Frank Gutch Jr: I Got Blistuhs on Muh Finguhs!!! (Plus Notes)

… and I’m looking for trouble because that’s just what you have to do sometimes.  Tributes and covers are sucking the soul right out of me and probably out of the goddamn entire world but you soulless bastards have no clue!  This whole I-got-to-see-the-best-bands and there-ain’t-no-good-music-anymore attitude is killing the listening floor (screw the dance floor) and I’ve had it up to my neck with the I-don’t-like-today’s-music-so-fuck-you memes on the social media and threads in the forums to the point that I’m thinking hell could not be a worse place to live— at least compared to this musical rotgut of a world we live in today.

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: New Albums: Lost Leaders, Zoe Muth, Chris & Gileah, Joseph LeMay, and Others; and Voluminarious Notes (there will be a quiz)!!!

If this was a real job, I would have been fired long ago.  I spent a whole day and night piecing together the research for this weeks column which was intended to be fun and games with radio charts because, man, when you get into them (especially the ones from the fifties and sixties), they are fun as hell and, boy, the tricks you have to know to understand them, but once again things came along to kick the idea to the curb.  It happens every week, swear to God, so I took a little trip down computer lane and counted the columns and column ideas I have started and not finished and it came to 27.  The good thing is that I still have 27 ideas set aside for future columns.  The bad news is that I haven’t worked on any one of them since. Sigh.

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?

Frank Gutch Jr: 50 Albums Which Impacted My Life— Scratch That. Plus Notes…..

My original plan was to list fifty albums which totally bowled me over and, in a way, took me in directions I never would have gone— until drummer/writer Bobby Gottesman derailed that idea for what will inevitably be another romp through who knows what to an end which could as easily be a train wreck as a party.  Gottesman published a short piece about the old farts in music these days and the blanket idolatry they are afforded in spite of arthritic hands and the need to step behind the stack of amps to hit the oxygen mask, not to mention the voices which on the whole are maybe one-tenth the strength and accuracy of what they were in their prime.