Frank Gutch Jr: I Always Wanted To Be a Musician (Videos With Commentary)…

 

…but I could never pull it together.  Of course, when I was young I thought I was a musician, piddling with the tonette in fourth grade, drafted into the junior high band in the fifth grade because they badly needed a bass drum player, playing drums in what could be called a jazz band then (though we were really not good enough to be called that), playing drums in the high school band and in a couple of rock bands and carrying it on through college.  I loved music and was always around it but I was never really a musician.

Frank Gutch Jr: If Music Is Dead, You Bastards Killed It! The Life— A Seattle Legend in My Own Mind… (plus notes)

That’s right.  You!  You, the Incipian Heed, the Flaccid Peni, the Ego Centered!  You, the ones who are always talking about how much they know about music and fart facts in concentric circles.  You, who complain that there is no good music anymore while listening incessantly to the decades-old— music which by all rights should have been put to bed long ago but instead is held high by listeners who stopped listening as examples of what music used to be.  Well, you can kiss my Rival Sons-loving ass!  All of you who don’t know that band, pucker up.

Frank Gutch Jr: MB Is For Music Biz

After reading what I consider Cam Carpenter‘s best column ever this past week (if you missed it, read it here), I could not help but look back over my years in the business.  The big difference between Cam and myself is that I spent all of my years on the bottomside, i.e. retail, and started those years looking longingly at the labels, hoping to score that most wonderful and elusive job in A&R (Artists & Repertoire— the people who spend ungodly amounts of time listening to live tapes and demos and sucking in smoke in scuzzy bars looking for that next big thing in music).  Cam did that.

Frank Gutch Jr: Psycho-Paths To the Heart (A Valentine’s Celebration of Musical Phobias and Neuroses), Deep Feedin’, What? Jon Gomm Again?, and Notezzzz…..

I’ve often wondered if previous generations of humans are as fucked up as we are about relationships.  I watch TV, go to movies and listen to music all the time and it appears to me we are a nation if not a world of basket cases.  We’re all self-involved and needy and greedy and sex-crazed and have so many phobias experts are identifying new ones all the time in an effort to keep up.  Growing up, I thought everything was laid out for us and it looked like gooey fun, but then when I was growing up we were in the era of Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis, The Three Stooges and that strange teen phenomenon which circled around a mashup of James Dean and Marlon Brando (the young Brando and not the Godfather-era).  Were we fucked up then?  I suppose we were.

Frank Gutch Jr: Crushed Out: It Was a Party, Jess Roden’s Anthology, Audrey Martell, and Notes You Can Take To the Bank…..

Good ol’ Pandora.  Just when it looks like the whole digital music service thing is about to fade into the background, those asshats raise their whine level a few decibels.  This time, they’re asking to take a portion of the musicians’ cut from them, claiming that the musicians are cutting into their fair share.  Wait a minute!  Wha-a-a-aaat??!!!!!!!  Okay, they didn’t put it in those words, but you have to know that’s what they’re telling legal eagles behind closed doors.  I have to wonder about the reasoning, though.

Frank Gutch Jr: If Nothing Else, Today’s CDs Are Tomorrow’s Collector’s Items….

And if you don’t think so, just look at the past.  What do you want?  78’s?  45’s?  Disc cylinders?  Vinyl?  Oh, so you think that CD’s are different?  I hate to tell you this (actually, I don’t), but no, they’re not.  You who are so anxious to kill the CD format shall suffer the same fate as those who killed (or greatly wounded) vinyl and every other outdated form of getting music.  You shall be committed to the hell of limitations beyond your wildest expectations placed upon you by the technocrats who toss out updates and new formats like acid at a Grateful Dead concert.