Yesterday I went through all of the private messages I’d shared with Frank Gutch Jr, since I’d first encountered him. It was in 2013, just after I’d begun writing this weekly column, and right from that first message, it was as though we were separated at birth.
I took a drive yesterday. I had been sitting in front of the computer screen too long and accomplishing little of anything at all and I needed a break. Usually when I hit the road I take music I need to hear for writing reasons but this time I needed time to myself. I grabbed one I had the urge to review by Town Mountain which when I pulled open the CD cover discovered was minus the disc. I had left it in my computer player at home. I have lost more than one disc that way. The other two were there though and I had heard neither all the way through for over a year: Lisa Parade‘s Finding Flora and Maxi Dunn‘s Edmund & Leo. I couldn’t wait.
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This is not my favorite column to write. In my youth, death was death, something which happened to everyone else. As a young man, I looked upon it as simply draining the talent pool because by then I was consumed with music— immersed in it to the point that life beyond it was a blur. In middle-age, it began becoming personal— friends and favorites taking the dive either stunningly quick or in dire circumstances.
Every year I get my hopes up and every year the so called experts behind the Grammy’s dash them against the rocks like fishkill, blood and brain cells covering the entire music industry with fresh stench in the form of what they claim to be “the best”— their words, not mine.
I am a lost Son of Canada. I must be. I love Canadian bacon, though bacon it not really be (except maybe technically). I love Jennifer Dale, an actor who deserved much more than she has been afforded, respect-wise (I reveled in her work on Canadian TV and film during Comcast’s all-too-short span of including CTV and CBC on their cable lineups in the ’80s). I love Due South, one of the most creative and funny-on-so-many-levels series TV has ever created (the transition of Ray to Ray— David Marciano to Callum Keith Rennie— a work of pure writing craftmanship).
One thing about history. Given enough time, it is a shadow of its former self. No matter what happens, importance of virtually everything is either magnified or diminished depending upon a number of factors. By the time it has been filtered over the years, it is not even remotely what it started out to be. The Twenties obviously weren’t all Gatsby and The Thirties weren’t all dust bowl and depression. There was so much more than the War (that would be of the Second World variety, sports fans) and recovery from to the Forties and if the US had lived the Fifties like Hollywood said, we would have fought like hell to stay there. Of course, by the time it got to us, it was Cliff’s Notes all over again.
Either I misplaced today’s column from one of our Monday Revolving Door contributers, (Darrell Vickers, Doug Thompson, Justin Smallbridge, or Gary Pig Gold), or the fridge magnet holding their schedules to their Kelvinator’s freezer door lost it’s power and dropped out of sight.
In any case, this column comes to you all because Jaimie Vernon made an amazing album, Frank reviewed it in another blog, and Laurie Biagini (we has similar names) re-posted it in her ALSO amazing Indie Pop Musician’s Daily online magazine. When I asked Frank’s permission to re-repost it here for your dining and dancing pleasure, the following exchange occured using the much maligned Facebook Message service.
After ending this last year cranking out two long columns about musicians we lost, I feel the need to counterbalance. While I know that death is a part of life (indeed, life = death according to the laws of nature), it was not all that much fun to dig through the past year searching for musicians recently passed. It was, in fact, a bit of a downer. Reliving the news that I knew was not half as bad as discovering the news I had missed. All too many musicians I admire tripped off this mortal coil without so much as a thank you, Frank, it’s been fun, and I was more than a little unsettled with each discovery. But the past is the past, whether we like it or not, and it was not all bad.
If we could all just tear ourselves away momentarily from the Zimmer Man’s Another Self Portrait, believe these words I say and tip both ears immediately towards (in absolutely NO order other than the alphabetical)…
The first time I ever heard The Beach Boys was at a birthday party for a friend of mine. She received the album and a new stereo. She put the album on and I was listening to it and by the time it got to “Catch a Wave”, the third track on the first side, I was freaking out. I didn’t want to have anything to do with the birthday party anymore. I just wanted to sit with my ears glued to the speakers, listening to this great music. I saved up my allowance and that was the first album I ever bought.
— Laurie Biagini
Bullseye Records of Canada
