Frank Gutch Jr: And Now For Something Completely (Well, Almost) Different, Plus Notes…..

Before I begin this, a little heads up.  Fort Worth, that bastion of musical lugubriation which has been producing worthy quarter and eighth note treatises since before Rock was born, is gracing us with two projects of which you need to be aware.  One involves Jim Colegrove and cohort Roscoe West (and a cast of others) who have come together in a group calling themselves Men of Extinction.  With music dipped in Country & Western and old-time Rock with a little Soul thrown in on the side, they have put together a very tasty and sometimes humorous album titled We Made It Ourselves.  And they did.

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.