Frank Gutch Jr: Let’s Play Catch and Then Catch-Up Because It Was Opening Day Yesterday and, Man, Are We Behind When It Comes To Music!

It was opening day yesterday— for baseball, in case you’re wondering.  Time for the so-called Faithful to breathe in the aroma of Spring and pay homage to overpaid athletes who had better be as good as they can be because that home run that center-fielder just hit cost the club $27,102.56.  I don’t know what it is but even the intelligent lay aside any real maturity they gained since the last out of last years World Series.  Cubs fans talk of a pennant, Red Sox fans rejoice in the fact that they have yet another chance to win it all and Dodger fans— well, the Dodgers haven’t been the Dodgers since they left Brooklyn, in my opinion.  Major League Baseball died for me on the day they announced the move.  Walter O’Malley destroyed not just one childhood fantasy of mine— that baseball was a sport— but also what I had always thought the only major league worth caring about— The Pacific Coast League.

Frank Gutch Jr: It’s Almost Spring! Let Us Celebrate With a New Alcoholic Faith Mission Album and Baseball!!! Plus Notes…..

Yep.  Denmark’s Alcoholic Faith Mission is releasing a new album, their first in three years, and it’s a beaut.  This column, in fact, originally started as a tribute to the band and its run but, as usual, life got in the way (my brain stopped functioning) and I promise a future column will go into the band’s history as well as numerous videos they have produced over the years.

Frank Gutch Jr: 2014 – A Look Back…..

One hell of a year for music.  Not so much for musicians— at least the musicians no longer with us.  Hard to balance a year like that, pluses and minuses popping up like ads from a virus, canceling one another out or piling one on top of the other ad infinitum until the system collapses from the weight.  We all felt the weight whether we all know it or not.  So many musicians now on the other side but, lucky for us, so many new musicians taking their places.  Jesus.  My head spins.

Frank Gutch Jr: Goodnight Songs: A Grammy Teaser?; Lavacado Clears a Room; Three Albums You Shouldn’t Miss; Plus Notes…..

Why am I the last to know about Margaret Wise Brown?  Chances are, if you don’t remember the name, you have heard her works, especially Goodnight Moon, a book written specifically for children and sandmen.  While I had not heard of it, everyone to whom I have mentioned it has, some making snide references to that rock I must live under.  Evidently my childhood was deprived— at least deprived of Ms. Brown and her wonderful works.  I am not taking it personally, though, thanks to Virginia musicians Emily Gary and Tom Proutt.  They contacted me awhile ago about a book they had recently been involved with, written by Ms. Brown, titled Goodnight Songs.

Frank Gutch Jr: Help! I’ve Fallen and I Can’t Reach My Turntable! featuring Jubal Lee Young, Anna Maria Rosales, Caitlin Canty and a Cast Of Thousands! oh, and notes too…..

Indiana Jones has nothing on me.  That big rolling ball chasing him?  That’s nothing compared to the mountain of carnivorous beasts chasing me in my dreams every night, each vying for that elusive review I promised what seems months ago.  It is the music reviewers equivalent to no pants in the schoolroom, the albums fighting one another to get to me, to rip flesh from bone, to make me pay for what they see as vinyl manslaughter— vinylslaughter, if you will— an offense so terrible as to consign innocent artists and albums to a certain death, so vile as to blast dreams to smithereens, so ghastly as to be— well— ghastly.

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: Lavacado, The Pick Brothers, Buster, Edie Carey & Sarah Sample, and Jenn Lindsay— It Ain’t All Hard Day’s Night & Pink Floyd Out There, Folks…..

Again, my column has been waylaid.  There is something in my universe which gets in the way of every other column I sit down to write.  This time it has to do with my favorite of the grunge bands in Seattle back when grunge was just a child— Son of Man.  I think that band and Screaming Trees were the only bands I paid close attention to back then, at least when it came to the up-and-comers.  Each had a certain undefinable something which made me sit up and listen.  Each has held up well as the years have passed.  One day I will post a list of my very favorite albums over the years and the Trees’ Sweet Oblivion will be there as will the lost “album” of Son of Man— I say lost because I am not really sure whether an album was the intention, they being handed to me on cassette as “demos”.