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.
The past week I have been revisiting some of my earlier DBAWIS columns and am shocked at how few people (as far as I can tell) know about them, even now. When I write about musicians, it is usually personal, both the person or people and the music, and I feel that sometimes they are more water under the bridge than anything. No one sends notes asking about someone I wrote about in 2012 unless something has happened since and there are so many truly talented people who deserve recognition. So this week, I am going to point toward artists you may have missed whom I think are above the norm in terms of talent and/or personality. And maybe I owe a few of them money, but that is neither here nor there.
He is! And I will tell you why! Read this— the beginning of an email he titled 7 Short Notes on Sandy Denny. Wait! I shouldn’t. You see, Brian is a good friend and lets me in on creative works long before they are ready for public consumption. Some works. Sure, some are just one-liners, but always one-liners of consequence. Others are long and involved thoughts squeezed through fingers or thumbs (unlike myself, he has mastered the craft of the smartphone), dancing around topics but never reaching the core, leaving that task to others.
It’s that time of year again, sports fans. Santa has been on the radio for the past two months, robot disc jockeys and purveyors of everything muzak beating us senseless with varying renditions of Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree and Jolly Old Saint Nicholas, hoping to lighten our mood enough to loosen the old purse strings. Hallmark Channel have kicked into full Christmas mode, plastering their channels with their cookie-cutter movies which vary mostly by the changing of leading ladies (this year’s favorite, by far, is Hilarie Burton, whom I saw in an old Castle episode and was floored by not only her beauty but the fact that the casting could not have been more right). I wish they had more creativity over at Hallmark, their overuse of the five plots and rotating stars coming very close to consumer abuse. But, hey, I’m a sap.
Please allow me to start this column with an aside. Each year, I compile a list of albums I consider the best. Last year, I picked Lost Leaders‘ self-titled album because it had that indescribable something which made me come back to it again and again. I mean, I love this album!!!
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.
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 laughed out loud the other day when Michael Fennelly commented that his daughter used to claim that when he hit the high notes, even dogs couldn’t hear him. I mean, kids can be your toughest critics but she may have been right because he has one of those voices that rides the jet stream at times— rock’s answer to bluegrass and country’s high lonesome, if you will.
I have learned my lesson. Numerous times over the past few years, I have been caught at my desk, coffee at hand, spewing said coffee in copious amounts thanks to the writings of my colleagues here at DBAWIS, sometimes through the mouth and sometimes through the nose. It is altogether possible that I have unknowingly spewed through various other orifices of my body as well, but by the time I get through laughing, everything is dry and, therefore, in the distant past, as it were.
Want to know how stupid we are? Us Americans, anyway? Pretty damn, as far as I can see, and all it took was sitting down and taking ten minutes to map out one day. I have had people tell me that if I really want to know what is happening, I should sit down every day and write down everything I did. Not in detail but with enough to show me what really happened and not just what I thought happened. When I did, I was stunned. See, I live on a very limited budget (What? You think we get paid for all the fun we have here at DBAWIS?) and I thought I was doing pretty well navigating through life. One days list and I’m not so sure.
Bullseye Records of Canada
Segarini: Don't Believe a Word I Say 