Roxanne Tellier – We All Loved You, Frank Gutch Jr – Tributes, Tales, and Tears

Yesterday I went through all of the private messages I’d shared with Frank Gutch Jr, since I’d first encountered him. It was in 2013, just after I’d begun writing this weekly column, and right from that first message, it was as though we were separated at birth.

Frank Gutch Jr: Not Rolling Stone’s Top 100

I just took another stroll through Rolling Stone’s list of 100 Greatest Guitarists.  I do so occasionally just to remind me of what a fools errand such lists are.  I realize that it sells “magazines” (are they a magazine these days?), people being suckers for Top of’s of 50 Best’s if for no other reason to compare choices with theirs.  Jimi Hendrix?  Sure.  #1.  Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck?  Automatic Top Ten.  James Burton and Buddy Holly?  You have no choice but to throw in the originators on occasion.  John Fahey?  Can’t leave out the cool artist who never really sold in terms of the numbers necessary to chart.

Frank Gutch Jr: Dave McGraw & Mandy Fer, Danny Schmidt, and Susan James— I Can’t Stand the Silence; plus Notes (and an apology to David Olney)…

I am being steamrolled.  It is a conspiracy, or maybe just the herd instinct.  What is the herd instinct?  That is the terminology we used when I used to work in retail records when for half an hour people would mill around the store until one came to the register, at which time those remaining followed.  We would check out three people in half an hour and suddenly there were fifty people standing in line.  Today it would be called WTF?  Then, we chalked it up to the herd instinct.

Frank Gutch Jr: Jack Bruce Is Gone and the World He Inhabited Will Soon Be Gone Too; Prediscovering Elliott Randall— Still Reelin’ In the Years; The Mess That Was ‘Baker Street’; and them freakin’ Notes you just cannot live without…..

Jack Bruce is dead.  Long live Jack Bruce.  And long live the musical era he lived in though that will soon be dead, too.  As dead as Bix Beiderbecke.  As dead as Glenn Miller.  As dead as Frank Sinatra.  As dead as … well, you get my drift.

Frank Gutch Jr: Random Thoughts On a Rambling Past (Plus Notes)

I watched/listened to a short clip of a Jim Dawson concert this past week.  Most of you don’t know the name, I am sure, but Dawson was at the forefront of my obsession with records back in 1971 and his Songman album is a treasure I would not part with except to Dawson himself.  He was part folkie as were so many back then— the beginning of the real singer/songwriter movement— and experimenting with layers of sounds.

Frank Gutch Jr: Don’t Look Now, Musicians, But You’re Being Usufructed; New Albums From Jubal Lee Young, Mad Anthony, and Fisher; and Scattered Thoughts and Mindfarts (plus Notes)

1.   1. Usufructed, and it ain’t fun.  Before you ever wrote or even heard that first note of that first song, the cards were already stacked against you.  Record labels, publishing companies and every other segment of what would build into the corporate structure which is the music industry have plotted against you from the start.  Of course, it was done legally.  God forbid that Universal or BMI take anything from you as regards what finally was termed your “intellectual property”.  God forbid that they treat the worker bees creating that which they would build into a multi-billion dollar industry like so much chattel.   I mean, after all, corporations are people, right?  And we know what people do to each other on a constant basis.