The History Of The Mystery Track – Nirvana’s Jam Song

Kurt Cobain was aggravated.  Nirvana was in the middle of take three of Lithium, a key future single off Nevermind.  The problem was timing.  Drummer Dave Grohl kept speeding up the tempo, throwing off Cobain’s guitar playing.

It was sometime in May 1991.  The band were recording with future Garbage drummer Butch Vig at the famed Sound City Studios in Los Angeles.  (More than 20 years later, Grohl would make a documentary about the place.  He actually possesses the original soundboard.)  Of all the songs they would record for their most famous album, Lithium would prove to be the most difficult to finish.

When Grohl once again played too fast, Cobain stopped the take.  Then, he started playing a completely different song.  Grohl and bassist Krist Novoselic soon followed his lead.

For years, Nirvana had often warmed up playing what they called The Jam Song.  It was loud, aggressive, buzzy and surprisingly structured.  Cobain would turn on his distortion pedal when he wanted to thrash around and he would turn it off when he wanted to play more melodically.  When it came time to sing, Cobain for the most part would simply scream out improvised nonsensical lyrics.  The Jam Song would ultimately end with him creating as much cacophonous noise as he could before completely running out of steam.

That memorable day at Sound City the band once again launched into their rehearsal number.  Cobain stepped to the microphone and screamed out short words and phrases, many of them lost in the swirling maelstrom.  Everything seemed to rhyme with “I am”.  To this day, no one can properly decipher everything he was trying to sing.  Searching for lyrics often results in curious misinterpretations.

With the exceptions of a softly groaning “mama”, during the first melodic break, and “I’m sorry”, during one of the thrashings, not much else gets through perfectly clear.  And yet, it really doesn’t matter.

The point is the rage, the frustration being burned off in a surprisingly compelling performance.  For years, I detested this song.  I always found it incredibly self-indulgent and tedious.  Funny how the passage of time can fix and correct your opinions.  (Ironically, the opening 20 seconds became the theme song for the college radio version of this series, so clearly even then it had some redeeming qualities.)

This version of The Jam Song has aged unexpectedly well, despite still being an acquired taste and yes, self-indulgent.  Why do I like it now?  The spontaneous release, hard-edged and raw as it remains, is somehow less aggravating than before despite running over six minutes.  It’s curious how Grohl struggled with the time signature on Lithium and yet is in perfect sync with his bandmates here.

Maybe it’s because of all the hard rock I’ve heard and thoroughly enjoyed in the decades since Nevermind’s release.  Maybe it’s because I’ve grown to love The Velvet Underground who pioneered the kinds of ear-splitting sound experiments Cobain is channeling.  Maybe it’s because the song sounds heavily influenced by The Jesus Lizard.  Or maybe I was never in the right frame of mind to embrace such a deliberately punishing number.

In this current, uncertain climate where there is so much to get pissed off about, an uncontained rager like this is welcome medicine, if only for a brief moment.

At some point near the end during what turned out to be the only take of this song, Cobain smashed his left-handed Mosrite guitar and left the remnants in the studio.  (He eventually received a replacement to finish making the album but it took a while.  The busted ax ended up being displayed in the Experience Music Project Museum (now the Museum of Popular Culture) in Seattle.)  Plus, he blew out his voice, a common occurrence throughout the sessions.  Unbeknownst to the band, after that spoiled Lithium take, a wise Butch Vig kept the tape rolling.  The band liked what they heard.

Once Nevermind was complete, everyone agreed that there would be twelve listed songs in total.  In the meantime, the band quickly mixed The Jam Song with a supervising Vig letting them do whatever they wanted.

“It wasn’t until a week or two later, when they went to do the mastering, that Kurt decided he wanted it on,” Vig later told Jim Berkenstadt and Charles Cross, the latter Cobain’s eventual biographer.

The plan was to include that instantaneous freak-out as a Buried Song on track twelve.  For the first time, they gave it an official title:  Endless, Nameless.

“It was kind of a joke for the band to do, as in, ‘We’re not going to list it in the packaging, or [mention] it exists.” Robert Smith, Geffen Records Vice President of Marketing, told the aforementioned authors of Classic Rock Albums:  Nevermind/Nirvana.  “It’s for that person who plays the CD, it ends, they’re walking around the house and ten minutes later…kaboom!”

But a funny thing happened on the way to the mastering stage.

At Masterdisk Studio in New York, where the Nevermind tapes were shipped, Howie Weinberg was responsible for transferring the 24-track mix into a stereo two-channel release.  Although he did master Endless, Nameless, he seemed to have misunderstood what he was supposed to do with it:

“In the beginning, it was kind of a verbal thing to put that track at the end.  Maybe I misconstrued their instructions, so you can call it my mistake if you want.  Maybe I didn’t write it down when Nirvana or the record company said to do it.  So, when they pressed the first twenty thousand or so CDs, albums, and cassettes, it wasn’t on there,” he later told Berkenstadt and Cross.

Actually, it was closer to fifty thousand, not including the three hundred cassettes that were sent to professional music critics, none of which included Endless, Nameless.

The problem may have stemmed from the possibility that the song wasn’t on or properly listed on the same finished reel as any of the other Nevermind songs, with each side of the original cassette getting its own reel (six songs from Side A on one, six songs from Side B on another).  When you open up the two-disc 2011 reissue, you’ll see a photo of the cover of one particular reel box right in the middle of the packaging.  Dated July 27, 1991, all that’s listed are three “B-Sides”, Aneurysm, Even In His Youth (both of which were added to the Smells Like Teen Spirit single) and Endless, Nameless which has the added instruction, “used for CD only”.  There is no demand for it to be added to Nevermind.

At some point, Nirvana acquired an early copy of the album and as Grohl recalled during an interview on an Australian radio station, the entire band was shocked and displeased:

“We popped it on.  We listened to it.  ‘Oh, let’s check to see if that track is on there.’  And it wasn’t there!”

Most infuriated was the ever attentive Cobain who soon made an angry phone call to Weinberg demanding to know why the song wasn’t on Nevermind.

“I got a heavy call from Kurt screaming, ‘Where the hell is the extra song?'”

A sheepish Weinberg replied, “Oh fuck.  Don’t worry.  I’ll fix it right away.  No problem.”

“Fix it!” Cobain reminded him, as if he didn’t get the message the first time.

Weinberg, who felt bad about the mistake, would redeem himself by inserting Endless, Nameless at the end of track 12 in a new master.  Ten minutes and three seconds of silence after the conclusion of Something In The Way at 3:48, the extra song begins at 13:51.  Cobain and company were then satisfied.

“It was a cool way to put a song on the album that maybe did not fit it [thematically],” he noted in Classic Albums, “like a separate album of its own.  In the end, it was my fault.  It was hilarious that it was forgotten, but it was part of the whole scenario.”

In a weird moment of irony, Weinberg claimed he had put many mystery tracks in the play-out grooves of previous vinyl releases, a far more difficult process as The Beatles learned with Sgt. Pepper.

Are you an aspiring guitar player who would love to learn how to play Endless, Nameless?  Don’t bother buying the Nirvana songbook.

“It wasn’t a good guitar song for scoring.”  Rita Legros of Hal Leonard Publishing asserted in Classic Albums.  “I don’t think they could score it.”

The songbook was supposed to directly warn purchasers on its cover that indeed it’s “not an appropriate song for guitar scoring”, hence its conspicuous absence, but for some strange reason it wasn’t added.

“The note just got accidentally left off,” Legros noted.

To make up for Weinberg’s screw-up, when Come As You Are was released as a single on March 3, 1992, Endless, Nameless became a properly listed B-Side, along with live versions of School (from Bleach) and Drain You.  When Nevermind was reissued and expanded for its 20th Anniversary Edition, the song was once again buried at the end of track 12 on disc one.  This time, listeners only have to wait eighteen seconds to hear it, because of the space needed for all the added non-album B-Sides.  It begins at 4:06.

When Nirvana went on tour in 1991 and 1992 to support the original collection, Endless, Nameless was often their closer and always resulted in trashed instruments and destroyed staging, which would continue during the ill-fated In Utero tour.  It was the ultimate blow-off song.

In the super deluxe edition, a live version from their 1991 Halloween show at the Paramount Theatre in Seattle was included as a properly credited finale on an exclusive bonus CD.  This version clocks in a little over seven and a half minutes.

When Nirvana played the 1991 Redding Festival, Endless, Nameless was their big finish.  (It’s only available as a bootleg.)  When In Utero was reissued and expanded for its own 20th Anniversary package, the super deluxe edition includes the complete Live And Loud show that MTV taped on December 13, 1993.  (It’s also available on DVD in the box and separately.)  In the original, highly edited broadcast, only a portion of Endless, Nameless was shown.  A bonus CD features the complete take and once again, it’s the last song on the CD.

On September 3, 1991, while on tour in Europe just before the release of Nevermind, they recorded another studio version of the song, this one wildly uneven and in its dying breaths, far more annoying, during a John Peel BBC Session.  Clocking in at nearly nine minutes, it was officially released thirteen years later on disc two of the With The Lights Out box set.  The chorus lyrics of The Vapors’ Turning Japanese are heard far more clearly here.

Yet another version appears on a bootleg appropriately titled Endless Nameless 1992-1993.  This particular rendition, from another 1993 Seattle show, is considerably shorter, running just under five minutes.

The extraordinary success of Nevermind (it has sold over ten million copies in America alone, not to mention an additional twenty million collectively in the rest of the world) meant that many people were exposed to Endless, Nameless.  There is no doubt that despite the long established presence of mystery tracks in the rock era, it inspired, as historian Alan Cross once wrote to me in a fax more than twenty years ago, a “plethora” of new ones.  According to Entertainment Weekly, the year the album came out there were 7000 new releases.  Six years later, there were 70000.  Many feature numerous types of uncredited material.  Even today, in this vulnerable digital era, we are still getting more examples.

The Wildhearts, a hard rock British band, named their 1997 album Endless Nameless.  But when asked directly by a fan in a 2002 website Q & A whether the Nirvana mystery track inspired this obvious tribute, lead singer Ginger pleaded ignorance.  Considering that he’s a fan and Nevermind was an enormous global phenomenon, it stretches credibility that he didn’t know about the song.

As for Lithium, once a click track was implemented the day after Endless, Nameless was recorded, Grohl finally got his timing right and the band were able to lay down an excellent backing track.

“In an interview commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the album’s release,” Danny Goldberg, Nirvana’s then-manager remembered in his revealing 2019 memoir about Cobain, “Dave said it ‘was like being stabbed in the heart,’ but he acknowledged that the end result was worth it.”

Rolling Stone seemed to agree.  It named Endless, Nameless the 60th best Nirvana song.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Saturday, December 21, 2019
1:40 a.m.

The History Of The Mystery Track – Britney Spears & The Backstreet Boys Hype Millennium

Jive Records had an idea.  They had signed a new artist, an ambitious 16-year-old girl from Louisiana.  Already a show business veteran, she was ready to move on from children’s Television, commercials and live theatre.  Quickly disinterested in sticking with a girl group called Innosense she briefly joined, she wanted the spotlight all to herself.  Jive was the only label willing to take a chance on her.

Her first single, co-written by Max Martin, was a fairly standard but irresistible I-dumped-you-but-I-still-love-you-and-want-you-back pleader and, as it turns out, easily misunderstood.  Martin wrote the lyrics in his native Swedish and the English translation came out a little awkward.  The song’s premise was otherwise straightforward.  A lovesick protagonist ultimately wants to know if their ex has similar feelings.  “Give me a sign,” they plead.  “Hit me, baby, one more time.”

When a demo of the song was presented to TLC, they were appalled.  They wrongly thought the chorus advocated violence against women.  So they passed.  They weren’t the only ones.

By the time the kid from Louisiana heard it, she knew it was a hit.  It took her two days in May 1998 to nail the vocals in Martin’s studio in Sweden.  As she later revealed to Rolling Stone magazine, she listened to Soft Cell’s cover of Tainted Love for inspiration.

As her first single was being prepared for release in October 1998, Jive wanted to add something extra to the CD, an advertisement of sorts for another one of their newest signings.

Imajin (pronounced Imagine) were four Black teens from New York also working on their first professional recordings.  (Aged 14 to 16, unlike most pop vocal groups of the era, they were talented old-school musicians who played their own instruments.)  They had already found success with their own debut single, Shorty (You Keep Playin’ With My Mind), which cracked the Top 30.  Jive was getting ready to release the follow-up.

Why not promote this song on their labelmate’s first single?  Both were scheduled for autumn releases.  (Free cassettes featuring both artists were already being handed out to kids during the Louisiana teen’s early mall showcases.)

With deep concerns about the original title, Hit Me Baby One More Time became the unnecessarily mysterious …Baby One More Time despite no change to the lyrics.  Although those concerns turned out to be well founded (some critics had the same wrongheaded reaction as TLC), Britney Spears would go on to have her first massive chart success.

After the conclusion of track two, a rare B-side called Autumn Good-Bye, an Unlisted Audio Track begins with the singer addressing the listener on track three:

“Hi!  This is Britney Spears and thanks for buying my first single, …Baby One More Time.  Right now, I’d like to introduce to you some friends and labelmates of mine.  They’re called Imajin and this is a sneak preview of their new single, No Doubt.  Hit it, guys.”

For the next minute and sixteen seconds (really the actual opening of the song), you’ll hear a catchy piece of fluff from this young R&B quartet until it fades out near the end of the second chorus.  The full song, an uptempo popper about a guy trying to convince a girl he likes to get busy with him without making her feel pressured to do so, runs three and a half minutes.

While …Baby One More Time topped the Billboard Hot 100 in early January 1999, Imajin’s No Doubt didn’t even make it to the Top 40.  (It fared much better on the Hot R&B Singles chart where it entered the Top 20, just like Shorty.)  Not even having a young Meagan Good appear in the accompanying video, which is included on the credited enhanced multimedia portion of Spears’ own single, made any difference.  (Scrubs alumnus Donald Faison makes a cameo in the beginning of it as an annoyed, sleep-deprived man.  He’s the brother of Imajin frontman Olamide Faison who currently appears on Sesame Street.)

Imajin released their self-titled album on October 26, 1999, 369 days after the surprise shoutout on …Baby One More Time.  Despite the inclusion of their only hit, Shorty, and the earlier unlisted push from Spears on her single, it failed to make much of an impact.  (No Doubt is track eight.)  After offering a few more tracks to soundtracks, the band backed up Baby DC on a standalone single and released one more of their own.  Both flopped as well.

Unable to find another breakthrough, Imajin broke up sometime in 2000.  That didn’t stop Jive Records from trying the same sales tactic again.

The same week …Baby One More Time the single hit number one on Billboard, …Baby One More Time the album also debuted in the same position on the Top 200, a first in American music history.  Two seconds after Spears’ cover of Sonny & Cher’s The Beat Goes On fades out on track 11, she once again addresses the purchaser of her CD in a Buried Audio clip that begins at the 3:43 mark.  Her scripted patter is very similar to the earlier mystery track found on her single:

“Hi!  This is Britney Spears and thank you so much for buying and listening to my first album.  It means so much to me that you enjoy listening to my songs as much as I love singing them.  Now, I’ve got something very special just for you.  I’m gonna give you a private sneak preview of some new music from an upcoming album by some labelmates of mine, The Backstreet Boys.  Hit it, guys.”

It had been two years since the Backstreet’s Back album broke this Florida-based quintet in America.  (Their international self-titled debut first started taking off in Quebec in 1996.)  And there was much anticipation for the follow-up.  Eventually entitled Millennium, it would be the most popular record they would ever make.

As Spears begins to talk about this “private sneak preview”, the first song clip fades in and we’re in the middle of the chorus.  When it fades out, she comes back.

“That was called I’ll Be The One and I think it’s gonna be number one.”

Released as the fourth and final single in the spring of 2000, The One, as it was ultimately called, was not a chart topper.  It peaked at #30 on Billboard’s Hot 100.  (It fared much better in Canada where it entered the Top 5.)  Curiously, the group had originally planned on releasing Don’t Want You Back instead.  The change came about because of a sabotaged vote on MTV’s Total Request Live.  Viewers were asked to make their own choice but once Nick Carter called in to give a push to The One, the fanbase followed his lead.

The mystery clip of the song doesn’t sound like it was directly taken from the finished album version, at least not that brief instrumental build-up.  The chorus is clearly from Millennium but it’s not clear if this portion was incomplete or ultimately discarded from the final mix.  Either way, you can understand why it wasn’t a bigger hit.  It’s routine fare.

“Next up is something a little different from the boys.  It’s called Show Me The Meaning Of Being Lonely.  I know you’re gonna love it.”

An enormous adult contemporary hit (it reached as high as number two in the spring of 2000 and stayed on that chart for over a year), this third single from Millennium was indeed an audience pleaser.  It peaked at number six on the Hot 100.  (It was number one in Canada.)  This unlisted clip joins the song in progress at the 42-second mark just as A.J. MacLean sings the tail end of the last line of the first verse (“…will be done”) and fades out right after the group chorus as the Spanish guitar and the string section start to take over at 1:12 of the finished track.

“And last, but definitely not least, a beautiful ballad called I Need You Tonight.  Thanks again for supporting me and I hope to see you all at my shows very, very soon.  Bye.”

Strictly an album cut, I Need You Tonight (it was originally titled Heaven In Your Eyes) was produced by Mutt Lange, the famed hard rock producer who twiddled the knobs for AC/DC and Def Leppard.  His then-wife Shania Twain sings uncredited back-up on the track, according to Wikipedia.  This unlisted snippet fades in as Spears very quietly and unenthusiastically signs off.  We’re entering the 52-second mark of the full-length song from Millennium as an overwrought Nick Carter warbles the last bit of the first verse and goes right into the chorus.  This final clip fades out just as he begins verse two (“I figured out what to say to you”) as we only get as far as the 1:38 mark of the finished song before the CD shuts off.  Thank God.

Interestingly, this was not the first time Jive secretly offered fans an early taste of Millennium.

Long before they handed out fully credited cassette samplers, way back in early January 1998, The Backstreet Boys released All I Have To Give, the third and final single from Backstreet’s Back, their second album.  A year later, the song was rereleased.  On the two-track US version, track three reportedly features uncredited snippets of The One (when it was still known as I’ll Be The One), Show Me The Meaning Of Being Lonely and I Need You Tonight.  On the expanded five-track US release, it’s apparently the unlisted track six.  According to discogs.com, the mystery track on both singles runs a little over two minutes.

Almost a year later in mid-November 1998, a VHS tape entitled A Night Out With The Backstreet Boys began circulating officially.  (The DVD came out two years later.)  Besides highlighting a concert taped for German Television in March of that year, there was a bonus CD called Selections From A Night Out With The Backstreet Boys, featuring six audio versions of tracks that appear in the video.  The seventh and final track features a much longer trailer for the same three songs Spears introduces a few months later on …Baby One More Time in the exact same order but with longer running times.  There’s no mention of it in the track listing on the back cover.  This uncredited preview runs almost four and a half minutes.

Instead of Spears doing the shilling, after that same brief instrumental snippet of The One at the top (six seconds worth), the clip continues with Howie D & Kevin Richardson (they also reportedly appear on the shorter All I Have To Give mystery track), clearly speaking off the top of their heads, urging the listener to not turn off the CD:

“Howie:  Hey, hey, wait up!  Wait up!

Kevin:  Hold up!  Stop!  Don’t touch anything yet because, uh, we’re looking forward to seeing you guys on the 1999 world tour.  But at the same time, we got some sneak previews of, uh, some of the material we’ve been working on for the next album, right, Howie?

Howie:  Yep.  You’ll find these songs and much more on the up and coming album in 1999.  So, hope you enjoy ’em.

Kevin:  So, check ’em out and we’ll see you guys soon.  Peace.”

As they start to wrap up their intro, this unfinished mix of The One rises in volume and then we’re into the first verse (“Guess you were lost when I met you”).  At the 1:27 mark, the song’s chorus ends cold and immediately after, you hear the beginning of Show Me The Meaning Of Being Lonely.  This time, we get past the brief instrumental break after the chorus and just as Richardson sings the opening line of verse two (“Life goes on as it never ends”), it fades out completely at 2:46.

At 2:47, you’ll hear the start of I Need You Tonight.  The song fades out at pretty much the exact same point as it does on the …Baby One More Time album, just as Carter finishes singing the first line of the second verse, wrapping up the mystery sneak peek at 4:23.

I haven’t been able to confirm if this banter is the same found on the All I Have To Give single.  (One superfan on Twitter believes it is but wasn’t completely sure and I never heard back from her again.)  The CD is long out of print and it’s been extremely difficult to find an online version of the unlisted preview, despite numerous, fruitless searches.

So, just to recap, for half a year, there were three separate mystery tracks promoting an album that would go on to become one of the biggest of the decade.  Astounding.  If only Imajin had this much institutional muscle behind them.

At the time, Spears wasn’t happy about doing her own Backstreet Boys promo.  As she told Entertainment Weekly in their March 12, 1999 issue, “If I would’ve known I had a choice, I wouldn’t have done it.”

What’s curious is why she was ordered to do it at all.  All I Have To Give sold 900,000 copies while the Night Out videotape/CD package sold three million.  The most astute fans were already aware of Millennium’s future release.  But, then again, young attention spans can be fleeting.  Jive Records were clearly not taking any chances.  These mystery ads ultimately paid off enormously.

“It worked,” Jezebel writer Maria Sherman told The Ringer about her own reaction to hearing the secret sales pitch on …Baby One More Time.  “It’s really cheesy marketing that I think nobody would enjoy now, but it really did work.  And I think I’m not alone in getting into them that way.”

She was 7 in 1999.  Today, now a professional journalist, she’s planning a book about boy bands in 2020.

An open fan of the group, Spears certainly didn’t hold it against the Backstreet Boys themselves who, according to Billboard, weren’t even aware of the mystery pitch for them on …Baby One More Time.  When she met Richardson in the late 90s, as she later recalled in a quote reprinted in the 1999 book Britney Spears: Backstage Passes, “He was so beautiful–he’s prettier in person than in pictures.  And I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness,’ I didn’t know what to say.”  The other guys didn’t do anything for her.

In turn, they were big fans of hers.  Each member has their own favourite Spears song.  (Tellingly, none of them picked …Baby One More Time, a song the group rejected as a possible recording of their own for Millennium.)

It’s not clear how many copies of …Baby One More Time feature the Millennium presentation.  Andrew Fromm, who wrote I Need You Tonight, speculated to Billboard Magazine in May 2019 that it’s probably only on “the first 200,000 copies”.  That seems a little low considering how well the CD was selling in those early months of 1999 not to mention the gap between its release and Millennium’s monstrous debut.  Regardless, if you buy a new copy today, the mystery track is not on there.  (Good luck finding a used edition.  It took me years (and two purchases) to finally snag one with the Millennium preview.  You’ll have an easier time finding it on YouTube.)

After failing to make Imajin a significant crossover act, along with the earlier mystery track ads on All I Have To Give and Selections From A Night Out With The Backstreet Boys, Spears’ personal promotion for the quintet four months before their return to a much brighter spotlight clearly had some kind of impact.  Millennium entered Billboard’s Top 200 Album Chart at number one selling a still remarkable 1.1 million copies, a record that would eventually be significantly broken the next year by *NSYNC.  (No Strings Attached would sell over two million its first week.  Adele has the current record with over three million.)  On that same chart, …Baby One More Time had actually moved up from number six to number three after almost 20 weeks in release.  Both albums would remain in the Top 10 for much of the rest of the year.

As of this writing, twenty years later, Spears’ debut album has now sold over 12 million copies in America alone.  Millennium’s overall total is over 15 million.  Unlike with Imajin, Jive Records correctly deduced that Spears’ new audience in early 1999 were either already fans of The Backstreet Boys to begin with or, like Sherman, after having heard the mystery track on …Baby One More Time, easy converts.  This unusual approach, to an undetermined extent, had finally worked.

In 2017, both started lucrative residencies in Las Vegas.  Spears was scheduled to return for a second run in early 2019 but real life has gotten in the way.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Saturday, December 21, 2019
12:34 a.m.

The History Of The Mystery Track – Radiohead’s Censored Breakthrough

“’Smells Like Teen Spirit’ had the kind of feel we’re after…When it came on the radio, you had no choice but to listen to it.  You couldn’t just drive along and ignore it; it came out at you.  I hope we’ll come out of people’s speakers in the same way.” (Thom Yorke in Melody Maker, May 9, 1992)

“That song will always be there…And in five, six, ten years’ time, people will be saying that ‘Creep’ is a f[uck]ing classic record.  We know that.” (Yorke in New Musical Express, October 10, 1992)

“There’s a pervading sense of loneliness I’ve had since the day I was born.” (Yorke in Rolling Stone, September 1995)

In the late 1980s, Thom Yorke started attending classes at Exeter University.  It was a challenging period for him.  Feeling very out of place in an extremely privileged institution, despite making friends (and enjoying a side gig as a DJ) he still felt very self-conscious and isolated at times.  It didn’t help matters that there was a significant problem with his left eye and that he was quite awkward with women.

In his childhood, several surgeries were performed to try to get it moving normally (it was paralyzed from birth) but the ultimate result was not only a drooping effect that gave Yorke a distinguished look that he decided to stick with, he now had limited vision.  He had already been bullied about it for years.

At Exeter, Yorke developed a massive crush on a fellow student.  While it was happening he started writing lyrics for a potential song:

“When I wrote it,” he told the NME in 1992, “I was in the middle of a really, really serious obsession that got completely out of hand.  It lasted about eight months.  And it was unsuccessful, which made it even worse.  She knows who she is.”

It’s not clear what actually happened.  Did he ask her out and she said no?  Did she say yes and lived to regret it?  Did he ask more than once, getting firmly rejected every time?  Or was he too shy to make a move but so obvious about his feelings that even she knew what he was up to and kept her distance?

A few months later, in another edition of the NME, Yorke regretted ever admitting the song was autobiographical:

“I got into a lot of trouble over that.  I shouldn’t have admitted to her being a real person.”

The eventual recording of Creep is one of those extraordinary accidents a good fiction writer could never invent.  While rehearsing songs for their first album, the band decided to do a run-through of Yorke’s self-loathing anthem, a practice they had grown accustomed to.  In his book Over The Edge: The Revolution And Evolution Of New Rock, historian and longtime radio host Alan Cross noted that one member of the band had a serious problem with the song:

“Guitarist Jonny Greenwood hated ‘Creep’ and was always looking for ways to sabotage the song whenever he was forced to play it.  He was trying to be obnoxious during one session of recording the Pablo Honey album.  The band was warming up with ‘Creep,’ as usual, when Jonny turned up all of his amps and cranked his effects pedals wide open just before the chorus.  Testing everything out, he banged the strings a couple of times, producing a couple of very noisy crunches before he began to play the buzzsaw chords of the chorus.  He figured that if he made enough noise, the rest of the group would take the hint and dump the song.  At the very least, he could make things rock a bit.”

As it turns out, the joke was on Jonny:

“Unbeknownst to the group, the engineer had a tape running in the control room and once the song was over, he played back what he had recorded.”

Unintentionally, Greenwood had actually improved the song.  His interrupting guitar attacks gave Creep an added intensity it had been seriously lacking and it also provided a clever transition from the verses to the choruses.  It was the Smells Like Teen Spirit moment the band had been striving for.

The band would record the song a second time and that would be the master take.

But there was a problem.  Creep sounded a little too much like The Air That I Breathe, an old Hollies song.  This would ultimately result much later on in a rather amicable settlement with Albert Hammond and Mike Hazelwood, the writers of the earlier track, after their publisher sued Radiohead.  They now earn royalties from the song.  They would’ve earned more had the band not been candid about their musical thievery.

Creep would make its official debut in the UK on September 21, 1992.  The reception to it was not positive.  Although there was some support for it in the music weeklies, most critics were dismissive and the buying public mostly ignored it.  (It barely entered the Top 80.)  Still determined to keep on progressing, the band moved forward continuing to put together their first album.  (Ironically, Anyone Can Play Guitar would be their first UK hit in early 1993.)

Meanwhile, in Apartheid Israel, a DJ named Yoav Kutner, the Jewish John Peel, was handed a copy of the song by an EMI plugger.  Near the end of 1992, he started playing it on his popular armed forces radio show, “sometimes three times an hour”, according to Slate.  The reaction this time was very different.  To show their appreciation (and their ignorance for the illegal occupation of Indigenous Palestinians), Radiohead started playing shows there and made a couple of local TV appearances.  (They would unapologetically return in 2017 dishonouring the BDS campaign.)  When they arrived, they were mobbed by highly excitable fans.  When they returned to the UK, it was back to obscurity.

In 2000, a New York Times Magazine profile noted a similar situation in America:

“A music director at a San Francisco college station found the single in a Berkeley record shop’s import rack and added it to his station’s playlist.  Within weeks it was an underground rage up and down the California coast.”

Not long after the original recording of Creep, Radiohead had another issue to resolve.  The band realized the lyric “so fucking special” was not going to get them on the radio, especially when it’s heard three times.  So Yorke made a last-minute change that would unexpectedly break them in North America:

“The replacement word is ‘very,’” he told a laughing John Harris of the NME.  “It’s the best option, really…The alternative was putting in a bleep, and that was never going to work.  At least ‘very’ sounds sarcastic.  I can sing that without feeling a twat.”

When Harris correctly pointed out that he made a not so radical compromise, Yorke didn’t deny it:

“Oh yeah, of course we have.  We know we have.  And it’s pretty obvious that we have – so anybody with any brains will realize that, see through it and go and buy the proper version.”

Indeed, when Creep was made available as a CD single, only the uncensored album cut was included.

Several months after Pablo Honey’s modest release, Creep started getting significant airplay on KROQ, the influential modern rock FM station that would later break Alanis Morissette.  Other stations would soon add it to their own playlists.  Around the same time, both MTV in the US and MuchMusic in Canada started airing the performance video and putting it in high rotation.  The radio version provided the soundtrack.  (By 1994, even Beavis & Butthead gave it their own seal of approval.  The album went Gold in September and has since been certified Platinum.)

Meanwhile, Radiohead was resistant to re-releasing the song in the UK.  In the end, EMI got its way.  This time, Creep entered the Top 10.  They were no longer anonymous in their own country.

When Pablo Honey debuted in February 1993, this safe for work mix was not included on early pressings of the album.  But eventually it would be, just only on later North American editions.  It’s not clear when it became an Unlisted Bonus Track on track 13, but if you buy the album today it should still be on there.  However, when the album was reissued with a bonus disc of non-album B-sides and rarities in 2009, the radio version was removed from disc one.  Two other versions of the song, an acoustic take and a BBC radio session from June 1992, appear on disc two.

There’s no question the superior take is the album version.   How can it not be?  “So fucking special” says it all. That said, the radio mix is easily one of the best mystery tracks of all time.

Interestingly, while the hook of the album cut begins immediately, on the unlisted radio mix, drummer Phil Selway hits his sticks as a count-in before the band plays.  This means this version runs a few seconds longer.  Also, it’s very clear Yorke re-recorded his entire vocal, not just “so very special”.  Everything else is exactly the same.

It’s hard not to think of the incel movement while listening to Creep today.  “I don’t care if it hurts/I want to have control,” Yorke sings at the start of the second verse.  “I want a perfect body/I want a perfect soul.”  An impossible standard even Yorke knows he’ll never meet.  (“But I’m a creep/I’m a weirdo”)

“I want you to notice when I’m not around,” he dreams almost pathetically before he makes clear his passive/aggressive feelings for his elusive target of lust.  (“I wish I was special/You’re so fucking special”)

Tapping into his permanent sense of alienation during the chorus (“What the hell am I doing here?/I don’t belong here”), by the end of the song he’s scared her off for good (“She’s running out again/she’s running out”).

At the start of the song, he puts her on a pedestal.  (“You’re just like an angel/Your skin makes me cry/You float like a feather/In a beautiful world”)  By the end, he angrily pouts and gives up.  (“Whatever makes you happy/whatever you want”)

While the song didn’t have the mass appeal of Smells Like Teen Spirit, it nevertheless entered the Billboard Top 40 and remains the biggest hit the band has ever had in America.  Despite eventually churning out dozens of big songs on FM rock radio, they wouldn’t have another Top 40 hit until Nude (from In Rainbows) fifteen years later.

Creep would be played on every date of the Pablo Honey tour for two years but all five members of Radiohead grew to resent its crossover success.  (Be careful what you wish for.)  First of all, there were deep worries about it being their only hit.

“…the thing about being a one-hit wonder: you know, you do come to believe it.” Yorke told the New York Times Magazine in 2000.  “You say you don’t but you do.  It messed me up good and proper.”

Second of all, Yorke didn’t want to be known as The Creep Guy (for many legitimate reasons) nor did Radiohead desire to be forever pegged as The Creep Band since it would significantly limit their artistic growth.  In that same NYT interview, Yorke bemoaned having to constantly answer press inquiries about the song, especially the ones about whether his parents screwed him up beyond repair:

“You can’t imagine how horrible that was.”

The internal resentment was so intense the band for years would not refer to it by name.  It was “that song” or “the previous song that shall remain nameless”.

In 1994, they released My Iron Lung, a deliberately sarcastic response to Creep.  The hook is very similar and then there’s this memorable lyrical passage:  “This is our new song/Just like the last one/A total waste of time”.  The humour was lost overseas.  It didn’t chart in America.

Despite endless requests for Creep during live shows, the band pulled it from the setlist for the rest of the decade.  (One such incident inspired Spirit Of The West’s 1996 song, Let The Ass Bray.)  Since 2001, they have only played it on rare occasions, every eight or nine years or so.  It wasn’t until 2016 when they toured in support of A Moon Shaped Pool that they made it a semi-regular part of their shows.  Thanks to all the brilliant, commercially successful albums they had released in the decades after it put them over, they could finally stop being so uptight about it.

Long after its first release, Creep’s popularity has continued to grow, just as Yorke boldly predicted in 1992.

The song was covered once by Prince during his 2008 appearance at Coachella, although he reversed the pronouns of the characters and extended the running time to almost ten minutes.  After someone posted a video of it on YouTube, he ordered it taken down and it was, much to Yorke’s disappointment.  “Well, tell him to unblock it.  It’s our song.” he said upon being informed of the situation, as noted by Yahoo! News.  Macy Gray did her own rendition for her album Covered, as did Carrie Manolakos whose live rendition in 2012 became an Internet sensation, as reported by The New Yorker.

In an unexpected moment of irony, Lana Del Rey declared in 2018 that the band’s publisher was planning on suing her because her song Get Free was a little too similar to Creep.  They wanted to collect all her royalties, she claimed.  She says she counteroffered with 40%.  While there was no lawsuit, Warner/Chappell Music didn’t deny they were hoping to collect some money, just not all of it.  It’s not clear if there was ever a settlement.  Del Rey, who has always maintained she didn’t steal from Radiohead, still sings Get Free in concert without any apparent consequence.  Unlike Radiohead, she cancelled her show in Apartheid Israel respecting the BDS movement for a Free Palestine.

In 2008, when EMI offered the public a Radiohead greatest hits collection, Creep reentered the Top 40 in the UK.  The band had already left the label in 2004 to pursue more profitable distribution options.  In 2019, as noted by Wikipedia, the song is “the UK’s most streamed song released in 1992” with over ten million downloads.

As for the Exeter student Yorke once pined for, the unknown subject of his breakthrough song, in 1992 he was long over her and believed she had moved on, too:

“I’m sure she didn’t give a shit, really.  She never gave a shit.” He asserted to the NME.  “She wasn’t even that nice, anyway…”

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Tuesday, December 17, 2019
2:59 a.m.

The History Of The Mystery Track – The Rolling Stones Honour “Stu”

Ian Stewart wasn’t feeling well.  He’d been “suffering from acute respiratory problems for several days”, according to author Barry Miles.  On December 11, 1985, the night before his doctor’s appointment, he was on stage at the Old Vic Tavern in Nottingham, England playing a gig with his band Rocket 88.  Despite his discomfort, he didn’t appear to be in any serious danger.

“I was waiting for him in a hotel,” Keith Richards revealed to Rolling Stone in 2002.  “He was going to see a doctor and then come and see me.  Charlie [Watts] called about three in the morning:  ‘You still waiting for Stu?  He ain’t comin’, Keith.'”

“Next evening, he went to a Harley Street specialist for a heart scan,” Bill Wyman noted in his 1990 memoir Stone Alone.  After it was completed, he returned to the waiting room.  All of a sudden, he couldn’t breathe.

He never smoke, he never drank, he never abused drugs.  But at the age of 47, Ian Stewart had instantly succumbed to a massive heart attack.

The timing couldn’t have been worse.  It was less than two weeks to Christmas.  (His only son, Giles, was just 14 at the time.  Stewart was divorced.)  And his other band were in the middle of a serious crisis.

The Rolling Stones had been toiling away on the follow-up to Undercover for nearly a year.  It was originally scheduled for a June 1985 release.  Then it was rescheduled for September.   In the end, Dirty Work would finally surface in late March 1986.

The problem was Mick Jagger.  Every member of the band knows that when a Rolling Stones project is happening, it becomes the number one priority.  No matter what you’re working on, you have to set it aside to come back to the fold.

Jagger wouldn’t delay sessions for his first solo album, She’s The Boss, and that pissed off Richards.  After the lacklustre reception for Dirty Work, instead of going out with the band on a tour, Jagger would instead commence writing his second solo record, Primitive Cool, which dropped in 1987.  To drum up business for the follow-up, he also did solo shows in Japan and Australia and played Stones songs without his bandmates, further inflaming Richards.

Relations between The Glimmer Twins had become so icy they stopped talking to each other for nearly three years.  (Instead, they cut promos on each other in the media.)  The absence of the peacemaker Ian Stewart had never been more glaringly felt.  (They eventually reconciled in Eddy Grant’s studio before embarking on the enormous Steel Wheels album and subsequent tour.)

Eight days after his sudden fatal heart attack, every member of the band, along with Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and numerous other rock and roll luminaries, attended Stu’s funeral.  While sitting together in one of the pews, Richards turned to Ronnie Wood and asked rhetorically:  “Who’s gonna tell us off now when we misbehave?”

Dirty Work has ten listed songs and one Unlisted Bonus Track.  Track eleven features a mid-tempo piano solo that lasts about 30 seconds.  There’s no mention of it anywhere in the liner notes.

That’s Ian Stewart playing a snippet of Key To The Highway, an old blues number by Big Bill Broonzy, a longtime Stones favourite.  (It actually has its own title:  Piano Instrumental, according to The Rolling Stones:  All The Songs, The Story Behind Every Track.)  The song was recorded in France at the Pathe-Marconi Studios on February 27, 1985 and in its full version, Keith Richards assumes lead vocals.  (It remains locked in a vault.)  Mick Jagger was absent from the studio that day, a regular occurrence during much of the sessions (he eventually showed up in the final stages to add all his vocals for most of the chosen tracks) which needlessly exasperated the tension with his longtime songwriting partner.  (Most of the Dirty Work outtakes feature Richards singing lead.)

21 years earlier, The Rolling Stones first recorded the song with Stewart and Jagger during a November 8 session at the famous Chess Studios in Chicago.  This version of Key To The Highway was never officially released but has been bootlegged for decades.  Another outtake version was recorded during the sessions for Exile On Main Street and later leaked.

During the making of the 1994 album Voodoo Lounge, the band tried laying down another take which ultimately didn’t make the cut.  It too was eventually made available in an unauthorized manner.  Key To The Highway has been played live by the band numerous times throughout the decades, including a few that were captured for TV broadcasts.  Richards himself later played the song with Eric Clapton in concert.  Clapton had recorded his own studio version for the Derek & The Dominos album.

On February 23, 1986, Key To The Highway was appropriately part of the setlist for a special tribute concert at the 100 Club in London held in honour of Stewart’s legacy.  A year after his sudden death, Richards played Key To The Highway as a guest performer during a club show with former bandmate Mick Taylor.

Stewart was an unusual character.  Originally born in Scotland (he would eventually relocate with his family to England before his teens), he would grow up looking like a cross between Jay Leno and Morrissey.  Blame a bad case of the measles for his prominent chin which made him self-conscious.  (“At around age 16, he had a revolutionary operation to try to reduce his jaw size,” according to Bill Wyman.)  He started playing piano “between the ages of five and seven”, reported Wyman in Rolling With The Stones, and never looked back.  (He also played the banjo in his youth and pursued athletics like rugby and weightlifting.)  His love of the blues never dimmed in his lifetime.  He later developed a passion for golf, his favourite pastime outside of music, “like his mum”, noted Wyman.  His only vice was a steady diet of cheeseburgers.

In his interactions with the Stones, he was blunt and direct, but never in a mean spirited way.  (Ironically, before he became a teenager, he was much more introverted.)  You always knew where you stood with him.   He was indisputably the conscience of the band.  Known for his biting humour, he was also a blues purist.  And, as it turns out, an integral figure in British rock and roll history.

In 1962, a fellow blues enthusiast who had started calling himself Elmo James placed an ad in Jazz Scene Magazine.  He wanted to put a band together.  Stewart would be the first to make contact.

The 24-year-old shipping clerk specialized in playing boogie woogie piano (he had already been playing gigs as part of Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated with a drummer named Charlie Watts who also played with him later on in Rocket 88) and after he auditioned for Lewis by pounding out a number of ragtime songs on a ravaged upright piano from a pub in Soho called The Bricklayer’s Arms, he was immediately invited to join.

Over the course of the next year, many members would come and go until the first settled line-up in 1963.  Stu, as everybody called him, was mostly responsible for recruiting Richards, Jagger, Watts, and Wyman.

“It was his vision, the band, and basically he picked who was going to be in it.” Richards confirmed in Life.

James would eventually revert back to his birth name:  Brian Jones.

Because everybody else in the band were starving artists (except Wyman who worked during the day), Stu, who also had a steady job, would routinely supply money and food whenever he could.  “He was a big-hearted guy,” Richards later wrote in Life.

Enter Andrew Loog Oldham.  Already a PR veteran in his teens having worked for Brian Epstein and The Beatles, he was hired to be the band’s first manager in the spring of 1963.  Because The Fab Four had cleaned up their Teddy Boy image by wearing suits and charming the pants off the media with their polite cheekiness, Oldham instinctively knew that The Rolling Stones had to be promoted as their polar opposite (although initially they too wore the suits and ties but only for a short while).  They needed to be perceived as the bad boys of British rock.  Considering how they lived (in absolute filth and squalor) and acted (thieving was a necessity for survival), it wasn’t far from reality.  In his autobiography, while living with Jagger and Jones, Richards recalls that recording equipment was placed in their bathroom unbeknownst to their apartment building neighbours and friends.  They always played back the results for a laugh.  Chuck Berry would be proud.

Despite his characteristic outspokenness, the straightforward Ian Stewart neither looked the part of a rebel nor did he act like one.  (He dressed like a preppie and always had short hair.)  He was as straight as they come, so Oldham ordered Jones to fire him, which he did right in front of his bandmates.  Immediately recognizing his overall importance to the band, he was quickly offered a different job (which he immediately accepted) and would be seriously underpaid for the rest of his life (although he was the first Stone to buy a Jaguar).

For the next 22 years, he had a rotating list of duties.  First, he was the band’s fiercely loyal and protective road manager, driving them to gigs, setting up their equipment (until they could afford proper techies) and preventing them from getting seriously hurt during a startling number of audience riots.  (He once got hit with a bottle right in the old noggin.)  When he came to fetch them from their dressing room, as Bill Wyman noted in Stone Alone and Keith Richards cheerfully confirmed in his 2010 autobiography, he would cheekily address them as his “angel drawers”, “my little three-chord wonders” or most memorably, “my little shower of shit.”

“In the early tours it was just me and the band travelling around.”  Stu later recalled as noted in The Rolling Stones:  An Oral History.  “As the shows got bigger, especially in America we would start to get guys who would take care of the equipment and I would make sure the travel and hotel arrangements were together…”  He would also “make the arrangements setting up the rehearsals with the musicians and for the recording sessions.”

Starting in 1968, Stewart would also run The Rolling Stones Mobile Recording Unit, a travelling eight-track recording studio that would be rented out to some significant bands of the era and beyond.  The Dark Side Of The Moon by Pink Floyd and the fourth untitled album by Led Zeppelin, the one that included Stairway To Heaven, were both recorded with that equipment, as was Houses Of The Holy and the Stones’ own Exile On Main Street.  Stu, who had already appeared on Boogie With Stu on Led Zeppelin III, delivered a memorable performance happily plunking away on the keys on Rock And Roll which was later licensed for a series of TV ads promoting the Cadillac CTS and other General Motors brands in the early 2000s.

In their most famous song, Deep Purple even referenced the Mobile Recording Unit in the first verse of Smoke On The Water (“to make records with a mobile”).  They used the equipment to make Machine Head.  A couple months after Stu’s death, the Unit was taken over by Wyman until he quit the band in 1992.

When blues legend Howlin’ Wolf made his London Sessions album in the UK in 1971, Stewart appeared on four tracks.  When the album was reissued and expanded in 2002, there he was on ten additional songs.  He was thanked second just behind Jagger in the liner notes.

In 1980, Stu appeared on stage with George Thorogood & The Destroyers for a concert that featured two songs that later appeared in The Rolling Stones pay-per-view special, The World’s Greatest Rock N’ Roll Party.  It was later officially released on home video in 2014.

Although not officially recognized as a full member (thanks to Oldham who was later replaced by Allen Klein), which meant he would no longer be photographed with the band for publicity purposes, Stu still appeared on numerous Stones recordings, both live and in the studio.  He can be heard tinkling in concert on a number of tracks on Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out and Love You Live.  And that’s him on the original studio versions of Brown Sugar; Tell Me; Star Star; Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing In The Shadows?; Time Is On My Side; Heart Of Stone; Dead Flowers; It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll; She Was Hot; The Last Time; Honky Tonk Women; It’s All Over Now; 19th Nervous Breakdown; Get Off Of My Cloud; Under My Thumb and Jumpin’ Jack Flash.  He also backed up the band on numerous album cuts and B-Sides.

Why didn’t he play piano on every Stones track?

“I don’t play minor chords,” he told producer and pianist in his own right Jim Dickinson as he later recounted to Bill Wyman.  “When I’m on stage with the Stones and a minor chord comes along, I lift me hands in protest.”

As a result, a rotating list of players, including the late great Nicky Hopkins and Billy Preston, filled his role on some other famous Stones tracks like Wild Horses (Dickinson played on that one); She’s A Rainbow and many, many others.

“…Nicky couldn’t play what Stu could, and vice versa.” Charlie Watts said as recounted in According To The Rolling Stones.  “Stu didn’t possess the finesse of the musical touch that Nicky had…Stu never played like that.  Stu was rumbling, with his left hand going at some ridiculous speed.  Stu had a very physical way of playing.  He was one of those players where the piano would bounce up and down.  The way he played was more like drumming.”

An unapologetic Stu had firm musical beliefs on what was acceptable and what wasn’t which the band didn’t always agree with, although as Richards notes in Life, he did ultimately soften his harsh criticism of Jerry Lee Lewis, a rare change of heart.  Amusingly, he hated the name of the band.  (“It sounds like a troupe of fucking Irish acrobats.”)  But he was overruled.

Stu played a major role in what has become the signature Stones song.  The band was struggling to figure out how to capture the right sound for this lick Richards had come up with and nearly forgot about.  As Stephen Davis reported in Our Gods Almost Dead, “Ian Stewart went over to Wallach’s Music City [in Los Angeles] & came back with a new Gibson fuzz box, the first one the company made, and told Keith, ‘Try this.’  It made the record.

The song was Satisfaction.

Stu was also instrumental in finding key replacements for departing band members.  When Brian Jones suddenly died in the summer of 1969, the pianist suggested Mick Taylor who stayed with the band for half a decade playing on some of their greatest singles.  Stu also played a role in Ronnie Wood joining the band when Taylor left.  Actually, as Wood recalled in The Rolling Stones: An Oral History, were it not for a certain Faces frontman, he would’ve become a member a lot sooner:

“…I remember when Brian died, Ian Stewart rang up the Faces rehearsal room, which we were using to get the band together initially.  [Stu is the reason they got that rehearsal space in the first place.]  He spoke to Ronnie Lane on the phone, and said, ‘Would Woody like to join the Stones now that Brian’s gone?’  And Ronnie Lane said, ‘No thanks, he’s quite happy where he is.’  I didn’t find this out for five years [laughs].”

“It’s really hard to remember when he wasn’t there,” Mick Jagger observed in the documentary 25 X 5: The Continuing Adventures Of The Rolling Stones, “but we used to rehearse in pubs and Stu would be there.  He was a lovely boogie woogie piano player.  He was very different from us because he was so straight and we were all a bit crazy.”

When the Stones were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame in January 1989, Jagger eulogized Stu to audience applause calling him, “a great friend, a great blues pianist whose odd but invaluable musical advice kept us on a steady bluesy course for most of the time.”  Despite Oldham’s cruel actions in 1963, Ian Stewart, the sixth Stone (but really the first to join making him the second after Jones), was inducted as an official member.

“I honestly don’t like Andrew Oldham as a person.” Stu told a then teenage-Bill German, the publisher of Beggars Banquet, the official Rolling Stones fan zine in 1981, still steaming after nearly two decades.  If Oldham needed help of any kind, “I wouldn’t piss on him if he were on fire.”

In the liner notes of Dirty Work, besides being thanked for his contributions to the album, the band included this separate statement about his legacy:

“This album is dedicated to Ian Stewart[.]  ‘Thanks, Stu, for 25 years of boogie-woogie.'”

So, why the unlisted snippet of Key To The Highway on track 11 and not the full version with Richards on vocals?  Considering how buried Stewart’s piano playing is on the 1964 version (a frequent occurrence during his other recordings with the band), it made more sense to isolate his work on the 1985 take in order to briefly showcase his exceptional, often underappreciated skill.

Also, Stu was an intensely private person who never considered himself a rock star, so offering an unlisted tribute in his honour is apropos.  Even his 2004 biography, limited to less than a thousand copies, was not made available in bookstores.  You could only order it online from the publisher’s website.

“…Stu always did what he wanted to.” Keith Richards recalled in According To The Rolling Stones.  “He eventually ended up with his own band, Rocket 88 [formed in 1979], and did all the other things he wanted to do, like promoting all of his mates, pushing the people he thought were good, which is what he loved to do.  He’d fix somebody up with some gear or get them a rehearsal room.  Stu just loved the day-to-day mechanics of band working.”

“He never changed from the day I first knew him,” Charlie Watts observed in the same book.

“Ian Stewart.  I’m still working for him.”  Richards admitted in Life.  “To me the Rolling Stones is his band.  Without his knowledge and organization, without the leap he made from where he was coming from, to take a chance on playing with this bunch of kids, we’d be nowhere.”

When Beggars Banquet publisher Bill German asked Stu in 1981 why he was so loyal to the band, Stu simply answered, “I like the music.”  When he asked him if he would “do it all again?”, the man wasn’t hesitant:

“…oh yeah, sure, I’d do it all again.”

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Monday, December 16, 2019
2:47 a.m.

The History Of The Mystery Track – Friends Again Soundtrack

The title is perhaps a little too self-aware:  Friends…Again.

In November 1999, right in the middle of its sixth season on NBC, Warner Bros. released a second collection of songs connected to one of its biggest sitcoms.  It had been four years since the release of its predecessor and much had changed.  Ross and Rachel had gotten together (including a drunken impromptu Vegas wedding) and broken up a couple of times (including an eventual divorce).  Insecure Chandler found himself in the middle of a lusty affair with a once indifferent Monica.  An dimly arrogant Joey got fired from Days Of Our Lives.  And Phoebe became a surrogate mother for her Scientologist brother.

The alternative rock that blasted glam metal off the charts at the start of the 90s was now being replaced by a new wave of teen pop at its conclusion.  You would never know it from listening to Friends Again.  Influential legends like R.E.M. and Lou Reed have been replaced by commercial college rockers Smash Mouth and Semisonic.  Highly respected songwriters like k.d. lang and Joni Mitchell are cast aside for photogenic newcomers like Lisa Loeb and Duncan Sheik.  The Barenaked Ladies have been swapped for another Canadian alt-pop outfit The Waltons.  Despite the trades, most of the tunes on this sequel are decent toe-tappers.  Even forever unknowns like Deckard and 8Stops7 offer good studio performances.

Once again, uncredited dialogue clips from the show have been scattered throughout the CD.  (Some are funny, others are hit and miss.)  There’s no indication of this in the track listing on the back cover.  But when you open up the liner notes and look at the label side of the CD itself, the vague description “Friends Sound Byte” pops up six times in both places at the end of specific track numbers.  Furthermore, an advertising sticker placed on the cellophane of the front cover reads “Also includes bonus excerpts from the FRIENDS television show…”  However, there are two others not mentioned at all.  Plus, there’s an Unlisted Bonus Track on track 14.  Let’s go through all nine mystery tracks in chronological order.

The properly credited track one features Friends’ warm-up guy Jim Bentley introducing the six cast members to an enthusiastic studio audience response during an unspecified taping in 1999 as the instrumental version of I’ll Be There For You (the TV version) is heard prominently in the mix.  Right after it concludes at the 38-second mark, Rachel confides in Phoebe and Monica:

“Ross kissed me.

Phoebe:  No! [squealing with delight] Yes!  Yes!

Monica:  Oh my God!  Oh my God!  Oh my God!

Rachel:  It was unbelievable!

Monica:  Oh my God!  Oh my God!  Oh my God!  [audience laughter]

Phoebe:  Ok.  Alright.  We want to hear everything.  Monica, get the wine and unplug the phone.  [audience laughter]

Monica:  Ok.

Phoebe:  Rachel, does this end well or do we need to get tissues?

Rachel:  Oh, it ended very well.  [wine glasses clinking]

Phoebe:  Oh.

Monica:  Do not start without me!  [audience laughter]  Do not start without me!

Phoebe:  Ok.  Alright.  Let’s hear about the kiss.  Was it like, was it like a soft brush against your lips?  [drinks being pored] Or was it like a, you know, ‘I got to have you now’ kind of thing?  [audience laughter]

Rachel:  Well, at first it was really intense, you know, [more drinks being pored] and then [taking a breath], oh God, and then we just sort of sunk into it.

Phoebe:  Oh.  So, ok, was he holding you?  Or like was his hands like on your back?  [light audience laughter]

Rachel:  No, actually, first they, they started out on my waist, and then they slid up, and then they were in my hair.

Monica & Phoebe:  Oh.  [audience laughter]”

Then, while enjoying slices of pizza, Ross tells Joey & Chandler his perspective:

“And, uh, and then I kissed her.

Joey:  Tongue?

Ross:  Yeah.

Joey:  Cool.  [audience laughter]”

This scene begins three seconds into the eighth episode of the second season, The One With The List, and lasts for another minute and change.  Ross and Rachel’s momentous first kiss happens in the second-to-last scene of the previous episode, The One Where Ross Knows.  This aftermath scene plays out exactly the same way on the show as it does on the CD.

The next mystery track starts at 4:05 on track three:

“Chandler:  Ok.  Last night at dinner?  It’s like all of a sudden we were this couple, ok?  And this alarm started going off in my head, you know?  ‘Run for your life!  Get out of the building!’  [audience laughter]

Monica:  What is it with you people?  I mean, the minute you start to feel something you have to run away? [light audience laughter]

Chandler:  I know!  That’s why I don’t want to go tonight.  I’m afraid I’m gonna say something…stupid.

Monica:  [softly]  Oh, you mean like that guy thing where you act all mean and distant until you get us to break up with you?

Joey:  Hey, you know about that?  [audience laughter]

Chandler:  Look, what do I do?  I want to get past this.  I don’t want to be afraid of the commitment thing.  I want to go through the tunnel to the other side!  [audience laughter]

Joey:  Well, I’ve never been through the tunnel myself cuz, as I understand it, you’re not allowed to go through it with more than one girl in the car, right?  [turns to Ross who pretends to agree] [audience laughter]  But it seems to me it’s pretty much like anything else, you know.  Face your fear.  In this case, you have a fear of commitment.  So I say, you go in there and you be the most committed guy there ever was!  Go for it, man.  Jump off the high dive.  Stare down the barrel of a gun.  Pee into the wind!  [audience laughter]

Chandler:  Yeah, Joe, I assure you if I’m staring down the barrel of a gun I’m going to be pretty much peeing  every which way.  [audience laughter]”

This heavily edited sequence is taken from the fourth episode of the third season, The One With The Metaphorical Tunnel.  On the TV show, Chandler walks into Monica’s apartment with his black cordless phone ringing (what happened to the white one from season one?).  He wants Joey to answer it because he knows it’s his girlfriend Janice and he’s trying to get out of their date.  Joey refuses and the phone stops ringing.

After Rachel asks him, “What’s the big deal?  Why don’t you want to see Janice tonight?”, the CD version commences at 6:47 with Chandler talking about his previous outing with her at a restaurant.  In the TV show we get a clearer picture of what happened at dinner:  “….when the meals came, she put half her chicken piccata on my plate, and then she took all my tomatoes!  [audience laughter]”

Also not heard on the CD is Ross mocking Chandler for this while also trying to understand why this is such a big deal to him (“And that’s bad because you hate chicken piccata?  [light audience laughter]…You didn’t want to share your tomatoes.  Tomatoes are very important to you.  [audience laughter]”

To the first question, Chandler responds “No,” he doesn’t hate chicken piccata.  Then, we’re back to the CD version as he finishes the rest of his opening lines, minus an additional “No” that precedes “It’s like all of a sudden we were this couple…”

In another deleted portion not heard on Friends Again, a scoffing Rachel responds to Chandler’s paranoia:

“Ugh, men are unbelievable.  Janice just thought she was giving you chicken.  She didn’t think she was giving you scary chicken.  [audience laughter]”

Monica’s dialogue from the CD version is heard next but as Chandler responds on the actual episode he cuts himself off when he stares at Monica’s stuffed boob (part of her uniform working as a waitress at a 50s-themed diner where she later met wealthy Pete), understandably deleted because it’s a visual gag.  He then finishes the rest of his dialogue and Monica responds in the same way she does on the mystery track.  However, Rachel’s humming in agreement with her is cut from the CD.

After Chandler claims he wants to be a better boyfriend, just to make sure he understands the metaphorical tunnel, in another cut portion, Ross tells Joey, “Where’s there no fear of commitment.  [audience laughter]”

As Chandler turns around to ask Monica, “Do you have any [ideas]…”, he accidentally hits her fake boob with his open hand and after staring and pausing in embarrassment, he turns back to the boys, “Do we have any thoughts here?” in another understandably deleted section.

During Joey’s speech, there are a couple of lines not heard on the CD:

“You have a fear of heights?  You go to the top of a building!  You’re afraid of bugs.  [pause]  Get a bug.  [audience laughter]”

After Joey urges Chandler to be “the most committed guy that ever was”, Rachel’s deleted response is, “Amazingly, that makes sense,” as Monica softly moans in agreement, also excised.  Before Joey finishes the rest of his speech, his “Oh, yeah!” is missing from the CD, an insecure Chandler asks, “Do you think?” in another omitted moment.  The rest of the scene is exactly the same as it is on Friends Again.  Chandler would take quite a while to finally realize that fear of commitment isn’t the real reason his relationship with Janice is doomed.

Onto the next mystery track that begins at 3:05 of track five:

“Phoebe:  [chuckling]  That’s fine.  Go ahead and scoff.  You know, there are a lot of things out there that I don’t believe in.  But that doesn’t mean they’re not true.

Joey:  Such as?

Phoebe:  Like crop circles or the Bermuda Triangle or evolution.  [audience laughter]

Ross:  Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.  [chuckling in disbelief]  What, you don’t, uh, you don’t believe in evolution?

Phoebe:  I don’t know.  It’s just, you know, monkeys, Darwin, you know, it’s a nice story.  I just think it’s a little too easy.  Heh.  [audience laughter]

Ross:  Too easy?  The process of every living thing on this planet evolving over millions of years from single-celled organisms is, is too easy?  [light audience laughter]

Phoebe:  Yeah, I just don’t buy it.  [audience laughter]

Ross:  Uh, excuse me.  [chuckling]  Evolution is not for you to buy, Phoebe.  Evolution is scientific fact, like the air we breathe, like gravity.

Phoebe:  [chuckling]  Oh, ok.  Don’t get me started on gravity.”

This is taken from the third episode of the second season, The One Where Mr. Heckles Dies.  (Mr. Heckles, who originally had a different name in season one, was Monica & Rachel’s odd downstairs neighbour who thinks they make too much noise.)  After Heckles’ body is taken away from the apartment building, the gang gather back at Monica’s apartment.  Phoebe claims she can still “sense” his presence and yells at him to go towards the light.  The CD version of the scene begins at 4:21 of the TV show as she responds to the collective skepticism.  With the exception of a missing “Too” from Ross and the sound of a cookie dish sliding on the coffee table (both deleted from Friends Again), everything is exactly the same.

In the show, the scene continues with an incredulous Ross trying to understand why Phoebe doesn’t believe in gravity.  Then, they’re interrupted by Treeger the super and Heckles’ attorney who reveals that the solitary old man with no family and no money has left all his junk to Monica & Rachel.

While the gang realizes he was a bit of a hoarder (and a lot like Chandler when it comes to being picky about dating women) as they clean out his place, a peeved Ross continues to interrogate Phoebe about her anti-evolution stance.  When he later brings over his “suitcase of facts” that contains 200 million year old fossils to Monica’s kitchen, Phoebe gets the better of him by pointing out that she’s not actually against evolution, she just doesn’t think it’s the only answer.  Like a good defense attorney she gets him to admit that maybe, based on famous past scientific reevaluations, there’s a small chance he could be wrong.  “I can’t believe you caved,” she marvels.  An ashamed Ross, too stunned to speak, quietly walks out with his suitcase, and the subject is never brought up again.

The next Buried Audio clip appears at the 3:14 mark of track seven:

“Rachel:  I just wish we hadn’t lost those four months.  But if time is what you needed just to gain a little perspective.  [gently slaps his cheek as she ends her last line] [audience laughter]

Ross:  [yelling]  We were on a break!  [audience laughter]  And for the record, it took two people to break up this relationship!

Rachel:  Yeah!  You and that girl from the coffee place which yesterday you took full responsibility for!

Ross:  I didn’t know what I was taking responsibility for, ok?  I didn’t finish the whole letter!

Rachel:  What?

Ross:  I fell asleep!

Rachel:  [mocking]  You feel asleep?  [audience laughter]

Ross:  [exasperated]  It was 5:30 in the morning and you had rambled on for 18 pages!  [light audience laughter] [shouting]  Front and back!  [audience laughter]

Rachel [infuriated] Ohh.

Ross:  Oh, oh, oh and by the way, y-o-u-apostrophe-r-e means “you are”.  Y-o-u-r means “your”!  [audience laughter]

Rachel:  You know, I can’t believe I even thought of getting back together with you!  We are so over!

Ross: [pretending to be upset] [shouting]  Fine by me!  [audience laughter]

Rachel:  [shouting] Oh, oh, and hey, hey, hey!  Those little spelling tips will come in handy when you’re at home on Saturday night playing scrabble with Monica.

Monica:  [offended]  Hey!

Rachel:  Sorry.  [audience laughter]  I just feel bad about all that sleep you’re gonna miss wishing you were with me!

Ross:  Oh, no, no.  Don’t you worry about me falling asleep.  [shouting]  I still have your letter!  [audience laughter]

Rachel:  [shouting]  And hey!  Just so you know, it’s not that common, it doesn’t happen to every guy, and it is a big deal!  [audience laughter]

Chandler:  [shouting]  I knew it!”

One of the most famous Ross & Rachel scenes from the show, this very funny clip is taken from the end of the fourth season premiere, The One With The Jellyfish.  The reunited couple is in bed together cuddling when Rachel brings up the infamous letter she wrote at the beach house earlier in the show much to Ross’ annoyance.  The CD version begins at the 21:17 mark of the episode.

After Ross shouts his catchphrase, an entering Chandler asks Monica, “Coffeehouse?” To which she replies, “You bet.”  This exchange is not heard on the CD.  They don’t make it out the door because a now dressed Ross and Rachel continue their fight in the living room in the same manner they do on Friends Again.  Only the audience laughter at Chandler’s last line has been cut.

Moving on to track nine and the fifth hidden clip that starts at 4:31:

“Chrissie Hynde:  [singing and playing acoustic guitar]  Smelly cat/smelly cat/what are they feeding you?  [light audience laughter]

Phoebe:  [cutting her off, clears her throat]  No, no, no.  I’m sorry.  [clears her throat again] [singing]  It’s smelly cat/smelly cat.  [audience laughter]

Chrissie:  [clears her throat and tries again]  S-S-Smelly cat/smelly cat.

Phoebe:  [cutting her off again]  Better.

Chrissie:  Yeah?

Phoebe:  Yeah, much better.  Good.  And you know what?  Don’t, don’t feel bad because it’s a hard song.

Chrissie:  Yeah.  [audience laughter]

Phoebe:  Wanna try again?

Chrissie:  Yeah!  From the top?

Phoebe:  [a bit peeved]  Ok.  There is no top, alright?  [light audience laughter]  That’s, that’s the beauty of Smelly Cat.  [light audience laughter]  Um.  [clears throat]  Why don’t you just follow me?

Chrissie:  Ok.

Phoebe:  Mmhmm.

Phoebe & Chrissie:  [singing in unison & playing together] Smelly cat/smelly cat/what are they feeding you?  [Chrissie sings high harmony]  Smelly cat/smelly cat/it’s not your fault.  [Chrissie quickly strums guitar and stops]

Phoebe:  That’s too much.  [audience laughter]

Chrissie:  Sorry.”

The longtime leader of The Pretenders (who appear on both the Friends soundtrack and Friends Again) plays Stephanie Schiffer, a rival musician who plays one paid gig at Central Perk, much to a jealous Phoebe’s dismay.  (Hynde does a solo acoustic version of the song heard on the earlier CD collection, Angel Of The Morning.)  The scene where Phoebe tries to teach her her signature song is the coda of the episode starting at the 24:17 mark.  It’s exactly the same as it is on the CD.

Right after the mystery track on Friends Again, still on track nine, Hynde starts counting into the next listed track, a double take on Smelly Cat.   First, we get a vocal reversal of the mystery track version (Kudrow as Phoebe doing the high harmony this time), followed by a quick, full-band, punky version.  When it’s over, Phoebe is still not impressed with her.

The sixth mystery snippet is on track eleven and begins at the 4:37 mark:

“Chandler:  Ok, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about us, you know, a lot of, uh, ‘us’ thinking, and uh, well I guess there’s only one way to do this.  [gets on one knee, light audience laughter]

Monica:  [concerned] What are you doing?

Chandler:  Monica…

Monica:  No, no, no.  Don’t, don’t, don’t do it.

Chandler:  Will you marry me?  [women in the audience squeal with delight]

Monica:  [softly]  Chandler, why are you doing this?

Chandler:  I’m doing this because I’m sorry?  [audience laughter]

Monica:  Do you, um, do you really think the best reason to get married is because you’re sorry?

Chandler:  Oh, no.  The best reason to get married is pregnancy.  [chuckles] [audience laughter]  Sorry’s pretty much fourth, you know, behind being ready and actually wanting to get married.  [laughs, audience laughter]  [deadpan]  Will you be my wife?  [audience laughter]

Monica:  Do you know that none of that stuff came from me?  I mean, I never said that I wanted to have babies and get married right now.

Chandler:  Yeah, I know.  But I was really confused.  And then I talked to these guys.

Monica:  Who?  Two divorces & Joey?  [audience laughter]

Ross:  [offended]  Hey!

Joey:  She’s right, you know?  [audience laughter]

Ross:  [whining]  Yeah, but still, cheap shot.  [audience laughter]

Monica:  You know when I said that I want you to deal with this relationship stuff all on your own?  Well you’re not ready for that.

Chandler:  [loudly relieved]  I didn’t think I was!  [audience laughter]

Monica:  Oh my God.  [chuckling]  What would you have done if I said yes?

Chandler:  Well, I would’ve been happy because I would’ve been able to spend the rest of my life with the woman that I love.  [pause]  Or you would’ve seen a Chandler-shaped hole in that door.  [audience laughter]”

At the 19:22 mark of the fifth season episode, The One With The Girl Who Hits Joey, a desperate Chandler, still wracked with deep insecurities about being a committed partner in his most serious relationship, makes his first attempt at proposing to Monica.  Earlier on in the episode, Chandler realizes he’s not ready for marriage or fatherhood.  Monica storms out on him when he claims they’re in a “casual” relationship.  Ross stupidly advises him he needs to make a “big gesture” to win her back.

In the actual episode, the fifteenth of that year, the women in the audience squeal twice, the first time when Chandler gets down on one knee.  Only the second reaction is heard in the clip on Friends Again.  Joey’s comment, “What a bad idea,” and Rachel’s, “Oh, I can’t not look at it,” have also been deleted from the CD version.

When Monica asks Chandler, “Why are you doing this?” his first response is only heard on the TV episode:

“I don’t know.  [audience laughter]  But I know I’m not afraid to do this.”

After Chandler proposes, Monica kneels down with him and says, “Chandler, umm, I want you to take just a minute and I want you to think about how ridiculous this sounds.”  An embarrassed Chandler replies, “Yeah, I’m kinda wishing everyone wasn’t here right now.  [audience laughter]”  All of this was cut out of the CD version including Monica calling him “honey”.  The rest of the scene plays out exactly the same in both versions.  Chandler, of course, would eventually get it right with his final proposal to her at the end of season six, one of the most touching moments in the show’s history.

Another unlisted excerpt is heard beginning at 3:47 on track twelve:

“Joey:  Hey Ross, will you pass me that knife?

Ross:  [pretending to be defiant]  No, I will not!

Joey:  [taken aback]  Oh, it’s ok, you don’t have to be so mean about it.

Ross:  You’re right.  I’m sorry.  Will you marry me?  [Rachel laughs hard, audience laughter]

Phoebe:  Aww, and I was gonna ask you to marry me because I forgot to say hello to you last week.  [audience laughter] [Joey chuckles]

Rachel:  Oh, no, wait, Pheebs.  I think for something like that you just ask them to move in with you but I’m not sure.  Chandler?  [light audience laughter]

Chandler:  [chuckling, getting a little annoyed]  Ok.  How long is this gonna go on?

Monica:  [chuckles]  Well, I think the length of teasing is directly related to how insane you were so, a long time.  [audience laughter, Rachel & Phoebe laugh]

Ross:  This is fun.  Ah, hey, Rach, remember that whole ‘we were on a break’ thing?  Well, I’m sorry.  Will you marry me?  [Ross laughs] [audience laughter]

Everybody but Ross:  That’s not funny, man!  [audience laughter]”

This is the coda scene from the same episode that happens right after Monica and Chandler make peace following his botched proposal.  Beginning at the 21:28 mark, it takes place at Central Perk and is exactly the same as it is on the CD.

The last mystery clip begins at 3:41 on track thirteen.  After 21 seconds of silence following The Waltons’ Beats The Hell Out Of Me, we’re back at Central Perk for another performance:

“Phoebe:  [quietly strums guitar and sings]  I found you in my bed/How’d you wind up there?  [audience laughter]  You are a mystery/Little black curly hair  [audience laughter]  Little black curly hair/Little black/Little black/Little black/Little black/Little black curly hair  [holds last note while lowering the volume] [stops singing] [audience laughter and applause] [talking]  Thank you.”

That’s right.  Phoebe is singing about a pubic hair.  Ross picked the wrong time to eat cake.

This memorable clip is taken from the third episode of the sixth season, The One With Ross’ Denial.  The TV version begins at 18:37 (the guitar intro is one second longer and actually starts right at the end of Monica and Chandler’s fight over his Merge sign in the bedroom idea).  After she finishes her song (screenwriter Seth Kurland wrote the lyrics while Lisa Kudrow composed the melody), Phoebe tells the customers, “Now if you want to receive emails about my upcoming shows then please give me money so I can buy a computer.”  This part was cut from the CD.

Ode To A Pubic Hair (the actual title of the song) was referenced three years later in the ninth season episode, The One With Ross’ Inappropriate Song.  Phoebe mentions it along with Pervert Parade during her awkward dinner with Mike’s parents.

Friends Again concludes with two versions of Friends ‘Til The End (I’ll Be There For You), both performed by Thor-El (is that a Superman pun?), also known as Almighty Thor.  A longtime collaborator of KRS-ONE, he’s the lone rapper in this otherwise pop/rock Caucasian collection.  The first version, track thirteen, is properly credited.  The second, track fourteen, is not.

Despite being a remix overseen by KRS-ONE (who is credited for it and acknowledged in the liner notes), it’s really not that much different from the regular mix, nor is it an improvement.  Sampling the hook and The Rembrandts singing the chorus of the original TV theme (now backed by female back-up singers), Friends ‘Til The End is faster paced but far more annoying, like the protagonist in the song who can’t stop mooching off his buddy.  Thor-El, who wrote all his rhymes, sounds a little too much like DMX’s younger brother and not in a good way.

Unlike the original Friends Soundtrack, Friends Again failed to find much of a following.  Despite the later emergence of three additional releases, it would be the last CD from the show to feature uncredited material.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Sunday, December 8, 2019
6:09 p.m.

Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay

Harold & Kumar are The Stoner Odd Couple.  Harold (John Cho) is the uptight, neat one.  Kumar (Kal Penn) is the sloppy loose cannon.  No matter how many times Kumar’s antics aggravate and sometimes implicate his best friend, despite Harold’s threats to the contrary, their stubborn friendship endures.  Not that I give a god damn.

For you see, I’ve never really cared for Harold & Kumar.  They are the least appealing characters in their own movies.

Having finally made it to White Castle in their hit-and-miss debut feature, at the start of their abominable sequel, they’re now on their way to Amsterdam, the pot Mecca.  In the previous film, Harold had fallen for a cute neighbour in his apartment building and now he’s trying to track her down in Europe.  Even he knows this is questionable.

But, of course, there are complications that delay the journey.  Before they even get on the plane, the duo run into familiar faces while traversing in the airport.  Kumar’s hot, sweet ex-girlfriend Vanessa (Danneel Harris who deserves so much better than this) is suddenly engaged to a Republican sleazeball with Homeland Security aspirations.  Harold appreciates that her fiance got him a job.  Kumar, clearly still in love with his redheaded dream woman, is resentful and suspicious.

It’s painfully clear that Harris hasn’t gotten over her ex, either.  While she walks away with her controlling partner, there she is turning her head back towards the boys with an unmistakable look that screams, “Please ruin my wedding!”  Message received.

While going through security, Kumar is singled out for extra scrutiny which means in order to not get caught with all the weed on his person he’s going to have to play the racial profiling charge.  But while in the airplane bathroom with an annoyed Harold, he pushes his luck too far.  He suddenly pulls out a contraption he invented that allows him to destroy his lungs without polluting the air.

An old white woman who already thinks he’s a terrorist takes one look at this thing (the bathroom door is open by this point) and freaks out causing a panic among the other passengers.  A leaping undercover marshall tackles Kumar and his device is destroyed.  No reasonable explanation prevents what happens next.

Former Daily Show correspondent Rob Corddry plays an idiotic Homeland Security gestapo who deludes himself into thinking his team has just nabbed two notorious guerillas.   It doesn’t matter that Harold and his family are American, not North Korean spies, and that Kumar has an Indian background and no violent history.  They’re still going to Guantanamo Bay.

The Corddry character is a problem because real-life Homeland Security agents aren’t stupid, they’re evil.  They know a lot of the people they’ve nabbed over the years were completely innocent.  They didn’t care.  The Bush Administration wanted convictions, justifiable or not.  Well, they got them.  They also wanted test subjects for horrific torture experiments.  They got that, too.

This fictionalized version of Guantanamo Bay is more like something out of a bad prison movie.  Harold & Kumar are thrown into an unsanitary cell in their orange jumpsuits.  In a nearby holding pen are two supposed terrorists who remind them that they only exist because of American imperialism, an accurate point that briefly lingers before being instantly forgotten seconds later.  Not acknowledged is that most of Gitmo’s prisoners haven’t done America any harm whatsoever.  In this movie, the other prisoners are just nondescript extras.

In easily the most objectionable moment in the entire film, the guards demand the prisoners perform oral sex on them which is reframed as eating a “cockmeat sandwich”.  It’s bad enough they’re making light of sexual assault, but to top it off with a large dose of homophobia is beyond despicable.  Just as Harold & Kumar find themselves stuck in the same disturbing dilemma, their next-cell neighbours find their opening.  But instead of freeing everybody, which would’ve been awesome, they only save themselves.  Fortunately, for the stoners, their cell door is open, too.

Considering how much heavy surveillance there is at the real Gitmo, not to mention all those well-armed military personnel, the very idea of escaping this gulag without being seriously violated is the real joke.  Harold & Kumar are somehow able to make it out no problem without running into anybody who could stop them.  The only reason they manage to get out at all is because one of the other escaping prisoners electrocutes himself on the surrounding electric fence effectively killing the power to the entire base.

It’s easier to believe that a corrupt American government is more stupid and incompetent than unconscionably evil, that bad ideas are not mistakes but deliberate plans to cause mass harm.  To not even attempt to satirize that reality is unpatriotic.

For the rest of the movie, Harold & Kumar are on the run hoping to avoid a return trip to hell.  They reunite with an old friend in Miami who somehow convinces every woman at his party to be bottomless.  That’s right.  They’re not wearing underwear.  When one woman tries to take her top off, she’s shamed into putting it back on.  Um, ok.  He loans the boys one of his tricked-out cars which they inevitably crash and abandon.

As before, while en route to stop Vanessa’s wedding, they have brief run-ins with unusual characters.

There’s the obligatory redneck incest couple with the freaky kid in the basement, the return of Christopher Meloni’s Freakshow, now a grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and of course, the “hetero” Neil Patrick Harris, still tripping balls and womanizing.  I have to say, since he hosted the Academy Awards a few years ago and made that awful “traitor” joke about Edward Snowden, I’ve stopped being a fan.  His earlier appearance in the White Castle movie was hilariously unexpected.  Now, he instantly wears out his welcome.  The surprise is gone.

When Harris takes the boys to a whorehouse, for some stupid reason he brands the biggest chested sex worker on call with his initials like 1985 Terry Funk which pisses off Bev D’Angelo so much out comes the rifle.  Let’s just say the final scene following the conclusion of the end credits is a disappointment.

It’s a testament to how lazy and irresponsible this movie really is that when the boys somehow end up in the company of President Bush (really an impersonator), he’s seen as a flawed yet powerless dude, a good-time bro and not one of the worst human beings America ever produced.  Yes, they call him out on his drug hypocrisy but not much else.  And yeah, I know, they need him to get the relentless Corddry off their back, but still.  If you’re wondering why today Ellen DeGeneres is openly defending being friends with the real Bush (who wasn’t exactly pro-gay as President), this movie helpfully explains why.

As for the comedy, I only laughed twice.  In a flashback, we learn that Kumar was originally like Harold and the reason he bonded with Harris was because she turned him onto weed.  Snooping Harold’s unexpected Goth look is funny.  And I have to admit, watching Harris fist the fake vagina of a giant bag of weed increases my admiration for her as a performer in what had to be the strangest thing she’s ever been asked to do on screen.

By the time Harold & Kumar finally interrupt her wedding ceremony, much to the consternation of her fiance whose full-on heel turn is completely predictable to everyone except the gullible stoners, her sudden anger at her rescuers is pure formula and not believable, but ultimately short-lived.  Not sure anyone has ever really been swept off their feet by math poetry.

Eventually, our heroes finally make it to Amsterdam and Harold reunites with his own lady love but not before acting the fool in an unwise moment of impulsivity.  And then, a gross finale.  The girls think the guys in the Halloween masks grabbing them are Harold & Kumar.  Nope.

They’re not the only ones who feel violated.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Sunday, December 8, 2019
5:06 p.m.