Pat Blythe – Hockey, Music for Kids and Chuck Leavell

I’m going to start out with something completely off the wall for me. Note, I am not a sports nut. Hockey (quelle horror!), baseball, basketball, volleyball, foozball….even Canada’s official sport, lacrosse…..don’t watch it, follow it, listen to it or talk about it. Sports is not something that ever turned my crank…..but then there’s Scott Foster. Foster is a 36-year-old accountant who’s never played in the NHL. He is a man who plays in a amateur league at Johnny’s IceHouse in Chicago, a man who was called into action by the Chicago Blackhawks on March 29. Foster is an “emergency backup”…..he fills in if the regular goalies are unable to play. 

Frank Gutch Jr: Scott Boyer: A Message In the Wind; A Repeat About Vinyl; and Them Tasty Notes

Scott Boyer has died.  Since the summer of 1971 I have been spouting his name— his and Tommy Talton‘s and Bill Pillmore‘s and Tom Wynn‘s and George Clark‘s and Pete Kowalke‘s (now living and still playing music under his not-so-new moniker, Peter Giri). They called themselves Cowboy and were a six-pronged country rock outfit out of Jacksonville who signed with Capricorn Records right after The Allman Brothers Band— indeed, signed because of The Allmans.  I say Jacksonville because that is where they settled as the band was forming.

Frank Gutch Jr: Consider These Reruns (Glimpses From the Past); Plus Notes of a Lugubrious Nature

Looking back has become a thing of the present lately.  It began when I felt a guilt sneak over me because so many of the artists I have written about have seemingly passed their buy-by date.  The listening public, it seems, only want the past in terms of oldies or the classics. God forbid they should let the music decide for them.  Add to that my inability at times to come up with fresh subject matter and a nostalgic bent and it seems the logical choice.  It is doubtful that many of you have read many of my columns from the distant past and those who have probably have lost the gist.  So why not visit the past here and there?  I have gleaned through many columns and have picked a handful of segments I believe will be of interest to a wide variety of readers.  Let us start with one overlooking the Pac Northwest, titled…

Frank Gutch Jr: My Memories of Capricorn; Plus Notes

Guy walks into the barracks, tosses a couple of albums on my bunk and it is a benchmark moment.  You’ve heard it before, probably too many times, but it happened.  The albums?  The Allman Brothers Band‘s first album and Steve Young‘s Rock Salt & Nails.  Both lodged themselves permanently in my collection and in my heart.  Young’s was to take awhile but the Allmans’ was immediate.  From the first note of Don’t Want You No More, I was hooked.  Desert island time.  Hall of Fame.

Frank Gutch Jr: Moments In Time— A Selfish Remembrance of Music…..

I  saw a photographic exhibition once in which a photographer attempted to lay out his life in black & white.  I don’t remember the person’s name but you wouldn’t know him anyway— he never reached any level of fame as far as I know— yet, anyway.  He was a nobody who loved taking pictures and being in pictures and he laid his whole life out in photos, mostly of himself and people who must have been nobodies too.