The History Of The Mystery Track – The Beatles & Queen Elizabeth

“For our last number I’d like to ask your help.  Would the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands?  And the rest of you, if you’ll just rattle your jewellery.”

On the evening of November 4th, 1963, The Beatles taped a famous set at The Prince Of Wales theatre in London, England.   It was the annual Royal Command Performance (AKA The Royal Variety Show), a multi-act concert for charity with a history that precedes the first World War.  The Beatles were part of an an extensive bill that included movie star Marlene Dietrich, Elvis Costello’s father Ross MacManus and Wilfrid Brambell who later played Paul McCartney’s “very clean” fictional grandfather in A Hard Day’s Night.

The performance aired six days later on ITV and was watched by more than a third of the country.  (BBC Radio also aired all four songs they played that night.)   Despite being invited every year until their acrimonious break-up in 1970, this would mark their only appearance at the event.

Backstage, before they went on, John Lennon openly planned to make a cheeky remark at the expense of certain Royal Family members in attendance before their finale Twist & Shout.  He went through with it minus an expletive.  In the end, Lennon was talked out of saying “fucking” before “jewellery.”  (You can hear his comments at the tail end of Til There Was You on disc two of Anthology 1.  He later made an oblique reference to this moment in Mean Mr. Mustard.)

Unfortunately, Queen Elizabeth, then 37-years-old and just a decade into her ongoing reign as the figurehead of Ol’ Blighty, was not in attendance that night.  (But her mother was and she reportedly had a great time at the show.)  She was absent because she was five months pregnant with Prince Edward, her youngest child, who would be born the following March.

On June 12th, 1965, her annual Birthday Honours List was announced.  Like every year, hundreds of names from various fields are invited to join the British Empire.  Besides honouring veterans (which was not the original plan when these awards were first conceived in the 1910s), there is also a Civil Division category mainly reserved for recognizing politicians and various other types of government workers, journalists, athletes, scientists, activists, educators but almost never entertainers.  Today, most of the names are quite unrecognizable with the exception of four:  George Harrison, John Winston Lennon, James Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr.

It’s hard to fathom today just how incredibly controversial it was in 1965 to award pop stars membership into the British Empire.  (In the current political climate, almost no one raises a fuss about this anymore.  Many rock stars gladly accept an invitation.)  A small number of past recipients (we’re talking grumpy conservative war veterans) were so offended, they disgustedly returned their medals in protest.

Lennon had the perfect retort:

“Lots of people who complained about us receiving the MBE received theirs for heroism in the war – for killing people…We received ours for entertaining other people.  I’d say we deserve ours more.”

(Ironically, on November 25th, 1969, Lennon himself would do the same thing, but for different reasons.)

When the British press were allowed to announce the list (they were embargoed until given the official go-ahead from the Royal Family), McCartney was actually on holiday in Portugal with his then-girlfriend, the actress Jane Asher.  Not scheduled to return home from their two-week vacation until the day after the official announcement was finally made, the couple returned a day early (manager Brian Epstein insisted) as the local papers trumpeted the MBE story on their front covers.  The press greeted them at the airport.

Four months later in late October, The Beatles arrived at Buckingham Palace to once again have their ears shattered by the incessantly loud sounds of thousands of their fans screaming in ecstasy as they walked in to receive their medals.  (They had to wait for Lennon who finally showed up over an hour late.)

“It was like in a dream,” Lennon recalled years later.  “It was beautiful.  People were playing music, I was looking at the ceiling – not bad the ceiling.  It was historical.  It was like being in a museum.”

At the hastily arranged press conference that followed the quick yet heavily structured morning ceremony, Paul remarked of the head of the Royal Family, “She’s lovely, great.  She was very friendly.”

“She was just like a mum to us,” 24-year-old Lennon recalled fondly despite previously not really being much of a fan of the monarchy, a sentiment that extended to the entire band at that point.  A less impressed Harrison added:  “She just said, ‘It’s a pleasure to give this to you.’  That’s what she said.  She actually said it to everyone.”

The Queen ended up making small talk with the fellas wondering what they were working on and asking about their history.  McCartney recounted, “Then she said to me, ‘Have you been together long?’ and I said, ‘Yes, many years,’ and Ringo said, ‘Forty years,’ and she laughed.”

In early 1967, The Beatles released Penny Lane.  One of the characters in the song is “a fireman with an hourglass and in his pocket is a portrait of the Queen”.  This marked the first time McCartney had ever directly referenced Queen Elizabeth in a song lyric.  It would not be the last.

On January 9, 1969, McCartney introduced to his bandmates a fragment of a new song that he had written at his home in Scotland.  For a minute, McCartney loosely played on the piano what he would eventually record on acoustic guitar six months later.  Sometime later that month, the band attempted to jam it out in a rehearsal that lasted almost two and a half minutes.  These moments were originally filmed at the Twickenham Film Studios (where the Beatles shot interior scenes for the movies A Hard Day’s Night and Help!) for possible inclusion in the movie, Let It Be.  (Neither made the cut.)  In fact, many songs that ended up on the Abbey Road album were unveiled for the first time during that tense-filled month-long period.

A few months after the Let It Be project was temporarily shelved for future retooling and polishing the following year, McCartney convinced longtime producer George Martin to return to the studio for one last recording project with his bandmates.  The result, of course, was Abbey Road, one of their best-loved albums.

During the filming of Let It Be, a bunch of unfinished songs were tested out by the band and ultimately rejected for the eventual theatrical documentary and subsequent album.  But while working on Abbey Road, they were given a second life.  Instead of fleshing out these little, incomplete segments into properly structured three-minute pop songs, the band decided instead to stitch them together into a medley, one that would almost cover an entire side of vinyl.

The original plan was to put it all on side one but eventually, The Huge or The Long One, as this cycle of tracks became known, was relegated to the flip side.  Either way, Abbey Road was going to end with a song being cut off.

On the afternoon of July 3, 1969, Paul McCartney arrived at Abbey Road Studios to record Her Majesty, his 23-second tribute to Queen Elizabeth, while he had the studio all to himself.  Recorded live and only taking up two tracks of eight-track tape, he made three proper attempts, only two of which were complete takes.  (When the 50th Anniversary reissue of Abbey Road was released in the fall of 2019, all of them were bundled into a single track.  The earlier outtakes from the Let It Be filming were curiously excluded.)

Phil McDonald, the engineer who recorded the session, asked Paul if he wanted to hear the playback of take three.  Paul liked what he heard and the song was added to The Huge, right between Mean Mr. Mustard and Polythene Pam.   Chris Blair, who was asked to fill in as tape operator, recalled to author Mark Lewisohn his memories of that day:  “I was extremely nervous on the session and my mind went completely blank.  Paul sat down and did ‘Her Majesty’ and I couldn’t for the life of me think how to spell Majesty on the tape box.  I rang upstairs, all around the building, asking people how to spell Majesty.”

Once everything was recorded, Paul got a chance to listen to a rough 15 minute and 30 second edit of the medley it in its entirety.  The order ran as follows:

1. You Never Give Me Your Money
2. Sun King/Mean Mr. Mustard
3. Her Majesty
4. Polythene Pam
5. She Came In Through The Bathroom Window
6. Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight
7. The End

John Kurlander, the second engineer on the recordings, recalled to Mark Lewisohn the day in late July the decision was made by Paul to ax Her Majesty from The Huge:

“He said ‘I don’t like Her Majesty, throw it away,’ so I cut it out – but I accidentally left in the last note.  He said ‘It’s only a rough mix, it doesn’t matter,’ in other words, don’t bother about making a clean edit because it’s only a rough mix.  I said to Paul, ‘What shall I do with it?’  ‘Throw it away,’ he replied.”

But Kurlander didn’t throw it away as he explained to Lewisohn:

“I’d been told [by the bigwigs at EMI, The Beatles’ record company] never to throw anything away, so after [Paul] left I picked [the discarded tape of Her Majesty] up off the floor, put about 20 seconds [actually, 15] of red leader tape before it and stuck it onto the end of the edit tape.  The next day, down at Apple, Malcolm Davies cut a playback lacquer of the whole sequence [longtime roadie Mal Evans took the tape to Apple on 31 July, returning it to EMI on the same day] and, even though, I’d written on the [tape] box that ‘Her Majesty’ was unwanted, he too thought, ‘Well, mustn’t throw anything away, I’ll put it on at the end.’  I’m only assuming this, but when Paul got that lacquer he must have liked hearing ‘Her Majesty’ tacked on the end.  The Beatles always picked up on accidental things.  It came as a nice little surprise there at the end, and he didn’t mind.  We never remixed ‘Her Majesty’ again, that was the mix which ended up on the finished LP.”

The ending chord of Mean Mr. Mustard can be heard right at the top of Her Majesty because that’s how the two songs were edited together for the medley.  And the last chord of Her Majesty is cut off because the rest of it ended up at the beginning of the next song in The Huge, Polythene Pam.  (Thanks to the 50th Anniversary edition of Abbey Road, you can now hear this original version of The Long One with Her Majesty reinserted into its original slot.)

When the final mix of the medley was ready for his approval, McCartney had a listen.  He preferred this reworked version and signed off on it.  But fifteen seconds after The End concluded, the tape kept rolling playing nothing but silence until the final crashing chord of Mean Mr. Mustard startled him as his rejected Her Majesty suddenly started playing.  Realizing that listeners would probably have the same reaction, it was decided to keep the song where it was.  But in order to maintain the surprise, Her Majesty would not be listed in the track listing.  It wasn’t until 18 years later when the first CD edition arrived that it was finally acknowledged, in this case as track seventeen.  Two additional reissues have kept it as a properly credited song.  However, the 2009 vinyl reissue has turned it back into a mystery track.

“It was quite funny,” McCartney later remarked to his longtime friend and biographer Barry Miles in 1997, “because it’s basically monarchist, with a mildly disrespectful tone, but it’s very tongue-in-cheek.  It’s almost a love song to the queen.”

“Her majesty’s a pretty nice girl/But she doesn’t have a lot to say,” McCartney sings at the start of the track.  Never formally educated, Queen Elizabeth was originally very self-conscious about her limitations and often appeared shy during public functions, although in 1965 when she met The Beatles she certainly didn’t have any trouble showing interest in their career.

“Her majesty’s a pretty nice girl/But she changes from day to day”

Around the time of Sgt. Pepper, it was reported that The Queen wasn’t exactly on board with their psychedelic period.  McCartney appears to be slyly referencing this.  (When he addressed the vast critical loathing for the Magical Mystery Tour TV Special (which aired on Boxing Day 1967), he infamously retorted:  “It wasn’t the worst programme over Christmas.  I mean, you couldn’t call the Queen’s [Christmas Day] speech a gas, either, could you?”)

“I wanna tell her that I love her a lot/But I’ve got get a bellyful of wine/Her majesty’s a pretty nice girl/Someday I’m gonna make her mine, oh yeah/Someday I’m gonna make her mine”

Although The Beatles were nervous to meet The Queen to receive their MBE medals, as far as we know, none of them, including McCartney, had any alcohol on their breath.  They, did, however sneak a quick cigarette in one of the palace bathrooms, not a joint as Lennon wrongly asserted later on.  (Harrison set the record straight years later.)  Regardless of its blending reality with schoolboy fantasy, while it’s far from brilliant, Her Majesty remains a curiously endearing throwaway.  (This Esquire journalist absurdly believes it’s their best overall song.)

In 1997, McCartney would once again find himself face to face with the head of the monarchy.  On this occasion, he would be knighted and given the official title of Sir.  (Ringo Starr would get his turn 20 years later.)  In 2018, he would also be named a Companion of Honour, essentially the Royal Family’s version of a lifetime achievement award.

For her part, in 2007, to honour the 50th Anniversary of McCartney and Lennon’s first fateful meeting at a church picnic when they were still high school students, she released a supportive message “with much pleasure”.

In 2002, McCartney was the headliner for the star-studded Party At The Palace as Elizabeth the 2nd, approaching her 60th year on the throne, looked on.  And yes, he played Her Majesty, the only time it’s ever been part of his setlist.  (The Dave Matthews Band have covered the song in concert, as well.)

In the autumn of 2019, a now 77-year-old McCartney was interviewed by the UK’s Express newspaper.  Five decades after his unusual tribute to the Queen, he continues to sing her praises.  In fact, his admiration for the 93-year-old figurehead has never been higher:

“I think she’s a great figure in history.  When everything’s falling apart in Britain she seems to be the glue.”

When she was first coronated back in 1953, McCartney found her “very attractive” and “like a glamorous film star”.

“She’s very intelligent,” he asserted, having now met with her on a handful of public occasions.

Back in 2012, he told the Telegraph, “She’s fabulous.  I’ve got a lot of time for her.”

In the same interview, while discussing Her Majesty, McCartney marvelled at how he was able to get away with it and not face any severe consequences for pretending to make a play for Prince Philip’s wife:

“It’s just a cheeky little song.  It sort of sums up how things have changed, doesn’t it?  You can write songs like that and not get sent to the Tower.”

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Monday, November 25, 2019
7:29 p.m.

The History Of The Mystery Track – Hidden Laughs & More Rembrandts On The 1995 Friends Soundtrack

The unexpected explosion of I’ll Be There For You, first a weekly TV theme in 1994, then an expanded pop song in mid-1995, convinced greedy NBC and Warner Bros. executives that more money was there to be made from music associated with their blockbuster sitcom.  In the summer of 1995, plans were hatched to put together what would become the first of five soundtracks spread out over the next 24 years.

A month into the second season, soundtrack number one debuted in October.  Simply titled Friends, the cover featured all six cast members lying down on a mattress, with “brother” and “sister” and a later, rejected romantic couple paired off through handholding.  Mostly aimed at the Nirvana Generation, superstar bands R.E.M. and Hootie & The Blowfish shared space with alt-rock legends Lou Reed, The Pretenders and Paul Westerberg of The Replacements.  Newcomers like Grant Lee Buffalo and Toad The Wet Sprocket were squeezed in with Canadians k.d. lang and the Barenaked Ladies.

Bookending all of them were the very reasons for this release.

The Rembrandts’ original theme kicks things off on track one while the Stickered Bonus Track version from L.P. (now properly listed on the second edition of that album and beyond, as well as on here) appears on track thirteen.

A quick perusal of the liner notes reveals additional, unlisted content:

“‘FRIENDS’ excerpts performed by Jennifer Aniston, Courtney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer.”

With the exception of a dark Phoebe folk medley noted in that same paragraph (complete with songwriting credits), you have to listen to the CD to not only find out what these other excerpts are but also where they’re all located.  I found most of these clips really funny in my 20s.  More than 20 years later, there are still some one-liners that have held up relatively well.  Let’s go through them all in the order they appear.

As the final chord of the TV Version of I’ll Be There For You rings out on track one, Chandler Bing starts talking at the 47-second mark:

“I am telling you, years from now, schoolchildren will study it, as one of the greatest first dates of all time.  [audience laughter]  It was unbelievable.  We could totally be ourselves.  We didn’t have to play any games.

Monica:  So have you called her yet?

Chandler:  Let her know I like her?  What?  Are you insane?  [audience laughter]

Monica:  Oh, guys.  It’s gross.

Chandler:  It’s the next day.  How needy do I want to seem?  I’m right.  Right?

Ross & Joey:  Oh, yeah.

Joey:  Let her dangle.

Ross:  Yeah.  [audience laughter]

Monica: Oh.  I can’t believe my parents are actually pressuring me to find one of you people.  [audience laughter]

Phoebe:  God, come on!  Just do it!  Call her!  Stop being so testosterone-y!  [audience laughter]

Chandler:  Which, by the way, is the real San Francisco treat [a reference to Rice-A-Roni].  [audience laughter]”

This 46-second snippet is from the 20th episode of season one, The One With The Evil Orthodontist.  It begins at the 1:38 mark of the show, right after the opening credits.  Like the CD, the theme song leads right into Chandler’s opening dialogue.  For some reason, this quick exchange which comes after Chandler’s opening line but before he ends his first set of lines was omitted from the CD version:

“Phoebe:  Yay!

Chandler:  I’ll say yay!”

Chandler does end up calling the woman but gets her answering machine.  It turns out she’s not an easy person to get a hold of.

The next mystery clip begins at the 3:18 mark of track 3:

“Rachel:  Okay, okay, Roger was creepy.  But he was nothing compared to Pete Carny.

Monica:  Which one was Pete Carny?

Rachel:  Pete The Weeper?  Remember the guy who used to cry every time we had sex?  [audience laughter] [imitates a weepy Pete]  ‘Oh!  Was it good for you?’  [audience laughter]

Monica:  Yeah, well, I’ll take a little crying any day over Howard The ‘I Win’ Guy.  [imitates Howard]  ‘I win!  I win!’  [audience laughter]  I went out with the guy for two months.  I didn’t get to win once.  [audience laughter]

Rachel:  How did we end up with these jerks?  We’re good people.

Monica:  I don’t know.  Maybe we’re like some kind of magnets.

Phoebe:  [excitedly]  You know my friend Abby who shaves her head?  [audience laughter]  She says that if you want to break the bad boyfriend cycle you can do like a cleansing ritual.  [light audience laughter]

Rachel:  Pheebs.  This woman is voluntarily bald.  [audience laughter]

Monica:  Ok, well, what kind of ritual?

Phoebe:  Ok.  We can, umm, we can burn the stuff they gave us.

Rachel:  Or…?  [light audience laughter]

Phoebe:  Or…or we can chant and dance around naked.  You know, with sticks.  [audience laughter]

Monica:  Burning’s good.

Rachel:  Burning’s good.  Yeah.

This 70-second snippet is from the 14th first season episode, The One With The Candy Hearts, which aired five days before Valentine’s Day 1995.  The scene starts at 4:58 on the show and is actually a bit longer.  Dialogue has been trimmed in a few places for the CD version.  The first comes right after Monica says, “Maybe we’re some kind of magnets.”  Thinking she’s being literal, Phoebe then says:

“I know I am.  That’s why I can’t wear a digital watch.  [audience laughter]”

Monica replies:  “There’s more beer, right?  [audience laughter]”

When Phoebe remembers her bald friend Abby, she begins with an omitted “Oh!”, then asks her question which is heard on the CD.

In the full TV version, Monica answers, “No,” she doesn’t know Abby.  Then Phoebe says, “Ok, well, I have this friend Abby who shaves her head.  [audience laughter]”  Her following “But” is not on the CD but her line about the cleansing ritual is.

Another deleted portion occurs after Rachel says that Abby is “voluntarily bald”.  A nodding Phoebe replies, “Yeah!  [audience laughter]”  Then says, “So, we can do it” meaning the ritual “tomorrow night, you guys.  It’s Valentine’s Day.  It’s perfect.”  The rest of the scene, picking up with Monica asking what the ritual entails, plays out right to the end as it does on the CD.

A few seconds after k.d. lang’s underappreciated Sexuality fades out on track five, a rare moment where silence separates a listed song from buried audio here, the next uncredited Friends scene begins at 3:20 with the sound of burning:

“Phoebe:  Ok.  So now we need, umm, sage branches and the sacramental wine.  [light audience laughter]

Monica:  All I had is, is oregano and a Fresca [soft drink].

Phoebe:  Um…[excitedly] that’s ok!  [audience laughter] [Phoebe pours them into the burning bucket]

Monica:  Ok.

Phoebe:  Alright, now we need the semen of a righteous man.  [audience laughter]

Rachel:  Huh.  Ok, Pheebs.  You know what?  If we had that, we wouldn’t be doing the ritual in the first place.  [audience laughter]

Monica:  Can we just start throwing things in?

Phoebe:  Umm…yeah!  Ok!  [audience laughter]

Rachel:  Ok, Barry’s letters, [Dentist Barry was her fiance she left at the altar in the pilot.] Adam Ritter’s boxer shorts.

Phoebe:  Oh, and I have the receipt from my dinner with [an unpronounceable African name; she pops her cheek with her tongue] [audience laughter]

Monica:  Hey, look, there’s a picture of Scotty Jared naked.

Phoebe & Rachel:  Oh!

Rachel:  Let me see.  Hey, he’s wearing a sweater.

Monica:  No.

Phoebe & Rachel:  Ew!  [audience laughter]”

This scene, also from The One With The Candy Hearts, starts in the actual episode at 12:54.  Nothing has been cut for its uncredited inclusion on the Friends soundtrack.  However, in the show, the scene continues with Phoebe accidentally putting in her MCI card (which she haplessly tries to memorize as it burns) and Rachel foolishly dumping in “the last of” her Italian ex-boyfriend “Paolo’s grappa” wine which turns out to be quite flammable as the fire exponentially grows in size.  (The overhead light shown in the episode’s coda is a little blackened.)

At the 17:01 mark, three firemen, who have experience with such Valentine’s Day “boyfriend bonfires” (this is the third they’ve extinguished this year), have already saved the day.  The fire is put out before the scene even begins.  They offer advice on how to prevent any more out-of-control mini-infernos.  In the last scene, the girls ask them out, thinking the cleansing ritual worked.  But then we learn two of the men aren’t single.

Moving on to the next clip.  You’ll find it on track seven.  Just as R.E.M.’s It’s A Free World Baby fades out, Joey and Chandler try to convince a suddenly glum Ross to have a boys’ night out:

“Joey:  Ross, check it out.  Hockey tickets, Rangers/Penguins, tonight at the Garden, and we’re taking you.  [pats Ross on the shoulder]

Chandler:  Happy Birthday, pal!  [pats Ross on the shoulder]

Joey:  We love ya, man.  [hugs Ross and kisses him on the cheek]

Ross:  [soft chuckle] [light audience laughter]  Funny, my birthday was seven months ago.  [light audience laughter]

Joey:  So?

Ross:  So, I’m guessing you had an extra ticket and couldn’t decide which one of you got to bring a date?

Chandler:  Well, aren’t we Mister-The-Glass-Is-Half-Empty.  [audience laughter]

Ross:  Oh my God.  Is today the 20th, October 20th?

Monica:  I was hoping you wouldn’t remember.

Ross:  [groans] Oh.

Joey:  What’s wrong with the 20th?

Chandler:  Eleven days before Halloween?  All the good costumes are gone?  [audience laughter]

Ross:  Today’s the day Carol and I fir[st] consummated our…physical relationship.  [to Joey]  Sex.  [light audience laughter]  You know what?  I, ah, I’d better pass on the game.  I think I’m just gonna go home and think about my ex-wife and her lesbian lover.  [audience laughter]

Joey:  [suddenly excited] The hell with hockey, let’s all do that!  [audience laughter]”

This Central Perk conversation is from the fourth episode, The One With George Stephanopoulos, which actually aired on October 13th.  Joey’s invitation to Ross starts at 2:58.  Once again, a couple of lines have been cut from the CD version.  After Ross makes sure Joey knows he’s talking about sex with his ex-wife, Mr. Tribbiani replies:

“You told your sister that?

Ross:  [slight chuckle]  Believe me, I told everyone.  [audience laughter]”

The scene continues like it does on the CD.

Eventually, in the full TV episode, the boys convince Ross to go with them to the hockey game (they promise to buy him a big foam finger) but while at Madison Square Garden, he gets hit with a puck and they take him to the emergency room.

The next unlisted excerpt appears on track nine at the 4:06 mark.  While taking a break from assembling his furniture after his recent divorce from gay Carol, Joey & Chandler try to encourage Ross as he worries he won’t ever find another partner:

“Ross:  What if there’s only one woman for everybody, you know?  I mean, what if you get one woman, and that’s it?  [slight pause]  Unfortunately, in my case, there was only one woman…for her.  [light audience laughter]

Joey:  What are you talking about?  One woman.  [audience laughter]  That’s like saying there’s only one flavour of ice cream for you.  Let me tell you something, Ross.  There’s lots of flavours out there.  There’s…rocky road, and cookie dough, and – bing! – cherry vanilla.  [audience laughter]  You can get ’em with jimmies or nuts or whipped cream.  [Ross lightly chuckles]  This is the best thing that ever happened to you!  You got married.  You were like, what, 8?  [snorts] [audience laughter]  Welcome back to the world!  Grab a spoon!

Ross:  I honestly don’t know if I’m hungry or horny.  [audience laughter]

Chandler:  Then stay out of my freezer.  [audience laughter]

Ross:  [skeptically]  Grab a spoon.  You know how long it’s been since I grabbed a spoon?  Do the words ‘Billy, Don’t Be A Hero’ mean anything to you?  [audience laughter]  You know, here’s the thing.  Even if I could get it together, um, enough to, you know, to ask a woman out, who am I gonna ask?”

These are actually two shortened scenes cut into one from the very first episode known as The One Where It All Began.  Before it begins on the Friends CD, there’s a line from the TV version that’s been excluded.  Ross says, “You know what the scariest part is?”  And then the CD version commences at the 15:13 mark.

After Chandler tells Ross to “stay out of my freezer”, the show cuts to Monica on her date with the creep who lies about being impotent so he can bed her.  We then cut back to the boys in Ross’ apartment at the 17:44 mark as he continues his speech from the CD version.

The TV version has Joey leaving after Ross’ exaggerated reference to the 1974 anti-Vietnam War Paper Lace song.  He needs to get ready for a date with a woman whose name he can’t remember.  (“I got a date with Andrea.  Angela.  Andrea.  Oh, man.”)  It turns out to be Julie.  Ross concludes his speech from the CD at 18:15.  All of this sets up the scene near the end of the episode where Ross suggests a possible future get-together with Rachel who seems up for the idea.  But then, nothing happens for another season.

This brings us to Phoebe’s short, uneven, three-song medley on track eleven, the weakest mystery track on the soundtrack.  It begins on the CD at 4:06.  Before and after she sings, she talks to the audience at Central Perk:

“I wanna start with a song that means a lot to me this time of year.  [shakes tambourine bells rhythmically then stops, starts playing acoustic guitar and sings]  I made a man with eyes of coal and a smile so bewitchin’/How was I supposed to know that my mum was dead in the kitchen?  [audience laughter] [shakes bells again]  La lalala la la la lalala la…[sings next song]  My mother’s ashes [audience laughter]/Even her eyelashes/Are resting in a little yellow jar [audience laughter] [sings last time]  And sometimes when it’s breezy/Or if I’m feeling sneezy [light audience laughter]/And now…[stops singing, starts talking]  Ah, excuse me, excuse me!  Yeah.  Noisy boys!”

This was taken from the Christmas episode, The One With The Monkey (the debut of Marcel, Ross’ rescued pet), episode ten of the first season, which premiered on December 15.  In a scene just after the credits, Phoebe reveals she has ten other songs about her dead mother which we thankfully don’t get to hear.  After Rachel introduces her to the little stage at the coffee shop, in a portion not heard on the CD, Phoebe says, “Hi,” and clears her throat.  Then the CD clip begins on the actual show at the 3:52 mark.

The medley heard on the CD plays out the same as it does on the TV show with one major change.  On the CD you can’t hear the two scientists arguing during Phoebe’s third and final song.

According to the liner notes, the songs she plays are, in the order they’re heard, Snowman, Ashes and Dead Mother.  Lisa Kudrow actually wrote her own music.  Adam Chase and Ira Ungerleider, story editors who wrote the episode, provided the lyrics.  One of the “noisy boys” distracting her during her performance of Dead Mother turns out to be David (Hank Azaria from The Simpsons) who ends up being Phoebe’s first serious boyfriend before work breaks them up and takes him out of the country for several seasons.  He eventually returns only to realize he has to compete with Mike (Paul Rudd) who eventually marries Phoebe in the tenth and final season.

What was David arguing about with his colleague?  Who is prettier?  Phoebe or Daryl Hannah?  For the record, David is correct.  It’s “bendy” Phoebe all the way.

On the very next track, track twelve, right after the second Paul Westerberg song, the gang get into a discussion about the importance of kissing.  It starts at 2:59:

“Monica:  What you guys don’t understand is, for us, kissing is as important as any part of it.

Joey:  [chuckling]  Yeah, right.  [audience laughter]  Serious?  [audience laughter]

Phoebe:  Oh yeah.

Rachel:  Everything you need to know is in that first kiss.

Monica:  Absolutely.

Chandler:  Yeah, I think for us, kissing is pretty much like an opening act, you know?  I mean, it’s like a stand-up comedian you have to sit through before…Pink Floyd comes out.  [audience laughter]

Ross:  Yeah.  And, and it’s not that we don’t like the comedian, it’s just that, that’s, that’s not why we bought the ticket.  [audience laughter]

Chandler:  You see, the problem is, though, after the concert’s over, no matter how great the show was, you girls are always looking for the comedian again, you know?  [Ross hums in agreement, slight audience laughter]  I mean we’re in the car, we’re fighting traffic.  Basically, just trying to stay awake.  [audience laughter]

Rachel:  Yeah?  Well, word of advice.  Bring back the comedian.  Otherwise, next time you’re gonna find yourself sitting at home listening to that album alone.  [audience laughter]

Joey:  [confused]  Are we still talking about sex?  [audience laughter]”

This 64-second snippet opens the second episode of the first season, The One With The Sonogram At The End.  No dialogue has been snipped this time but the short music cue during Monica’s opening line is absent on the CD along with the sound of the high five Rachel gives Monica after her last line.

Two more mystery tracks are buried on the last track, track thirteen.

After the Long Version of I’ll Be There For You ends at 3:05, twenty seconds of silence passes before the surprise instrumental version of the original theme begins.  (By the way, The Rembrandts weren’t initially credited for their performance of the theme in the closing credits on the show until episode nine, The One Where Underdog Gets Away.)  This version was sometimes used in place of a final comedy scene on the show, usually at the end of a season finale with a big cliffhanger.  It’s the last piece of music heard in the closing credits of the last episode of the tenth season.  (It’s also heard on the menu pages of the first season DVD box set.)  The best thing about it is, because there’s no vocals, you can hear certain instruments a lot clearer in the mix.  It’s still catchy.

As the final chord rings out, Joey starts talking about his new stand-in gig at the 4:14 mark:

“Joey:  My agent has just gotten me a job…[excitedly] in the new Al Pacino movie!

Monica:  Oh my god!

Chandler:  Whoa! That’s great.

[everybody talks excitedly]

Phoebe:  Kick ass!

Monica:  What’s the part?

Joey:  Can you believe this?  Al Pacino!  This guy’s the reason I became an actor!  [saying Pacino’s famous line from …And Justice For All]  ‘I’m out of order? Peh, you’re out of order!  This whole courtroom’s out of order!’

[light audience laughter]

Phoebe:  Seriously, what, what’s the part?

Joey:  [saying Pacino’s famous line from The Godfather Part III]  ‘Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!’  [light audience laughter]

Ross:  [chuckling]  Come on, seriously, Joey, what’s the part?

Joey:  [nervously stalling]  Uhh…[very soft spoken] I’m his butt double.  [light audience laughter]

Rachel:  [trying to understand]  You’re, you’re his blah, mah, what?  [light audience laughter]

Joey:  [normal volume]  I’m his butt double.  [audience laughter]  Ok?  I play Al Pacino’s butt.  [audience laughter]  He goes into the shower, and then…I’m his butt.  [audience laughter]

Monica:  [slight laughter]  Oh my God.

Joey:  Come on, you guys.  This is a real movie and Al Pacino’s in it.  And that’s big!

Chandler:  Oh, no.  It’s terrific.  It’s, its, you know, you deserve this.  After all your years of struggling you’ve finally been able to crack your way into show business.  [audience laughter]

Joey:  Ok.  Ok, fine.  Make jokes.  I don’t care.  This is a big break for me.

Ross:  Yeah, you’re right.  You’re right.  It is.

Phoebe:  Yeah.

Ross:  So, you gonna invite us all to the big opening?  [audience laughter]”

Taken from episode six, The One With The Butt (you can see a shortened preview of this scene on the first season box set), the scene in the show actually begins with Joey walking into Monica’s apartment talking on a giant cordless phone getting the good news about the Pacino movie from his new agent Estelle (who makes her debut in this episode).  The portion that’s unlisted on the CD begins at 13:59 in the episode and is exactly the same from start to finish.  No deletions this time.  Unfortunately, during his big scene in the shower, Joey overacts with his ass (too much clenching in one spoiled take), which deeply annoys the director (the real James Burrows who directed a bunch of Friends episodes) and ultimately gets him fired.

No worries.  As anyone who watched the show knows, he would eventually become Dr. Drake Ramoray on Days Of Our Lives.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Wednesday, November 20, 2019
4:04 a.m.

The History Of The Mystery Track – Pet Sounds & Sgt. Pepper

On March 7, 1966, Brian Wilson released his first solo single.  Originally, Caroline, No was 2 minutes and 28 seconds long.  But Murry Wilson, Brian’s abusive, overbearing stage father, insisted the song be sped up so Brian’s voice would sound younger.  That made the song 12 seconds shorter.  (It made no difference.  Caroline, No barely hit the Top 40.)

Two months later, on May 16, it became the final song on side two of Pet Sounds, the eleventh studio album by The Beach Boys.  Immediately after the song fades out, instead of the usual dead silence, there is an additional coda.

Fifteen days after the single release of Caroline, No, Brian brought in his two beloved pet dogs, Banana (a beagle) and Louie (a weimaraner named after the legendary producer Lou Adler, a close friend of Brian’s who helped put his first wedding together) to Western Studios (now known as EastWest Studios).  Beach Boys historian Brad Elliott told me in an email in 2002, “there really weren’t [any] formal ‘takes’ of the barking.”  With the tape continuously rolling, Brian’s dogs just did their thing until he was satisfied with their performances.  Engineer Chuck Britz claimed in 2016 that the whole session took “6 or 7 hours”.  Brian’s perfectionism was no joke.

But Brian needed something else.  He found it on a 1963 sound effects album called Mister D’s Machine.  It was an album of train sounds put out by Mobile Fidelity Records, a label founded in 1958 that, according to Elliott, “primarily released albums of train recordings.”  The record just happened to be in the Western Studios music library at the time Brian was looking for a special sound.  Elliott told me via email that Brian selected track one, No. 58:  70 MPH Through Edison.  He only used 35 seconds of it.

The finished result is, well, truly bizarre.  I’ve never really understood why it even needed to be added to Caroline, No.  It feels intrusive and out of place.  While the single version of Caroline, No has grown on me a lot over the decades, I still don’t like this coda.

According to Wouldn’t It Be Nice: My Own Story, Brian recalls the moment he played “a dubbed-down acetate” of Pet Sounds for his first wife, Marilyn, while in their bedroom.  After the full album version of Caroline, No concluded, Brian remembers telling her, “Can’t you see me on the back of that train?  I can.  Just going away.”  After shelving Smile, his ambitious but doomed follow-up (which would finally be completed several decades later), Brian stayed in bed for four and a half years.

Up until recently, I felt this new ending wasn’t even part of the song, but rather a separate piece of Buried Audio.  Although both Brian and historian Brad Elliott have asserted Banana & Louie barking at the train is in fact part of the album version of the song (and I’m no longer going to disagree with them), that coda has sometimes appeared on its own on different releases and not always properly credited, either.

In early 1972, Warner Bros. offered a mail-order, multi-artist double compilation called The Whole Burbank Catalog, the first of many such LPs not available in stores.  Their purpose was to expose audiences to as many different artists as possible with the hope they would go out and buy their respective studio albums (although some of the songs, previously unreleased, were exclusives to these collections).  The two-dollar price tag was imprinted right there on the front cover.  (Warner had no intention of making money off of them.  They were purely promotional tools for their roster.  Now long out of print, they have become sought after collector’s items on the used market.)  Burbank alone featured some of the biggest names of the era (Fleetwood Mac (when Peter Green was still in the band), Alice Cooper, T. Rex) and those who would become better known years later (Captain Beefheart, Bonnie Raitt).

The coda to Caroline, No is an Unlisted Bonus Track on side four.  It’s the tenth track and pops up right after Arlo Guthrie.  “The trailer starts three seconds after the previous track, ‘Ukulele Lady,’ ends,”  Elliott told me in an email.

The compilations were originally put together by Warner executive Stan Cornyn who later wrote a memoir of his time at the label.  “When he didn’t have time to compile the albums anymore, he passed the torch to me,” Dr. Demento told me in an email in 2002.  This series of “loss leaders” continued on until 1986.  “(They did one or two more after I left the label.)” Dr. Demento revealed.

Why was Banana & Louie barking at a train record included as a mystery track?

“Using the ‘Caroline No’ tag probably came about because Warner Brothers had just done the deal with the [Beach Boy]s to put out the late 1960 albums on Brother/Reprise,” Elliott reasonably speculated to me.  (Brother was Brian’s independent boutique label.  Charles Manson once auditioned for him, thanks to Dennis Wilson’s urging, in his own home studio.)  He pointed out that the single mix of Caroline, No was properly listed on another compilation entitled Middle Of The Road, also released in 1972.  The Pet Sounds album would be repackaged with early editions of Carl & The Passions – So Tough which followed the release of both compilations that same year.

For his part, Dr. Demento, who slipped in lots of uncredited things on these now hard-to-find Warner Bros. mail-order vinyl releases, told me in his email, “Those hidden tracks were just random inspirations.”

“I did it just for fun.  Warner Bros. Records at that time had a well earned reputation for having more of a sense of fun than its competitors, and they encouraged me, at least to a point.”

In 1993, a special 24 karat Gold CD edition of Pet Sounds was issued.  Further confusing things, the coda to Caroline, No has been separated from the original single mix.  Instead of sharing space on track thirteen, on this edition only it can be heard as a separate piece on track fourteen.  It’s even been given a proper title in the track listing:  Conclusion.

Because of his relentless attention to detail and the dramatic departure from their earlier work, the making of the Pet Sounds album was fraught with tension.  As Brian recounted in his first autobiography, at one point singer Mike Love, who was worried about messing with the lucrative girls-cars-surfing songwriting formula that made the band consistently successful (he denies this today) and was growing irritated with the constant vocal re-takes, snapped at him:

“Who’s gonna hear this shit?  The ears of a dog?”

Besides the million people who eventually bought the album, there was one band in the UK who was paying very close attention.

On April 21, 1967, a day after recording sessions for the Magical Mystery Tour EP had begun, The Beatles had one last piece of business to complete for the album they had been working on the previous five months.

Pet Sounds, itself inspired by Rubber Soul, had been released while they were finishing up Revolver in the summer of 1966 and only influenced the creation of one song, Here, There & Everywhere.  It had a much bigger impact on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, especially on She’s Leaving Home.

The band had long wanted to put something goofy in the play-out groove, the end part of a vinyl record that is usually silent and indicates to the listener that it’s time to switch sides.  Before the invention of automatic record players, which would shut off the second the music ended, the needle would forever play on back and forth in that space until you manually lifted it.

It wasn’t feasible for The Beatles to record something to fill it back in 1963 when they made their first album, Please Please Me, which was recorded in a single, day-long session.  There just wasn’t enough time.  Plus, it’s unlikely Parlophone, their label, would’ve approved anyway.

But by 1967, they were the biggest band on the planet and while they still had to fight for some creative control (in the case of Sgt. Pepper, certain celebrity cut-outs had to be removed from the famous cover for various reasons), if they wanted to put something unlisted in the play-out groove, no one was going to stop them.

For five and a half hours, starting at 7 in the evening, all four members walked into the Abbey Road Studios for the last Sgt. Pepper recording session, stepped up to the microphone and started talking nonsense.  When they weren’t rambling, they were singing.  And when they weren’t singing, they were giggling.  There was a good reason for the giggling.  According to their friend Barry Miles who witnessed their silliness, they were “completely stoned.”

“They just went down into the studio,” producer George Martin told Geoffrey Giuliano years later, “and [I] said, ‘Sing the first thing that comes into your head when I put the red light on.’  And they did that.”

Somehow, in all that tape, they found two whole seconds worthy of looping on Sgt. Pepper.

The band also decided to add something else.

As a tribute to Banana & Louie, a high-pitched tone that only they could fully hear was sequenced right after A Day In The Life and served as a lead-in to the tomfoolery embedded in the play-out groove on side two.

“Actually, the 20,000-hertz tone went on the end of the album after I had been explaining to the blokes how there were certain frequencies that human beings could not hear,” Martin recounted in his 1994 book about the making of Sgt. Pepper.  “I mentioned that dogs, however, were able to hear much higher frequencies than we could.  Inevitably, this prompted Paul to say, jokingly, ‘You realize we never record anything for animals, don’t you?  What about my dog, Martha?  Let’s put on something only a dog can hear.'”

Longtime Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn disputes this.  He claims “John Lennon suggested that they insert a high-pitch whistle especially for dogs, 15 kilocycles, to make them perk up.”

“It was a problem when the record came to an end,” Paul McCartney told his official biographer Barry Miles in 1997, “and no one could be bothered to get up and turn it off.  ‘I know, we should put something on that!’  I could handle that, because that’ll be a mantra!  That’s fine.  I can handle five hours of that and if nobody gets up, it won’t bore us.  Hours of random tape was recorded but we just chose one little bit that we liked:  ‘Couldn’t really be any other; Couldn’t really be any other; Couldn’t really be any other,’ something like that.”

Engineer Geoff Emerick told Lewisohn there really wasn’t that much thought put into the mystery track:

“They were all there discussing how to end the LP but the decision to throw in a bit of nonsense gibberish came together in about 10 minutes.  They ran down to the studio floor and we recorded them twice–on each track of a 2-track tape.  They made funny noises, said random things; just nonsense.  We chopped up the tape, put it back together, played it backwards and threw it in [the mono and stereo masters of Sgt. Pepper].”

As it turns out, that was the easy part.  Putting both the high-pitched noise and the two-second loop on the actual vinyl was far more difficult and time consuming.

Harry Moss was the man responsible for that job.  According to Emerick, as he recalled to Lewisohn, Moss struggled:

“It took Harry about 8 attempts to get it right because the slightest incorrect placing of a stylus at the very beginning of the LP side can put the concentric groove out.  We had to enquire if putting musical content in the run-out groove would tear the metal when the records are stamped out at the factory.”

According to Moss, putting something in the play-out groove was not an original concept:

“I was told by chaps who’d been in the business a long time that cutting things into the run-out grooves was an old idea they used to do on 78s.”

Nevertheless, as he told Lewisohn, that didn’t make his job any easier:

“Cutting Sgt. Pepper was not too difficult except that because we couldn’t play the masters I had to wait for white label [test] pressings before I could hear whether or not I’d cut the concentric groove successfully.”

As for the tribute to Banana & Louie, “It was done at the same pitch as the police dog whistles.”  Moss’ own dog would “suddenly sit up and look around” whenever he played it.

Because of how long it was taking to put these uncredited bits on copies of Sgt. Pepper, during its original release on vinyl they would only appear on the first British pressing, presumably a million copies since that’s how many pre-orders there were, which meant that Brian Wilson’s dogs probably never heard it.  (It’s not clear when they actually died.  One of their last known photos, with the entire Beach Boys, was taken in 1976.)  It would be thirteen years before Sgt. Pepper’s Inner Groove, as it later came to be titled, first saw release in America, initially on the bootlegged Collectors Items before its official, credited unveiling on Rarities.  (Collectors Items was scrapped by Capitol Records in favour of its eventual replacement.)

For some inexplicable reason, shortly after Sgt. Pepper’s triumphant unveiling in late May 1967, an indeterminate number of fans decided to play the mystery track backwards.  What they supposedly heard shocked them as McCartney recounted to Barry Miles in his officially sanctioned biography:

“I had this very open house then, because I was living on my own [on Cavendish Ave.]…I had quite a few visitors there, but these kids came in one day and said, ‘What’s all that swearing when it goes backwards on the end of the loop about?’  I said, ‘No, it doesn’t, it says, ”It really couldn’t be any other.”’  They said, ‘It does do it, though, we’ve done it.’  I said, ‘No, it bloody doesn’t.’  I said, ‘Well, come in, look, we’ll get my record player.’  We put the record on, then you could turn the turntable backwards.  It probably hurt the motor, but you could turn it backwards, and sure enough, it said something like ‘We’ll fuck you like Superman; We’ll fuck you like Superman; We’ll fuck you like Superman.’  I said, ‘Oh, my Gawwd!'”

For the record, there were no subliminal messages intentionally placed forwards or backwards in the play-out groove of Sgt. Pepper.

“We had certainly not intended to do that but probably when you turn anything backwards it sounds like something…If you look hard enough you can make something out of anything.”

In a much earlier interview, McCartney insisted, “You get a pure buzz after a while because it’s so boring it ceases to mean anything.”

Actually, the word I’m thinking of is annoying.

In 1987, when it came time to release Sgt. Pepper on CD, it was decided that the mystery loop and the high pitch noise would be buried on track thirteen, right after A Day In The Life.  But as George Martin remembered to Geoffrey Giuliano, they had to make a compromise:

“CDs don’t have run-out grooves.  What we thought would be nice was to go back and have that again, so we just gave the sound as though it were a run-out groove.  We had several revolutions going on and it gradually fades at the end.  Giving an idea to people what it was all about.”

Sgt. Pepper’s Inner Groove would reappear unlisted again on the 2009 remastered edition of Sgt. Pepper and the 50th Anniversary expanded edition in 2017.

When A Day In The Life’s final sustained piano chord finally peters out, that high-pitched tone (which humans can actually hear, just not as intensely as animals do) is first heard at the 5:06 mark.  Four seconds later, you’ll hear one of The Beatles giggle and then the loop (which is repeated twelve goddamn times) starts until it’s thankfully faded out.  For the record, McCartney is actually singing, “Never do speak any other way.”

As for The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, it made its own debut on CD in 1990 to belated acclaim and financial success.  On this version, Banana & Louie are still barking at the train right at the end of Caroline, No on track thirteen.  But they’re also heard at the end of the properly listed bonus cut, Hang On To Your Ego (the original version of I Know There’s An Answer) in what is clearly Buried Audio on track fifteen.

In the eighteen-second clip which starts during the fade at the 2:57 mark, you’ll hear Marilyn Wilson, Brian’s first wife, call out Banana.  After both dogs stop barking, The Beach Boys’ frontman turns to his engineer Chuck Britz and asks:  “Hey, Chuck, is it possible we could bring a horse in here without…if we don’t screw anything up?”

An incredulous Chuck replies:  “I beg your pardon?”

A frustrated Brian then says, “Honest to God [unintelligible], the horse is tamed and everything,” and the clip fades out.

Considering the fact that Brian had a giant sandbox constructed inside his living room (which Banana & Louie mistook for a giant litter box), such a gnarly request was not out of character.  In the end, the improbable idea was thankfully abandoned.  This unlisted studio banter would later reappear in slightly longer form on The Pet Sounds Sessions, a celebratory four-disc box set issued in 1997.  (It was supposed to be out the previous year to coincide with the album’s 30th Anniversary.  It also appears on the updated version of the box set released in 2016.)  The fully credited Dog Barking Session (Outtakes) appears on track 24 on disc three.  (It actually cuts out Marilyn at the start and begins a few seconds after the 1990 version’s starting point before revealing more of the wacky in-studio conversation.)

Disc two features two mystery tracks tucked away at the end of track nineteen.  46 seconds after the really cool instrumental version of Here Today (without the album fade but with Brian politely cutting the musicians off after they nailed the take), you’ll hear a much clearer version of one bit of mysterious background chatter heard on the completed mono cut of the song (with vocals) on the Pet Sounds album.  (Elliott informed me that this was captured on March 25, 1966, during a vocal session.  It begins at 1:46 and ends at 2:02 on the finished mono version of Here Today.  There’s other chatter captured briefly at the 1:16 mark but good luck deciphering it.)

After someone briefly sings, “Hoo hoo hoo hoo” (“Sounds like either Brian or Alan [Jardine]; I can’t say for sure,” Elliott wrote to me.  My own guess would be Brian.), a moaning, echoey Bruce Johnston asks an unknown fellow, “Do you have that attached to the flash you have rigged up?”  The man quietly replies, “Yeah, I do.”  Bruce satisfactorily responds, possibly with food in his mouth, “Very good.”  The man says, “Here we go.”  Then Brian orders the playback to be stopped and for his bandmates to get ready to sing.  (“Top, please!”)  The whole time you hear the instrumental break of Here Today playing on a studio monitor.  Strictly for those who always wanted to know what they were saying.

Nobody knows who that man is but what we do know is that he was hired to take snaps of the band while they were making the album.  “The details of who that photographer was have been lost to time,” Elliott asserted to me.  (A different photographer, George Jerman, took all the snaps of the band, minus Johnston, at the petting zoo.)  According to Rolling Stone, the mystery photog had bought his camera equipment while touring with the band in Japan.  (When Pet Sounds was being mastered in stereo for the first time, Brian decided to delete both bits of studio chatter from the mono version of Here Today as well as other tracks.  Now all you hear are the finished songs.)

Five seconds after that eighteen-second clip concludes, you’ll hear a faded-in double-tracked Brian repeatedly singing “Sometimes I feel very sad”, a key line from I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times, while his bandmates harmonize behind him.  It lasts fifteen seconds and then fades out.  (This is heard twice in the finished song.)  I honestly never fully appreciated this mystery track, or the full song in general, until now.  It’s clearly one of the standouts on Pet Sounds.

On the full version of I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times, there’s an additional vocal competing for attention with Brian and his harmonizing bandmates (“Can’t find nothin’ I can put my heart and soul into”) which isn’t heard in the unlisted snippet.

For its 40th Anniversary, Pet Sounds was reissued with yet another mystery track.  Like the 1999 edition, it features both mono & stereo versions of the album with one version of Hang On To Your Ego serving as a dividing point on track 14.  But after the stereo mix of Caroline, No (complete with the added coda) ends on track 27 on the 2006 reissue, there’s now 13 seconds of silence.  And then, with 31 seconds remaining on the CD at the 3:03 mark, you’ll hear a snippet of the isolated background vocals from the finished version of Wouldn’t It Be Nice.

This portion begins at the 35-second mark of the original song and fades out (in the unlisted isolated version) at 1:04 just as Brian sings the title.  Sometimes you don’t always fully appreciate the pitch perfect harmonies of these classic songs until everything else is removed from the mix.

In 2002, Brian and his talented touring band performed four straight nights at the Royal Albert Hall in London, England with many British rock stars, past and present, watching with great admiration in the audience.  For the first time ever, his most famous work was traditionally played from start to finish, sounding uncannily at times like the original 1966 recordings.

The resulting CD was Pet Sounds Live, a surprisingly moving recreation of all thirteen songs in the exact order they appear on the 1966 release.  (Age may have forced occasional lower key changes but Brian hasn’t lost his vocal heart.  In particular, he nails God Only Knows, the song brother Carl sang on the original album.)  While the crowd enthusiastically applauds the end of the finale, Caroline, No, the train sound from Mister D’s Machine rolls on like it does on the original Pet Sounds.  But Banana & Louie’s barking is conspicuously absent.

Two years earlier, Brian launched the Pet Sounds Symphony Tour, which reworked all the songs as classical pieces.  In a 2000 Toronto Sun article by music critic Jane Stevenson promoting the shows, she revealed that Banana & Louie had long since been replaced by five other dogs.

Two were terriers named Paul and Ringo.

(Special thanks to Brad Elliott & Dr. Demento.)

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Thursday, December 5, 2019
12:55 a.m.

CORRECTION: Commenter Tom Schulte has correctly pointed out that I goofed on Stan Cornyn’s name. I wrongly had it as Corbyn. The text has now been corrected.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Thursday, November 11, 2021
2:31 a.m.

The History Of The Mystery Track – The Rembrandts Ride The Friends Wave

On Thursday, September 22, 1994, NBC debuted a new sitcom at 8 p.m.  Three handsome men and three beautiful women in their 20s hanging out in each other’s apartments and the local coffee house cracking wise and bemoaning their less than stellar lives despite being good-looking, middle class white people in implausibly large apartments with affordable rent.

Friends became an immediate success and by the time it returned for its second season the following year, it was a phenomenon.  For a decade, we were sucked in to the soap opera antics of Joey, his best friend Chandler, his eventual wife Monica, her brother Ross, his on-again/off-again girlfriend Rachel and their mutual pal Phoebe.  We laughed and we cried.  But now, we also cringe at the “slut” shaming, the homophobia and transphobia we didn’t always acknowledge in real time.  (Some will also argue the show “fat” shamed, as well.  But I always liked Fat Monica because she was cute, charming and clumsily endearing.  Even more will make the stronger case that the show was too white and lacked diversity, a common problem with network TV.  The real New York is far more multicultural.)

Despite being a runaway hit (even today in syndication, it remains very popular), Friends has always been controversial.  There are as many vocal detractors as there are die-hard supporters.  Nothing has fueled this divide more than its theme song.

Danny Wilde and Phil Solem were longtime veterans of the California music scene.  In 1981, they were in a band called Great Buildings.  But after their one and only studio album tanked, they went their separate ways working on other projects until they reunited to form The Rembrandts at the end of the decade.

Up to this point, they had exactly one hit:  That’s Just The Way It Is, Baby, from their self-titled debut, which cracked the Top 20 in 1990.  In the autumn of 1994, they were in the process of completing their third album, the cleverly named L.P., when their manager received a phone call.

Friends executive producer Kevin S. Bright was a big fan of the band.  He wanted Wilde and Solem to help write the show’s opening theme song.  To help spark their creativity, he sent over an unaired copy of the pilot which featured R.E.M.’s It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) as a temporary placeholder.

“We liked it,” Wilde later told TV Guide, so The Rembrandts went to work pitching ideas in a meeting with the show’s creators.  “We got the offer on Wednesday [September 14],” Solem revealed on the CNN Special Report, Friends At 25, “[and] went over the arrangement on a Thursday with the music director Michael Skloff…”

“We went into the studio,” Wilde explained to Billboard Magazine in 1995, “and cut a [51]-second version of the theme song…It was so fast.  We cut it on a Saturday [September 17]; we worked in a 20-hour session.  We cut it and mixed it in the same session, because it had to be finished on Monday [September 19] so that they could go on line with it, because the show was airing that Thursday.”

“It was wham, bam, bing-bang, boom,” Wilde said to TV Guide in the mid-90s.  “Phil and I figured it would be this anonymous little song.”

There was no chance of that happening.

Charlie Quinn was the program director for WYHY-FM, a Top 40 channel based out of Nashville.  Tom Peace was the music director and also an announcer.  Realizing how popular the Friends theme song was becoming, they decided to tape the original 51-second recording as it played on TV.  Then, they looped it twice to turn it into a three-minute track, adding some instrumentation at the end and started putting it on the air.  As they say in the biz, it “got phones”.  Listeners called in repeatedly demanding replays and wondering where to get their own copies.  According to Friends: A Cultural History, at its peak, this bootleg version of I’ll Be There For You was played close to 60 times a week in early 1995.  Very quickly, other stations started adding it to their own playlists.

Word quickly got back to Elektra Records, The Rembrandts’ label.  With L.P. pretty much “in the can”, it took three months for Wilde and Solem to expand the original theme into a proper three-minute single.  As a result, the album’s release was ultimately moved from March to May 1995.

“Let’s just say it was the record company’s idea,” Wilde told The Los Angeles Times in July 1995. “We were asked very politely to put it on the album.”

“It was an open door and we were kind of sucked in like a vacuum.” Solem told the same paper.  He also told Billboard:  “Our record label said we had to finish the song and record it.  There was no way to get out of it.”

Despite suggesting ideas and making slight changes, The Rembrandts were not officially credited as songwriters of the original TV theme.  (The lyrics were chiefly written by future Storage Wars guest star Allee Willis while much of the music was composed by the show’s music director Michael Skloff.  According to Willis, Skloff came up with the title.)  This time, they were determined to have more input.

The good news was they already had the first verse and chorus.  Now they needed a second verse, a middle eight section and a guitar solo.  The producers, including Friends creators David Crane and Marta Kauffman (her then-husband was Skloff who she divorced in 2015), helped collaborate during the process of expanding the original cut but it was tough to settle on a finished lyric.

“There was a version that we did with a different second verse and a completely different bridge,” Solem revealed to Buzzfeed in 2014. “We tried to make it more like what the rest of the songs on our album were and they didn’t like it because it kind of went a little dark.  It never got put out, but there’s some secret copy floating around.”

An MP3 copy of that rejected version used to be posted on The Rembrandts’ official website but has since been taken down, unfortunately.

Eventually, a substitute lyric was settled on and the band rerecorded the music expanding the length to three minutes and five seconds.  Whereas the original theme was known as the TV Version, this new take would naturally be known as the Long Version.

Because the band had already settled on a track listing for L.P. and all the artwork had already been completed, this new version of I’ll Be There For You would become a Stickered Bonus Track (a little advertising sticker noting its inclusion would be added either to the outside cellophane on the front cover or permanently on the front door of the actual CD case), but only for the first pressing (roughly 250000 copies).  Thanks to the album selling well (it was eventually certified Platinum making it their biggest seller), follow-up pressings updated the packaging.  I’ll Be There For You would eventually be properly credited as the fifteenth and concluding track in all the right places.  The band insisted there be a ten-second gap of silence after track fourteen to symbolically separate it from the rest of the album.

Upon its release, thanks to constant radio airplay, it became a massive hit, although curiously it only peaked at #17 on Billboard’s Hot 100 Singles Chart (it was paired with L.P. single This House Is Not A Home), three spots below That’s Just The Way It Is, Baby’s highest position.  (It went to number one for five weeks in Canada.)

Shortly thereafter, a video was shot over three days in Studio 8H (the home of Saturday Night Live) in New York’s Rockefeller Centre (it was originally supposed to be taped in Los Angeles but it was difficult to get everybody together in the same place) which featured all six cast members who cancelled their vacations to participate (the first season had already wrapped).  According to The Rembrandts, there was a different plan for the video:

“There was a scene that the director had specifically written where the cast was going to be trying to get into one of our shows, as if they would do that,” Solem revealed to Buzzfeed. “They were going to get into one of our shows and apparently, they were going to bring this frozen fish and use it to, like, knock us out.”

But the cast hated the idea and it was scrapped.  Entertainment Weekly revealed another rejected concept in its June 2, 1995 issue:

“The first video script called for Marcel [Ross’ pet monkey] to portray the director…” but he was booked for other projects and therefore unavailable.

Instead, the cast clowned around the appropriately all-white Studio 8H set sometimes stepping in to pretend to play the band’s instruments.  The video debuted in mid-June on MTV and MuchMusic and like the audio version on radio it was put into immediate high rotation.

The constant presence of I’ll Be There For You split the public into two, distinct camps:  Keep Playing This Song Because I Love It and Please Make It Stop Or I Will Kill Someone.  For 25 years, I’ve been in the first camp.

I like the hook, the clapping, the harmonies, the simple, relatable lyrics about still being loved and cared for despite being a perpetual screw-up, the true meaning of friendship.  Billboard Magazine compared the track to The Beatles’ I Feel Fine and The Monkees’ Pleasant Valley Sunday.  There’s no question the twangy arrangement has a very mid-60s feel about it.

On a couple of award shows, when played as entrance music, presenter Matthew Perry couldn’t help but mock the song:

“I can never get enough of hearing that song,” he cracked at the 1996 American Comedy Awards.  “Oh, keep playing that song!” he zinged at the 1997 Emmys.  So, put him in the second camp.

According to Jennifer Aniston many years later, he wasn’t the only annoyed cast member.

“No one was really a big fan of that theme song,” she declared to the BBC in 2016.

During the last outtake shown before the end credits of We’re The Millers, an otherwise terrible 2013 comedy, Aniston’s co-star Jason Sudekis plays some “victory music” which turns out to be I’ll Be There For You.  As everybody in the scene except a surprised Aniston cheerfully sings along, like the audience, even she can’t help but laugh and smile.

For his part, Weird Al Yankovic did a parody called I’ll Repair For You (Theme From Home Improvement) which has never appeared on any of his studio releases.  When he asked permission to include it on Bad Hair Day, the producers said no, so it was left off the album.  (They felt the original was already getting too much negative attention.)  He only plays it live in concert.

Not everyone has a sense of humour.  In 2004, Blender Magazine named it the 15th worst song ever.

However, in 1996, it was nominated for a Grammy in the Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals category.  Sadly, The Rembrandts lost to Hootie & The Blowfish.

The monster success of I’ll Be There For You proved to be too much for Phil Solem, albeit temporarily.  The constant grind of touring and promoting over the last half decade, plus not knowing how to push the band forward creatively in order to not be solely defined by this unexpected smash, burned him out so he left the band in 1996.  He briefly formed T.H.R.U.S.H. which disbanded by the end of the decade.

His former bandmate kept the band going with a fourth album in 1998.  Spin This! was billed under the name Danny Wilde & The Rembrandts.  Containing no Friends-related material or breakout singles it bombed.

But this second split would be followed by yet another reunion.  Coming to terms with their association with Friends, Solem and Wilde made peace with it in 2000 and resumed recording together.  In 2004, the year Friends went off the air, they rerecorded I’ll Be There For You for their compilation Choice Picks, which was reissued in 2005.  A proper Greatest Hits CD of their original recordings (including a couple of rare Great Buildings cuts) arrived the following year, even though the band only had three legitimate hits.  They also played their most famous song on a bunch of shows as the sitcom was signing off.  They remain an active band today and continue to record new material.

Regardless of the unfairly harsh criticism (surely the result of an overexposed, overplayed song), I’ll Be There For You would remain the theme song for Friends for every one of its episodes, all 236 of them.  Many have wondered how much money The Rembrandts have made off both versions.  Surely, it’s in the millions, right?

“Let me put it this way,” Danny Wilde revealed to the Los Angeles Times in 2004.  “I can’t retire on it, but it’s putting my kids through college.”

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Sunday, November 17, 2019
1:53 a.m.

The History Of The Mystery Track – Heartbreak Saves The Clash

“…I see a flash of movement and colour–a blur of dark hair, high-heeled shoes, fluttering chiffon scarves and the longest, thinnest legs I’ve ever seen…He’s stick thin with tight red-and-white checkered trousers, black high-heeled slingback shoes, a girl’s fitted jacket that’s too tight, all topped off with fluffy, backcombed hair…

I just know this boy’s going to be my friend…I like his bravery and style; he’s my kind of person.  I make eye contact with him and burst out laughing.  I laugh with a mixture of recognition and relief because I know our friendship is inevitable, we’re obviously like-minded people so we may as well get straight to it and dispense with the slow polite phase of getting to know each other.  But I’ve offended him and my laughter is met with a wounded expression.

So I say, ‘Hello, I’m Viv.’

In a soft, shy voice with a South London accent, the boy replies:

‘Mick Jones.'”

(An excerpt from Clothes Clothes Clothes Music Music Music Boys Boys Boys by Viv Albertine (Side One, Chapter 20, Peacock)

It was 1974 when the future guitarist of The Clash first met the future guitarist of The Slits.  A year after their chance encounter at Hammersmith College in the UK, there they were bumping into each other at an HMV eager to buy Patti Smith’s first album.

He would go on to briefly form The London SS.  She would become part of The Flowers Of Romance until her friend and bandmate Sid Vicious fired her for not being good enough.  (Albertine freely admits to not knowing what she was doing at that time.)  Later, they would be tourmates with the influential bands that made them famous.

In 1975, Mick Jones and Viv Albertine would ultimately become more than friends but it was never smooth sailing despite their passionate love for each other.  One biographer summed up their relationship in one word: “tempestuous”.  Throughout her memoir, Albertine reveals that they broke up and got back together so many times, she lost count.  She had a bad temper and flirted with other guys.  He would get jealous despite having other women in his life.  But he did help her pick out her first guitar and encouraged her creativity.  She loved his music, his sense of humour and his kindness.

Three years after The Clash were formed, the band had thus far released at least half a dozen singles, a couple of EPs and two proper studio records.  Despite little airplay the band was generating media raves and money for their UK label.

America was a different story.  CBS Records hated their self-titled debut which they refused to release in its original form.  (For two years, you could only get it on import.)  Although they did put out album number two, Give ‘Em Enough Rope, they didn’t exactly promote it very well.  (As a result, it didn’t chart on Billboard.)  Mainstream radio spins were non-existent.  Live appearances were rare.  At least respected critics like Robert Christgau were enthusiastic.

Already, The Clash were facing an existential crisis.  Despite being absolute students of rock history, Strummer and Jones often slagged their heroes in print and made a point of making fast, blunt, tightly configured songs very reminiscent of The Ramones, one of their biggest influences, rather than delving full tilt into reggae and other Black genres they preferred.  (Police & Thieves, notwithstanding.)

In serious debt to CBS (biographer Marcus Gray reported they owed 50000 English pounds, roughly the equivalent of 100000 American dollars) who they were already feuding with (they didn’t always get along with their UK label, either), The Clash also went through three managers (they even managed themselves for a short time).  Mick Jones developed an unfortunate cocaine habit.  Drummer Topper Headon was addicted to smack.  They returned to the studio in the spring of 1979 to work on early demos for their third record.  (These became known as The Vanilla Tapes which were released on CD in 2004.)  Isolated from the dying punk scene (The Sex Pistols had broken up the previous year) and the prying eyes of the mostly supportive music media and their growing fanbase, after spending three months rehearsing and recording rough takes, they spent an additional three months putting together the most important album they would ever make.

It certainly wasn’t easy at first.  With no original songwriting happening (both Strummer and Jones had terrible writer’s block for about a year), the band opted to play selections from their archive and beloved covers in the studio hoping that would spark something.  They also played impromptu soccer matches in a nearby school playground with their friends, including visiting CBS Records reps, which helped intensify their bond.

London Calling wasn’t supposed to be a double record.  It was a happy accident that once Jones and Strummer started writing again the sessions were generating more than enough solid tracks for serious consideration.  In the final weeks of recording in the autumn of 1979, it looked like 18 songs were going to be tracklisted.

Then, Viv Albertine dumped Mick Jones for the final time.

Their romantic relationship was doomed from the beginning.  U2 said it best in their song Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own (“If we weren’t so much alike/I’d like you a whole lot more”).  There was lots of sex in the UK punk scene and even serious relationships, but love and romance out in the open was frowned upon.  Plus, Albertine wanted to be her own person with her own music career which caused an emotional conflict.  She loved Jones but preferred “to be seen as a separate entity, rather than ‘Mick’s girlfriend’.”

“Mick believes in love and romance,” she wrote in her 2014 memoir, “whereas I’m questioning all my old beliefs and habits.  He wants emotional stability.”

Ironically, Albertine revealed that a childhood filled with listening to idealistic love songs gave her the distinctly wrong impression about men.  Few, if any, lived up to her unrealistic expectations.  She repeatedly learned the hard way how seriously flawed we are.

Her reticence in being openly involved with Jones (which wasn’t exactly a secret) is illustrated in a street encounter with another friend Johnny Rotten.  As the hand holding couple approaches him and future friend Sid Vicious (this was their first meeting), Albertine “drops Mick’s hand immediately–don’t want to look like a drip…”  In a later, more private and extremely awkward encounter in her apartment, Rotten asks her to give him a blow job which doesn’t go so well.  (It was her first attempt.)  He eventually asks her to stop trying.

“Mick used to cry and cry about Viv,” Johnny Green, The Clash’s road manager, told Marcus Gray in Route 19 Revisited.  “She was really quite hard on him.  He rarely behaved like that with other women.  He played the rock star normally, but with Viv, no.  It’s the only time I’ve seen him like that.  She broke his heart.  He was in love with her.”

In 1978, when they were back together yet again, Albertine got pregnant and decided to have an abortion.  A concerned Jones was willing to accompany her so she wouldn’t go through it alone.  But she wanted to be alone.  (“I don’t want to feel anything.  If he’s there I might feel something.”)  He later brought her flowers while she recovered.  Paradoxically, she was at peace with her decision to terminate for 20 years but now, having an adult daughter from a failed marriage, she seriously regrets it.  (Had she had the baby, while Jones would’ve been supportive as would her own family, it’s seems highly unlikely she would’ve been able to be fully committed to The Slits.  Chances are, she would’ve been resentful for missing out her one chance at making history.)

In September 1979, The Slits released their debut album, Cut.  The perfectly titled Ping Pong Affair is about her many break-ups with Jones.  Although at face value it sounds like a harsh kiss-off to a problematic relationship, it’s really about why letting go is so goddamn hard.  The contradictions are deliberate and revealing.

The specific inspiration for the track was a terrible fight the couple had that led to Albertine storming out of Jones’ place one night, “forgetting I didn’t have enough money to get a taxi”.  Having already been attacked by a couple of skinheads who wanted to rape her (but were scared off when her then-boss of a club she used to bartend for drove up to check on her), her worry about being assaulted again was fully justified.  (It wasn’t the only time she feared for her life.)  Fortunately, she made it home safe that night.  Later on, Albertine recalls hearing Jones’ “beautiful soft voice” at a newsstand without him noticing.  She quietly admitted to herself “I was still in love with him.”  When The Slits break up in 1982, there she is in his bed turning down sex but secretly wishing they were back together which never happens.

Because of long faded memories, it’s not exactly clear when Jones wrote the song that would save The Clash.  (It most certainly was not written and recorded in a day or two as Blender Magazine falsely asserted.)  But considering the timing of the last break-up and the second phase of the London Calling sessions, it’s likely he started working on it almost immediately in late summer 1979.  According to co-producer Bill Price (who helped oversee Never Mind The Bollocks), by the time November 10 arrived, the start of the last recording session, Jones was adding his double-tracked vocals to an already recorded arrangement:

“…I seem to remember that we had done the backing track earlier, maybe under a different name…I’m sure it was started, but not finished before the American tour,” he told Gray.

With the album behind schedule and The Clash hard up for cash, the band decided to do a brief late summer run of shows in the US which they called the Take The 5th tour in reference to the Constitutional Amendment that protects one from self-incrimination.

Ironically, Jones’ new song was originally not supposed to be part of London Calling in the first place.  The original plan was to give it away for free.  Back then, it wasn’t uncommon for top acts to offer flexi-discs (flimsier 45s) to any one of the British music weeklies to create some street buzz, especially after a long absence.  These bonus songs would be available upon the purchase of an issue with no added charge.

The band was in discussions to attach the song with an issue of the New Musical Express but ultimately, and perplexingly, the magazine said no.  (Guess they preferred their political stuff.)  Regardless, Jones was a firm believer that the song was something special.  Joe Strummer, on the other hand, was completely indifferent.  He openly told the press he was not fond of what he derisively dismissed as “complaining heterosexual songs”.  Although it would later be added to setlists (you can hear a live version on the 1999 From Here To Eternity CD), Strummer was never a fan.  He didn’t play on the actual recording.  Sometimes when it was played during gigs, he told the audience it was ok if they decided to go the bathroom for three minutes.

But Jones was insistent and soon a compromise was reached.  All the London Calling album artwork had already been completed (replacing it would be too expensive and time was very short) so it was agreed that the song would be quietly added to side four of the vinyl (track five), side two of the cassette (track nine).  So fans would know it was on the record, an advertising sticker mentioning the track was placed on the front of the sealed package.  Also, if you looked closely at the play-out groove on side four, you could see an etching of the song’s title to help you clue in.

Having already missed one release deadline (London Calling was originally scheduled for an October unveiling), adding this Jones composition at the last minute was really cutting it close.  A day after the song was finished in the early morning hours of November 11, the band agreed to turn it into a Stickered Bonus Track.  On November 13, the fully mixed album was finally sent out for mastering.  Had it not been mastered and then shipped off by train to be manufactured into multiple vinyl and cassette copies, London Calling would not have dropped domestically on time on December 14.  More importantly, had this not happened, the band would be in violation of their UK contract and possibly go even further into debt as a punishment for not honouring their part of the deal or, even more harshly, lose that deal entirely.  They had to release a new studio album every year.  It had been 18 months since the debut of Give ‘Em Enough Rope.  There was no such worry in America.  London Calling first surfaced in January 1980, three months after the reconfigured US version of their self-titled album.

Originally called Stand By Me (because of its chorus), the song was retitled Train In Vain (Stand By Me) so no one would confuse it with the famous Ben E. King song.  Jones told Rolling Stone that the song’s arrangement was “like a train rhythm”.  The title also referenced Love In Vain, the old blues standard by Robert Johnson that The Rolling Stones, a Jones favourite, covered in the late 60s.

As the song fades in, we hear the famous drum pattern kick things off.  Then, with the volume growing louder, Jones plucks his six-string and starts poring his heart out as a rare harmonica (also played by Jones) attempts to fill the holes in his aching heart:

“You say you stand by your man/Tell me something I don’t understand/You said you loved me and that’s a fact/And then you left me said you felt trapped”

The opening line is a reference to another Slits song from Cut:  Typical Girls which itself references Tammy Wynette’s biggest hit Stand By Your Man.  (“Typical girls stand by their man”)  But as Clash biographer Marcus Gray points out in Route 19 Revisited, Jones didn’t catch the irony.  Typical Girls mocks anti-feminist stereotypes (“Typical girls are sensitive/Typical girls are emotional/Typical girls are cruel and bewitching”…”Don’t create/Don’t rebel/Have intuition/Don’t drive well”).  It criticizes stifling conformity and horrible self-loathing that women are taught to buy into at such a young age.  It doesn’t actually comment on Mick Jones.

Nevertheless, this misinterpretation fuels much of his sorrow (“the heartache’s in me to this day/Did you stand by me?/No not at all/Did you stand by me?/No way”), a sentiment deeply and fully shared by Albertine in Ping Pong Affair and her 2014 memoir.

In the second verse, there’s a curious line that goes “So alone I keep the wolves at bay”.  Is Jones saying he’s so upset about losing the love of his life he can’t move on to date other women as he had done before?  Or maybe he’s taken a hit of coke to numb his pain.  Or maybe he’s isolating himself from his friends hoping not to be ridiculed for blowing it.

Jones takes a shot at his record company for being cheap (“I got a job but it don’t pay”) and then melodramatically proclaims himself incapable of functioning normally without Albertine (“without your love I won’t make it through”)  For the record, he made it through just fine.  The two remain good friends to this day.  And the song, while certainly not one of The Clash’s best, remains one of their most accessible and universal.  It is certainly one of the most influential mystery tracks of all time.

Train In Vain, the second single from London Calling, was issued in America in February 1980, June in the UK.  Two months later, The Clash played the track along with three others from London Calling on the ABC SNL knock-off series Fridays, their first ever appearance on American Television.  (It had been in their live repertoire for months by this point.)  Train In Vain would do what no other Clash song had done before.  It cracked the Top 40 in Billboard Magazine.  It would eventually peak at a respectable #28.

The success of the song along with rave reviews for the album (Christgau gave it an A+) and relentless touring finally broke the band in America.  (London Calling would eventually be certified Platinum.)  Two years later, Topper Headon’s Rock The Casbah would become their biggest hit cracking the Top 10.  They would eventually perform on the real Saturday Night Live and later open for The Who in New York’s Shea Stadium, later released on CD.

Train In Vain would pop up again and again as a properly credited track on numerous Clash greatest hits collections over the years (a slightly shortened version was rereleased in the UK in 1991) and even find a spot on The Rolling Stone Collection, a massive seven-CD box set featuring dozens of the most enduring rock songs personally endorsed by the magazine’s editors in 1994.  (It was ranked 298 on their list of the 500 greatest songs of all time.)  The song was even a clue on Rock And Roll Jeopardy (it was the $500 answer under “Train” Songs), hosted by future Survivor stalwart Jeff Probst, in 1998.

In 1995, Garbage released their own self-titled debut.  Having released three singles that failed to break through on Billboard (despite getting extensive airplay on college and alternative stations), the band tried again with single number four.  Stupid Girl features a constant loop of Train In Vain’s opening drum rhythm (it also features an uncredited drum sample from R.E.M.’s Orange Crush).  It would become the band’s biggest hit, climbing as high as #24 on Billboard, marking the second time Train In Vain had put a band over in America.

In the mid-80s, nearly a decade after it was first available on vinyl and cassette, London Calling debuted on CD.  To keep with the spirit of the original vinyl (and insisted upon by the band themselves), Train In Vain remained unlisted in the track listing, at least on the back cover and in the liner notes.  It is, however, listed on the actual CD as track 19.  In 1999, when the album was rereleased for its 20th Anniversary, Train In Vain was finally properly credited in all the right places on London Calling, which has continued for all subsequent reissues.

Train In Vain would become a remarkably adaptable cover for a wide variety of artists over the years.  Annie Lennox did a surprisingly engaging, slow-downed dance version for Medusa while Dwight Yoakum did a really good countrified take for Under The Covers.  Joe Strummer might not be a fan of the original but what does the song’s inspiration think?

“I’m really proud to have inspired that,” Viv Albertine said in 2016, “but often [Jones] won’t admit to it.”  In her 2014 memoir, she declared it one of her favourite all-time Clash songs.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Sunday, November 17, 2019
12:33 a.m.

The History Of The Mystery Track – The MuchMusic Groove

In the summer of 1997, MuchMusic started promoting a new compilation on its airwaves.  Nostalgia for music from the previous decade had been growing for some time and The Nation’s Music Station wanted to capitalize on its revived popularity.  (They would release many more retro collections well into the 2000s.)

Distributed by Quality Music (who started releasing the long running series of MuchDance CDs), MuchMusic’s Made In The ’80s features classic tracks from Billy Idol, The Cult, Tears For Fears and thirteen others from the New Wave era.  It’s actually a decent collection worth seeking out.  (I’ve recently spotted affordable used copies in local music shops.  Unfortunately, the CD has long been out of print so new copies are no longer being produced.)

During their on-air shifts, VJs like Bill Welychka would make a point of informing viewers that there was something extra on the CD they might be interested in hearing, unsubtly suggesting the possibility of a mystery track.

Access Magazine, a Toronto entertainment freebie publication, offered free copies through a contest which is how I obtained one.  (I was a secondary prize winner.)  Sure enough, exactly one minute after Culture Club’s Do You Really Want To Hurt Me? ends on track 16, a familiar drumbeat breaks the silence.

Tony Young was a rambunctious English kid raised by immigrant Jamaican parents who then relocated to Kitchener, Ontario in the mid-1970s when he was just a young teen.  It was his older brother Basil who ultimately got the Mohawk College graduate in at MuchMusic.

Like Basil, Young was a Day Oner, one of the original employees who was hired just before The Nation’s Music Station’s official launch on August 31, 1984.  Basil was an in-house cameraman (he also travelled the world doing remotes for The New Music) while Tony, who also shot footage eventually, originally started as a VTR operator. Working from nine in the morning (when Much was still rerunning the previous day’s 6-hour (later 8-hour) programming) until five in the afternoon (which was the midway point of the current day’s schedule), his hours would be extended when he became involved with pre-taped comedy skits on Christopher Ward’s relocated City Limits.  (The original six-hour show aired late nights twice a week on sister station, City-TV, in 1983, and was the template for MuchMusic.)  Exhausted, it wasn’t unusual for Tony to leave work at 2 in the morning.

As he revealed in his 2004 memoir, Tony “became one of those cultish, behind-the-scenes characters that Much camera operators would take great delight in showing on TV–even if it was usually just the back of my head or the occasional shot of my face.  Once they got to know me, the VJs and camera operators realized that I had quite the personality, so they’d include me in all of these short vignettes.”

Besides working on City Limits, Tony was also featured prominently in Station ID promos.  Perhaps the most famous one is the Psycho parody.  Recreating the shower scene when Janet Leigh gets attacked, instead of Anthony Perkins dressed as an old woman, the original giant MuchMusic logo is seen terrifying him.  He also frequently appeared as a character nicknamed The Spy.  The constant airing of these promos got him recognized on the streets of Toronto.

The exposure thrilled Tony, an aspiring actor who once worked as Michael Winslow’s stunt double on Police Academy 3: Back In Training.  (Winslow was the guy who did all the silly sound effects.)  His life’s ambition was not to be a crew guy like his brother.  (Tony almost didn’t work for Much because he “needed my own identity and path” away from big brother Basil.  He only relented when Basil booked him that job interview.)

MuchMusic was co-founded by Moses Znaimer, who “had an open-door policy that allowed him to take advantage of the talent on hand,” Tony noted in his memoir.  “Staffers could come in and talk shop, maybe pitch ideas, or simply chat about whatever happened to be on their minds.”

Tony had been working with another cameraman Gord McWatters on these station IDs and they both had an idea.

“…one of the first meetings I had with [Znaimer] revolved around a MuchMusic promotional item that I had worked on with Gord McWatters.  Gord and I were both lowly camera dudes in [1987], but we wanted to keep our creative juices flowing–and possibly make Canadian music video history in the process…”

In March 1987, MuchMusic staffers were preparing to move into a new studio, the Chum City Building on 299 Queen St. W.  Gord and Tony wanted to create a musical two-minute promo centred around the move.  “After doing the ID with [McWatters] that promoted the move from 99 Queen Street to 299 Queen Street, a lot [of] the folks at Much were hot on us to produce a full-length video of sorts.  But how were we going to pull this off?  A full-length video–with no money–while we were working full-time?”

The solution was to write another catchy, lighthearted song about the VJs but to also emphasize all the shows that were airing on Much during this period.  Once again, 299 Queen Street would serve as the location for the video which would reduce the need for a large budget.  The ground floor, where much of the promo was shot and the focal point for most of the live broadcasting for many years to come, ultimately became known as The Environment (Denise Donlon says in her memoir the name was Znaimer’s idea; everyone had to say it during their time on-air) and the site of many memorable on-air moments.  (During a live interview, Tony once had his head thrusted into the ample bosom of Spice Girl Melanie Brown.)

Conveniently, a few of Tony’s co-workers, all off-camera technical staffers, were in a band.  They “liked to get together and jam on their days off,” he revealed in his memoir.  Tony’s future wife Paula Johnson (then his live-in girlfriend who had encouraged his on-camera antics) “had written a couple of rap sequences that she had performed with a local DJ in Kitchener when she was about 15 years old, so the two of us figured that we could come up with something creative.”

After Tony convinced “my boys” in the Much band to be the backbeat for this new song he was writing with Paula, everybody was christened with new nicknames.  Drummer Steve Vogt became Steve Snare, guitarist Dave Murphy was now Lo Tide, and bassist Richard Oulton was Richie Baby.  (A fake bio was circulated with the changes.)  Older brother Basil, who became the bespectacled DJ, was renamed Mix Master Baz, and Paula became Lady P.  Gord, who played the “shifty manager”, was Dutch, which Young had already been calling him off-camera for years.  As for Tony himself, he first tried Much Master T (which became the title of his book) but then wisely shortened it to Master T.  It would be the only moniker that would stick beyond the video.

Recorded in a local Toronto studio “owned by these two British guys, Mark and Steve” Goodall, two brothers who later formed the pop duo The Bookroom, The MuchMusic Groove would first get a proper audio release in 1989 when it appeared in listed form as the fourteenth and final track of MuchMusic: Soul In The City, a long forgotten CBS Records compilation.  On MuchMusic’s Made In The 80s, it became a Buried Song on track 16.

Shot mostly after hours in the spring and summer of 1987 when the channel was rerunning the day’s schedule (Tony told Chris Ward in Is This Live? the whole low-budget production took “about three months” to complete), which is why it’s still daylight for some of the outdoor scenes, any employee who happened to be in the new Chum City Building that day was thrown into the video including Moses Znaimer himself.  After hearing a demo of the song, he gave Tony and company his blessing to make it all happen.  (Notice all the drawn shades in certain scenes to prevent potential gawkers.  In his memoir, Tony claims the whole production was done surreptitiously despite being officially sanctioned.)

The MuchMusic Groove video begins with a shot of graffiti and some unrecognizable spy music unrelated to the song.  Red phones suddenly go off and each of the band members suddenly abandon their duties to go meet Master T in the basement, complete with deliberately cheesy sound effects.  Older brother Basil, aka Mix Master Baz, is in the middle of filming Kim Clarke Champniss outside (“This is Kim Clarke Champniss.  We want to find out what the man in the street thinks about the new Master T smash hit.”) when he gets the call.  An annoyed Champniss wonders why his cameraman has stopped rolling.  (“Basil?  Basil!  Where you going?  Basil?  Basil?”)  Apparently, when the red phone rings, you don’t need to answer it.

Once everybody gathers in the bowels of the Chum City Building, Steve Snare lives up to his name and there’s Master T dancing to the surprisingly catchy hook.  As he gives the audience the hard sell on MuchMusic’s on-air talent and specialty shows (and instantly proves once again he’s a credible rapper), we see a whole bunch of white people allegedly dancing to the track.  Many off-camera crew members, all wearing sunglasses, pop up in many of the scenes.  (Look for Denise Donlon in front of The New Music sign (she’s second from the left) and seated future VJ Craig Halket next to the control panel.)

Reminding people of his previous rap about MuchMusic’s move to a new building (“Master T is back with a heavy groove/Don’t touch that dial/Don’t nobody move”), an exhuberent Tony Young starts rolling through MuchMusic’s weekly programs and personalities in 1987:

“Well the week starts off on the mellow side/With Ziggy’s Mush Music, The Lover’s Guide.”

Ziggy is Ziggy Lorenc, the breathy-voiced, pixie-haired blonde (she did let it grow out eventually) who hosted Mush Music, an hour of romantic videos, mostly in the adult contemporary genre but not exclusively, every Monday afternoon.  In between clips she would read or conduct interviews.  The show eventually evolved into Life On Venus Ave. which aired on Much until 1994.  It would continue for another two years on City (its original home) before being cancelled entirely.  She wrote her memoir under the same name in 1997.  Lorenc now does a late night radio program on romantic music for the FM part of Zoomer Radio, owned by Moses Znaimer.

“With my satellite dish I point to the west/To catch TDM with the West coast’s best”

Terry David Mulligan, affectionately known as TDM, was based in Vancouver and hosted the appropriately named Much West for more than a decade.  (That’s him throwing a videotape to Master T in the video.  He’s the only one who didn’t shoot his part in Toronto.)  He’s also appeared in major motion pictures and Television programs since the early 70s.  Today, he co-hosts a travelling wine show with Jason Priestley.

“Oldies, goldies, videos from the racks/TDM also brings you BackTrax”

Mulligan also hosted BackTrax which focused on vintage clips from as far back as the 60s and 70s.  Originally airing on Tuesdays, it was eventually moved to Sundays.  Up until this year, the current Much was airing three hours of old videos every Thursday night at 6 p.m. under the name Throwback Thursday, usually organized by theme or year of release.  Today, they still do an hour of TBT every Thursday afternoon at 1 on Retro Lunch.

“The Stones, Madonna, and a whole lot more/Get to strut your stuff on the spotlight floor”

Every VJ got a turn to host the daily show Spotlight which focused a single half hour (sometimes two or more on consecutive days, depending on the artist and their output) on one individual act.  In between videos were interviews taped either for Much or sister station City TV.  The show was still going strong up until March of this year where it was expanded into an hour on Monday nights with no VJ doing an intro at the top or artist interviews.

“And now for videos that are tasty and new/Much and the Munchies got something for you/Hostess the mostess/The new video show/The latest hot videos in the land you know”

The Hostess Sneak Previews, usually hosted by an overly hyper Steve Anthony on Wednesdays, introduced the newest clips to come into the station, some of which would become big hits, some that would get modest rotation and some that would rarely be played again.  (Sometimes the show premiered clips not yet seen anywhere in North America or the world, in some cases.)  It was later renamed Freshly Pressed and finally Brand New Shit which aired up until March 2019.

Because there was no autocue, Anthony often half-jokingly referred to his constant stack of papers for info nuggets on the bands and artists being played as “Paper Hell”.  I’m not sure what’s going on with his deliberately bad dancing in The MuchMusic Groove video (he used the same choreography in his appearance in the earlier move-to-299-Queen-St. promo) but it’s still amusing and entertaining.  (Is he trying to be Stevie Wonder?)

The blond-haired Anthony also hosted many of the annual Tree Toss events.  (After Christmas, a show would be built around whether or not a real, giant tree could be successfully chucked into a large garbage bin from the top of the staircase in the back of the Chum building.)  Long after his career as a VJ, he would be the voice of Much and all its sister stations for years and as recently as 2018, the former Montreal radio jock was also co-hosting Breakfast Television every weekday morning on City.

Hostess, of course, is the snack company, best known for its Twinkies and many varieties of potato chips, that sponsored the show for about a decade or so.  The Munchies were their stuffed, multi-coloured toy mascots, “three friendly goblin-like creatures coloured red, orange, and yellow”, according to Wikipedia’s description.  It would not be the only Much program to be branded.

“Well it’s time to turn your speakers to overdrive/’cause the Pepsi Power Hour is coming alive”

Soft drink conglomerate Pepsi got to sponsor their own show starting in 1985.  The Pepsi Power Hour, which aired on Thursday afternoons, focused exclusively on heavy metal videos.  That’s original host Laurie Brown pretending to shred during the first guitar solo, actually performed by Lo Tide, on the actual set where the show was taped.  (She was also in Corey Hart’s Sunglasses At Night video.  She played a prison guard.)

After moving on to CBC TV in the 90s (she later switched to CBC radio in the late 2000s, wrote a memoir and since 2018 has been doing a podcast), Brown would later be replaced by the late Dan Gallagher (who also hosted the offbeat game show, Test Pattern) and former cheerleader Teresa Roncon.  By that point, Coke was out and the show, eventually retitled Power 30, lost half its running time.

“There’s just no missing the Coca Cola Countdown/For the Top 30 videos around the town”

In 1984, Pepsi’s biggest rival paid to attach their brand to the Friday show that ranked the most popular clips of the week.  They only played about a third of the actual entries during the hour-long show (and never gave you a complete list during the broadcast, an ongoing annoyance for many years).  Most of the rest (but curiously not all) would be aired throughout the day and the rest of the week with a helpful accelerating rocket graphic (for videos that were moving up) or falling parachutes (for those drifting downward) that changed last week’s position to the current one.  The only Much program that originally didn’t feature a VJ on-camera, they would only be heard talking over the clips.  The show lived on well into the 2000s (eventually without Coke’s involvement) until 2017 when it was finally cancelled.  Some years, it was just a Top 20 countdown.

“Look everybody, here’s a picture of me/I think I made it into RSVP/Requested Songs for Video Play/Could I see Michael Jackson today?”

Long before there was Total Request Live on MTV, there was this hour-long Much program that usually aired on Saturday afternoons.  Viewers would be encouraged to create artwork asking for a band or a specific clip to be aired and send it in to the station hoping it would be shown.  (Much saved all this mail for decades although who knows what they’ve done with it all since.)  The show proved so popular, there was a daily version called Daily RSVP which was only a half hour.  Again, it was hosted by a rotating roster of VJs, usually whoever was working a shift that day.

Michael Jackson had just released Bad, his long anticipated follow-up to Thriller, that summer, hence the timely shout-out from T.

“For style, fashion, and so much more/Tune into Erica Ehm for Fashion Notes”

Originally the receptionist at Much, Erica Miechowsky (or Ehm for short) became a VJ in her own right and hosted her own half hour Saturday sartorial series which would eventually be eclipsed by Jeanne Beker’s long running Fashion Television on sister station City TV.   In 1994, after a decade at Much, the entrepreneurial Ehm would move on to pursue a variety of projects including hosting a variety of short-lived TV shows, becoming an award-winning songwriter, starting her own label, baring her breasts in a stage play, writing several best-selling books and launch a MILF-inspired website.

“Scoops, stars, musical views/Kim Clarke Champniss has all the news/He keeps you in tune with an hourly rock flash/He has a crack news team with such panache”

The British-born child actor (Village Of The Damned) turned music manager (he oversaw the career of Images In Vogue) turned rock journalist originally stuck to covering entertainment news on Rock Flash, an hourly two-minute update on industry happenings.  He replaced future executive Denise Donlon who went on to co-host The New Music, a show he also made numerous appearances on.  Eventually a part-time VJ, he became way more famous for occasionally pissing off musicians in New Music interviews that became legendary.  Marianne Faithfull, Bee Gee Robin Gibb and Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten all walked out after being offended by questions that were hardly hard-hitting.

Sadly, in 2019, it was widely reported Champniss has lost his speaking voice after a cancerous tumour was successfully removed from his throat.  This marks the second time he’s had cancer.

“Soul In The City is a funky show/Soul In The City, soul music on the go/Soul In The City, to get you off your feet/Soul In The City, Michael Williams gets the beat”

The most mellow of all MuchMusic personalities, before Tony Young became a VJ in 1990 not to mention the later emergence of Monika Deol on Fax, the American-born Williams, another DJ from Montreal, was the first Black host on The Nation’s Music Station.  (He was also the original host of the Tree Toss event.)  Besides announcing videos during regular hours, he also hosted the R&B program Soul In The City on Saturday afternoons.  In the 1990s, he would also helm the self-explanatory Rap City.  In 1996, he angrily left the station after a dispute with an unnamed label weasel:

“The word on the street and in the building was that he had an altercation with a record exec, was insulted by some racial undertones in the conversation, and commented to exec that he wasn’t a ‘housenigger’.  This record exec was alleged to have taped the conversation and it created all of this tension in the CHUM-City Building,” Master T cryptically revealed in his 2004 memoir.

Since his departure, Williams has kept himself busy with a variety of gigs including teaching, voiceover work and returning to radio and TV broadcasting.  Most recently, he’s been seen on the CTV News Channel program, Pop Life, as an occasional panelist.  And he’s also doing old-school DJing events.

“On a Saturday night, don’t leave your pad/’cause the Big Ticket Special is super bad/Concerts, specials to blow your mind/And you can listen to your radio at the same time”

The Big Ticket Special was the first MuchMusic program to acquire a sponsor, the Carling O’Keefe beer company (then the third largest in Canada), long before the channel even launched.  Its Miller High Life product was specifically tied to the show for years, a brand that’s been around for over a century.  (Carling O’Keefe was bought out by Molson, then the second biggest booze manufacturer, in 1989.)  For those with a decent system at the time, if you tuned into CHUM-FM when it aired, you could hear the show simulcasted in stereo.

“New media revolution/What’s that you say?/City Limits with Chris will show you the way/For offbeat videos, independent bands, too/Tune into the show that’s innovative and new”

Former Second City improv comic Christopher Ward moved his influential City-TV show to MuchMusic in 1984 where it usually aired Friday nights at Midnight.  (Champniss would eventually replace him following his departure at the end of the decade, although Ward would return for many Decembers in the 90s to host the annual year-end Fromage show which singled out the worst videos of the year.)  No longer an eclectic genre mishmash of various acts, both mainstream and obscure, in its new home it strictly focused on alternative rock long before the phrase became a mainstream sensation.  (This was the only place to see Skinny Puppy videos.)  That’s Ward in the silly long-haired wig miming along with Tony, his former skit partner.

Ward eventually struck big as a songwriter.  (A video for his song Boys & Girls played on Much during this period.  It features a young Mike Myers as Wayne Campbell, a character that previously appeared on City Limits.)  He’s most recognized for co-writing all of his then-girlfriend Alannah Myles’ big hits from her first record.  He also became part of Austin Powers’ fictional band Ming Tea (wearing another silly wig) and later wrote a memoir about the early days of MuchMusic.

As Tony wraps things up, he encourages brand loyalty through audience addiction (even though Much only offered eight hours of original programming every day at that time) and gives additional plugs to Mush Music, Soul In The City and the Pepsi Power Hour:

“So as you can see MuchMusic provides/24 hours of musical pride/Shows with romance, new soul and power/Make sure you tune in every hour/Well that’s it for Master T and The Super Hip 3/We hope you enjoyed this musical odyssey”

For its first three years, Much was a pay channel in Canada.  But the year The MuchMusic Groove was released, it was unofficially added to basic cable as a “negative option”, meaning the audience got it automatically unless they refused to pay for it.  It was officially added in 1989.

Although he doesn’t mention this in his memoir, the stage name Master T and The Super Hip 3 was clearly a tribute to Spoonie G and The Treacherous 3, one of the earliest hip hop acts.  Featuring a young Kool Moe Dee, they were best known for early 80s singles like Fast Rap and the heavily sampled Love Rap.

To celebrate the completed edit, a launch party took place at the Beverly Tavern conveniently located across the street from the Chum City Building.  400 dollars was allocated for the event (in his memoir, Tony says it was all blown on chicken “wings and finger food”) as The MuchMusic Groove video was, according to him, “well received by all that night”.  (Chris Ward confirms it in his book:  “The reception to the video was amazing.”) Although, later on, he reveals that not everyone liked the idea of him doing goofy promos.

The MuchMusic Groove video was put in light rotation airing one or two times a day, according to Tony’s 2004 memoir.  I recall it usually airing near the bottom of an hour after another show had finished a little early.  Because the video runs nearly 5 minutes, a minute longer than the recorded song, it ate up a lot of time and because of its content, it served as a perfect, extended promo in between scheduled programming.  It’s not clear how many times it aired overall (at least dozens, possibly hundreds of times over two years) but by the end of the 80s as personnel changes started happening and new shows started airing, it was dropped from the daily playlist altogether.  I have not seen it on Much in decades.

“After the success of ‘The MuchMusic Groove’ video,” Tony writes in Much Master T, “we heard through inside sources that it was being used as a promotional and education tool to be screened whenever business associates came by or when tours came through.  We were told that, from a conceptual standpoint, this video was over and above anything being put out by the promotional department at the time.”

Not expected to turn a profit for three years, MuchMusic was already in the black by 1985 after only one.  (Moses Znaimer’s notorious cheapness paid off.)  By early 1987, it had already attracted a million subscribers.  Two years later, after the official transition to basic cable, that number climbed to either three and a half or four million.

Initially reluctant to become a proper VJ himself (like Peter Gabriel, he only felt comfortable playing characters), Tony would recycle the Master T persona while hosting a succession of shows and conducting a series of interviews (including a famous one with Tupac Shakur shortly before his murder) until he signed off the station for good in 2001, after nearly 20 years.  Recently, he’s been hosting the online chat show, RX Music Live and along with his wife Paula has put together an ongoing travelling tour of his extensive Much/Master T memorabilia collection.

The surprising legacy of The MuchMusic Groove isn’t its lighthearted tone, its surprisingly good guitar solos, its lack of samples or its now historic, cheerful view of its personalities and specialty shows.  No, The MuchMusic Groove unintentionally started a revolution in Canadian music.  It became the first homegrown rap video to ever air on The Nation’s Music Station.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Saturday, November 16, 2019
3:54 p.m.

The History Of The Mystery Track – Alanis Morissette Gets Her Release

“You can’t really go wrong with the truth, you know?  And the more vulnerable I’ve become outwardly, the more empowered I become, too, because once you tell the truth, there’s really nowhere else to go.”

(Alanis Morissette, Hollywood’s Best Kept Secret TV show, 2004)

On October 8, 1992, the Ottawa Senators played their first home game in their first NHL season in 35 years since being reinstated as an active franchise.  Before the puck was dropped, a local celebrity sang the Canadian National Anthem.

Four months later on February 3, she would return to deliver another rendition of O Canada, this time at the 1993 NHL All-Star Game in the old Montreal Forum.  There was one hockey fan in attendance who took particular notice of the singer.

Dave Coulier had been a stand-up comedian and voice-over actor for over a decade but was best known for his role as Joey, the “cut…it…out” guy on the hit ABC family sitcom Full House which, at the time, was in its sixth season.  Divorced the previous year, he felt an immediate attraction to the young woman.  The feeling was mutual.

He was 33.  The woman, Alanis Morissette, was 18.

Little did either know how consequential their short-term relationship would turn out to be.

Born in Ottawa, Alanis was a child prodigy, having written and recorded her first single at age 9.  By 1991, the teenager signed a deal with MCA Canada (now Universal Canada) and released two hit dance pop albums over the next two years.  In promotional interviews, despite seeming happy and proud of her early efforts, privately she was disillusioned and distressed.  As she later revealed, she was quietly suffering from an eating disorder and felt the music wasn’t reflecting her true self.  She also felt an unbearable pressure to be perfect at all times resulting in panic attacks.  After her second album went Gold instead of Platinum like her debut, MCA dropped her, ironically freeing her to pursue a more authentic musical path.

After a short stint hosting the CBC concert series Music Works (she came up with the name herself), Alanis headed for Los Angeles in 1994.  She got mugged the day she arrived.  But her experience there would improve substantially once she started working with a new collaborator.

Glen Ballard was an in-demand producer and songwriter.  Best known for co-writing Michael Jackson’s Man In The Mirror, he had already amassed a long string of production and performance credits including working on the blockbuster debut records of Wilson Philips and Paula Abdul, and collaborating with R&B legends like The Pointer Sisters, Teddy Pendergrass and Patti Austin.  He also helped give self-absorbed soap star Jack Wagner his one and only hit, All I Need, which he co-wrote and co-produced.  It went to number 2 on Billboard’s Hot 100.

As he told Entertainment Weekly in 2015, Ballard had a long association with MCA Records:

“I had been a staff writer at MCA since 1978.”

And it was his publisher who suggested doing a song with Alanis.  They would end up collaborating on at least 3 dozen.

Why did they get along so well?  There were no ulterior motives:

“A lot of people I was writing with basically had agendas, and part of the reason why I clicked so well with Glen was because when I met him, he didn’t have an agenda.  Which was awesome, because as an artist when you meet somebody who says, ‘Let’s just see what happens,’ that’s a dream come true for me.”

Between March and June 1994, Alanis would travel back and forth from Canada to L.A. to work with Ballard in his own personal studio.  (The recent California earthquake had thankfully caused only minor damage to his Encino property.)  But it was during a particularly fruitful three-week writing period later that fall where Alanis would create the song that would forever change her career.

As noted in Ottawa Sun music critic Paul Cantin’s 1997 biography of Alanis, following her departure from MCA Canada, the singer relocated from her hometown to Toronto with the help of some close relatives, settling in a modest, one bedroom apartment.  (A potential move to Hollywood was seen as too much of a possible cultural shock for an already fragile Canadian.)

Not too long after the move, Alanis and Coulier broke up having only been seeing each other for less than six months.  A friend later revealed to Cantin that when asked about the split, Alanis replied, “I was 19 and I wasn’t ready to be a mother.”

Around this time, Alanis had joined Songworks, which invites aspiring songwriters to attend workshops and to collaborate with like-minded creatives.  It was there she met Steve Haflidson.  Together, they wrote Gone, a possible early attempt at processing her time with Coulier which only he recorded, although a Swedish band named Cube would later take a crack at it themselves.

“I was a people pleaser,” she told CBC.  “And I had a hard time stopping the process if I was writing with someone out of respect for them, so I would finish the song, but I knew that I would never use the song.  The exercise of it was really illuminating for me but I knew I hadn’t sort of found my rightful seat, so to speak.”

Alanis also became friendly with Greg Torrington, one of her new neighbours in Toronto.  He was managing a band called Sal’s Birdland.  At dinner one night, Torrington played their demo for a receptive Alanis.  As he recounted to Cantin years later, she was quite taken with one song in particular.  So Fucking Happy knocked her right out.  She flipped over the use of an expletive right there in the title.  As Torrington put it, she found it “so daring, so bold.”

What ultimately inspired her global breakthrough, according to Cantin, was “a calm, rational telephone conversation with a former lover.”  Alanis struggled with her honesty.  She couldn’t convey her true feelings to him.  After learning to suppress her authentic self throughout her entire life, it was only after she hung up that it all came spilling out.

“I was probably more mad at myself for being in that position,” she recalled to Cantin. “For close to a year, I didn’t admit how I felt about it.  And then I got off the phone with him one day and I was completely freaked out.  I just wrote down everything I felt for the first time.  I’m a very rational, conscious person a lot of times, especially when it comes to people’s feelings.  I would never hurt someone on purpose, so I would never say that to him.  But I got off the phone, and I thought:  ‘I owe it to myself to be completely honest about how I feel.'”

In the end, she wrote three pages that agonizingly documented her pain, “resentment and fears.”  She now had a starting point, at least lyrically.  As for the music, it was time for a trip back to Los Angeles.

In the autumn of 1994, Alanis returned to Ballard’s home studio and they resumed their rigourous yet highly productive one-song-a-day writing and recording schedule.  One night in October, she laid down her vocals for this powerful new track she had just written with him.  As Ballard told the CBC, a second take wasn’t required.

“On ‘You Oughta Know’ it was 11 o’clock at night, she sang it once.  We were exhausted.  That was it.  That’s the record, that’s the vocals.  From a vocal standpoint, no one has that much courage.  Everybody wants to fix their shit, she never did.  She never did.  She just wanted it to be that.  And of course it was spectacular.  But there was no Auto-Tune, no double track.  We doubled certain things just for effects, but all those vocals are just her at the end of the night, singing something she just wrote.  And that’s the most amazing thing to me, is the way she finished it.”

This version of the song would be listed as track two on what became Jagged Little Pill.  But a superior take would become an Unlisted Bonus Track on the album.  (It’s one of two mystery tracks found on track 13.)

Because they were able to churn out a properly recorded song a day during two unusually prolific stints in a personal recording studio without the support of a major label, Jagged Little Pill is essentially an independent production.  The songs are the original demos with only slight enhancements and alterations, just a few of which were laid down beyond those sessions.  (Some songs were later re-recorded but quickly deemed inferior and ultimately scrapped.)

When word got out that Alanis was looking for a deal, only Madonna’s boutique label Maverick was willing to sign her.  You Oughta Know, the original cut, was one of three tracks played to A&R rep Guy Oseary in his office.  He was sold immediately.

As Jagged Little Pill was being tweaked for the last time, Oseary sent a copy of You Oughta Know to Jimmy Boyle (curiously credited as Boyelle on Jagged Little Pill), a producer who, like Oseary, was close with the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

“[H]e just kept saying, ‘Gosh, imagine what this would sound like with a stronger bass and guitar.'” Oseary recounted to the CBC in 2015.  “So he had the immediate vision for it.  And then I talked to Alanis and Glen and asked if we could try to let Jimmy see out his vision.  And so we did…”

“The music they gave me was totally different than my final mix,” Boyle told UA WebZine in 2004.  “I wanted her voice to be really aggressive.  The original song and music was very different so I had Dave Navarro and Flea come down and redo everything.”

“The structure of the song was in place but there were no guide tracks,” Navarro asserted years later.  “We just had the vocal to work from.  It was just a good time and we basically jammed until we found something we were both happy with.  Alanis was happy too.”  For his part, Flea told Bass Player Magazine in 2002 that he “played on it as a favour to” Boyle, “a friend of mine.”  He considered it one of the highlights of his session work.

It becomes clear in the opening seconds of this unlisted version of You Oughta Know how much of a difference the added production makes to the overall song.  As Alanis seemingly sounds supportive of her ex-boyfriend’s new relationship (“I want you to know/That I’m happy for you/I wish nothing but the best for you both”), Flea’s sinister bass playing instantly betrays the sarcasm of those remarks.  After she sings this opening passage, the bass slyly hints at more ominous commentary to come.  It’s Flea’s way of saying “Uh oh!” purely through his instrument.

From there, Navarro’s guitar chimes in and Alanis unleashes on her ex.  The details are so specific they can’t be made up.  Morissette pointedly asks a series of uncomfortable rhetorical questions as she demands to be compared favourably to her ex’s new partner:  (“An older version of me/is she perverted like me?/would she go down on you in a theatre?/does she speak eloquently?/And would she have your baby?/I’m sure she’d make a really excellent mother”)

The bitter chorus suggests Alanis was the one who was dumped.  (“And every time you speak her name/Does she know how you told me you’d hold me/Until you died, til you died/But you’re still alive/And I’m here to remind you of the mess you left when you went away/It’s not fair to deny me/Of the cross I bear that you gave to me”)

It’s hard not to think of Glenn Close’s vengeful character in Fatal Attraction when listening to You Oughta Know.  Like Alanis, she too felt disrespected and ignored by her short-lived paramour and refused to stay silent.  Unlike Close, who became an unhinged psychopath, the more sensible Alanis prefers to safely rant in the shadows.  She doesn’t want reconciliation or even vengeance.  She just wants to make a statement, one that’s been suppressed for far too long.  So incensed by her ex’s happier love life, she wonders if he’s really over her:

“It was a slap in the face how quickly I was replaced/Are you thinking of me when you fuck her?”

Not content to leave it there, Alanis gets in one last shot, as if her now terrified ex isn’t already thinking about filing a restraining order against her.  In the last lyrical section of the song before the final chorus, she growls, “I’m not gonna fade/As soon as you close your eyes and you know it/And every time I scratch my nails down someone else’s back/I hope you feel it…well can you feel it?”

For Canadians like me who only knew Alanis as a facile pop star, You Oughta Know was a revelation.  It jolted you with its unvarnished rage and contempt.  Like Alanis herself (who never expected this very personal song to be a global smash), it demanded to be heard and accepted.  But unsurprisingly, it also divided audiences and critics both then and now.  Regardless, it’s one of the greatest mystery tracks ever made.  More importantly, it saved Morissette’s career.

Is the real villain of the song the mysterious “Mr. Duplicity”?  Or is it Alanis, the young, spiteful lover who refuses to let go and move on?  The fascinating contradiction of the song is how you can deeply appreciate its grade A craftsmanship and even relate to her heartfelt rejection while simultaneously thinking her ex wisely dodged a bullet.

The influential LA FM radio station KROQ started playing You Oughta Know on May 16, 1995.  “It seriously was one of the biggest phone reactions I’ve ever seen in the history of the station,” then-music director Lisa Worden told the CBC 20 years later.  At its peak, it was being played 6 or 7 times a day, according to Paul Cantin’s Alanis biography.  Thousands of stations would add the song to their playlists, as well.

In the summer, the video would start playing on both MTV and MuchMusic.  None of the actual players on the track are seen.  By this point, Alanis had hired her touring band which included future Foo Fighter drummer Taylor Hawkins and former Chili Pepper guitarist Jesse Tobias who are seen pretending to play their respective instruments.  Curiously, the unlisted Jimmy The Saint Blend, as it became known, was used as the soundtrack, not the listed album cut.

Within four months of its release, Jagged Little Pill would hit number one on the Billboard Top 200 Album Chart.  It would stay in the Top 20 for another year.  As of this writing, thanks to four other popular singles, the album has sold 15 million copies in the United States alone, 2 million more in Canada, making it one of the most successful releases in the SoundScan era.  (It’s sold at least 10 million more internationally.)  In a testament to its enduring legacy, it’s now become a Broadway musical.

The unlisted version of You Oughta Know ultimately became the more popular of the two versions despite not ever charting on the Billboard Hot 100 Singles Chart.  Because there was no domestic physical release of the song (there was, of course, an international version available on import that included both takes), it was disqualified despite being an absolute fixture on multiple rock radio formats.  (Billboard dropped this requirement a few years later.)

In 1996, You Oughta Know was nominated for Best Rock Song at the Grammys.  It was one of four gongs Morissette would go on to win.  Jagged Little Pill also won Album Of The Year.  (A live orchestral performance of You Oughta Know from that broadcast was later released as a B-Side.)

She had an even better night at the Junos, Canada’s own music awards program.  You Oughta Know won Song Of The Year.  And Jagged Little Pill took home another Album Of The Year prize.  On top of that, Morissette would snag four additional gongs.

Throughout its whirlwind success, one question remained annoyingly unanswered.  Who was the subject of Alanis’ breakthrough single?

Numerous media outlets including Entertainment Weekly and American Journal put out a list of potential candidates.  Was it Friends star Matt LeBlanc who appeared in one of her early 90s videos?  (Nope, they were just friends.)  How about hockey player Mike Peluso who claimed “1 percent of me says maybe it is [about me] and 99 percent is not.”?  (When biographer Paul Cantin informed Alanis of his comments, she laughed out loud, so that would be a no, as well.)  How about former collaborator Scott Welch, who produced her two teen albums?  (He denied they ever dated and insisted they had a strictly professional, platonic relationship.)

Which brings us back to Dave Coulier.  Alanis told Cantin:  “I’m not going to deny or say yes to that, because I think it is wrong.  I sort of laugh at it.  That was the most public relationship, and it is a predictable answer…The truth is I am never going to tell who it was about.”  A curious response, to say the least.

For his part, Coulier has been inconsistent with his own public reactions.  In a 2008 interview with the Calgary Herald, he pretty much confirmed everyone’s suspicion:

“I said, ‘Wow, this girl is angry.’ And then I said, ‘Oh man, I think it’s Alanis.’ . . . I listened to the song over and over again, and I said, ‘I think I have really hurt this person.’ I tried to contact her and I finally got a hold of her. And at the same time, the press was calling and saying, ‘You want to comment on this song?’ I called her and I said, ‘Hi. Uh, what do you want me to say?’ And she said, ‘You can say whatever you want.’ We saw each other and hung out for an entire day. And it was beautiful. It was one of those things where it was kind of like, ‘We’re good.’ ”

That’s not what he told Buzzfeed in 2014:

“First of all, the guy in that song is a real a-hole, so I don’t want to be that guy.  Secondly, I asked Alanis, ‘I’m getting calls by the media and they want to know who this guy is.’ And she said, ‘Well, you know it could be a bunch of people.  But you can say whatever you want.'”

He also claims the relentlessness of the press forced him to give a false answer:

“One time, I was doing a red carpet somewhere and [the press] just wore me down and everybody wanted to know so I said, ‘Yeah, all right, I’m the guy. There I said it.’ So then it became a snowball effect of, ‘OH! So you are the guy!’

But as recently as 2013, he told HuffPost Live that certain lyrics struck a chord with him:

“There was a lot of familiar stuff…But the one that got me was, ‘I hate to bug you in the middle of dinner.’

“We had already broken up…She called and I said, ‘Hey, you know, I’m right in the middle of dinner. Can I just call you right back?’ And so I remembered that line when I heard ‘You Oughta Know,’ and it was more like, ‘Uh-oh.'”

Bob Saget, Coulier’s friend for 40 years and longtime Full House co-star, has claimed, perhaps facetiously, that he was there for one of those phone interruptions.

There is one more possible suspect.  During her last day hosting Music Works, the 1994 CBC program, she met Barry Muir, the bassist for The Blue Shadows, a band led by Billy Cowsill, whose family famously did a version of Hair.  He was 36.  Alanis was 19 and had a major crush on him.  But there was a problem.

He was married.  (Alanis didn’t know this right away.)  That didn’t stop them from fooling around in his hotel room at 2 a.m.

While Muir insists they only made out and watched late night videos on MuchMusic, the relationship was serious enough that he ended up dumping his wife.  The long distance romance with Alanis ended shortly thereafter when Billy couldn’t accept their considerable age difference.

Regardless of who Mr. Duplicity truly is (it has to be Coulier although it’s not clear who the other woman in his life was at the time), Alanis isn’t angry at him anymore.  As she told Paul Cantin, “I was in so much pain, the best way for me to release it at that moment – and it certainly was a snapshot one afternoon – was to be angry.  And then a week or 6 months later, I wasn’t angry anymore.  But all of a sudden, the song is still angry.  And people presume I am still, too.”

True to her word, she has never outed him.  “Declaring his identity would be cruel…And if it was written for the sake of revenge, Lord knows, I would be plastering his picture everywhere.  And I would never do that, because I have respect for him.”

In the end, Alanis would move on to have a number of high profile relationships before marrying rapper Souleye in 2010.  They have three kids.  For his part, Coulier would remarry in 2014 after a long courtship with a photographer (which might explain his sudden reluctance in identifying with You Oughta Know).  Whenever Alanis comes up in publicity interviews, he makes a point of singing her praises.  Smart man.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Wednesday, November 6, 2019
11:28 p.m.

The History Of The Mystery Track – Guns N’ Roses Covers Charles Manson

On November 23, 1993, Guns N’ Roses released their fifth album.  Rather than offer a collection of new compositions, every song on “The Spaghetti Incident?” is a cover.  Some were recorded during the sessions for the Use Your Illusion CDs while others were completed during off-days from the band’s epic two-year global tour in support of those same records.

Despite having plenty of new tunes to work on with his bandmates (some of which ended up on the first Slash’s Snakepit album, It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere), lead singer Axl Rose wanted to pay tribute to his punk and metal heroes instead, a project that had been discussed as far back as 1989.  Coming two years after the mega success of Use Your Illusion I and II, it was important to still maintain fan interest which at the time remained very high.

Advance copies of “The Spaghetti Incident?” were sent to professional rock critics who mostly raved about the album.  But there was one song they didn’t get to hear before the public.

In early 1992, lead singer Axl Rose started wearing various Charles Manson T-shirts, usually in black or red, during live concerts.  Biographer Stephen Davis noticed one while reviewing footage of a gig that year in Japan’s Tokyo Dome.  (Rose also wore one for the Estranged video.)  On the front was the infamous 1969 mug shot of the convicted cult leader, the same gonzo photo used for a cover story in Life Magazine.  On the back, the phrase “Charlie Don’t Surf”, a famous line from Francis Ford Coppola’s classic Vietnam epic, Apocalypse Now. (The shirt’s creators were avid surfers.)

The 17 dollar shirt could’ve generated miniscule royalties for Manson.  He would’ve earned a measly 10 cents for every one “sold at 160 stores, most of them in California.”  They were manufactured by a company called Zooport Riot Gear.  Established in the mid-80s, their modest headquarters were based in Newport Beach, California, hence the pun.

Near the end of 1993, the owners told the Los Angeles Times they had sold “more than 1,000 and fewer than 4,000.”  By 1994, the company claimed to have “sold 25000 shirts and caps bearing his likeness.”  (You can still buy one today.  They’re even offered on Amazon.)

But thanks to a 1971 civil judgment against him, Manson couldn’t profit from anything regarding his image because he owed half a million dollars to a survivor of one of his victims.  (In order to keep it active, extensions had to be filed once every decade in order to continue to collect.)  The suit was filed on behalf of the young Bartek Frykowski, the then-11-year-old son of Manson Family victim Wojiciech (Voytek) Frykowski, “who was shot twice, pistol-whipped around the head 13 times and stabbed 51 times before he finally succumbed,” according to a 30th Anniversary article by Andrew Gumble in the UK paper, The Independent.  (The elder Frykowski was a friend of Roman Polanski whose pregnant wife Sharon Tate was also brutally murdered.)

By 1993, because of interest, the unpaid settlement had grown to almost a million and a half.  Manson wasn’t rich to begin with so any of his future earnings would go directly to Frykowski.  (In a tragic irony, Bartek died in 1999.  Police claim he stabbed himself to death but that’s not been accepted by his supporters who believe he was murdered.  He was only 40.  It’s not clear now if his survivors (he had three children with two different women) are continuing to collect royalties.)

The notorious Tate-LaBianca murders aside, Rose and Manson had a lot in common.

They were born to teenage mothers.  Both had toxic relationships with women.  Neither had a good relationship with their fathers.  Both came from deeply religious conservative homes.  Both sang in their churches.  Both were lower middle-class.   Both had ugly white supremacist views.  Both were juvenile delinquents with long rap sheets.  Both were abused.  Both were accused of rape.  Both were domineering dictators of their respective groups.  Both had experienced deep paranoia about the possibility of being attacked by unknown assailants.  (Manson did suffer burns on a fifth of his body after an attack by a fellow inmate he taunted in the 80s.)  Both felt deeply misunderstood by the world at large and played victim in the media constantly.  And both wanted to be rock stars.

During his second-to-last stint in prison in the mid-1960s, Manson started writing music, his guitar playing annoying his fellow inmates so much he requested a transfer to a different facility, according to Helter Skelter.  While incarcerated, he was befriended by Phil Kaufman, an eccentric record producer also in custody who famously stole and burned Gram Parsons’ corpse.  (Kaufman was nabbed on drug charges.)

A fan of his vocal approach, Kaufman encouraged his songwriting even though he didn’t care for his guitar playing.  Claiming he was rather reluctant to record his own folky creations (Manson says otherwise in Manson In His Own Words which is confirmed by biographer Jeff Guinn in his own book), Kaufman ultimately convinced the cult leader to do so once he was released in 1967.  Kaufman himself would be discharged in 1968 and would briefly become involved in Manson’s cult although he would never become a true follower.

After Manson was arrested along with a handful of his “Family members” for the murders of seven people in late 1969 and once again finding himself incarcerated, Kaufman received urgent phone calls from his former friend demanding he release his recordings.  Manson desperately needed money for his defense and also wanted to soften his image.  As Guinn asserted in his 2013 biography, he also wanted to be bigger than The Beatles.

Featuring a doctored version of that Life Magazine cover, Lie: The Love & Terror Cult debuted on March 6, 1970, the same day one judge in Manson’s case stripped him of his ability to defend himself in court.  (He would be convicted along with his incarcerated followers on all counts the following year.)  In its initial independent run on vinyl, only a sixth of the 2000 copies available were sold.  (According to Guinn’s 2013 Manson biography, reputable music shops were aghast at the idea of stocking it.)  The album has since been re-released multiple times including in 2006 where the CD edition was expanded from 14 tracks to 26.  Sales remain so low it has never been certified gold or platinum.  Only alternative rock acts like Skinny Puppy and The Lemonheads plus a dwindling number of Manson die-hards bothered to acquire their own copies.

The very first track on side one of the original album is Look At Your Game, Girl (a shorter “alternate version” appeared on the 2006 re-issue), a track recorded as a demo for the company now known as Universal.

According to Manson, Beach Boy Dennis Wilson “really liked” the song.  Along with producer Terry Melcher and songwriter Gregg Jakobson, Wilson “scheduled two recording sessions, the first at a studio in Westwood Village” (which didn’t go so well because Manson got into a dispute with “the studio manager” who disagreed with his approach), the other at Brian Wilson’s home studio (where “about ten songs”, including another version of Look At Your Game, Girl, were laid down and remain locked away highly unlikely to be released).

Despite these sessions, no major label was brave enough or shameless enough to distribute Manson’s music.  Initially recorded during the initial wave of Sgt. Pepper mania, Look At Your Game, Girl would be forgotten for over twenty-five years until Axl Rose had his first listen.

After all this time, it is still not clear who really turned the Guns N’ Roses singer onto this particular song.  In his ghostwritten autobiography, Marilyn Manson, who bought Lie while he was still in high school back in the 80s, claims he was the one who introduced Rose to Manson’s music in general:

“…Trent [Reznor] took me to a U2 concert one night and backstage I met Axl Rose.  He was very neurotic and was telling me all about his psychological problems, his split personalities, and I felt like, ‘This guy’s a total fucking flake.’  Being the overzealous type, I started telling him about my band anyway.  And I said, ‘You know we do this song ‘My Monkey’ and it’s an adaptation of a Charles Manson song off his album Lie.’  And he’s like ‘I’ve never heard of that before.’  I told him, ‘You should check out the album, it’s cool.’  And lo and behold six months later Guns N’ Roses put out The Spaghetti Incident and Axl Rose covers ‘Look at Your Game, Girl’ from the Lie album.”

In a 1993 Associated Press article, Richard Lemmons, “a friend of the band, said he gave the group a tape of the song” sometime in the summer shortly after the 28-month Use Your Illusion tour had ended.  He said Rose “went nuts over it.”  Lemmons, a right-wing conspiracy theorist who has donated money to anti-abortion causes, was also friendly with the incarcerated Manson.  (He felt his life sentence was overly harsh and unfair.)  Regarding the original version of Look At Your Game, Girl, Lemmons said:

“It’s like Charlie’s baby, the best thing he ever wrote, and he’s really proud of it.”

Lemmons and his brother Dan were the ones who made the Manson T-shirts Rose wore in concert.  (When a royalty agreement contract was sent to his prison, Manson duly signed it even though he would ultimately not be paid, despite false media reports to the contrary.  Regarding the shirt’s creation, “We did it as a joke,” Richard told the Providence Journal in 1994.)  Rose even invited them to watch the filming of the Estranged video.

In a public statement released in December 1993, Rose claimed it was a family member who tracked down a copy:

“…one of the things we do up at my house is have ‘Name That Artist’ contests where we play obscure songs and everyone tries to name the artist.  My brother Stuart found Look At Your Game, Girl at a large record chain and, needless to say, he won that round.”

He also falsely claimed that a Beach Boy wrote it:

“It is my understanding that the song was written by Dennis Wilson [who had a brief association with Manson].  To what extent Charles Manson is involved in the publishing, I’m not aware.”

For the record, an indie label owns the publishing.

When Rose informed his Guns N’ Roses bandmates of his plan to record a cover of a Manson song for “The Spaghetti Incident?”, no one was completely supportive, not even high ranking executives at Geffen Records, the band’s label, including the founder himself, David Geffen:

“I would hope that if Axl Rose had realized how offensive people would find this, he would not have recorded this song in the first place.  The fact that Charles Manson would be earning money from the fame he derived committing one of the most horrific crimes of the 20th century is unthinkable to me…” he told the press in December 1993.

Geffen knew two of Manson’s victims.

Guitarist Gilby Clarke told Spin Magazine in their July 1999 cover story about the now reclusive Rose: “Axl played me the Manson song, ‘Look at Your Game, Girl,’ and I said, ‘That’s pretty good.’  Then he told me what it was and I just went, ‘What?'”

Tom Zutaut, the then-Geffen A&R executive who signed the group in 1986, was equally perplexed:

“The Manson thing was much more problematic than ‘One In A Million,’ [the song from G N’ R Lies that had racist and homophobic lyrics].  I could never understand why that song was so important to Axl.”

Publicly, lead guitarist Slash was half apologetic.  He asserted the cover, which he doesn’t play on, was “done with naive and innocent black humor on our part”.  Privately, it was more complicated.  While some reports asserted he was against including the cover on “The Spaghetti Incident?”, according to G N’ R biographer Stephen Davis, he was “nonplussed” when he heard Manson’s original demo.

As for bassist Duff McKagan, he had more pressing matters to deal with.  In July 1993, he was found by an old friend doubled over in intense pain in his home in Seattle.  Rushed to the ER, it turned out his pancreas had burst and the oozing digestive enzymes contained within it had spread throughout his body causing unbearable pain.  Although he would ultimately recover (and after a couple of tries, maintain sobriety after years of self-abuse), he was understandably “oblivious” to the Manson fallout, according to one newspaper account, and didn’t realize Look At Your Game, Girl would even be released.  He was also more focused on his first solo album which dropped in September.  In his second autobiography, How To Be A Man, he acknowledged, “I don’t remember precise details about the second half of 1993…”

With much of “The Spaghetti Incident?” already completed, Rose roped one of his bandmates, keyboardist Dizzy Reed, and his gardener Carlos Booey (misspelled “Booy” in the liner notes), into recording the song at his house “late at night” in either September (according to biographer Mick Wall) or October 1993 (according to an anonymous poster on this Guns N’ Roses forum), just weeks before the album’s release.

With absolutely no chance of the song being properly listed, it became a Buried Song on track twelve.  You’ll hear it with 2 minutes and 34 seconds left on the CD.

“Whenever?  Good.” says Booey as he proceeds to count everybody in.  What follows is a surprisingly gentle vocal from Rose and an equally laid back flamenco-style arrangement.  Once Booey starts strumming chords on his acoustic guitar, you can clearly hear the shaking of maracas and the soft pounding of hand drums.

Setting aside the notorious man who wrote it, this version of Look At Your Game, Girl is undeniably catchy.  Manson’s deceptively enigmatic lyrics ironically suggest emotional manipulation not on the part of the woman he’s addressing, but rather himself, making it all the more compelling and curious.  Rose himself could’ve penned something similar.  He too has a tendency to project.

In his publicly released December 1993 statement, Rose explains why he ultimately recorded it:

“Personally, I liked the lyrics and the melody of the song.  Hearing it shocked me and I thought there might be other people who would like to hear it.

I like the words because, to me, it’s about a woman who has thrown things away.  She thinks she’s gaining love but basically she’s gaining sadness.  It was very fitting for a personal situation I happened to be in.  [Rose had broken up with Stephanie Seymour after a tumultuous relationship where she accused him of physical abuse.] The song talks about how the girl is insane and playing a mad game.  I felt that it was ironic that such a song was recorded by Charles Manson, someone who should know the inner intricacies of madness.

Manson is a dark part of American culture and history.  He’s the subject of fear and fascination through books, movies, and the interviews he’s done.  Most people hadn’t heard anything Charles Manson recorded.”

Roughly the same length as the original (which feels rushed and features a quivering Manson vocal), it’s all over in a breezy two minutes.  The slower rhythm is more effective than what the cult leader had in mind.  At the end of the song, after letting out his customarily drawn out “ahh”, Rose quietly thanks Manson.  (“Thanks, Chas.”)  Then, he snaps his fingers and says, “Jack!”  (In the long list of thank yous in the liner notes, Manson is acknowledged only as “Charles”.)

When music critics were sent advance review copies of “The Spaghetti Incident?”, Look At Your Game, Girl was deliberately excluded.  (Many eventual reviews of the mystery track were unfavourable.)  However, it is on every edition sent to radio stations.  (I first heard it on the CD my Mohawk College radio station received.)  If Geffen had such an objection to it and were trying to minimize the inevitable, unwelcome publicity its exposure would bring, why would they allow this?

More concerned about how the listed covers would be received, early pressings of the album featured a band-approved sticker slapped on the front that read:

“Chock full of unsavory subject matter and explicit lyrics, etc., etc., etc.,…so don’t say we didn’t warn you”

Ironically, the mystery track that caused so much outrage features zero cursing whatsoever.  On the contrary, Ain’t It Fun, which includes the word “cunt” and was later released as a single (a censored version is on the Greatest Hits CD), slipped through without much pushback.

Less noticed were the peculiar symbols at the bottom centre of the cover.  They’ve since been revealed as symbols created by The Zodiac Killer.  Their translation sums up Guns N’ Roses attitude in general:  “Fuck ’em all.”

When the press started covering the Manson connection to Look At Your Game, Girl, shocked family members of the murdered victims were appalled, as were the original prosecutors in the criminal trial.  The negative reception to a song most had not actually heard forced the band to consider dropping the song from future editions of “The Spaghetti Incident?” which they ultimately backed away from.  (In a rare Rolling Stone interview in 2000, Rose declared it would finally be deleted altogether.  For the record, it can still be heard on current copies.)

Not helping was the false press assertion that Manson stood to profit from the song’s inclusion on the G N’ R album.  Because of the 1971 civil settlement, that would never happen.  (To assure his harshest critics that he himself wouldn’t profit at all from Look At Your Game, Girl, Rose claimed in his public statement that he was going to donate his own royalties to an unnamed environmental charity that protects dolphins, a sly reference to the Estranged video.  It’s not clear if he ever did so, though.  For their part, Geffen donated their profits from the album to Sharon Tate’s mother’s Crime Victims Bureau.)

Despite Geffen’s sincere efforts to draw up a royalty agreement acknowledging Manson as the true author of the song, as noted by the Manson Family Blog, more than 70000 dollars in royalties (which included T-shirt sales) would eventually go to Bartek Frykowski (in 2019, his lawyer told The Daily Mail they eventually collected an additional 60000 from the band), who would ultimately never receive the rest of the money Manson owed him.  (In an updated version of Helter Skelter, it was revealed that as of 1992, Manson was getting 500 dollars per autograph from his “outside” admirers.  It’s not certain if Frykowski got to collect that money, as well.)

For his part, Phil Kaufman, the earliest booster of Manson’s music, sent him a letter in 1994 hoping to recoup his own lost investment into Lie, thanks to all the publicity the Guns N’ Roses cover was generating.  It’s unclear if he ever received a reply or any money.

To show his appreciation for their Charlie Don’t Surf T-shirt business (even though he never earned a penny himself), Manson created a strange painting for the Lemmons Brothers which he dubbed The Texas Hemorrhoid.  (They were born in the Lone Star State.)

When Manson died in 2017 after being incarcerated for nearly 50 consecutive years (he was originally sentenced to death but thanks to a fortunately timed moratorium on executing prisoners in California, he and his convicted followers got life sentences instead), there was a small funeral attended by his grandson.  Sparsely attended by roughly a couple dozen mourners, songs from his tiny catalogue were played during the service.  One of them was the uncredited version of Look At Your Game, Girl from “The Spaghetti Incident?”

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Wednesday, November 6, 2019
2:53 a.m.

My Amityville Horror

I feel sorry for Daniel Lutz.  He is a broken man.  Alone, angry and depressed.  Divorced and abandoned.

He tells his sad story in My Amityville Horror, a fascinating documentary about the extraordinary lengths one abuse survivor will go to avoid escaping his own prison of reality by inventing another.

Now middle-aged, bald and memorably gruff, like a skinnier Michael Chiklis, Lutz has a penetrating stare despite clearly being uncomfortable in front of the camera.  (Notice those beads of sweat under the hot lights.)  He is sometimes red-eyed emotional, sometimes shaky which explains his nicotine addiction.  There is much awkwardness and trembling and eye twitching.  There are times he can’t be motionless.

He is suspicious of outsiders.  Everything he asserts, he insists, is the truth of his life, even though everybody knows, to a certain degree, he has to be kidding himself.

Lutz was just ten, the oldest of three kids, when his blended family moved into the Amityville house in New York (his real father left after divorcing his mom, his stepfather officially adopted him), the site of a horrible mass murder.  He remembers initially loving the place, how big it was, the excitement of exploring its wide open spaces.

But just as quickly, his mood soured.  His new stepfather, George, a former Marine, was cold and strict.  They frequently butted heads.  When George’s death is brought up, Daniel is gleeful.  And yet, there is no true relief, only a lingering trail of misery.

We meet a reporter Daniel trusts.  She’s known him since the 70s when she covered his family’s story for a local TV station.  She correctly observes that she wasn’t seen by him and his conspiciously absent siblings (who refused to appear on camera) as a typical media Nosy Rosy but rather as an empathetic ally who respected their privacy outside their home.  Much of the movie centers around their reunion and her subsequent attempts to try to nail down his story.  Curiously, she’s not entirely unpersuaded.  Something surely happened, just not exactly how he describes it.  As she notes in the Living With Amityville DVD featurette, she can’t fully prove or disprove his testimony, an assertion echoed by others.

Another TV reporter from the same area who also covered the Lutzes is far more skeptical.  He recalls his one and only night in the house where he didn’t experience anything supernatural whatsoever.  But his cameraman, with no history of heart problems, did experience palpitations which remains unexplained.

Lutz and his reporter friend visit a kind, elderly Lorraine Warren who, along with her now deceased husband Ed, visited the Amityville house at the time the Lutzes briefly lived there.  (Ed, who was 79, died in 2006.  Lorraine died this past April at age 92.  The recent Annabelle Comes Home, the latest installment in the endless Conjuring franchise inspired by the Warrens, is dedicated to her.  In My Amityville Horror, we even catch a brief glimpse of the real Annabelle rag doll in Lorraine’s house.)

It is a surreal scene (“This is fucking nuts,” Daniel humourously confesses early on in a conspiratorial whisper to the camera.).  In her kitchen, Lorraine has caged “identical twin roosters” who cock-a-doodle-doo constantly and look nothing alike (one’s brown, the other’s white).  At one point, she pulls out an unusual crucifix she claims with a straight face is partially made from the wood of the real cross Jesus Christ was nailed to.  She didn’t have it during her Amityville visits, though.  Uh huh.

The Warrens were clearly bullshit artists (which is one big reason I’ve rejected all the Conjuring films and their spin-offs; also they’re not scary enough).  No one has ever verified or corroborated a single piece of evidence they put forth in any of their routinely outlandish cases.  (And that includes a weird, mysterious photo of a child with bright eyes supposedly captured at the Amityville house when none of the Lutz children were home.)  But her grandmotherly sympathy for the awestruck Daniel makes her endearing.  She is a big comfort to him.  By the time the scene wraps up, his eyes are flooded.  Is he really this naive?

Daniel also finds support from a shrink whose worst trauma (relocating to a different country) doesn’t quite compare to the suffering endured by her patient, a troubled man who claimed he tried to kill his abusive stepfather 50 times.  He is initially uneasy in her presence, weary of opening up to her unless she can match his pain.  But she doesn’t judge his account.  She only listens with understanding ears.

My Amityville Horror wants to have it both ways.  The filmmakers and most of the on-camera participants know this is a bunch of hooey and say so outright.  But Daniel is a compelling figure, even when he’s bullshitting, and even they can’t completely dismiss him.  It’s a glaring contradiction you can’t help but accept.  He maintains a fierce, sometimes defensive intensity.  He remains as vulnerable as ever no matter how hard he tries to project masculine strength.

He might like driving a roadster and his old monster truck, and enjoy showing off his shredding abilities (he’s a good guitar player as demonstrated in a couple of scenes) but he’s still that scared, frustrated child now trapped in an angry man’s body.  Fed up with trying to convince the eye-rollers he’s for real, he’s clearly looking for an inner peace he’s still searching for.  Years of therapy haven’t really helped, neither has the splintering of his three families, the ones he grew up in and the one that resulted in two kids of his own, none of whom appear on camera, either.  There’s also no encounter with his ex-wife.  What’s the story there?

There is, however, his supportive cousin who confirms that George was an intimidating presence around everybody including him.  But he is the only surviving family member willing to stand by him, albeit up to a point.  He doesn’t verify any of the following:

levitation; a sudden, inexplicable swarm of flies; a garage door with a mind of its own; a freaked out dog (that looks demonic itself in that family photo) trying to jump a backyard fence to escape…something, only to almost hang himself accidentally; a supposed visitation by a spirit that takes a seat in the kitchen and then just as quickly disappears never to be seen again.

Daniel also claims he was once yanked up the famous staircase by some invisible entity.  Stepfather George supposedly saw green slime in the basement.  His mom allegedly turned into an “old crone” for a few hours before looking young again.  And we can’t forget the “cold spots”.  No matter how hard the furnace was working, they never ever went away.  (How come none of this shit happened to the three other families who have lived here?)

There’s a telling moment when Daniel reveals that George may have had a deep fascination with the occult and that he didn’t like Daniel snooping around his books about the subject.  Furthermore, Daniel claims George could move objects with his mind.  The more he goes on about these farfetched fantasies, the more you feel sorry for him.  The truth must be too unbearable to reveal.

In another unexplained anecdote, Daniel recounts a story reimagined in The Amityville Horror movie.  While trying to open up a window, he claims it came right down on his hands crushing them.  His father and the rest of his family struggled mightily to free him.  The only supposed reminder of the incident:  a curvy pinky.  The rest of his hands are perfectly fine.  Sure.

By the end, when director Eric Walter asks him if he would ever take a polygraph test, a red flag emerges.  Daniel flips out on him, clearly offended that his questioner this late in the movie would now challenge his credibility.  With much protestation, Daniel says he would.  Considering their noted unreliability, though, would any of us really accept the results?

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Tuesday, November 5, 2019
3:59 a.m.