Frank Gutch Jr: Musicians on a Mission: Dan Phelps, Julian Taylor, Wes Swing, and Jimmy Lee (formerly Lee’s Company)… Plus a lugubrious panorama of Notes

Meet Dan Phelps, if you have not already done so.  I first ran across him over a decade ago when he was working with both Bill Pillmore and his daughter Jess Pillmore on their respective albums, Look In Look Out and Reveal.  Bill was an original member of Cowboy and I had heard through Scott Boyer, another original member of that venerable band, that he was recording for the first time, to my knowledge, since Cowboy‘s excellent 1971 release, 5’ll Getcha Ten.  When I contacted him, he was in full recording mode, working with Phelps, whom he had chosen to produce.  To my amazement, Phelps did more than just produce.  He was a sideman and a damn good one, a creator of good licks and solid musical ideas.  It was a first look at a musician I would follow from that point on.

Frank Gutch Jr: The Anatomy of a Masterpiece, Part Two: Jess Pillmore, Plus Notes…..

Like I said last week, you don’t have to sell millions of albums to get my vote.  The quality just has to be evident, and in 2005, Jess Pillmore‘s Reveal earned my pick as the best album I heard that year.  It surprised myself as much as anyone, to be sure, for Pillmore was a somewhat unknown quantity to me, outside of one previous album I had received a few weeks before titled Slightly Skewed, an album leaning much more toward folk and pop than the new one.

Frank Gutch Jr: The Anatomy of a Masterpiece, Part One: Dan Phelps, Plus Notes…..

 

The masterpiece in the header is none other than Jess Pillmore‘s Reveal, a 2005 release which swept me away and earned my pick for Album of the Year.  I don’t think there is a person out there who would not raise the brow, but like that old crusty umpire, I call them as I hear them.  I undoubtedly have most if not all of you at a disadvantage.  You have not heard the album and even if you have you have not studied it.  You are therefore unaware of the sweat and blood and emotion and, yes, genius which sets this album apart from so many others.  At first listen, even I had little inkling what was beneath the songs themselves.  At twenty listens I began to have an idea.  By one hundred, I knew.

Frank Gutch Jr: The Music That Made Me Who I Am…..

It was my birthday last week.  I’m not saying it because it matters much to me— less and less as each year passes.  I mention it because of the things friends tell me, most of which reminds me of who I am and the paths I have taken to get here.  I mean, none of us plan to be who we are— it just evolves.

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: Jon Strongbow: Meltdown in Alien City— Plus Notes…..

There are thousands of stories in Music City and this is one of them.  It involves a young musician— in fact, a young artist, as Jon Strongbow dabbled in many different arts, possibly even the occult.  A musician implanted with an idea which would end up almost destroying him and yet become a central point from which the rest of life would emanate.

If that sounds ominous or convoluted, it should.  Strongbow’s existence cannot have been easy, what with sidesteps into mental institutions and through mental windows while the reflection in the mirror of reality kept morphing.  And yet he adapted.

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.

Frank Gutch Jr: Psycho-Paths To the Heart (A Valentine’s Celebration of Musical Phobias and Neuroses), Deep Feedin’, What? Jon Gomm Again?, and Notezzzz…..

I’ve often wondered if previous generations of humans are as fucked up as we are about relationships.  I watch TV, go to movies and listen to music all the time and it appears to me we are a nation if not a world of basket cases.  We’re all self-involved and needy and greedy and sex-crazed and have so many phobias experts are identifying new ones all the time in an effort to keep up.  Growing up, I thought everything was laid out for us and it looked like gooey fun, but then when I was growing up we were in the era of Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis, The Three Stooges and that strange teen phenomenon which circled around a mashup of James Dean and Marlon Brando (the young Brando and not the Godfather-era).  Were we fucked up then?  I suppose we were.

Frank Gutch Jr: Fun With 45s (Into the Depths of Hell), Jess Pillmore Breaks Her Silence, and Notes…..

That’s what one of my old girlfriends used to call hanging out at my place.  The Depths of Hell.  Of course, as far as I could tell, anyplace which did not exclusively play everything Los Angeles was hell to her.  Linda Ronstadt.  The Eagles.  Joni Mitchell.  Jackson Browne.  Gawd, but I always thought if there was a hell on Earth, it was Los Angeles.  Soft Rock hell.  Bland hell.  Mediocre hell.  Just plain hell.