Frank Gutch Jr: Answering the Questions, Where Do Houseflies Socialize; You Only Believe Me When I’m Lying; Rolling Stones Magazine’s 100 Greatest Guitarists of All-Time? Seriously?; Plus Notes

The world doesn’t always go my way and sometimes I get so pissed about that that I have to vent.  GodDAMN if the world isn’t going the way of idiots and psychopaths as the Trump Generation attempts to destroy everything good, but I will be damned if I will let it happen to my music.  That’s right.  My music!  Sure, you have your music— The Beatles and Floyd  and Queen and even Beyonce and Kanye and whoever the hell else.  YOU don’t have to worry.  YOU can find that music and plenty of people who still love that music just walking down the street.  Me, I have to work for it.  I have to scrounge and search and listen and question at every turn.  You think that’s easy?

Frank Gutch Jr: These Are People I’ve Known (But Who Try to Keep It a Secret); Plus Notes

The past week I have been revisiting some of my earlier DBAWIS columns and am shocked at how few people (as far as I can tell) know about them, even now.  When I write about musicians, it is usually personal, both the person or people and the music, and I feel that sometimes they are more water under the bridge than anything.  No one sends notes asking about someone I wrote about in 2012 unless something has happened since and there are so many truly talented people who deserve recognition.  So this week, I am going to point toward artists you may have missed whom I think are above the norm in terms of talent and/or personality.  And maybe I owe a few of them money, but that is neither here nor there.

Frank Gutch Jr: Between Assignments? A Look at a Few Bands Which Weren’t, Really… Or Were They? Plus Them Nefarious Notes

I was looking through the Book of Face pages the other day and ran across a post about The Sidewalk Scene.  I remember them, friend Ray Brandes having been a frontman for them how long ago?  Two years so?  Three years?  The post linked to a page which showcased four studio-produced tracks, all jangly and sixties-oriented.  Music, in fact, that I remember fondly.

Frank Gutch Jr: Skyboys Redux— Live at The Fabulous Rainbow! Mark Lindsay Redux! Plus Notes

But first, some incredibly sad news.  Jim Manolides no longer wanders among us.  Jim had been a longtime stalwart of Pac Northwest music, having played with James Henry & The Olympics, Dave Lewis, The Frantics, and Jr. Cadillac, among others.  In addition to having played music in the Northwest for decades, he was also looked upon as a music historian of repute.  I mean, he had been around since almost the beginning.

Frank Gutch Jr: Dumpster Diving For 45s, Ken Nordine….. Plus Notes To Die For

I feel sorry for kids these days.  They do not know the pleasure of the 45 RPM record.  They do not understand the thrill of buying a hit and finding a song on the flip side that gets as much or more play time as the hit.  They do not know, in this day of pay-per-track that they should be getting two songs for the price of the one.  It’s the law.  Or should be.  I am sure that asshats at corporate chuckle every time us idiots order a song, knowing that they are shortchanging us.  Yep, we used to get two songs.  Like I said, it was the law.  Labels and distributors, though, write their own laws these days.  I know I’m a dinosaur, but anything less than two is a fuck you to us music junkies.  Well, fuck them.

Frank Gutch Jr.: Tom Kell & The Skyboys, Michael Fennelly, Stu Nunnery, “Goin’ Down”, and Just Plain Nuts– erm– Notes…..

I have learned my lesson.  Numerous times over the past few years, I have been caught at my desk, coffee at hand, spewing said coffee in copious amounts thanks to the writings of my colleagues here at DBAWIS, sometimes through the mouth and sometimes through the nose.  It is altogether possible that I have unknowingly spewed through various other orifices of my body as well, but by the time I get through laughing, everything is dry and, therefore, in the distant past, as it were.

Frank Gutch Jr: Notary Sojac: The Band and the Legend, Plus Notes…..

These guys crack me up.  Even forty years later.  Even after having been separated four decades, these guys are still brothers under the skin, and they are brothers.  They lived as brothers and fought as brothers and even had various “heads of state” treat them as brothers whilst trying to keep them from getting screwed as a band.  You look at the films and read the books of bands back in the late sixties and early seventies, you might think that life was all getting stoned and getting laid and flowers-in-your-hair, but that’s all surface.

Frank Gutch Jr: YOU WANT A MASHUP? I’LL GIVE YOU A MASHUP!

That’s what they call it, is it not?  Where some needle-nosed geek sits behind a keyboard and threads Beatles and Michael Jackson songs together and comes up with the modern version of Stars on 45?  Hey, I admit that some of them are decent and a few have been downright creative, but let us face it.  It’s a fad.  No more nor less than the medley fad that pretended that what Stars on 45 was doing was musically viable.  Show of hands.  How many bought Stars on 45?  How many still have them?  That wind you feel is all those hands going down.