Frank Gutch Jr: A Journey and the Soundtrack to my Life; Angharad Drake’s New Album; The Big Bright In the Studio; Plus Notes…

 And I don’t mean the band Journey recently inducted into the supposed Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.  God knows what those clowns think when they make their choices but when I look at the possible choices they could have made besides those guys… well, I won’t go there.  Let me just say that I understand when people are upset when I make such statements because they have a soundtrack to their lives as well, but this isn’t their column, is it?  I look at it this way— Journey had hits, yes, and made CBS one hell of a lot of money, but they didn’t have an original bone in all of their collective bodies and you will never change my mind.  Hall of Fame?  Not even close.  Not while the hundreds more deserving are locked out.  Change that to thousands.

Frank Gutch Jr: The World Had Paul Revere & The Raiders, But the Pac Northwest Had Paul Revere & The Raiders!!!; Halloween (Because Life Must Go On); and Those Ever Popular Notes…

I would have placed a few more exclamation points behind the header but that would be overdoing it and while Paul Revere would occasionally go over the top, it was usually onstage.  No doubt about it, Paul Revere & The Raiders lead the all-Pac NW rock ‘n’ roll team, no disrespect to the likes of The Wailers, The Sonics, The Frantics and other bands of their era, nor to Heart and Nirvana and Soundgarden and others of the more recent past/present.

Frank Gutch Jr: The Pac Northwest— Redux….. In the Way of Explanation

When I wrote this past week’s column about the Pacific Northwest music scene (read it here), I left it feeling as if it wasn’t quite done.  You may have gotten an idea of what it was like but unless you lived it, you don’t.  I knew my little corner of the Willamette Valley and I am sure that Seattle people my age knew Seattle and Portland people knew Portland, but if you weren’t there it was a different planet.  I came to that realization while re-watching the documentary which highlighted the aforementioned column— the one laying out EJD Enterprises and the part Ed Daugherty played in the lives of so many musicians and teens back in the sixties’ Willamette Valley of Oregon.