Frank Gutch Jr: Let’s Talk Notary Sojac; The Return of Highlight Bomb; Jeff Ellis (Plus Notes)

I was twenty-three, fresh out of the Army and full of frustration and cynicism.  I had spent the last one year, nine months, two days, four hours and thirty-five minutes in what I considered a military prison.  Before I was drafted, I was a radical, a hippie, an idealist.  Staunchly anti-war, I isolated myself from old friends and family.  I smoked dope, joined The Resistance and demonstrated on and off the University of Oregon campus.  When I got out of the Army and returned to Eugene, I learned that I hated everyone who displayed bumper stickers or posters which heralded “America— Love It Or Leave It” or “My Country, Right or Wrong” as if they were the Eleventh and Twelfth Commandments.  Those who upheld vocal groups like Up With People as true American music became my enemy.

Frank Gutch Jr: Albums You Should Not Have Missed (But It’s Not Too Late)— A Recap, Plus Notes You Should Not Miss (Spoiler Alert: Videos Involved)…..

I present to you music I have loved over the years and have written about but only a few have found.  This is about music by artists who deserve more than they have gotten and are consigned to live in the shadow of what they should have been.  In many ways, I wish they could have recorded back in the seventies when the music business was a real center of the public’s attention because had they, some would be stars of today.

Frank Gutch Jr: The Forgotten Past, Recent and Otherwise; Plus a Few (Very Few) Notes

 

Joseph LeMay‘s album Seventeen Acres has been out how long?  Three months?  I wrote about it in an earlier DBAWIS column and have barely mentioned it since.  I have to wonder why.  I love some of the songs on that album and like everything about it.  It is beautifully recorded, masterfully produced and mastered and, even more important, made up of outstanding songs.  And yet I push it into the past.  So I started thinking— how does that happen?

Frank Gutch Jr: Dumpster Diving For 45s, Ken Nordine….. Plus Notes To Die For

I feel sorry for kids these days.  They do not know the pleasure of the 45 RPM record.  They do not understand the thrill of buying a hit and finding a song on the flip side that gets as much or more play time as the hit.  They do not know, in this day of pay-per-track that they should be getting two songs for the price of the one.  It’s the law.  Or should be.  I am sure that asshats at corporate chuckle every time us idiots order a song, knowing that they are shortchanging us.  Yep, we used to get two songs.  Like I said, it was the law.  Labels and distributors, though, write their own laws these days.  I know I’m a dinosaur, but anything less than two is a fuck you to us music junkies.  Well, fuck them.

Frank Gutch Jr: Sonics Boom! Seattle’s Peter Blecha Writes (Not Rewrites) Pac NW Music History!, Pac NW Labels— In Fact, It’s the Great Pac NW Rundown, Part One! (plus Notes?)…..

You may not know or know of Peter Blecha, but I do.  Peter and I have been acquaintances if not friends for a number of years and I have watched his growth as a writer and music historian with great interest.  We share an intense interest in the Pacific Northwest music scene, past and present, and we both revered the music and the bands which inhabited the various periods in the Pac NW music saga.  We know that the rest of the world, if not for The Sonics and Paul Revere & The Raiders, would consider the music scene minor league at best, but have always considered the rest of the world ignorant of the music and artists who seemingly have and have had to struggle for respect beyond the borders of Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana.

Frank Gutch Jr: MB Is For Music Biz

After reading what I consider Cam Carpenter‘s best column ever this past week (if you missed it, read it here), I could not help but look back over my years in the business.  The big difference between Cam and myself is that I spent all of my years on the bottomside, i.e. retail, and started those years looking longingly at the labels, hoping to score that most wonderful and elusive job in A&R (Artists & Repertoire— the people who spend ungodly amounts of time listening to live tapes and demos and sucking in smoke in scuzzy bars looking for that next big thing in music).  Cam did that.

Frank Gutch Jr: A Video Retrospective…..

It’s called introspection, sports fans.  We all feel it every once in awhile and I have been under its spell for the past week and the result has been a total lack of perspective and thus, no cohesive idea for a column.  I don’t know why it happens but I do know that it is indiscriminate, that it is sometimes a struggle to even look at the blank page without it beating you to a mental pulp.  For myself, the one thing I fear beyond misspelling a musician’s name is the inability to write at all and we are all under deadline, the scourge of any supposed journalist.  In the movies, the reporter is always able to crank out a barnburner of an article at the last second, saving his/her job and possibly the future of the newspaper itself.  Well, that’s Hollywood, folks, but it does give you an idea of what it is like to produce under pressure.

Frank Gutch Jr: Music For a Rainy Day, Free Research Turtles Download Reminder, and Notes…..

I sit in a small enclosed room and await the first rain in a few months, feeling sorrow for those who live in drought-infested areas and have to wait for the life-giving water which falls from the sky.  It is a wondrous thing, rain.  I cannot imagine living without it, having grown up in the Pacific Northwest where rain and indeed weather is such a factor in life.  In the past more than the present, of course, because the State of Oregon depended upon farming and logging for so many decades and God knows that farmers and loggers constantly looked and look to the sky, hoping that the gods are friendly.

Frank Gutch Jr: Plumbing the Depths

I woke up just a  few minutes ago with music in my head and a heart heavy with whatever it gets heavy with and found myself once again on the Low Rocks, plumbing the depths.  When you’re young and your hormones rage, you find sanctuaries—we all do— and my favorite was the Low Rocks, a slight rock shelf which skirted the Santiam River on the northern edges of good ol’ Sweet Home, Oregon, a town which I hold dear to my heart and which will always be home.