— the one where she OD’d. He got stuck in L.A. and I ended up meeting him and pulling him right out of Joplin’s defunct tour band. He was a fabulous player. We had a kickin’ band. But, again, those guys were playing with me predicated on being able to make a living.

When we got back to L.A., the tour was over. We went out and played some other dates, but I continued writing and eventually went up to San Francisco to work with Elliot Mazer on the next album. I used a few players out of the road band and Elliot brought in some ringers. He brought in Pat Simmons from The Doobie Brothers and Martin Fierro, who was this great horn player, and he brought in Ned Doheny. I knew Ned through Jackson Browne. He was one of the L.A. guys. And there was Merl Saunders and David Palmer. I knew David through Rolleston’s work with Steely Dan. We recorded Tails Out in San Francisco but did some overdub work down in L.A.

When Tails Out was finished, I had some people at RCA in my corner and through some unrelated things, there were some people of power who were a little antagonistic toward me. It wasn’t personal, but it became personal.

The album was done, pressed and released, but had a really limited run. Rolling Stone did a three-quarter page review, which I never did read. I only know about it because Stephen Holden told me about it. It was a beautiful review but it never ran because the album really never came out. There was this intrigue going on and a lot of mine fields got laid and in several situations, blew up. And I had a lot to do with it not coming out.

The album was probably on the shelf for about an hour, Berry laughed. I think maybe ten, fifteen thousand might have made it into distribution.

I ran into someone who lived here in Nashville who worked in a record store in a mall near where I had grown up. He had gotten involved with my career as a fan, but I didn’t know him. I had walked into that store one day and struck up an acquaintance with him based upon the Home At Last project. I received a call from him shortly after the second album was scheduled for release. I was in California and he called from Tennessee to let me know they had product in the store. I had a test pressing of that album, but that was all. And that is how I ended up with a shrink-wrapped retail copy of it. He saved me one.

Everything fell apart at RCA, but before it was finalized the VP at RCA who had heard the demos the secretary had played and had been instrumental to bringing me to the label pulled me aside one night and told me Clive Davis was about to start his own label, Arista Records. Everything was evidently in place behind the scenes for the label to kick off, but it had not yet gone public. What it looked like was that Clive was willing to make me an offer even though I was still at RCA. During that whole transition, George Clinton and I were reconnecting, partially because both of our careers were sputtering. Every time either of us would go three steps forward, we would go two steps back. So we got together and did some demos and put together some pickup bands.

Clive wouldn’t offer us a deal right out, but he wanted to hear us. We met with him at the Beverly Hills Hotel where he had a bungalow. He took us to the ballroom, which was empty. The only people there were Bob Feiden, Clive, myself and Clinton. There was a white piano there, supposedly the same one used in the film Holiday Inn. We played four or five songs with just acoustic guitar and piano and cut a deal right there. Ah, show biz! The stuff dreams are made of…..

We didn’t want to go out as a pre-Hall & Oates or something. We both were band players, so Volunteers morphed out of that. Originally, there were six of us. We rehearsed in Hollywood for several weeks and when the deal was finalized and the front money was there, we decided to go back to Nashville. We needed to get out of L.A. and the plan was to head to Nashville, rehearse and start recording there. Right at the last minute, two of the guys got cold feet. One of them had family. They both pulled out of the band, which was how we ended up a quartet. That really diminished the power of the band. I mean, I’m a competent guitar player, but I’m certainly not a lead guitarist. Both of the guys who left were guitarists, so before they left we had bass, drums, keyboards and three guitars. We were stubborn and doggedly determined, though, and we were already signed. Rather than back up and punt, we decided to go it on our own which was not really a great idea. The Volunteers album has some nice stuff on it, but musically it needed much more attention than it got. The four of us could not really carry what needed to happen.

The album was received coolly and we went out on tour. We held our own, but not all that well, so the dates we played were not very strong. And that is basically how that project wound down.

To backtrack a bit, between the second RCA album and signing with Arista with Volunteers, I got within— how would you measure it?— on a stair with ten steps, I got to about 8 ½ with Atlantic and Ahmet Ertegun. If that had happened, that would have been very interesting because in terms of where I was trying to go, musically, and I guess in terms of my persona if I can put it that way, Atlantic could have been a real home for me, in that time frame. Just before we got in bed together, everybody was speaking the same lingo.

And part of that whole Rolling Stone review thing? (The review had been written and published in Rolling Stone of the Tails Out album, even though it was decided to not release it, if you remember) Part of that is that there were people working behind the scenes who were functionally out to get me I didn’t know about. As far as I can tell, it filtered down to the people at Atlantic. When it got down to the last meeting before it became a matter of how many zeros to put on the check, I got crucified and the deal fell through. It can happen in any field of work, but what it came down to was that I was sabotaged. And that was a big hit because what was happening with Atlantic and the people and the product line and where they saw the company going, it would have been a wonderful fit.

Volunteers was kaput, Timber was kaput. It looked like Berry’s solo career was kaput as well. Exhausted and frustrated, he returned to Nashville to re-evaluate.

On a personal level and in terms of ruining one’s physical and mental attributes, it was not unheard of for some people to just drop out for awhile. Some re-emerged and some didn’t. That, for me, was a difficult period.

Through the changes that came about after we left Arista, I was pretty fried. I came back to Nashville and tried to regroup and figure out how my life was supposed to work. I think George went back to Chattanooga to do basically the same thing. George met some people who had just opened a studio down on Lookout Mountain. I had this thing I was kicking around, revisiting rockabilly and the like, just trying to figure out where I needed to go next.

I had a history with Tommy Talton and the guys in Cowboy and I had overlaid with the Capricorn people over the years. At the time, it seemed like a lot of those people were at loose ends— people who had tried like myself to connect but hadn’t. I was reconnecting with Paul Stookey and was just turning the corner back toward having a spiritual encounter.

Somehow, we got some comp time at the studio on Lookout Mountain and I created this alter ego known as R.W. Knox. I went in and recorded four or five tunes which had a rockabilly vibe, thinking I might want to go in that direction. I was thinking of trying a resurgence thing. I wasn’t trying to make a deal. That was just the kind of music I was writing at the time.

At that point, Berry signed a publishing contract with MCA through a person he had worked with during the Kapp days, Leeds Levy.

Things had already started changing for me because of my re-encounter with Jesus, so I told him, here’s the deal. I can’t guarantee that I will write another secular tune because I am having a spiritual awakening and I’m not sure where it is going to end. If you want to cut a deal, that’s fine, but I can’t guarantee quotas or anything. He said, just send me what you have and we’ll cut a twelve-month deal and see where it goes from there. I made the deal and that was the end of it because I went the direction I thought I was going. I became more and more involved with things of The Kingdom and less and less involved with anything that resembled a career. That in effect uncoupled me from anything in the music business related to a profession.

As I was coming out of that contract, I had quit playing. I had put my guitars under the bed. This whole encounter with The Holy Ghost began to realign my life.

Now, what was happening in the Christian music industry was that Contemporary Christian music was surfacing. A lot of that music was just starting to migrate here. A lot of the Christian labels and labels with music which had Christian leanings began to pick up local bands— rock bands— people like myself who were getting saved and rededicating their lives.

I started an acoustic trio and we began being courted by the Christian labels. We had four or five labels after us and recorded a number of demos but could never really come to terms with doing a project which included going out on the road. I had just come out of 20 years of being beat to death by that and thought, this is crazy. Here I am trying to line my life up with following The Lord and you guys are trying to put me right back in the music business. So I did record with that trio, but we never did any masters.

Out of that, ministry evolved— lay ministry. I started becoming more and more active with the church and got more and more involved with The Word of God and got more and more involved with in worship as a worship leader. As a result, I became less and less involved as a Christian writer. I wrote for awhile and some musicians covered my songs. I in fact wrote with two or three people and we had several ‘Christian hits’ which did very well. But I was no longer interested in walking a career path. The more I pursued The Lord, the more it became apparent that The Lord was calling me into worship ministry.

Berry spent years following his heart, but he didn’t give up music entirely.  Indeed, he began using music more and more in his ministry, creating different ways to spread The Word.  When I contacted him, maybe five or six years ago, he was just beginning to think about music as something he might once again want to dive into.  But the heartbreak and the frustration had to have given him pause.

I was surprised when one day he asked what I thought about him re-entering the world of music.  Being a fan, I was ecstatic.  I have everything I could find in my collection— both Timber albums, the A&M 45 (Beechwood Blues), his first solo album (Home At Last) (the second, Tails Out, has continued to evade me…  Slowly the holes began to fill in and it felt right to me, possibly because it finally felt right to him.  He was writing songs in earnest (he never really quit), practicing, making contact with old acquaintances and friends (Norbert Putnam and Tommy Talton, among them, and sounded more positive than I had heard since we became acquainted..  When the wheels started turning, they turned fast.

Journey Mercies has been released and is available on iTunes.  (You can listen to and purchase it by clicking here)  Berry also told me that he is working on gathering all of his recorded music and making it available, including various demos, the Capitol project, Tails Out, and who knows what else.  He has promised to keep us apprised, but I don’t trust him.  I shall hound him until it happens, if it is really meant to be.  For myself, it will be a collection well worth having.  In this case, you can call me what you want— junkie, fan, or completist.  I accept them all.

Berry is on Facebook for anyone who wishes to follow his progress.  I cannot begin to tell you how good it is to see him diving back into the secular world.  Keep tuned.

And now, without further ado, let us dive into this weeks…

Notes…

Perhaps you have heard me mention songstress/actor/songwriter Audrey Martells.  I’ve been into her music for years and have watched her posts which have covered not only her activities but those of her family (she has a musician husband, Belden Bullock, and two extremely talented sons— Niles and Cole).  While checking out Niles’ new video for a song titled Paralyzed, I ran across an excellently filmed and produced version of When I Fall In Love sung by Ms. Martells, who will have a new album out soon.  I mean, I have heard just about everything Martells has released and am surprised at her range and talent.  The talent has obviously trickled down to her sons.  First Martells, then Niles Bullock— a one-two family punch…

Because it was recently Halloween, I give you Karly Driftwood…Driftwood.  There used to be a used goods shop over at the coast called Driftwood Mac.  She should put a band together by that name…

The only picture I have seen of Ben Reel had me thinking “acoustic folkie.”  He may be, but he isn’t on this track.  Cool clips and good music and a return to the female background vocal style I loved in the Mid-60s to the mid-70s.

Col. J.D. Wilkes and Th’ Legendary Shack Shakers use p;d-time cartoon work to make their song come alive.  Damn!  I love these guys!

Is something wrong with Langhorne Slim, or is this how it will be from now on?

Bet Phil Lynott never thought The Boys Are Back In Town would be presented this way…

In case you wondered, they do things a bit differently down in Mississippi.

Now, Crowder is another thing entirely.

The Prefab Messiahs kick it back to the late 60s… or thereabouts.

The question every dog asks himself… Who is a Good Boy…

=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.”