Frank Gutch Jr: Will You Still Feed Me: A Look Back at the Music of My Teen Years… Plus Notes

 

I looked in a mirror this morning.  I am no longer that lanky young teen anxious to conquer the world but am instead the Metamucil blob of phlegm beaten into submission, almost, by an uncaring world.  Don’t ask me when the world changed but it changed drastically and I have been spit out the other end, not all that changed mentally but a physical time bomb with littler and littler time available.  So excuse me while I take a little tiptoe through the tulips, music-wise, in an effort to wrap up the year.

Frank Gutch Jr: Psycho-Paths To the Heart (A Valentine’s Celebration of Musical Phobias and Neuroses), Deep Feedin’, What? Jon Gomm Again?, and Notezzzz…..

I’ve often wondered if previous generations of humans are as fucked up as we are about relationships.  I watch TV, go to movies and listen to music all the time and it appears to me we are a nation if not a world of basket cases.  We’re all self-involved and needy and greedy and sex-crazed and have so many phobias experts are identifying new ones all the time in an effort to keep up.  Growing up, I thought everything was laid out for us and it looked like gooey fun, but then when I was growing up we were in the era of Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis, The Three Stooges and that strange teen phenomenon which circled around a mashup of James Dean and Marlon Brando (the young Brando and not the Godfather-era).  Were we fucked up then?  I suppose we were.

Frank Gutch Jr: Norton Records: After the Flood, Music Millennium: Back to the Future (Vinyl)

“That’s it.”  That is the final word in this video Norton Records posted on Vimeo not long ago.  Not, “That’s it, we’re done.”  More like, “That’s it, there is nothing more to say at this time.”  Head Nortonite Billy Miller had just given the rundown on the work being done to salvage as much as possible from the devastation they had incurred from Hurricane Sandy and a heartbroken Mirriam Linna had showed us the warehouse where boxes of vinyl lay piled in heaps like dunes on a beach (wall-to-wall) and, truth be told, that was it for those comments because they and a whole host of volunteers had and have a mountain of work ahead of them.

Frank Gutch Jr: The Pacific Northwest…That Sound!

They call the sound “garage” these days.  The sound of The Sonics and The Fabulous Wailers (who were always referred to as just The Wailers in the Pac Northwest) and Mr. Lucky & The Gamblers and Paul Bearer & The Hearsemen and so many more who relied on that harder edge to get teens to dance.  Older people called it garbage and maybe it was, but by the gods, teens would have said (if they’d thought of it) it is our garbage, and they hung onto it like it was the last order of fries they might ever get.  Not all teens, but enough of them.  Enough to pack the various National Guard Armories which were the core of the NW venues allowing rock ‘n’ roll.  Enough to place bands like The Gentlemen Wild and The Live Five and The Dimensions on the rock charts— the local rock charts.  Was there ever really anything but local?  Not then and not up here.