Frank Gutch Jr: On the Road With The Lisa Parade and Maxine Dunn (Plus Them All-Important Notes)

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.

Frank Gutch Jr: Part 1 of 2 Starting with Notes!

Frank Gutch Jr: Due to circumstances beyond our control, you will be getting my column in two segments this week.  I had the Notes ready to go but last night had to deal with a kidney stone the size and shape of the original Batmobile, and I am not talking the model.  I was just about to take a sharp spoon and attempt to dig it out, kidney and all, when the pain slowly subsided and I was allowed some rest. 

Frank Gutch Jr: They Come From Edmonton— Science Fiction of the Most Musical Variety… Plus Notes

They were Jesse Dee & Jacquie B when I first heard them— two waifs supposedly in the outbacks of the Yukon surviving by hunting and survival skills, living off the land, playing bars for beer.  They ate raw meat, sometimes frozen if there was no way to thaw it (there evidently isn’t, on the whole), but skirted moose and squirrel out of respect.

Frank Gutch Jr: The Chicago I Never Knew (and the Chicago I did)

I have to come to the conclusion that if there weren’t major sports in the US of A, the youth of America would not know where they were.  Sure, they would know they were in Dallas or Little Rock or Minneapolis if they happened to live there, but knowing where you are does not equate to knowing where you are.  You have to be somewhere in relation to somewhere else to really know where you are, don’t you?  Well, maybe not.

Frank Gutch Jr: From Goodnight Moon To Goodnight Songs and Beyond: Famed Children’s Author Still Alive In Prose and Song, or Are You Glad To See Me Or Is That a Grammy In Your Pocket?; Jeff Ellis: A Day Late and a Dollar Short … Plus Notes, as few as they are

Goodnight stars; Goodnight air; Goodnight noises everywhere.

So Margaret Wise Brown ended her classic childrens book Goodnight Moon, a bedtime book for the ages.  Until I received a message from Charlottesville musician, Keith Morris, he of The Crooked Numbers, I had never heard the name nor knew of the book, to my knowledge.  How I missed it I don’t know because not one person of the multitude I asked later was ignorant of its existence, though few recognized the name.

Frank Gutch Jr: 2013— A Look at the Best, plus Notes You Can Take To the Bank…..

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.

Frank Gutch Jr: The Beginnings of Christian Rock— erm, Contemporary Christian Music, plus Notes…..

Yep.  Braindead again.  After struggling for four days and working my way through four— count ’em, four starts, I find myself without a column and already an hour past deadline.  How do these things happen, I keep asking myself, but they do and when they do I wish I was drinking again.  Back in the old days, if I couldn’t get something down in a certain period of time I would pop a cold one and before the six-pack was done, I didn’t care anymore so I would type until it looked like there were enough words (or I couldn’t see the keys anymore) and would hit ‘send’ and to hell with it, you know?

Frank Gutch Jr: A Video Retrospective…..

It’s called introspection, sports fans.  We all feel it every once in awhile and I have been under its spell for the past week and the result has been a total lack of perspective and thus, no cohesive idea for a column.  I don’t know why it happens but I do know that it is indiscriminate, that it is sometimes a struggle to even look at the blank page without it beating you to a mental pulp.  For myself, the one thing I fear beyond misspelling a musician’s name is the inability to write at all and we are all under deadline, the scourge of any supposed journalist.  In the movies, the reporter is always able to crank out a barnburner of an article at the last second, saving his/her job and possibly the future of the newspaper itself.  Well, that’s Hollywood, folks, but it does give you an idea of what it is like to produce under pressure.

Frank Gutch Jr: The Best of the First Half of 2013,

Jesus, is 2013 great or what?  I’m dancing, crying, thinking, sweating, burping and bopping thanks to a handful of musicians who have me freaking out, they’re so good.  I know I said 2012 was good.  And it was!  Hell, it still is, musically.  Musicians put out some of the best music I’d heard last year, but goddamn it, 2013 is smokin’ hot!  Seriously!  And excuse me for a sec whilst I dance the happy dance.  You see, No Small Children‘s anthemic Might Get Up Slow is playing right now and will for a few times more because I need some uppers!  Shee-it, this is good!  In another time, this would be topping the charts and rocking kids out!  Even famed ex-radio disc jockey Robert W. Walker sez “Fuh-reeking great!”  Jeez, I’m sounding like Barnum & Bailey here, but sometimes you have to let loose, you know?

Frank Gutch Jr: Who’s Who In Rock Music, Maxi Dunn & The Lost Art of Arranging, Bryce Larsen Steals Jane (Again!), and The Lonely Wild…..

I sit at the desk a partial human being once again, the throat still coated with viscous fluids and the chronic hacking reduced to a wheezing irritation of the I-think-I-can variety (irritating but not life-threatening).  I am drinking Royal Crown Cola (as opposed to the preferred Crown Royal) to reduce viscosity, the mind is somewhat sharp though I could easily use another eighteen hours sleep before writing this (I have been waking at 3 A.M. these past few nights) and wonder how far I will go before losing energy and direction.