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: New Albums: Lost Leaders, Zoe Muth, Chris & Gileah, Joseph LeMay, and Others; and Voluminarious Notes (there will be a quiz)!!!

If this was a real job, I would have been fired long ago.  I spent a whole day and night piecing together the research for this weeks column which was intended to be fun and games with radio charts because, man, when you get into them (especially the ones from the fifties and sixties), they are fun as hell and, boy, the tricks you have to know to understand them, but once again things came along to kick the idea to the curb.  It happens every week, swear to God, so I took a little trip down computer lane and counted the columns and column ideas I have started and not finished and it came to 27.  The good thing is that I still have 27 ideas set aside for future columns.  The bad news is that I haven’t worked on any one of them since. Sigh.

Frank Gutch Jr: We Are the World Done Local, Mining 45s, and Notes…..

Quick!  Without searching, answer a few questions.  Who recorded We Are the World?  Who benefited?  Who wrote it?  Was there a B-side?  Were there other projects similar?  Does anyone care?  Did anyone care?

For those born after the fact, it may surprise you to know that plenty cared.  Over 20 million people worldwide bought the record.  I mean, Michael Jackson and Lionel Ritchie, the writers of the song, were huge at the time.  So were producers Quincy Jones and Michael Omartian, though Jones significantly more than Omartian.

Frank Gutch Jr: If Nothing Else, Today’s CDs Are Tomorrow’s Collector’s Items….

And if you don’t think so, just look at the past.  What do you want?  78’s?  45’s?  Disc cylinders?  Vinyl?  Oh, so you think that CD’s are different?  I hate to tell you this (actually, I don’t), but no, they’re not.  You who are so anxious to kill the CD format shall suffer the same fate as those who killed (or greatly wounded) vinyl and every other outdated form of getting music.  You shall be committed to the hell of limitations beyond your wildest expectations placed upon you by the technocrats who toss out updates and new formats like acid at a Grateful Dead concert.