Frank Gutch Jr: Thank You, Vancouver! We Love You! Be Sure To Tip Your Waitress!

My brother-in-law kept telling me about New York but all I could see was the tall buildings popping out of the ground of downtown Vancouver.  It wasn’t the massiveness of the city.  It was the feel!  And make no mistake, Vancouver is a city.  A big one with a big downtown and all of the pluses and minuses which go with it.  Sirens all night, a large homeless contingent, people walking with rolling suitcases everywhere.  Restaurants— my God, there were so many restaurants— every kind of food you could possibly imagine.

Frank Gutch Jr: Three Noteworthy Reissue Labels Mining the Gold… and Silver… and Copper… and Tin… plus Notes

Music used to be all about hits, and before that, artists, and before that, publishing.  Recycling music was written into the process from the beginning, but when the LP came along, recycling became a way of life.  To be fair, early reissue albums were not reissues at all but were what they termed “budget” discs, a term also applied to albums of “generic” music by artists of little known or unknown cachet.  Labels such as Harmony and Pickwick and Design once filled drug store racks with albums of dubious distinction, filled with either deep tracks of a popular artist or tracks by bands put together in the studio to recreate hits of the day.