Frank Gutch Jr: Help! I’ve Fallen and I Can’t Reach My Turntable! featuring Jubal Lee Young, Anna Maria Rosales, Caitlin Canty and a Cast Of Thousands! oh, and notes too…..

Indiana Jones has nothing on me.  That big rolling ball chasing him?  That’s nothing compared to the mountain of carnivorous beasts chasing me in my dreams every night, each vying for that elusive review I promised what seems months ago.  It is the music reviewers equivalent to no pants in the schoolroom, the albums fighting one another to get to me, to rip flesh from bone, to make me pay for what they see as vinyl manslaughter— vinylslaughter, if you will— an offense so terrible as to consign innocent artists and albums to a certain death, so vile as to blast dreams to smithereens, so ghastly as to be— well— ghastly.

Frank Gutch Jr: A Short Word About John Stewart; When a Label’s a Label, When a Label Is Not a Label, and When Labels Suck the Life Right Out of Music; a Research Turtles/Flamethrowers Update— Plus Notes…..

I remember it like it was yesterday, hearing that John Stewart had left us.  My heart sank and all that was good seemed to disappear.  John and I had been acquaintances, of a sort.  We had met when a salesman working for a distributor handling Stewart’s own label, Neon Dreams, brought him into the dungeon at Peaches Records in Seattle for a visit.  We were introduced and I liked him from the first handshake.  I at first felt intimidated, of course.  How could you not be when you considered his background— the Kingston Trio albums and before that, The Cumberland Three, and after that, the incredibly huge string of solo albums.