Frank Gutch Jr: Doug Sahm & The Search For The Perfect Taco… Plus Notes

‘At freaking Doug Sahm.  I thought I knew him, and I do know his music, but he was a lot more complicated than I’d ever heard.  Hell of a musician.  The epitome of crazy as hell.  Hellbent on glory.  And yet shied back from it whenever it showed itself.  If his life had been all stage, I think he would have been happier, but those times in between shows and rehearsals wore him down.  There are only so many shows in any one of us and Sahm had more than most.  A lot more.

I think I learned more about him watching the documentary Sir Doug and the Genuine Texas Cosmic Groove than I could have learned outside of following him since the sixties and the explosion of Texas music (and The Sir Douglas Quintet) all over the US of A.  There is a lot to learn and watching the film a few more times will more than likely fill in some holes, but man!  What a life!

Frank Gutch Jr: John Stewart— More Than Just “Gold”; Wayne Berry— Welcome Home

I picked up a turntable for my sister a couple of months ago.  She had found what she said was about twenty of her old albums (it was more like a hundred and fifty) and had the urge to once again hear them.  Mostly they were albums I remember her liking— Percy Faith, Rod McKuen, Enoch Light and the like.  She drove me nuts with those albums when we were kids but I secretly liked a lot of them.  (I did truly hate the Sound of Music, Colleen, but the others were okay).

Frank Gutch Jr: Rain Perry, Mark Hallman (The Shopkeeper), and Congress House Studio; Spotify Once Again; and Notes Hitting the Spot

You can file this one under “and I thought I knew something.”  I just watched a documentary which starts “When I was a kid, music was everything,” a statement as acute to me as author Scott Turow‘s line “It suddenly hit me how much I missed music for which I once felt a yearning as keen as hunger.”  It struck a note so deep in me that I watched  all one-hour-and-thirty-one minutes feeling a kinship with the narrator (and, as it turns out, producer of the film), almost relieved that I was not alone.