TIME MACHINE TUESDAY NUMBER 3

The third of what will hopefully be many memories from a life of both rock and roll, not to mention radio, television, drinking, and debauchery. Shall we begin?

Pat Blythe – Dear Frank

Preface …..

The loss of Frank Gutch Jr. has affected so many people both in and out of the music industry. For many, it’s a deeply personal loss.

Frank was a prolific writer and reviewer and there weren’t enough hours in the day to accomplish whatever he wanted to do. There was always a new artist, brand new music or a new release from someone he was following. His dedication was and is unbeatable. His love for the music and for those who created it yet went unnoticed who, in his estimation, should be world famous by now and “why weren’t they?”  There was absolutely no one like him. Irreplaceable, unique, exceptional, matchless…..Frank would blush, lower his head and say he was just doing what he loved and believed in. (I can hear his “aw shucks”) and then change the subject. He had an intense and genuine curiosity about other people’s lives and not only loved hearing about them but in many respects took great joy in living vicariously through all of us.

Frank Gutch Jr: Paradise Is Paved, Here Comes the Parking Lot… plus a Voluminous Collection of Note(s)

Goldband Studios is gone.  Here I have been spending the past few years singing the praises of Research Turtles— I call them the boys from Lake Charles— without realizing that the city/town/parish also was home to Eddie Shuler and Goldband.  Dumb me.  I have known of Goldband since I was in college, having found them through That Dorm Guy who was somehow plugged into anything and everything musical.  I look back now at him and wonder how he was able to find so much music in a land with pretty much nothing but Billboard Magazine to guide him, but he did.

Frank Gutch Jr: Earlier, On Planet Normanium (Part One)— Research Turtles Redux and Baseball As We Never Knew It; Plus N-n-n-notes!

Some things just will not let go.  Seven years ago I discovered the Research Turtles.  For the last two, I had hoped for a reunion.  I now know it will not happen.  Even if they got back together, they would be a different band.  They have grown as individuals and probably matured musically beyond that band and could never capture what they once had, but for five years I envisioned success and that period gave me hope in a world pretty much without hope, the music business morphing into something beyond my recognition, the Eks and the Westergrens of the world using what I consider stolen music to build huge bank accounts for themselves and others off of the labor of musicians.  That Research Turtles do not today exist is not surprising, for who would want to hand their creations to someone else for a pittance while they made millions.

Frank Gutch Jr: David Bullock: The Price of Obscurity and the Struggle For Balance; Plus Notes

The first thing David Bullock said to me when I asked about his new EP, In the Waking World, was, and this is paraphrased, “How do I write my bio without emphasizing Space Opera?”  I wanted to say hell if I know but the more I thought about it the easier it seemed.  Only because I probably know more about that band than maybe a dozen people out there (beyond the crazies who go out of their ways to find out what a musician has for breakfast).

Frank Gutch Jr: The Music That Made Me Who I Am…..

It was my birthday last week.  I’m not saying it because it matters much to me— less and less as each year passes.  I mention it because of the things friends tell me, most of which reminds me of who I am and the paths I have taken to get here.  I mean, none of us plan to be who we are— it just evolves.

Frank Gutch Jr: If Music Is Dead, You Bastards Killed It! The Life— A Seattle Legend in My Own Mind… (plus notes)

That’s right.  You!  You, the Incipian Heed, the Flaccid Peni, the Ego Centered!  You, the ones who are always talking about how much they know about music and fart facts in concentric circles.  You, who complain that there is no good music anymore while listening incessantly to the decades-old— music which by all rights should have been put to bed long ago but instead is held high by listeners who stopped listening as examples of what music used to be.  Well, you can kiss my Rival Sons-loving ass!  All of you who don’t know that band, pucker up.

Frank Gutch Jr: Notary Sojac, the Formative Years (Meaning The Warloks); Gary Minkler and Duggy Degs: On the Fringe; Gary Heffern: Rock’s Poet Laureate; and Stuff in the Form of Notes…..

I’m like the A-Team’s Hannibal Smith in that I too love it when a plan comes together and love it even more when it balloons into an epic tale of adventure, lust and romance.  The romance part, of course, would be my endless fascination for the music of the bands (past, present and future) which came out of the musicians who comprised Notary Sojac, the band few knew and even fewer knew about.

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: The Forgotten Past, Recent and Otherwise; Plus a Few (Very Few) Notes

 

Joseph LeMay‘s album Seventeen Acres has been out how long?  Three months?  I wrote about it in an earlier DBAWIS column and have barely mentioned it since.  I have to wonder why.  I love some of the songs on that album and like everything about it.  It is beautifully recorded, masterfully produced and mastered and, even more important, made up of outstanding songs.  And yet I push it into the past.  So I started thinking— how does that happen?