Frank Gutch Jr: Daisy House— An A&R Dream

In all my years in music, I never worked for a label.  I wanted to.  But I wanted to work only in A&R.  Artists and Repertoire.  They were the people who found the artists, who were liaison between the artist and label management, who groomed the performers and worked with them on the songs for their albums and maybe just the direction of focus.  I knew a few A&R people in L.A.  They loved it.  They wouldn’t have done anything else.  Most of them, when their A&R gigs ended, got out of the business because it was a sewer everywhere else.  Sales?  The pits.  Promotion?  Real work.  Management?  A path, most of the time, to disaster.  I mean, A&R was where the adventure was.  And is.

Frank Gutch Jr: BC’s Laurie Biagini In Song and Words; Bullseye Canada Reactivated; Vinnie Zummo and The Beatles Reunion; and Notes…..

The first time I ever heard The Beach Boys was at a birthday party for a friend of mine.  She received the album and a new stereo.  She put the album on and I was listening to it and by the time it got to “Catch a Wave”, the third track on the first side, I was freaking out.  I didn’t want to have anything to do with the birthday party anymore.  I just wanted to sit with my ears glued to the speakers, listening to this great music.  I saved up my allowance and that was the first album I ever bought.

— Laurie Biagini

Frank Gutch Jr: On a Midnight Listening Rampage With Eric Lichter

If you have never stumbled through the night listening to something you’d never heard before you’re not going to understand what a thrill this is, but I am right now diving through a string of songs by The Green Pajamas‘ Eric Lichter that I don’t think even he knew were posted.  Not that long ago, I was searching Facebook for possible inclusions in the Notes section of this column and Eric posted a couple of songs on a site called Broadjams.com.

Frank Gutch Jr: A Video Retrospective…..

It’s called introspection, sports fans.  We all feel it every once in awhile and I have been under its spell for the past week and the result has been a total lack of perspective and thus, no cohesive idea for a column.  I don’t know why it happens but I do know that it is indiscriminate, that it is sometimes a struggle to even look at the blank page without it beating you to a mental pulp.  For myself, the one thing I fear beyond misspelling a musician’s name is the inability to write at all and we are all under deadline, the scourge of any supposed journalist.  In the movies, the reporter is always able to crank out a barnburner of an article at the last second, saving his/her job and possibly the future of the newspaper itself.  Well, that’s Hollywood, folks, but it does give you an idea of what it is like to produce under pressure.

Frank Gutch Jr: The Stores Are Alive With The Sound of Music….. plus Notes!

I still get asked why I love record stores.  Still.  Older people shrug their shoulders and the young— well, let us just say that rolling of the eyes seems to be part of their DNA.  Every time it happens, I think, hey, I wasn’t like that.  Well, except for the time that Momma pointed out that Ernie Fields‘ rockin’ In the Mood was a cover of a Glenn Miller song.

Frank Gutch Jr: Redefining (Or Maybe Taking a Closer Look at) Concept Albums… and Notes (as few as there are)!

Over forty years in the record business and I’m still agog at the conception of the industry from the outside.  People think musicians are rich (or if not rich, well off, because otherwise they would not be able to support themselves, right?).  People think stars are talented without demanding that it be proven (I hate to use the guy as an example, but the Bieber’s music will last no longer than the lives of his current fans because, and we all know this, his music is contrived crap).

Frank Gutch Jr: Jock Talk: KAKC Tulsa’s Jim Peters Talks About Radio In the Sixties—

A simple recipe it was.  Sprinkle a few hundred radio stations throughout the United States and Canada, mix with rock ‘n’ roll and stir.  Stir up would be a more apt term because when the music hit the airwaves, the shit hit the fan— the music fan, that is.  Not a big deal, you say?  You’re probably right.  In the grand scheme of things, a handful of traditionalists screaming McCarthyisms in a world already changed beyond their understanding would turn out to be flies on a horse’s ass, so to speak, and to scream them at teens plugged into a jukebox or record player at full volume was, well, laughable, but scream them they did and, as they say, the rest is history.

Frank Gutch Jr: When I Want Country, I Want Country!

And not the crap they’re telling us is Country.  It seems like forever ago that I cared about Country music.  Nashville pretty much put me off my feed when they started promoting artists like Brad Paisley and Taylor Swift and The Jayhawks— whom I like, don’t get me wrong— or maybe what I mean to say is, I don’t hate.  But it just ain’t Country, my friends, and that’s the truth.