Frank Gutch Jr: Music Millennium: Still Weird After All These Years; Meet Sid Hagan; Plus Them Glorious Notes

It plays like a loop in my head, the first time I visited Music Millennium. I remember the drive to Portland from Eugene, parking down the hill on East Burnside, the walk up the street and even opening the door. Had I filmed it, it could not be any more clear. I had been in many record stores before— in  fact, the guys with me were all denizens of Eugene’s House of Records— but this was different. This was the famed Millennium, the seller of imports, the mecca of what record stores should be as far as many of us were concerned. Tower Records may have had stores open at the time (it was the summer of ’72, though I have been saying ’71 for years and have only recently discovered my mistake) but the Pac Northwest didn’t know it. Why should we have cared? We had the Millennium!

Frank Gutch Jr: Meet The Duck (and Other Tales of Woe); A Node to Billy Miller (RIP);

 

His real name is Steve Suhadolnik but they called him The Duck after a weekend in Seattle with his buddies Newman Newman and Dahlgreen left all three of them practically penniless because of Newman Newman’s hours-long call to his girl back in Indiana while the Duck and Dahlgreen took in a double-feature and (I am sure) trolled Pike Street for hookers.  See, The Duck had this thing for hookers, having spent a year in Bangkok living with one.  Number One, in fact.  He always told me, you ever make it to Bangkok go down to the Thermay Lounge and ask for Number One.  Then he would smile, just like in this picture, and smack his lips.

Frank Gutch Jr: Confessions of a (Reformed) Vinyl Junkie, Plus Notes…..

I used to have over 10,000 record albums.  That is really not that many when you really look at it.  More than you could listen to fairly in a year, I suppose.  Deep enough to impress vinyl junkies, too many to impress anyone sane.  Way more than enough to make my life desolate when it came to relationships.

Frank Gutch Jr: While Most of Us Talk, Some of Us Do— Grass-Tops Recording; Record Store Day Goodies; Media and Politics— The Hot Topics Are Nothing New; Plus Them Incredible, Edible Notes

Don’t look now, kiddies, but in spite of all the mumblings and grumblings of a plethora of naysayers, the music industry is reinventing itself.  Not at the top, of course, where one (Universal) or two (are any others left?) keep eating the detritus remaining from the Great Music Holocaust of the late-90s and early-2000s.  Rather than change the model, executives at the various major labels would rather go down with the ship, hopefully while clutching that pot of gold in the form of those golden parachutes being handed out by corporations which claim to lose money but which seem to be able to find millions enough to buy out contracts of those leaving the fold. (How do you spell bribery these days?)  They hang on, but not because they are competent.

Frank Gutch Jr: My Journey As Brought To You By…..

The Corona School of Writing, Weinhard’s Private Reserve, record labels (major and independent) and just about everyone I have ever really known.  So I sit here quaffing the ice cold Weinhard, waiting for that writing buzz and wondering where I will go with this because I have no real idea where I am going, only where I have been.  I have been lucky, lucky like I cannot believe, but not lucky of my own making.  I have been surrounded by good people— no, people more than good— and it is time I pay tribute to those and those things which have made me who I am.

Frank Gutch Jr: Down Under Down Under: Band Picks By My Favorite Aussie Musicians

God, but I love Australia.  I love the openness and the freedom and the idealism.  I love their uniqueness— I mean, what other continents have such cool animals as the duck-billed platypus and kangaroo and koala.  What other continent has the history, much of it forgotten outside that country’s boundaries— the penal colonies (Did you know that England sent their undesirables to the soon-to-be United States before diverting them to Australia? Colonies were colonies to those inbred bastards back then, eh?), the rabbit roundups (The newsreel clips are pure science fiction! Check out the little video I found on Youtube which highlights the problems of invasive species down under), the flying doctors, the centralization of schools.  The Outback.  Uluru (Ayers Rock to those outside Australia), The Great Barrier Reef.

Frank Gutch Jr: Tracy Nelson (Mother Earth) Talks Sixties San Francisco, The Music Biz, Racism and The Counterculture’s View Toward Women!!! Plus Notes…..

I’ll be a sonofabitch!  I was on page ten of this post when the goddamned computer decided to start a new document from that point, shredding the old one into etherdom.  For a minute, I was pissed, I tell you, because that was two days of work, but the couple of hours trying to retrieve said document made me realize how much I really don’t care.  It may be time and work lost, but this interview, graciously granted by Tracy Nelson, a monumentally talented vocalist, was lost to the ages (computer crash) until I came upon a hard copy I had printed for just that reason.  I cannot begin to tell you how happy I was to find it.

Frank Gutch Jr: The Millennial Kickstart!!!, Life In Proctorville— We The People’s Wayne Proctor Talks Sixties Music Scene in Florida, Plus Notes and Vids!!!!!

Welcome to the new Millennium, ladies and gentlemen, and in this case, the new Music Millennium.  I don’t have to go into details to explain the situation with record stores these days (okay— “music” stores, but they will always remain record stores to me).  They are struggling, even the biggest of them.  Even the best of them.  Even Portland, Oregon’s legendary Music Millennium.  Sure, they’re hanging on and doing better since the recent vinyl revival, but hanging on is not what owner Terry Currier wants.  Hanging on is the least that he wants.  And he has never been one to pocket money, either.  Most of what Terry has made over the past 45 years he has put either back into his store or used toward something to strengthen the music community.  And not just that of Portland.  He has stepped beyond that city more than once, mainly in a capacity to organize indie record stores.

Frank Gutch Jr: The Stores Are Alive With The Sound of Music….. plus Notes!

I still get asked why I love record stores.  Still.  Older people shrug their shoulders and the young— well, let us just say that rolling of the eyes seems to be part of their DNA.  Every time it happens, I think, hey, I wasn’t like that.  Well, except for the time that Momma pointed out that Ernie Fields‘ rockin’ In the Mood was a cover of a Glenn Miller song.

Frank Gutch Jr: Norton Records: After the Flood, Music Millennium: Back to the Future (Vinyl)

“That’s it.”  That is the final word in this video Norton Records posted on Vimeo not long ago.  Not, “That’s it, we’re done.”  More like, “That’s it, there is nothing more to say at this time.”  Head Nortonite Billy Miller had just given the rundown on the work being done to salvage as much as possible from the devastation they had incurred from Hurricane Sandy and a heartbroken Mirriam Linna had showed us the warehouse where boxes of vinyl lay piled in heaps like dunes on a beach (wall-to-wall) and, truth be told, that was it for those comments because they and a whole host of volunteers had and have a mountain of work ahead of them.