Frank Gutch Jr: Tania Stavreva; Sometimes It Takes a Choir; Plus Them Damn Addictive Notes

Time to bust outta this place, amigos.  Time to strike out into the unknown— well, lesser known— and visit city cousins, because we are definitely heading toward the city.  No Hoi Polloi allowed where we’re going—  nothing but royalty and coronation balls.  I would make a joke here but lowering standards is beneath us today, okay?  Today hamburger is not on the menu.  More like foie gras— to the more common among us, goose liver.  Not just any goose liver, though.  This is, like I said, foie gras, a mixture of specially fattened goose liver to please the palate if the mind.  And of the ears.

Gary asks, “How Can The Killer Save Souls?”

In honor of The One And Only Jerry Lee Lewis who, believe it or not, just turned 82 (!!) we take a little trip back. Sixty years back from the 8th to be exact, to an unassuming little building at 706 Union Avenue, Memphis, Tennessee where something called “Great Balls Of Fire” has just been brought, red hot, into the Sun Studio.

A Segarini Rerun – 29+ Great Movies I Will Never Tire Of Watching That You May Have Never Seen

From exactly a year ago. A new addition to my Movie Lust coming soon. In the meantime…This. – Bob

Music may be my life and ‘job’ and undoubtedly, my most well-honed and informed skill-set, but it is not what I do for ‘fun’. What my spare time (Ha!) is used for, is my passion for movies and television.

Frank Gutch Jr: Classic Rock— Not As Classic As You Might Think; Plus, In Keeping With the Theme, Notes of a Classic Nature

 

I would love to gather all of the music directors of so-called Classic Rock radio stations in the Roman Coliseum and turn the lions loose.  I was around long before the term Classic Rock was even phrased and as big a fan of rock radio as there was and I learned to hate everything radio tried to do after big money came in with all of their ideas to make radio “better.”  I suffered through a number of formats from the time of “Boss” radio to the present, the only one being worth a shit (to my mind) being Underground.  Ah, the days of underground.  I remember returning from the Army to Eugene and radio station KZEL and being floored with evening sets by The Wasted Potato (I think his name was Gary Parmentier) like War/Four Cornered Room, The Temptations/Masterpiece, and Funkadelic/Maggot Brain, back-to-back-to-back.

Segarini – Petty Differences

It was sometime during the Spring of 1977. I was in New York (for God knows why) and my friend Ritchie swung by the Chelsea and Bobnapped me in his TransAm, or Camaro, or whatever the fuck it was, and drove us across the George Washington Bridge into Soprano Country and the Wilds of New Jersey. This wasn’t the first time by a long shot. Once was to a Mansion he and his buddies ‘liberated’ while the owners were in the Hamptons, where he introduced me to Yes and ‘Roundabout’ on a GhettoBlaster set up on one of the numerous fireplace mantles, and another time, when he spirited me away to a high school in West Orange to hear some guy named Bruce Springsteen play a school dance in the Gymnasium. THIS time, we were on our way to a house party on the Jersey Shore, long before The Situation briefly lived in a broken condom….

Frank Gutch Jr: Thoughts on Big Star, The Little Band That Wasn’t Until One Day, Forty Years Later, It Was; Plus Updates and Voluminous Notes of a Lugubrious Nature

It was a epiphanal moment, one where an aura engulfs something or someone with angelic choir background.  In this case, it engulfed the first two albums released by new and tiny Ardent Records: Cargoe‘s self-titled classic and Big Star‘s #1 Record.  I held them up and asked Gary Haller, co-owner of Eugene’s now famed House of Records if they were any good.  They looked good, the slick glossy covers showing artsy pictures of the bands, the neon Big Star sign classy in an Andy Warhol sort of way.  “Dunno,” Gary replied.  “Nice artwork, though.”  I brooded over them for the next hour or so, pulling other records from the racks to read liner notes I had already read numerous times, hoping that this time I would find inspiration.  To buy.  To listen.  To covet.

DOUG THOMPSON – RISING TO THE TOP AT MOTOWN

Sometimes meeting your heroes can be very disappointing.  They could just be having a bad day or had a fight with their significant other or their manager, or recently received bad news about a pet project…or as is sometimes the case, they could just be an asshole.

On the other hand, some heroes exceed your expectations and then some.