Frank Gutch Jr: The World Is Dying and Yet It Lives, Especially in Canada – The Land of Mowat, Music, and Literature

We are killing the world.  Killing it.  The human, the supposed brightest and most intelligent species on Earth is killing the only planet we have.  The only one which can sustain us.  Forget about Mars or the myriad of planets scientists are telling us might be alternate worlds for us.  There is not enough time to find them and, if you ask me, it wouldn’t do any good anyway.  We would kill them too.  It is our way— our lot in life.  As much as we want to be compassionate and good, we can’t.  We cannot shake the urge to kill, usually in the name of progress.

Frank Gutch Jr: Hot Damn! Summer In the City? I Knew a Girl Named Summer Once…

 

Only one.  I was running combine for a small farmer outside of Halsey, Oregon and was hauling grass seed to a warehouse on the outskirts of Harrisburg.  The warehouse was a stone’s throw away from what I considered a very nice ranch-style house with a big picture window through which I saw her the first time, a small girl… a waif of a girl, but so beautiful it took my breath away.

Frank Gutch Jr: Julian Taylor Has a Band, EIEIO; Wreckless Eric & The Case of the Not-So-Brave-New-World; From The Sally Rose Band To Shagwuf (with an umlaut); A Look Back at Audrey Martell(s); and Plain Old Notes

If I headed a bill, I wouldn’t want The Julian Taylor Band opening.  I mean, remember when Hendrix opened for The Monkees?   No, I don’t suppose you do.  Most of you, anyway.  Let us just say it didn’t last.  While Julian Taylor is no Hendrix (apples and oranges, really), he is a monster in the wings awaiting his chance and his new album, Desert Star, might just be it.  It’s a double album, I hear, and one with four distinct sides.  I have it.  I want to listen to it.  I will get to it.  But first I have to get past this performance of Taylor and crew at Lee’s Palace in Toronto.  Posted only a couple of days ago, it has been looping on my computer since.  I hear funk and I hear soul and I hear so much more.

Frank Gutch Jr: Lavacado, The Pick Brothers, Buster, Edie Carey & Sarah Sample, and Jenn Lindsay— It Ain’t All Hard Day’s Night & Pink Floyd Out There, Folks…..

Again, my column has been waylaid.  There is something in my universe which gets in the way of every other column I sit down to write.  This time it has to do with my favorite of the grunge bands in Seattle back when grunge was just a child— Son of Man.  I think that band and Screaming Trees were the only bands I paid close attention to back then, at least when it came to the up-and-comers.  Each had a certain undefinable something which made me sit up and listen.  Each has held up well as the years have passed.  One day I will post a list of my very favorite albums over the years and the Trees’ Sweet Oblivion will be there as will the lost “album” of Son of Man— I say lost because I am not really sure whether an album was the intention, they being handed to me on cassette as “demos”.