Frank Gutch Jr: Three Noteworthy Reissue Labels Mining the Gold… and Silver… and Copper… and Tin… plus Notes

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.

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.