Frank Gutch Jr: Earlier, On Planet Normanium (Part One)— Research Turtles Redux and Baseball As We Never Knew It; Plus N-n-n-notes!

Some things just will not let go.  Seven years ago I discovered the Research Turtles.  For the last two, I had hoped for a reunion.  I now know it will not happen.  Even if they got back together, they would be a different band.  They have grown as individuals and probably matured musically beyond that band and could never capture what they once had, but for five years I envisioned success and that period gave me hope in a world pretty much without hope, the music business morphing into something beyond my recognition, the Eks and the Westergrens of the world using what I consider stolen music to build huge bank accounts for themselves and others off of the labor of musicians.  That Research Turtles do not today exist is not surprising, for who would want to hand their creations to someone else for a pittance while they made millions.

Frank Gutch Jr: The Beginnings of Christian Rock— erm, Contemporary Christian Music, plus Notes…..

Yep.  Braindead again.  After struggling for four days and working my way through four— count ’em, four starts, I find myself without a column and already an hour past deadline.  How do these things happen, I keep asking myself, but they do and when they do I wish I was drinking again.  Back in the old days, if I couldn’t get something down in a certain period of time I would pop a cold one and before the six-pack was done, I didn’t care anymore so I would type until it looked like there were enough words (or I couldn’t see the keys anymore) and would hit ‘send’ and to hell with it, you know?

JAIMIE VERNON: The Top 125 Most Influential Top 100 albums – Part 1

This week a meme went viral on Facebook of a poll asking readers to identify the number of albums they owned from a random list of 100 ‘Most Influential Albums of All Time’. In the end it was discovered that this was nothing but a front for an app that hijacked Facebook user personal info. However, the debate about the validity of the list itself remained. Music, like all artistic disciplines, is in the ears of the beholder. I expect that had I actually taken the quiz there would have been little commonality between the contents of my personal collection and the ones deemed ‘most influential’.