Frank Gutch Jr: Daisy House— An A&R Dream

In all my years in music, I never worked for a label.  I wanted to.  But I wanted to work only in A&R.  Artists and Repertoire.  They were the people who found the artists, who were liaison between the artist and label management, who groomed the performers and worked with them on the songs for their albums and maybe just the direction of focus.  I knew a few A&R people in L.A.  They loved it.  They wouldn’t have done anything else.  Most of them, when their A&R gigs ended, got out of the business because it was a sewer everywhere else.  Sales?  The pits.  Promotion?  Real work.  Management?  A path, most of the time, to disaster.  I mean, A&R was where the adventure was.  And is.

Frank Gutch Jr: Radio— The Longest Acid Trip Ever; plus Notes

GodDAMN, I feel sorry for the youth of today!  I just finished listening to Jaimie Vernon‘s Nightmare at 20,000 Watts yet again (What is that— 500 or so?) and I’m thinking radio, radio, radio and while The Vermin’s version might be the latest, it brings back an entire world pretty much lost these days.

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: Diament Is an Ear’s Best Friend; Little Lonely Rocks the Furniture; Impending Releases; and a Raft of Notes…..

Barry Diament.  Odds are, you’ve never heard of him— or think you haven’t.  The truth is, though, that if you have albums or CDs by Bad Company or Hoodoo Gurus or Led Zeppelin or Linda Ronstadt, you could have some of his work in your collection.  Diament, you see, has mastered or remastered  albums by those and many other musical artists.  What is mastering?  According to Hoyle (erm, Wikipedia):