Frank Gutch Jr: The Saga of Jim Colegrove, Chapter Six: Plus Notes…..

Having given you five chances to look behind the curtains of a life of a rock ‘n’ roller of more stature than most people these days could possibly know— that of Fort Worth’s Jim Colegrove— I have decided to give you a sixth.  Call I a bonus, if you will— a chance to experience second-hand an era of music most of you could not possibly know.  A chance to see the machinations of an industry, for that is what it became, in its growth stages.  So far it has involved a string of names many would recognize— Felix Pappalardi and Gene Pitney and Lou Adler and so many more.  Let us add a few more as the band he is in at this point of his career, Bo Grumpus, prepares to spark a major label career.

Frank Gutch Jr: Old Is Not Irrelevant

While working on this weeks column in which I had hoped to give insights into record labels and how they evolved, I realized that much of the music of the past and my attitudes toward it and the business surrounding it needed to be readdressed.

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: Loose Ends, Even Looser Ends, Paige Anderson & The Fearless Kin, Green Monkey Christmas, and Those Pesky Notes (to which you should really pay more attention)…..

It’s 3:30 in the morning and I can’t sleep and part of it has to do with Spotify.  Not Spotify specifically, but all of the music subscription services that have come along since digitization:  Mog and Pandora and Rhapsody and Sony and others.  What set me off was a musician who posted on Facebook that maybe you should log on to Spotify and check out a certain artist.  Why would that set me off, you ask?  Because I have just recently turned my back to such “services”.  Because if they are a better way to find music and artists, they are also cutting off the hands that feed them.  The hands of musicians and the hands of songwriters ans indeed the hands of all involved in the musical process, for it is a process.