Frank Gutch Jr: We’re Missing Too Much, You and Me (a look at music already slipping into the past), Plus Notes To Knock Your Socks Off…..

This past week I am working on two big articles, this column and have a stack of reviews waiting to be written and am wondering where I can find the time.  I need a good 48 hours in a day to even think about keeping up, but if they gave them to me I would more than likely use them napping or watching Howard Stern  make a judging ass out of himself on network TV  (No, I wouldn’t.  I hated him when he was doing his radio and TV shows.  After watching him embarrass himself brown-nosing some poor schlep who was lucky enough to make it to the end of some lame circus act of song or dance, it reinforced my initial judgment.

Frank Gutch Jr: Who’s Who In Rock Music, Maxi Dunn & The Lost Art of Arranging, Bryce Larsen Steals Jane (Again!), and The Lonely Wild…..

I sit at the desk a partial human being once again, the throat still coated with viscous fluids and the chronic hacking reduced to a wheezing irritation of the I-think-I-can variety (irritating but not life-threatening).  I am drinking Royal Crown Cola (as opposed to the preferred Crown Royal) to reduce viscosity, the mind is somewhat sharp though I could easily use another eighteen hours sleep before writing this (I have been waking at 3 A.M. these past few nights) and wonder how far I will go before losing energy and direction.

Frank Gutch Jr: Lighthouse Revisited, Wilderness Road, What Were the Odds (Game & Ratchell), and Notes…..

“I have to tell you, New York is just like a chick.  When she hates you she beats you to death, but when she loves you you know you’ve been loved…”  I don’t know exactly who said that but it was a member of Lighthouse and is but one line of many out of a radio documentary on that bandyou need to hear (assuming, of course, you have any interest in the history of rock and/or jazz music at all).  It was recorded during the band’s very first live gig at, of course, New York’s Carnegie Hall, a gig so impressive that fans and critics alike thought that this was the beginning of something incredibly huge.  Huge it became— in Canada, at least— but the States had better things to do than to listen to the new and the odd and, to the American mainstream, horns and this jazz/rock fusion was both new and odd.  Skip Prokop and crew, you see, took it further than Blood Sweat & Tears and Chicago ever did.  Way further.

Frank Gutch Jr: M-M-M-Metal Is All You Ever Play, Get Research Turtles’ Mankiller Pt. 1 of 2 While You Can— Free! and Notes, Notes and More Notes!!!!!

With apologies to The Records (that’s the band, sports fans) and their song Teenarama.  I was sitting here plowing my way through one of my more favorite albums of the past few weeks by one Sandrider and wondering what it is that makes us turn right or left when mood strikes us— to bang heads with Freedom Hawk and Sandrider and then slither into the sixties and early seventies pop garden with The Records and The Shoes.  It’s a hell of a jump from “Cut down these heathens” to “C-c-c-c-c-cola is all you ever drink,” from “Hold not your blades to our sad thirsty throats” to “Teenarama/All that melodrama/Gimme gimme gimme gimme/Teenarama” but it is a jump I make all the time.  It’s no wonder I’m screwed up.  I can’t walk a straight line.  Hell, sometimes I can barely walk!