Frank Gutch Jr: My Morbid Yet Sanguine World

Someone once told me I was eccentric.  I laughed out loud because I am the least eccentric of any people I know.  I am, in fact, so normal and middle-of-the-road that I occasionally label myself boring.  I am.  Boring, that is.  I am a puddle of mediocrity in a pool of ordinary.  The jack of all trades and master of none.  Neither the dimmest bulb nor the brightest.  Plain yogurt.  A one dollar bill.  I am as exciting as baseball in the off-season and Christmas in July.  I have been the second choice of too many girls to recount (Gosh, Frank, if it wasn’t for— insert name here— it would be you) and the tenth choice on a team of nine.  I write because I have no other talent.  I am the sponge which lives vicariously.  Even the kids who love me abandon me when they are old enough to realize…

Frank Gutch Jr: I Have Seen the Future and It Wasn’t This…..

 

Not the political future, which has turned out bad enough, but the music future which is floundering.  I saw it going awry in 1992 when I left the retail record business as it morphed to a “music industry” I never recognized.  I tried to make sense of it then, wondering why the decisions being made by not just major labels but by what then was becoming an entertainment conglomerate were so unerringly ridiculous.  I need to watch the documentary on Tower Records, All Things Must Pass, in detail.  I need to revisit the individual instances which brought down radio, records and everything else entertainment around our ears.  I need to understand who was in power, if indeed anyone was, and who made the monumental mistakes which gave us the chaos we now have.

Frank Gutch Jr: Death Becomes Relevant – Part Two (Musicians We Lost in 2014

Relevance is a matter of perspective.  When you are young, you think you will live forever.  When you reach middle age, if you are that lucky, it begins to matter.  From that point on, it gains importance as time passes until the grim reaper knocks on the door.  Death— something you ignore as a child, unless you have personal contact with it in some form— something which, as the years go by, eventually becomes inevitable.

GARY PIG GOLD has TEN YOU MAY HAVE MISSED In 2014

When not deep down in the basement with Dylan’s 11th Bootleg Series, or in the studio as Mike Nesmith bravely barks orders at the Wrecking Crew on that Super Deluxe version of the first Monkees album, Gary had both ears peeled directly towards – in strictly alphabetical order as always, that is…

Roxanne Tellier – And a Happy New Year!

This year it falls to me to be the last voice of DBAWIS 2014. Still decked out in my new holiday outfit, and digesting our early family Christmas dinner,