No More Lounging Around

Gregg Sutton

"I'm a vanishing breed
America's not the way she was
and there's no more room
for people like me"

--Gregg Sutton, "Home Away from Home."

Gregg Sutton conveys an honesty in his songs that makes you think you've heard them before. You can delve elsewhere into his career as a songwriter of platinum and gold records that hang on the walls of his small home studio. Here we can focus on a selection of the raw songs themselves, the lyrical edge transformed into the esthetic realm with a thumping soulfulness. He recalls the ebullient 1960s, when people celebrated peeling away layers of themselves for the astonishment of the discovering act, not for the shrewd marketing of shards. For many of Sutton's generation, growing older meant selling out, but for him it entailed a deepening of the search for freedom while paying lip service to survival in a predatory world.

highmoonoon offered Gregg and his longtime collaborator and muse, Fredo--who provides the artwork and design--a blank slate to create. Fredo's rarely seen paintings, some including herself and Gregg--in the accompanying CD pamphlet give the project an organic quality that only the long road and time's spices could provide.

Gregg Sutton's memoirs, Here's Your Hat, What's Your Hurry? was published in English by Stone River Press in Kobe, Japan (2005). Japanese readers can sample a brief selection translated by Taguchi Tetsuya and appearing in GUI Vol. 27 No. 76 (Tokyo: December 2005, pp.80-89). Sutton's brutally candid reminiscences of people and places--with all artwork also by Fredo--make rewarding reading, especially as they reverberate with the songs on "No More Lounging Around."

Writer, vocalist, arranger, musician and performer, Gregg Sutton was happening before the music machine derailed into mega-corporation pre-packaged bullshit, symbolized by the materialistically-inclined, so-called "royalty" of rock, The Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Rod Stewart and the rest. Sutton stayed earthy and risky at the cost of not being a household word. There is every indication that his comet will continue its one-pointed trajectory across the cosmos, carving out light and movement where there were none before.

John Solt
Bangkok, 2006

Click "additional info" for an audio sample.