The History Of The Mystery Track – You Oughta Know What Happened To 1000 Mona Lisas

When a song captures the zeitgeist of its era, when it excites just as much as it inflames, chances are it will survive beyond its moment. Its power, its vulnerability, its authenticity, despite the contrary view of its detractors, will resonate for the years and even decades to come.

One such track from the summer of 1995 stood out more than any other. Despite not qualifying for Billboard’s Hot 100 Singles Chart (there were no commercially available physical copies to buy domestically), its presence on radio and TV was ubiquitous. You could not escape it, no matter how hard you tried. It was simply everywhere.

Meant to exorcise some emotional trauma from a relationship gone very sour indeed, it caused such a sensation it even divided feminists, some of whom questioned the wisdom of releasing a song they argued reinforced the worst stereotypes of the unhinged, scorned woman.

Inevitably, when a track like this explodes into the mainstream, there are covers. In 1996, noted Toronto scenester Jaymz Bee and his band released a loungy cocktail version. That same year, Weird Al Yankovic included a snippet in his polka medley of recent alternative rock hits. 25 years after the original’s phenomenal debut, Beyonce slipped in an excerpt during her performance of If I Were A Boy at the 2010 Grammy Awards. Of the three, only Mr. Bee had the courage to not censor “fuck”.

Back in the summer of 1995, long before anyone else decided to take a shot, an up and coming punk band from Hollywood was game. What started as a lark led to an unexpected hit of their own, their only one to date. In the ultimate irony, their biggest success, covering someone else’s breakthrough song, became their own and unfortunately, unintentionally led to their undoing.

1000 Mona Lisas had stuck it out in the LA club scene for a few years in the early 90s (Weezer opened for them in 1993) when they finally caught a break. RCA Records was interested in signing them.

Rather than put out a full album right away, the band decided on a shorter release which they simply named The EP. Only five original songs were planned for inclusion. But at the last minute, a sixth cut, a Buried Song tucked away on track five, would ultimately be added.

“We were sitting at Bottom Of The Hill [a music club] in San Francisco,” frontman Armando Prado told MTV.com in November 1995, “and we were thinking, what can we do to mess with people…”

Alanis Morissette’s You Oughta Know, both the listed version and the hidden Jimmy The Saint Blend, had been blowing up huge that summer receiving extensive airplay on various radio formats. The video, featuring her touring band who didn’t play on either of the studio recordings, was in high rotation on MTV and MuchMusic.

“It was at the end of July,” Prado told MTV.com, “and she was starting to get popular.”

The trio started playing it during live shows and it received an “enthusiastic” reaction, according to Billboard Magazine in their January 20, 1996 edition. One fan in particular wanted them to record it for The EP.

In a little over a decade, Brian Malouf had already accumulated a remarkable list of credits. He was twiddling the knobs and adjusting the faders while Michael Jackson was demoing the Bad album. He discovered Everclear. And he ended up mixing Pearl Jam’s Even Flow among many other hit songs.

By the mid-90s, he was the A&R guy for RCA. Despite the reluctance of 1000 Mona Lisas, he insisted they include their version of You Oughta Know on The EP. They ultimately agreed to make it a mystery track. (Morissette and her producer Glen Ballard are properly credited as the songwriters in the liner notes.) You’ll find it with 2 minutes and 8 seconds left on track 5. (After the last listed song, Instilled And Lost, also listen for the occasional “wheeee!” from someone in the band (it sounds like Prado) which pops up at 2:10, 3:07 & 4:32.)

“I really just thought maybe a college radio station here or there might pick it up,” Prado told MTV.com, “but it’s been playing all over the country.”

“The buzz on 1000 Mona Lisas began late last summer [1995] as their version of ‘You Oughta Know’ started lighting up playlists from KROQ Los Angeles to WXEG Dayton, Ohio,” reported Billboard in its January 20, 1996 issue, “often in close proximity to Alanis’ original. RCA didn’t promote the track as a single; demand for the tune built by word-of-mouth while the band was on the road.” The song was also put into heavy rotation on CFNY, Toronto’s modern rock station, which had already been playing Alanis for months.

With just a minimalist piano accompanying him, Prado earnestly sings the opening lines. Then, after one last piano flourish, the rest of the band suddenly thrashes into the mix jacking up the volume and quickening the pace. Prado maintains his deadpan delivery until things are slightly slowed down as he and his bandmates scream out the chorus.

“I didn’t change the gender in the lyrics,” Prado revealed to MTV.com, “because I wanted to stay true to what it was, I didn’t see any reason for messing with her lyrics, it’s her song. I definitely respect what she’s done.”

In the second verse, Prado does make a slight alteration at the top. “You seem very well” is replaced with “you look peaceful”. (It sounds like he mixed up the lyric with the next line “things looks peaceful” and just decided to keep it in.) And after another shrieked out chorus, instead of a solo followed by another set of words, the band simply repeats the chorus one more time and everything ends cold.

So, what did Alanis herself think of this tighter, faster, punkier reworking of her most famous song? According to Billboard, she was mixed.

“For her part, Morissette says it feels funny to hear 1000 Mona Lisas sing ‘You Oughta Know’ ‘because the song is so personal to me….[1000 Mona Lisas] obviously like the song, and they’re passionate about what they do, so God bless ’em.'”

But according to Prado himself, as noted in the July/August 1996 edition of Impact Magazine, she was more complimentary when she met the band backstage:

“She came to our show in Salt Lake City [in November 1995] and said she liked it…I told her we’d do ‘One Hand In My Pocket’ [sic] next and she cracked up!”

The gig took place at the Zephyr Club. In mid-April 1996, Prado told Deseret News that playing her song right in front of her was a trip:

“It was good for the adrenaline.”

Like he told Impact Magazine, their backstage encounter was a highlight of the evening:

“It was cool meeting her.”

Morissette had every reason to be flattered by the band’s rendition. Despite doing the song just for fun, it’s one of the best mystery track covers of all time. Morissette’s unvarnished contempt and bitterness towards Dave Coulier was pure punk rock anyway, even if the slick, superior Chili Pepper arrangement suggested otherwise. It took 1000 Mona Lisas all of two minutes and eight seconds to fix this.

While talking to MTV.com in November 1995, Prado let slip another secret. 1000 Mona Lisas had recorded another mystery track, this one for their first proper album.

Three months later, New Disease debuted. Four minutes and thirty seconds into track 14, the band revs it up again, this time for a hit song from the mid-70s.

Around the same time Martha the sheepdog was frolicking around on their Scottish farm, Paul & Linda McCartney had also adopted a feisty puppy.

“We’ve got a Labrador puppy who is a runt, the runt of a litter,” McCartney told a reporter while promoting his third Wings album. “We bought her along a roadside in a little pet shop, out in the country one day. She was a bit of a wild dog, a wild girl who wouldn’t stay in. We have a big wall around our house in London, and she wouldn’t stay in, she always used to jump the wall.”

Frequently escaping her owners to go prowling around town, when she returned from one such excursion, the McCartneys were surprised to learn how busy she’d been:

“She came back one day pregnant. She proceeded to walk into the garage and have this litter…Seven little black puppies, perfect little black Labradors, and she’s not black, she’s tan.”

They named one of her newborns Jet, which also happened to be the name of one of his ponies he also had at the time.

While making Band On The Run, as McCartney later revealed to Australian radio in 2017, some of the lyrics were inspired by his first wife’s Dad:

“It was kind of – a little bit about the experiences I’d had in marrying Linda. Her dad [the entertainment lawyer, Lee Eastman, McCartney’s longtime manager for decades who died in 1991] was a little old fashioned and I thought I was a little bit intimidated, as a lot of young guys can be meeting the father figure. And if the dad’s really easy-going, it makes it easy. It wasn’t bad but I was a bit intimidated, probably my fault as much as his.”

Mixing fact (“I can almost remember their funny faces/That time you told them that you were going to be marrying soon”) with Lennonesque surrealism (“with the wind in your hair of a thousand laces/Climb on the back and we’ll go for a ride in the sky”), the song is catchy enough to forgive the deliberate, and in this case, literal flights of lyrical fancy.

Initially, there were no plans to release Jet as a single. But the album Band On The Run was underperforming on the sales chart compared to what McCartney had accomplished more easily with The Beatles. Struggling for the critical respect John Lennon was easily garnering for his own solo work, the LP needed a belated, added push.

It took Capitol Records’s promo man Al Coury to convince him to put Jet out as a 45. In the end, two versions were issued: the full-length album cut and a three-minute single edit. The song would peak at #7 on the Billboard singles chart, #2 in the UK. And Band On The Run would ultimately become a multi-platinum smash, the biggest record McCartney would release with Wings.

Jet became a concert highlight for decades. During McCartney’s tour in support of the 1993 album Flowers In The Dirt, it was one of the only Wings songs regularly played during shows.

“We mastered `Jet’ off a cassette we recorded a few years ago,” Armando Prado told Deseret News. “It’s a song I’ve always wanted to cover.”

“We don’t want to be known as a cover band,” Prado declared to MTV.com, “so we may be ending that pretty quickly. This one cover [You Oughta Know] has gotten us more notoriety for doing covers than we care to have, but it’s also really gotten us where we are.”

As expected, this unlisted take of Jet is much faster than the original. No slowed-down reggae detours in this version. There’s a quick guitar break but no melody-mimicking keyboard solo, no vocal improvs popping out of the background and certainly no saxophones.

Prado also makes subtle lyric changes. “That time you told them that you were going to be marrying soon” now reads “How come you told me that you’re going to be marrying soon?” which changes the whole dynamic of the song. Instead of a worried fiance concerned about what his future wife’s father thinks of him before their wedding, this Jet is about a guy who belatedly realizes he’s the side piece.

And for some reason, the opening line of the last verse – “With the wind in your hair of a thousand laces” – loses the L in the last word. Either he made another mistake and left it in or maybe he’s a poker fan, I don’t know.

When I reviewed New Disease for my college newspaper in 1996, I found the record hit and miss. As for Jet itself, following the more substantive You Oughta Know, it felt “disposable” by comparison. And truthfully, I don’t remember ever hearing McCartney’s original until much later on. But today, it’s a rollicking, affectionate mystery gem that deserves to be rediscovered.

Unlike what happened to Wings in 1974, Jet would take 1000 Mona Lisas no further, despite being given a big push in the band’s accompanying bio sent to radio stations with New Disease. It failed to match or eclipse the surprise success of You Oughta Know. The frustration of not being able to generate hits through their own material also took their toll. Modern rock radio wasn’t buying what they were selling anymore. Nu metal was becoming the new thing and they couldn’t compete.

In the May 23rd, 1998 edition of Billboard Magazine, there was an article about their label RCA Records which was going through its own creative and commercial struggles. In a brief notice midway through, there was a short paragraph focusing specifically on the unrealized potential of 1000 Mona Lisas:

“With internal and external stress,” Billboard vaguely concluded, “the band eventually broke up.”

In 1997, Prado recorded another song under a different name, B.U.G.S., for a benefit album entitled Generations I – A Punk Look At Human Rights. And then he left the music business altogether. After successfully completing medical school, he has since become a nurse. (When contacted for comment through his public Facebook account, there was no response.)

Hopefully, the stress of being in a rock band helped him prepare for the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Tuesday, September 5, 2023
3:36 a.m.

The History Of The Mystery Track – Our Lady Peace, Ray Kurzweil & Molly

Mike Turner was looking for something to read. It was 1999 and his band, Our Lady Peace, were on an American tour in support of their third album, Happiness…Is Not A Fish You Can Catch. Riding long hours on a bus in between gigs can be tedious. So one day the guitarist stepped into a bookstore and found something that caught his eye.

The Age Of Spiritual Machines was written by Ray Kurzweil, an eccentric inventor, among other things, who firmly believes that death can be overcome once humanity fully merges with technology. Not an original idea by any means but few have taken the time to conceptualize such a radical line of thought outside the fantasy world of science fiction. Diagnosed with type 2 diabetes at age 35, there’s no question such a depressing diagnosis would profoundly motivate an already highly driven philosopher and computer scientist with considerable wealth to prolong his life by any means necessary.

As he read, Turner became mesmerized by Kurzweil’s often far-out ideas (“I picked it up, read it and went mental,” he told Chart Attack in 2000) and as soon as he finished the book, the lead guitarist passed it on to the band’s singer Raine Maida. He had the same reaction.

Despite the fact they had just made their third album, even before Turner bought The Age Of Spiritual Machines, the songwriting process for the next collection of songs had already begun.

“It ended up being a concept record,” bassist Duncan Coutts told the Pop Matters website in 2010, “but it certainly didn’t start that way.”

Just over a year after the release of Happiness…Is Not A Fish You Can Catch, Our Lady Peace unveiled Spiritual Machines. Hoping to get Kurzweil’s blessing for the project during its difficult production (the drummer got mugged while walking his dog and some of his parts had to be played by Pearl Jam’s Matt Cameron), not only was the author thrilled about the album, he also volunteered his services to help participate in the recording. He even gave the band one of his specially designed keyboards, the Kurzweil 350, which was implemented constantly.

Officially, Kurzweil appears on six tracks spread out throughout the record. With the exception of his voice buried so deep during an instrumental break on the single In Repair it’s basically indecipherable, the author is more clearly heard reading mostly word-for-word quotations from his book in brief snippets all set to moody electronic music and tucked away between proper songs.

But 12 minutes and 7 seconds after the final song, The Wonderful Future, concludes on track fifteen, there’s a seventh appearance, one of the weirdest mystery tracks of all time.

On page 37 of The Age Of Spiritual Machines, Kurzweil engages in a conversation with an unknown person about the future. Ten pages later, there’s another dialogue. These exchanges continue on at various points throughout the book, usually at the end of a subsequent chapter. Starting with Chapter 10, we jump ten years into the future, and then another ten years in 11 until the final engagement seven decades later in 12. We begin in 1999 and ultimately conclude a full century later.

It isn’t until the very beginning of Chapter 7 that we even learn this mysterious person’s name.

“I’M MOLLY.”

Molly is not real. She’s a fictional character Kurzweil created in order to fantasize about communicating with an immortal cybernetic being in his idealized future. He gives her a back story. She’s married with children but there’s complications. (Her husband, an inventor, uses virtual reality to cheat on her and see other women naked without their knowledge.) She’s an overachieving intellectual/artist who lets the author know how many of his theories and predictions, organized by decade, prove correct which feels more than a little self-serving. (And contrary to his later assertion that 86% of his guesses came true, he got a lot of shit wrong. His math is clearly off.)

Unlike most of the spoken word segments on Our Lady Peace’s Spiritual Machines which are all under a minute each, this unlisted piece buried at the end of track 15 goes on for roughly three and a half minutes.

What ensues, following the introduction of some simple, ongoing, echoey piano playing and what sounds like electronic reproductions of whales moaning, is a peculiar, somewhat awkward and cheesy imaginary conversation between Kurzweil and Molly. In fact, the track is appropriately entitled R.K. and Molly.

Before each line of dialogue, Kurzweil calls out the name of the communicator about to speak which is heard at a lower decibel. He plays himself, of course. And he plays Molly but with his voice artificially raised to a helium-like pitch. Put simply, it doesn’t sound right. She doesn’t sound hot.

Divided up into three separate speaking segments, with that mood music playing on uninterrupted during the slight silences, the first segment involves snippets taken from pages 235 and 241 of Chapter 12 entitled 2099. Instead of starting right from the beginning of what is the longest conversation from the book, he picks it up for the hidden track nine lines into it, jumping right back into his odd flirtation with a made-up android:

“Ray: Anyway, you do look amazing.

Molly: YOU SAY THAT EVERY TIME WE MEET.

Ray: I mean you look twenty again, only more beautiful than at the start of the book.

Molly: I KNEW THAT’S HOW YOU’D WANT ME.” (p. 235)

“Ray: Okay, you were an attractive woman when I first met you. And you still project yourself as a beautiful young woman. At least when I’m with you.

Molly: THANKS.

Ray: …are you saying that you’re a machine now?

Molly: A MACHINE? THAT’S REALLY NOT FOR ME TO SAY. IT’S LIKE ASKING ME IF I’M BRILLIANT OR INSPIRING.

Ray: I guess the word machine in 2099 doesn’t have quite the same connotations that it has here in 1999.

Molly: THAT’S HARD FOR ME TO RECALL NOW.” (p.241)

After a five-second break, with the piano and fake whale noises still going strong, the conversation continues as Molly talks about her kids and a project she’s working on. At the tail end of page 238 in the book, Kurzweil asks her “what else” is she up to as they catch up after a long break from communicating. She responds, “JUST FINISHING UP THIS SYMPHONY.”

He asks, “Is this a new interest?” Her response begins the second portion of R.K. and Molly on the Spiritual Machines CD and can be found at the start of page 239:

“Molly: I’M REALLY JUST DABBLING, BUT CREATING MUSIC IS A GREAT WAY FOR ME TO STAY CLOSE WITH JEREMY AND EMILY.

Ray: Creating music sounds like a good thing to do with your kids, even if they are almost ninety years old. So, can I hear it?

Molly: WELL, I’M AFRAID YOU WOULDN’T UNDERSTAND IT.

Ray: So it requires enhancement to understand?

Molly: YES, MOST ART DOES. FOR STARTERS, THIS SYMPHONY IS IN FREQUENCIES THAT A MOSH CAN’T HEAR, AND HAS MUCH TOO FAST A TEMPO. AND IT USES MUSICAL STRUCTURES THAT A MOSH COULD NEVER FOLLOW.

Ray: Can’t you create art for nonaugmented humans? I mean there’s still a lot of depth possible. Consider Beethoven–he wrote almost two centuries ago, and we still find his music exhilarating.

Molly: YES, THERE’S A GENRE OF MUSIC–ALL THE ARTS ACTUALLY–WHERE WE CREATE MUSIC AND ART THAT A MOSH IS CAPABLE OF UNDERSTANDING.

Ray: And then you play MOSH music for MOSHs?

Molly: NOW THERE’S AN INTERESTING IDEA. I SUPPOSE WE COULD TRY THAT, ALTHOUGH MOSHs ARE NOT THAT EASY TO FIND ANYMORE. IT’S REALLY NOT NECESSARY, THOUGH. WE CAN CERTAINLY UNDERSTAND WHAT A MOSH IS CAPABLE OF UNDERSTANDING. THE POINT, THOUGH, IS TO USE THE MOSH LIMITATIONS AS AN ADDED CONSTRAINT.

Ray: Sort of like composing new music for old instruments.

Molly: YEAH, NEW MUSIC FOR OLD MINDS.” (p. 239)

What in the hell is a MOSH? It’s an acronym Kurzweil made up to differentiate generic human beings from their technologically enhanced successors. As explained to him by the imaginary Molly on page 237, it stands for Mostly Original Substrate Humans. On page 306 of The Age Of Spiritual Machines, Kurzweil himself defines it thusly:

“In the last half of the twenty-first century, a human being still using native carbon-based neurons and unenhanced by neural implants is referred to as a MOSH. In 2099, Molly refers to the author as being a MOSH.”

A few seconds later, we come to the last segment. You’ll find the portion with Molly on page 252 which ends Chapter 12. The last section where Kurzweil loses contact with her is actually the opening lines of Epilogue: The Rest Of The Universe Revisited found on page 253:

“Ray: Maybe we should kiss goodbye?

Molly: JUST A KISS?

Ray: We’ll leave it at that for this book. I’ll reconsider the ending for the movie…

Molly: HERE’S MY KISS….NOW REMEMBER, I’M READY TO DO ANYTHING OR BE ANYTHING YOU WANT OR NEED.

Ray: I’ll keep that in mind.

Molly: …THAT’S WHERE YOU’LL FIND ME.

Ray: Too bad I have to wait a century to meet you.

Molly: OR TO BE ME.

Ray: Yes, that too.” (p.252)

“Ray: Actually, Molly, there are a few other questions that have occurred to me. What were those limitations that you referred to? What did you say you were anxious about? What are you afraid of? Do you feel pain? What about babies and children? Molly?…” (p.253)

The unorthodox backing track eventually grinds to a halt and slowly fades out as the CD shuts off.

The full final conversation between Kurzweil and his imaginary cybernetic plaything in Chapter 12 of The Age Of Spiritual Machines goes on for 18 pages, 19 if you count the start of the Epilogue. In some of the portions excised for the mystery track, Molly throws out random quotes from famous figures, there’s a brief discussion about government intrusions into privacy, human rights applying to humanoids, quantum computing, virtual food in place of the real thing, imagining your own body and bringing it to life, and of course, Kurzweil constantly hitting on a married robot. (In real life, he too is married with 2 kids.)

R.K. and Molly is also heard, but not in its complete form, on the credited enhanced portion of Spiritual Machines, a rare acknowledgement of a CD Extra on a Sony Records release. (In most cases, this is normally not indicated on the outside packaging.)

When you put the CD in the CD-ROM drive of your computer, the track starts playing as you watch a crude animation set in a hospital. At any time while R.K. and Molly plays, you can click that snail in the upper right hand corner which takes you to another screen. (If you let the animation play out, you’re taken there automatically.) It’s here you’re encouraged to create a login name in order to visit an Our Lady Peace “secret site”. (Unfortunately, it doesn’t exist anymore (it was discontinued by 2003) but cached portions have survived.)

Six years later, Our Lady Peace released their first compilation of hits entitled A Decade. The two popular singles from Spiritual Machines appear midway through the CD.

Before In Repair begins at the 15-second mark of track 10, against another sparse electronic mood arrangement, Kurzweil makes the following prediction:

“The year is 2029. The machines will convince us that they are conscious, that they have their own agenda where they have our respect. They’ll embody human qualities. They’ll claim to be human. And we’ll believe them.”

This quick clip, entitled R.K. 2029, is also from Spiritual Machines and unlike its secret placement on A Decade, it’s properly credited and given its own track number separate from In Repair on the earlier album. As before, it’s sequenced right before the song begins.

None of these specific lines appear in The Age Of Spiritual Machines, but similar sentiments are expressed in much longer form on page 153 in the following paragraph. The heart of the book’s premise, which feels heavily influenced by Blade Runner, is found in these words:

“Just being–experiencing, being conscious–is spiritual, and reflects the essence of spirituality. Machines, derived from human thinking and surpassing humans in their capacity for experience, will claim to be conscious, and thus to be spiritual. They will believe that they are conscious. They will believe that they have spiritual experiences. They will be convinced that these experiences are meaningful. And given the historical inclination of the human race to anthropomorphize the phenomena we encounter, and the persuasiveness of the machines, we’re likely to believe them when they tell us this.”

Just like the rebellious replicants who easily pass for human unless you test them for emotion.

A more succinct assertion awaits on page 280 of the Timeline section. At the very end of the summarized 2029 predictions, Kurzweil writes:

“Machines claim to be conscious. These claims are largely accepted.”

Right at the start of track 11, we don’t hear Life right away. Instead, with Turner gently noodling in the background, Kurzweil returns. Using another fictional character to illustrate the conviction of his basic theory that cybernetic humans are simply superior versions to their mortal predecessors, he presents the following scenario in 19 seconds:

“Have we lost Jack somewhere along the line? Jack’s friends think not. Jack claims to be the same old guy, just newer. His vision, memory and reasoning ability have all been improved. But it’s still Jack.”

In Chapter 3, Of Minds And Machines, Kurzweil introduces a hypothetical situation involving the made-up example of the aforementioned Jack beginning on page 52. Near the start of paragraph three, he writes:

“Our friend Jack (circa some time in the twenty-first century) has been complaining of difficulty with his hearing. A diagnostic test indicates he needs more than a conventional hearing aid, so he gets a choclear implant…This routine surgical procedure is successful, and Jack is pleased with his improved hearing.

Is he still the same Jack?

Well, sure he is. People have cochlear implants circa 1999. We still regard them as the same person.”

After opting for “newly introduced image-processing implants”, having already acquired “permanently implanted retinal-imaging displays in his corneas to view virtual reality”, near the bottom of page 52, Kurzweil writes:

“Jack notices that his memory is not what it was, as he struggles to recall names, the names of earlier events, and so on. So he’s back for memory implants. These are amazing–memories that have grown fuzzy with time are now as clear as if they had just happened.” Even the bad ones.

“Still the same Jack?” Kurzweil asks at the top of page 53. He eventually answers, “yes, it’s still the same guy.”

And then, in paragraph four on that same page, you’ll read a slightly different version of what Kurzweil recites uncredited on A Decade. The first two lines of the mystery track are exactly the same. But starting with the third line, there are slight changes. (I’ve highlighted them in bold.)

“Jack also claims that he’s the same old guy, just newer. His hearing, vision, memory and reasoning ability have all improved, but it’s still the same Jack.”

In the book, following this passage, Kurzweil goes on and on about Jack, his enhancement possibilities and the constant questioning about whether “new Jack” can still creditably be seen as the “old Jack” despite seeing dramatic physical improvements that aren’t human, for another two pages in that chapter.

On page 126 of Chapter 6, Building New Brains…, he brings up Jack again, summarizing the ethical dilemma of whether a person who downloads themselves, or rather, gets “scanned” into a new and improved cybernetic body can still be the same human being they once were:

“Subjectively, the question is more subtle and profound. Is this the same consciousness as the person we just scanned?”

Kurzweil gives a conflicting answer:

“If he–Jack–is still around, he will convincingly claim to represent the continuity of his consciousness. He may not be satisfied to let his mental clone carry on in his stead.”

R.K. Jack is an uncredited, exclusive outtake since it did not appear on Spiritual Machines.

More than two decades after being wowed by Kurzweil’s thought provoking, yet now somewhat discredited and often overly rosy “futurism”, Our Lady Peace revisited the subject for an unexpected sequel.

In 2022, the band released Spiritual Machines 2 and launched an unusual tour to promote it. Once again, Kurzweil provided voiceover narrations, this time bragging about his supposedly accurate predictions from the previous century (something he also does in The Age Of Spiritual Machines when referring to the first book he wrote, The Age Of Intelligent Machines). He even offers new ones. Everything is properly listed and in the right order.

Mike Turner, the founding guitarist responsible for initiating the original project and who left the band after their 2002 American breakthrough Gravity, was brought back just to help spearhead the follow-up.

Molly, the fake humanoid Kurzweil lusted after in print and on record almost a quarter century ago, doesn’t appear on Spiritual Machines 2 but was brought back to life for The Wonderful Future Theatrical Experience, Our Lady Peace’s tour in support of the album, which also featured her creator in holographic form.

Five years after her first appearance in The Age Of Spiritual Machines, Molly was also revived in Kurzweil’s 2004 book, The Singularity Is Near. 15 years after their last fake conversation, not only does he talk to her from the year 2104, bizarrely he also converses with her 2004 version at the same time. In fact, the two Mollies talk to each other.

Although, there is an extensive conversation about the supposed future of virtual sex (which hasn’t really exploded yet, ahem), I’m happy to report Kurzweil no longer has a raging boner for Molly. It’s true what they say. We really do slow down when we’re older.

Molly, on the other hand…

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Friday, September 1, 2023
2:56 a.m.

The History Of The Mystery Track – R.E.M. Covers The Clique

“I love records that intrigue me, that keep me guessing. Rock ‘n’ roll’s basically all about mystery.”

Peter Buck, 1986

In the final week of 1977, a young college student started working for a local record shop in Georgia. Wuxtry Records, an independent store operating in the college town of Athens, had just opened the previous year. In 1978, they would open a second location in nearby Decatur. Peter Buck, who was already thinking of dropping out, would eventually work in both.

A longtime audiophile, he became obsessed with obscure recordings by long forgotten artists of the past. Two years into his tenure, a young guy walked in with two beautiful women on his arms flipping through the racks. Buck thought he was just a ladykiller. But he later found out it was the man’s sisters.

Michael Stipe was a frequent customer of Wuxtry’s. Buck struck up a friendship with him and made sure to set aside some cool stuff he thought his new pal would like. They eventually talked about forming a band together.

One of the old 45s Buck was intrigued by was Sugar On Sunday, a 1969 single by a short-lived Texas band called The Clique. It reached as high as #22 on the Billboard Hot 100. It would be their only radio hit and they didn’t even write it. It was a cover of a Tommy James & The Shondells song, originally an album cut from their 1968 release, Crimson & Clover.

When Buck flipped it over, he ended up preferring the B-Side. Now a full-time member of R.E.M. with Stipe, Mike Mills and the bassist’s former bully, drummer Bill Berry, he was actively looking for songs that would make decent covers for live shows. He gave Mills a copy. They planned to work out their own arrangement.

But as the band was starting to write its own material, their priorities shifted. Beyond live performances and the occasional B-side for their eventual IRS singles, the idea of remaking old songs was mostly abandoned.

As the band’s critical reputation grew through the first half of the 80s, one important thing kept eluding them. What was it going to take to get them on mainstream radio? Already fixtures on college stations, most Top 40 and rock listeners didn’t know who they were. Yes, their low-budget videos were getting limited airplay on MTV and MuchMusic and yeah, they did Late Night With David Letterman. But there was no undeniable breakthrough. It also didn’t help that their independent record label IRS didn’t have the greatest distribution system. Their singles and albums weren’t as widely available as they should’ve been.

After releasing three studio records in three years, R.E.M. went to work on the fourth. Lifes Rich Pagent (there’s no apostrophe because Stipe hates them, apparently), the title taken from an Inspector Clouseau line from the second Pink Panther movie, A Shot In The Dark, was mainly a leftovers album. Most of the material was comprised of discarded, unused tracks from earlier album sessions.

While rehearsing in their Athens headquarters on Clayton St., Stipe noticed Mills & Buck fiddling around with a song he didn’t recognize. But he liked what he was hearing. A little short on original songs for the new record, a cover would be one less space to fill.

“Michael didn’t know the words,” Buck later said as recounted in the 1997 book It Crawled From The South: An REM Companion, “so we said, ‘Mike [Mills], you sing lead and Michael [Stipe], you sing exactly what he sings a couple of seconds afterwards.”

(I Am) Superman, that old Clique B-Side, would mark the first time a cover would appear on an REM release. Despite being excluded from all but two of their greatest hits packages (it only surfaced on the IRS releases Singles Collected and the double-disc version of And I Feel Fine…), little did anyone know the remarkable longevity it would go on to enjoy.

On March 8, 1986, during their first ever gig christening the new 40 Watt Club in Athens, the band debuted their new cover. They would continue playing it on numerous shows throughout the rest of the year and into 1987.

Unlisted as the 12th and final track on Pagent (after the original plan for it to be its own B-side was cancelled), the song would also be released as a single on November 3, 1986, three months after the album. The sleeve cover for the 45 features a sketch of an unknown baby, credited to a mysterious Kaleb, a curious Superman reference. On the back cover, it announces the song’s inclusion on the album without noting its unlisted status.

The song begins most unusually. A toy starts screaming in Japanese before Buck kicks in with that catchy hook. When the band toured Japan two years earlier, they picked up a talking Godzilla doll, the kind that you pull with a cord in order to activate its voice. It became a mascot of sorts for a time, often resting on a guitar amp.

Because the movie Godzilla only let out that now iconic scream, the words are actually from a breathless, unknown journalist warning his fellow citizens of the impending danger. This is what he’s saying in English:

“This is a special news report. Godzilla has been sighted in Tokyo Bay. The attack on it by the Self-Defense Force has been useless. He is heading towards the city. AAAAAGGGGHHHH!!!!!”

For the most part, R.E.M doesn’t deviate too much from The Clique’s original. Although Buck’s opening lick offers a few more notes than the B-Side’s single-chord introduction, therefore actually improving it, the basic arrangement is roughly the same, even the little instrumental break before the last set of words. (Both cuts feature a prominent organ during that section.) Only the ending is different. The Clique fades out while R.E.M. stops cold with Buck’s final strum ringing out.

Randy Shaw’s nasally vocals are far more ghostly and buried, but unlike R.E.M.’s remake there is no delayed echo response to every line of the chorus, just direct harmonizing on the last two words of each (“what’s happening” and “do anything”). For the verses, The Clique have the chorus sung at the exact same time resulting in a cluttered feel, making some of the words difficult to ascertain unless you already know them. R.E.M. wisely dropped this distractingly layered approach. In their version, you just hear Mills going high and Stipe going low as they harmonize the verses. Still, you can see why Buck liked the song so much. Despite its creepy stalker lyrics, fairly typical of the era (think The Who’s I Can See For Miles), it’s undeniably hooky.

(I Am) Superman would be slotted in as the last song on Lifes Rich Pagent (it’s track 6 on the “Supper Side” of the LP version) but it was deliberately unlisted on the album’s back cover. (The label side of the actual CD does list it, as does the vinyl edition, simply as Superman, in this case as track 12.) A quick perusal of the liner notes explains something peculiar about the outside track listing.

Right under Swan Swan H is a mysterious “+” sign followed by “___________________”.

When you flip open to the first panel of the liner notes on the left, the first thing you’ll note in capital letters is this:

“ALL SONGS BERRY BUCK MILLS STIPE.”

But right under all the publishing information you’ll see not everything on the album is an original composition. You’ll see “EXCEPT” in slightly smaller block letters followed by that same plus sign and now a much longer line right underneath them.

In the middle of the panel, just below the snail mail information and the gag about a “cricket machine” museum exhibit, you’ll learn who actually wrote Superman. (The label side of the CD itself reprints the same information.)

Alan Zekley, who preferred to be called by his middle name Gary, was a California native who pitched songs he wrote to bands he hoped to produce. (He had his own solo single, Other Towns, Other Girls in 1963.) After writing Superman with Mitch Bottler, Zekley ultimately convinced the members of The Clique to record it.

Eight seconds of silence separates Swan Swan H, the last credited song and this hidden cover tune. According to Peter Buck, as recounted in It Crawled From The South, it just made sense to put some distance between the two:

“Here’s this record and you’ve gone through it and the songs are pretty varied and kinda serious, and there’s this joyous end. It’s kinda dumb and enjoyable. I love it!”

When promoting Lifes Rich Pagent during press interviews at the time, there was a hope on the part of the band to meet the surviving members of The Clique. Unfortunately, they were not so easy to track down now.

But Chuck Fieldman, an entertainment reporter for the Chicago Tribune, managed to locate Zekley through the publisher of the song R.E.M. was about to make famous. Long out of the music business (according to this, his last credit appears to be from 1974), The Clique’s former producer was found working for Texas Instruments in Los Angeles.

Thrilled to bits that this rising college rock band was covering one of his old forgotten songs, he was very eager to meet them. He saw Martha Quinn on MTV talking it up and was already hearing the song on the radio.

As a surprise, having caught the earliest flight he could, he traveled from California to the other side of the country for their first face-to-face encounter backstage before a gig. So happy to see him, the band wanted to return their appreciation by giving him a chance to shine in a way he never had before.

On October 26, less than two weeks before the 45 would appear in stores, R.E.M. played a show in the college town of De Kalb, Illinois. Just before they played Superman that night, Zekley was introduced by Mike Mills and brought out on stage. A bootleg video of the moment posted on YouTube shows an overjoyed Zekley singing back-up with Michael Stipe, enthusiastically dancing on the spot and banging a tambourine with a great deal of delight.

He had so much fun, he came back to do it all over again on November 6 during a show at the Felt Forum in New York City, three days after the Superman single became available for purchase.

Seizing an opportunity, IRS Records rushed out a press release entitled “‘Superman’ Writer Comes Forward, Joins R.E.M. On Stage” where Zekley offers high praise for R.E.M.’s cover:

“They did it the way I did it. They did the hell out of it. It speaks to me.”

Radio broadcasters agreed. Well, at least the ones programming rock stations. While it never cracked Billboard’s Hot 100 (Fall On Me, the first single from Lifes Rich Pagent, at least hit 94), R.E.M.’s version of Superman would be added to numerous playlists in North America. As a result, it peaked at #17 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Tracks chart.

And while those same stations played Fall On Me far more often (before The One I Love, it was their highest charting single climbing into the Top 5), (I Am) Superman has had a surprisingly long shelf life long after its original unveiling.

In Tempus, Anyone?, the fourteenth episode of the third season of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman which first aired in 1996, near the half hour mark, the song is heard for just over two minutes. Unfortunately, a knock-off version was substituted for the DVD box set.

Almost fourteen and a half minutes into Dynamic Duets, the seventh episode of the fourth season of Glee which debuted in 2012, romantic rivals Ryder and Jake, dressed as fake Supermen named Mega Studs, compete for the affection of a clearly flattered Marley while doing a slightly sped up redo of the song during a rehearsal for sectionals. Superman comes to an abrupt end 82 seconds later when a fed up Jake slugs the guy he’ll inevitably make peace with right in the kisser. (With a newfound confidence, near the end of the episode, Marley asks out Jake who maybe didn’t blow it after all.)

In the final scene of Superdad, the eighth episode of The Jim Gaffigan Show which aired in 2015, R.E.M.’s cover of Superman plays just as the comedian accidentally locks himself out of his apartment after taking out the garbage in his underwear.

Superman has also become an unlikely jock jam, especially during playoff games on TV. On May 10, 2003, the song was played in the XCEL Center during the first Overtime of Game 1 of the Conference Final Series between the Minnesota Wild and the Anaheim Mighty Ducks. (The Ducks finally scored the only goal of the game in the second overtime in what became the first of four straight victories.)

On June 17, 2008, after Kobe Bryant drained a succession of three-pointers during Game 6 of the NBA Finals between his Los Angeles Lakers and their longtime rivals the Boston Celtics, Superman was played as the TV outro music going into a commercial break. (It was all for naught. The Celtics easily won 131-92, securing their 17th championship.)

Although there was no official video for the track, YouTube is loaded with tributes. One clip pairs the song with scenes from the disappointing Superman Returns, doubling as an unofficial trailer. Another incorporates various clips from numerous Superman shows and movies, including the vintage noirish Max Fleischer cartoons and shots of the best Man Of Steel Christopher Reeve.

Lifes Rich Pagent would be R.E.M.’s most successful IRS album until the release of Document in 1987 when they scored their first legitimate Top 10 single on Billboard. The following year, they made the jump to Warner Bros., released numerous multi-platinum blockbusters and never looked back.

As for Gary Zekley, tragically, he would not get to fully enjoy all the tributes and commercial uses of his once ignored song. He died of a heart attack in 1996. He was only 53.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Friday, October 7, 2022
4:00 a.m.

The History Of The Mystery Track – Eddie Vedder Angrily Mourns Layne Staley

“When I tried drugs, they were fucking great, and they worked for me for years, and now they’re turning against me — and now I’m walking through hell, and this sucks.” – Layne Staley to Rolling Stone (February 8, 1996)

On April 4, 2002, Mike Starr paid an old friend a visit. It was his 36th birthday and he wanted to catch up with the man that he believed saved his life.

Ten years earlier, they were bandmates, both struggling to stay sober. Starr played bass. Layne Staley was the lead singer and one of the main songwriters.

On January 22, 1993, their band Alice In Chains played the Hollywood Rock Festival with Nirvana and the Red Hot Chili Peppers in Brazil. Based on two accounts Starr has given publicly, it’s not entirely clear what actually happened that night.

In one retelling, Starr claimed to author David de Sola that “Layne shot me up [with cocaine] first a couple of times. Then Kurt [Cobain] shot me, and then Layne shot me after that and I died, for like 11 minutes.”

In another told to Dr. Drew Pinsky on the February 16, 2010 edition of his long running radio show Loveline in what became his last interview, Starr claimed that the Nirvana singer and his wife Courtney Love got him high first:

“We shot up all night [but] Layne didn’t know that.”

In this version of events, after Staley helped administer a needle, Starr “flatlined” and didn’t have a pulse. In a panic, Starr claims his terrified pal was “crying and punching me in the face”, in a desperate attempt to revive him.

“I wake up,” Starr claimed to Pinsky, “and I’m all wet and I’m laying over the toilet and, you know, I’m in a different room…and he had me in the shower…I was obviously blacked out during that time…”

According to this Diffuser article in 2007, Starr ultimately survived his ordeal because Staley successfully performed CPR on him.

But in that 2010 Loveline interview, Starr doesn’t mention this at all. In fact, Dr. Pinsky informs him that putting an overdose victim in a shower is one of the worst things one can do, no matter how good the intentions of a caregiver. When he tells Starr that it would’ve been better if Staley had given him fluids or performed CPR, the bassist doesn’t correct him on the latter point. Pinsky insists he was very lucky to survive his ordeal.

Shortly thereafter, Starr left the band. Although it was publicly spun in the best possible light (Staley told Rolling Stone in 1994 Starr was simply homesick and quit), he was actually fired for his uncontrollable addictions. “I never the quit the band,” he told Pinsky on Loveline. “I’m not a quitter.”

Nine years later, the roles were tragically reversed. Although Starr himself was “high on benzodiazepine” that day to his eternal regret, Staley was now the one in desperate need of immediate medical care.

When Starr saw his old friend in his expensive fifth floor condo in Seattle that fateful Spring day in 2002, he was shocked. Barely eating and chronically dependent on heroin, he was living a highly isolated life where he mostly kept to himself at home, although an anonymous source told de Sola he would make trips to a local comic book store he worked at from time to time usually accompanied by a couple of friends who had to “kind of prop him up and help with him a lot.”

Not exactly a large man to begin with, Staley had shriveled next to nothing. He was so incredibly thin Starr wanted to intervene. The guilt he was feeling was overwhelming.

According to de Sola’s account in his unauthorized Alice In Chains bio, the TV was on and Staley was clicking around the dial looking for something to watch when he stumbled upon Crossing Over, the since cancelled syndicated talk show hosted by fake medium John Edward who wrongly claims to have full access to the spirit world.

In an alarming moment, as noted by de Sola, Staley asserted the following to Starr:

“Demri was here last night. I don’t give a fuck if you fucking believe me or not, dude. I’m telling you: Demri was here last night.”

An eventual model/actress, Demri Parrott was in her late teens when she met Staley in the late 80s, well before he broke through in the music business, while working in a retail clothing store in Seattle. By all accounts, she was the love of his life. They were engaged for three years just as his band was starting to find mainstream acceptance.

But the relationship was troubled. Both dived headfirst into drug addiction and both failed multiple times to maintain permanent sobriety. Parrott would develop a heart problem so serious she required a pacemaker.

One night in the fall of 1996, Parrott had ingested some pills, overdosed and fell into a coma for 12 hours. With no hope for a recovery this time, her family requested she be removed from life support. She died October 29th at age 27. (Starr was 27 the night he OD’d in Brazil.) Staley was reportedly so despondent over her death he had to be put on a 24-hour suicide watch. Many close confidantes have since revealed to the press that they believe this is the reason Staley kept using and would no longer seek treatment.

Was Staley so lonely and so lost that he could’ve been experiencing severe hallucinations? Did he really believe he had seen his dead girlfriend in his apartment?

Already awkward and uncomfortable, the visit with Starr was also unpleasant. Staley immediately suspected Starr was using and called him out on it. The two men argued about Staley’s emaciated condition. (Staley didn’t deny he was unwell. Starr recalled him saying, “I’m sick.”) When Starr threatened to call 911, Staley threatened to end their friendship. Fed up with being lectured by a fellow addict while nowhere near healthy himself, Starr stormed out. (“Fine, I’ll just leave.”)

The bassist intended on coming back but never returned:

“I went home and blacked out on benzodiazepine,” he told Pinsky on Loveline.

In his later retelling, he remembered a scared, conflicted Staley’s last words to him:

“Not like this. Don’t leave like this.”

It was the last time anyone saw the Alice In Chains frontman alive.

In the days that followed, his friends, his bandmates, his business associates and especially, his family became even more worried than usual. It was not uncommon for him to ignore the ringing of his phone or to refuse to let anyone enter his building despite repeated knocking and shouts from the street. Months would go by without a word or an encounter at all. (It had been a month or two since he was last seen at his favourite comic book store. His Mom hadn’t seen him since Valentine’s Day.) The silence from his end was already deafening.

It was only when his accountants realized he had stopped withdrawing funds, which he had presumably been using to buy more drugs, as well as comics and action figures, that more alarm bells went off. They contacted Susan Silver, Alice In Chains’ longtime manager, who called his mom.

On April 19, just before 6 p.m., Nancy Staley McCallum arrived at her son’s condo. She knocked on the door and got no response. Then, she dialed 911 requesting a welfare check.

Within 10 minutes two officers from the Seattle Police Department arrived. They knocked on the door. Still no response. They knocked it down.

As they searched for answers on the fifth floor, they made a startling discovery. A razor thin body in “an advanced state of decomposition” still sitting upright on the couch, his skin “darkened” and “leathery”, an empty syringe jabbed in his leg. In his hand, another needle, this one fully loaded, waiting for its turn to be injected.

“You don’t want to see this,” the cops told McCallum.

It was a grisly scene. The place was a mess. Drug paraphernalia scattered all over the place. When Layne Staley’s body was moved, it turned out he was sitting on even more empty needles. The TV was still on. His starving pet cat desperate for food. (Bandmate Jerry Cantrell would later adopt her and she would live for another eight years on his farm, according to de Sola.)

His crestfallen mother said her last words to him as he sat there motionless. All his teeth were missing and he weighed less than 90 pounds. His answering machine completely full of unreturned messages.

After 13 attempts at rehab, three trips to the ER and three previous near-death experiences, Layne Staley’s body could take no more.

The next day, Pearl Jam were back at Bad Animals Studio (now Studio X) in Seattle for a long day of recording. Two months earlier in February 2002, they commenced work on their seventh studio album. They were comfortable here having already recorded Vitalogy and Yield in the previous decade.

By this point, the band had already worked up dozens of songs (“more than 30” altogether, according to a fan who later made a free, unauthorized double-disc bootleg of the complete sessions), far too many to include on a single album.

Then came word about Staley.

“I got a call from Kelly Curtis [Pearl Jam’s manager] that Layne died,” guitarist Mike McCready revealed in the 2011 coffee table book Pearl Jam Twenty. “We were at the studio at probably eleven at night. I wasn’t surprised, but I was. It was sad. I hadn’t seen him for, like, three or four years.”

Back in 1994, McCready had collaborated with Staley on what became the only album by the Seattle supergroup Mad Season which also included Screaming Trees drummer Barrett Martin and bassist John Baker Saunders who later died of a heroin overdose himself in 1999.

Above would surface the next year and spawn the radio hit River Of Deceit. There were plans to do more recording but Staley’s deteriorating health prevented that from ever happening. (However, over time, there were occasional reunions with surviving members for live gigs.) McCready, a recovering addict who met a then sober Saunders in rehab, had hoped this cleaner environment would convince his friend Staley to straighten out for good.

When McCready told his bandmates what had happened, everyone wanted to go home except Eddie Vedder, Pearl Jam’s longtime frontman. He ultimately stayed behind in Studio X with producer Adam Kasper. Filled with rage and despair, Vedder strapped on an electric guitar with banjo tunings and started working on an impromptu solo tribute for Staley. The song was written and recorded that same night. According to McCready, it was recorded at “two or three in the morning”.

“I think he was just so angry, and he wanted to get it out,” the guitarist noted in Pearl Jam Twenty.

Loosely structured like The Velvet Underground’s Heroin but not nearly as powerful despite a highly agreeable lyric, it begins with soft, slow, simple, start-and-stop strumming as Vedder quietly seethes against the many highly successful Layne Staley imitators:

“So all you fools/Who sing just like him/Feel free to do so now/Cause he’s dead”

He never names anyone in particular but surely he’s addressing Scott Stapp. Himself a troubled figure (he, too, struggled with addiction and erratic behaviour until he was properly diagnosed with bi-polar disorder), the Creed frontman achieved far more commercially with his much maligned band than Alice In Chains ever did which clearly irked Vedder. (Human Clay alone sold more copies than all AIC albums combined.)

Rage immediately turns to empathy as Vedder warmly empathizes with Staley’s pain. In a higher register he thankfully quickens his playing to match the adrenaline rush of the elusive high his old friend still desperately craved:

“Using, using, using/The using takes toll”

Imagining he preferred being a loner (“Isolation just so/Happy to be one”), a crushed, helpless Vedder also mourns the absence of Staley’s closest friends and family in his final moments:

“Sad to think of him all alone”

The pace unfortunately slows down again as a low-voiced Vedder mournfully reflects on the bitter irony of his beloved colleague unable and unwilling to reach out when any number of supporters would’ve gladly been there in an instant to help get him clean:

“Lonesome friend/we all knew/Always hoped/You’d pull through”

The tempo increasing once more, Vedder insists Staley’s fans issue no judgment (“No blame, no blame/No blame, it could be you”), and then offers this obvious warning about chronic addiction:

“You can’t grow old using”

Vedder wraps up reiterating his antipathy against the Staley clones calling them “fuckers” and dares them to keep ripping off his distinctive vocals because “it won’t offend him/just me/because he’s dead”.

At the time, Pearl Jam already knew which 15 songs, of the 30 or so they had recorded, would make the cut for Riot Act. Vedder’s anguished tribute to Staley was not going to be one of them.

“Most of the songs are about bigger kinds of things,” guitarist Stone Gossard asserted in Pearl Jam Twenty. “The energy was feeling so positive, and there was something about the song that felt like it maybe wasn’t right for this particular record.”

As a result, 04/20/02, as Vedder would eventually call his solo tribute referring to the date he first learned of Staley’s death (even though technically the song was recorded on April 21st), would stay in the vault.

A year later, as the band grew disenchanted with Sony, the band decided to no longer produce studio albums for their longtime label. Instead, they started compiling existing tracks for a couple of double compilations.

The first one, Lost Dogs, features B-Sides, soundtrack and tribute album contributions, a few rare fan club singles and material never before unveiled. As the band discussed the track listing, inevitably the subject of 04/20/02 came up. Was it finally time to release it?

In the end, the answer would be yes but everyone agreed it would be buried at the end of track 14 on disc two. It begins just after the six-minute mark.

“I think the reason it’s hidden,” Mike McCready asserted in Pearl Jam Twenty, “is because [Vedder] wouldn’t want it to be exploitative. I think he wants it to be hidden so you have to find it and think about it.”

Pearl Jam’s personal and professional relationships with Staley and Alice In Chains goes right back to their origins. In 1991, AIC asked them to open for them on numerous dates during their tour in support of their major label debut Facelift. At the start of that year, Pearl Jam were still going by their soon-to-be-discarded original name Mookie Blaylock, the New Jersey Net whose jersey number 10 became the title of their own first full-length release.

Both bands appeared in the underappreciated Singles, Cameron Crowe’s humourous cinematic paean to the Seattle music scene. And they both shared space on the more popular soundtrack which has since been rereleased and expanded. Alice In Chains and Pearl Jam would continue to play live shows together right up until the late summer of 1992.

In the decades since his death, Staley has not been forgotten by the man who secretly eulogized him on Lost Dogs.

When Pearl Jam played a show in Chicago on August 22, 2016, Vedder had a very special reason for bringing up his friend’s memory:

“It’s the birthday of a guy called Layne Staley tonight, and we’re thinking of him tonight too.” As Vedder pointed out that night, he would’ve been 49.

Pearl Jam played Man Of The Hour, a song given to the Tim Burton film Big Fish, in his honour.

Almost exactly four years later, Vedder appeared on a podcast hosted by Chris Cornell’s daughter Lily. Although much of the conversation focused on his close friendship with the late Soundgarden vocalist, while discussing his “dark lyrics”, he also pointed out similar traits shared with Kurt Cobain and Staley:

“These weren’t people going, ‘I’m going to pretend to write a dark song.’ It was real for everybody. It became a thing to make fun of the dour grunge groups. I think people took it personally. They were like, ‘We weren’t fucking around.’ That’s probably why people liked it and seemed to need it. ‘This guy is speaking for me. I feel these things.’”

Like Ian Curtis before him, when it came to songwriting, Layne Staley never kept his personal demons closeted. They were always there, front and centre, unvarnished and uncensored. Like Lou Reed before him, he did not advocate for more addicts. (“I don’t want my fans to think heroin was cool,” he told Rolling Stone in 1996.) He presented cautionary tales based entirely on his own self-destruction. If you paid attention, you heeded his words and hopefully avoided dangerous paths of your own. If you didn’t, you either ignored his suffering or paid your own price for being a devoted, misguided follower.

One man who never got over his death was Mike Starr. Eight years after their last encounter, Starr had appeared on the third season of Celebrity Rehab in extraordinarily rough shape. (In one scene while lying in bed one night, he rolls over and vomits on the floor before falling back to sleep again.)

In one fateful episode, he speaks with Layne’s Mom where he expresses deep regret and shame for not calling 911 that traumatic April day. (“I wish I would’ve called 911 that day…I wish I would’ve known he was dying…I wouldn’t have just walked out the door.”)

To her eternal credit, a kindhearted McCallum doesn’t blame Starr at all and insists that “Layne would forgive you.” When the bassist expresses his profound shame for not being sober when confronting his old friend, McCallum explains why her son wouldn’t call 911 himself:

“Because he was embarrassed. A beautiful man with huge talent had squandered his life and his talents and that’s not a judgment, that’s just a statement of fact and he knew that. And it’s a horrible thing but I don’t blame you and I never have.”

Despite her best efforts, Starr never forgave himself. Despite brief periods of good health, he reverted back to his worst impulses until March 8, 2011 when he was discovered dead of an overdose in a home he shared with Days Of The New’s Travis Meeks, his new bandmate, in Utah. He was 44.

Two years earlier, Alice In Chains would reconvene after a long absence with a new singer. Pearl Jam would join them for a festival gig in Belgium in 2010, the first time in nearly twenty years that the two bands had shared a bill together.

In Grunge Is Dead, one of two literary oral histories about the Seattle scene, Nancy Staley McCallum revealed how she struggled to fully understand her son’s health problems:

“…I was completely unaware or completely unprepared for any kind of drug involvement. He struggled a bit in high school for a couple of years, but had quit using. Then he was off and running with the band…I had no idea how to help my son, and I didn’t know how severe his use was. I just didn’t know how much to be alarmed.”

She didn’t accept that his music was often autobiographical until it was too late:

“I thought that the songs he was singing about drug addiction were about people he was observing…I was so naive. If I had any idea what the entertainment industry is like, and what would happen to him…I would have hidden him.”

In his 2010 interview with Drew Pinsky on Loveline, Starr was still struggling with the loss of his best friend:

“Sometimes I feel naked without Layne in this life…I just really miss him.”

As for Alice In Chains, starting in 2013, founding drummer Sean Kinney starting paying tribute to both men. The front of his bass drum reads “LSMS”, the initials for Layne Staley and Mike Starr.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Wednesday, September 14, 2022
9:32 p.m.

CORRECTION: Layne Staley had a cat, not a dog, that was later adopted by his friend and bandmate Jerry Cantrell. Many thanks to GrungeFairy54 over at Reddit for pointing out the error, the kind comment and posting the link which explains why this piece has been accessed so much recently. I’ve corrected the text. I’m sorry for not catching my mistake sooner.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Wednesday, February 7, 2024
3:00 p.m.

Oh, What A Fart (Song Parody)

(With deep apologies to Bob Gaudio, Judy Parker, Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons.)

(To the tune of December 1963 (Oh, What A Night).)

Oh, what a fart
Ripe & juicy, it slipped out, you see
How embarrassing it was for me
A smell so heinous, what a fart

Oh, what a fart
You know I wouldn’t even take the blame
She would never ever be the same
It still lingers, what a fart

Oh, I, got a funny feeling when they all cleared the room
Oh my, as I recall it rippled much too soon

(Oh, what a fart!)

It burned the hairs all up inside her nose
Couldn’t wash the stench right off her clothes
It lives forever, what a fart

It just came out sounding like a clap of thunder
I turned her off with my nauseating blunder

(Oh, what a fart!)

Oh, I, got a funny feeling when she walked in the room
Oh my, as I recall she threw up way too soon

(Oh, what a fart!)

Why’d it take so song to share this gift?
No more clenching now just let it rip
Happy blasting, what a fart

I felt a rush as my pride just went asunder
Release the gas inside, a flatulent wonder

Oh, what a fart!
(doo, doo, doo, doo doo, doo, doo, doo, doo doo)
Oh, what a fart!
(doo, doo, doo, doo doo, doo, doo, doo, doo doo)
Oh, what a fart!
(doo, doo, doo, doo doo, doo, doo, doo, doo doo)
Oh, what a fart!
(doo, doo, doo, doo doo, doo, doo, doo, doo doo)
Oh, what a fart!
(doo, doo, doo, doo doo, doo, doo, doo, doo doo)

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Sunday, June 27, 2021
7:50 p.m.

The History Of The Mystery Track – The Osbournes Family Album

“At one point I said to Ozzy and Sharon, ‘You guys should do a show where they just follow you around with a camera. I would watch that because of the sheer craziness of you two.’ So their reality show was basically an idea introduced in one of my interviews…I never missed an episode.” (from Howard Stern Comes Again)

Ever since PBS made a show about a dysfunctional family in the early 1970s, there has been a curious fascination about Reality Television. How much of it is actually real? How much is actually scripted? Who would want to put their private lives on full display for the world to see?

For thirty years, reality shows focused exclusively on ordinary people outside the gated communities of Hollywood. That all changed in 2002.

Ever since the successful launch of the Real World a decade earlier, MTV had been slowly transitioning away from playing music videos. As the show kept being renewed every year, the channel starting thinking about expanding the concept.

In 2000, Ozzy Osbourne and his family were featured in an episode of Cribs, the long running series that takes viewers inside lavish celebrity homes. “Then, about a year later,” recalled MTV executive Lois Curren to Entertainment Weekly in their April 19, 2002 cover story, “we had dinner with Sharon [Ozzy’s wife and manager] and the kids. We just laughed so hard over Sharon’s stories that we said, ‘That’s the show. You guys.'”

“I thought it would be like Absolutely Fabulous,” Sharon told EW in the same issue. “Like something popular but only with a small number of people. I had NO idea it would ever be like this.”

As it turns out, that humblebrag would be dead-on accurate. When The Osbournes debuted in March 2002, it became an instant sensation. 5 million viewers tuned in for the premiere, rather small for network Television but record breaking for cable, and that number would only grow throughout the first season. Three more would follow.

Suddenly, the first family of heavy metal were all household names meriting breathless media coverage, a mix of delight (from fans new & old and many professional critics) and harsh condemnation (from the likes of noted scold and future convicted serial rapist Bill Cosby). The show was so popular Ozzy & Sharon were invited to the White House Correspondent’s Dinner where then-President George W. Bush joked that his elderly mom Barbara was a fan. The former Black Sabbath frontman stood, laughed, blew a kiss and smiled in appreciation. All of it captured by MTV’s omnipresent cameramen.

Three months after the first episode hooked viewers into becoming regular watchers, The Osbournes Family Album was released by Sony. Clocking in at exactly 57 minutes, the CD features a mix of songs chosen by the family as well as selected dialogue clips from the show.

Here’s the thing. There’s no mention of the bonus audio anywhere in the track listing or the liner notes. Not only that, there’s no track numbers noted next to the songs that are listed. What we have here is a rarity in the history of recorded music. The Osbournes Family Album is a mystery album where nothing is where it’s supposed to be.

Track 1 does not feature Pat Boone’s version of Ozzy’s first solo single Crazy Train (that’s on track 2). Instead, you hear Ozzy during a radio interview talking about him:

“I used to live next door to Pat Boone [for three years] and I gotta tell you, people think Pat Boone’s a nerd and I always confess I was in that category for a while until I met him, you know?”

While Ted Stryker, a then-afternoon DJ (now one of the morning guys) on KROQ, the LA modern rock station (who several years later became an on-screen DJ for Ellen DeGeneres’ daytime talk show for a brief time), listens and says, “Right,” a couple of times, Ozzy finishes his thought:

“And he really is, I mean living next door to The Osbournes, bricks goes [sic], rocks goes [sic] through the window and cats goes [sic] flying out the door and he never complained once.”

This is taken from the beginning of the fourth episode, Won’t You Be My Neighbour?, the one where the family gets into a bizarre feud with their noisy neighbours next door. (Remember Sharon throwing a ham over to their side?)

For some reason, parts of Ozzy’s opening comment have been trimmed from the CD. In the show, he actually begins, “In my old days, I used to…” and then everything is exactly the same as it is on the CD.

Following Boone’s dorky 1997 cover (its only appearance on The Osbournes is at the start of the second segment of episode six), which sounds like bad spy movie music and features back-up singers actually making “choo choo” noises (a much better abbreviated take featuring Lewis Lamedica became the show’s theme), we’re onto track 3 and another uncredited audio clip featuring Ozzy:

“I love you all. I love you more than life itself. But you’re all fucking mad!”

One of the most famous soundbites from the show (it’s reprinted in the liner notes with “fucking” censored as “f*@%ing”), this is swiped from the premiere episode, A House Divided, where the family moves into their new mansion in California. It’s actually heard twice in the show. The first time during the cold open where we first see Ozzy, Sharon and two of their three kids. At the one minute, four second mark Ozzy utters his comment to 15-year-old Jack in the kitchen.

Near the end of the show, we get a fuller context for the comment just before it reappears at 19 minutes and 14 seconds. In what will be a recurring theme throughout the season, Jack and sister Kelly are not getting along. When Jack comes into the living room/kitchen to complain about her ditching him and one of her friends at a club they were all hanging out at one night, Ozzy wonders why he won’t go to Sharon. Jack explains he already did that and despite promising to sort things out between them, according to him, she’s done “fuck-all.”

Not at all interested in this sort of drama, a lovingly indifferent Ozzy levels with his son and offers his familiar comment while Get Me Through, a single from his 2001 Down To Earth album that he performs live on Jay Leno’s Tonight Show on the same episode, plays in the background. The clip reappears a third time in the season finale during a highlight reel at the 20:17 mark.

Track 4 features Ozzy’s pretty cautionary tale Dreamer (which is sampled on episodes six and seven). Also spawned from Down To Earth (a reference to Black Sabbath’s original name), this plaintive plea for peace and harmony in spite of ongoing anguish and widespread planetary damage was obviously inspired by John Lennon’s Imagine, Ozzy’s favourite all-time song, which coincidentally enough appears on track 12.

The next unlisted audio track is on track 5. In another famous exchange, Ozzy lectures his underage teenage kids just before they go out to the Roxy, the legendary rock club in LA:

“Please don’t [unintelligible] get drunk or, or get stoned tonight. Don’t drink, don’t take drugs tonight.”

Kelly softly insists, “No, no, I don’t do that. I don’t do that.”

“Please,” a concerned Ozzy replies before finishing with, “And if you have sex wear a condom.”

This happens at the 17 minute, 31 second mark of the season premiere. A pink-haired Kelly actually winces after Ozzy’s insistent birth control remark.

In the actual episode, while looking at Jack, Ozzy explains his reasoning, “cause I’m fuckin’ pissed off that I can’t,” which isn’t heard on the CD. The following “Don’t be,” has also been cut for the CD version just before his “Don’t drink” comment.

An abbreviated portion of Ozzy’s comments – the first two lines, then the condom remark – are reprised during the clip montage in episode ten, the season finale, at 18:58.

As was later revealed, both Jack and Kelly had already been developing terrible drug addictions for years. In fact, in one episode, realizing something is very wrong, Sharon and Ozzy have a meeting with them about it, a rare serious moment for the series. But the kids are in denial and will remain out of control until both check into rehab a couple of years later. In 2003, Jack opened up to MTV about his problems. (Recently in 2021, Kelly revealed she’s relapsed.) Ozzy would publicly blame himself and Sharon for not being stricter.

Track 6 is Kelly’s energetic, rocked-up cover of Madonna’s Papa Don’t Breach featuring two members of Incubus (in season two, she performs it at the MTV Video Music Awards with a different backing band, her first ever live gig) which was also a Buried Song on her first album, Shut Up. (You’ll find it on track 11 with 3:25 left on the CD.) Her mostly absent sister Aimee, seen exactly once in a family photo in the opening shot but thereafter with a blurred face (curiously, in one instance, the same family photo later on) and only heard twice, was originally offered the chance to sing it but passed. The Osbourne Family Album is actually dedicated to her:

“This album is dedicated to Aimee Osbourne, to let you know Aimee, we are all so proud of you and love you unconditionally. Mom, Dad, Kelly & Jack.”

Unlike me, most critics were unimpressed, including a fictional, award-winning TV pimp. On the ninth episode of the first season of Chappelle’s Show, which originally aired on March 19, 2003, in the fourth and final skit, Dave Chappelle plays Silky Johnson, the Playa Hater Of The Year. While he looks at a photo of the Osbourne family, regarding Kelly, he zings, “I like the song the girl sings, ‘Papa Don’t Preach’. I got a new song for ya, bitch. It’s called ‘Daughter Don’t Sing’.”

Track 7 actually features two clips with a bit of silence in between. In the first one, we’re in the middle of Kelly complaining to Ozzy about her mostly unseen older sister Aimee booking her an appointment without her permission.

“No,” Kelly says at the top, three minutes and nine seconds into episode four. She’s responding to Ozzy asking his youngest daughter, “Did you have an appointment?” The family’s Australian nanny Melinda is the one who says, “It wasn’t a practical joke.” In the actual show, this is a response to Ozzy’s suggestion of a sisterly prank. Both of Ozzy’s remarks aren’t heard on the CD.

Kelly then complains, “She was gonna send me to the dentist. She was gonna get me a new car. She was gonna send me to a fucking gynaecologist. I’m like, ‘Aimee, my teeth, my car, my body, my vagina, my business.’”

At the time, Kelly had an obsession with talking about her genitals to the point where her own mom wonders perhaps half-jokingly if she should’ve named her Vagina Osbourne instead. (The vagina obsession continues into season two.)

This is part of a much longer conversation that begins just before the two and a half minute mark and runs roughly three and a half minutes altogether. Its placement next to Papa Don’t Preach is deliberate. In the actual episode, Ozzy wonders if Kelly has been sexually active (she does admit to a previous UTI) which she denies in smirking embarrassment. He then jokes that if she does get pregnant, he’ll do some damage to the guy responsible. He picks up a phallic-looking object from the kitchen to drive home the point.

Kelly’s last line, minus her sister’s name, reappears in the season overview segment at the end of episode 10 at 19:04.

The tension between the two siblings continues all these years later. In a 2021 appearance on Dax Shepard’s podcast, Kelly revealed they’ve stopped speaking to each other altogether.

A couple seconds later on the CD, Ozzy is suddenly heard screaming, “Rock and rolllll!!!!!”

42 seconds into the premiere episode, you’ll watch the prince of darkness climb out of a golf cart and stare into the camera as he shouts this. It pops up again in the very last shot at 20:58. It reappears at the 6:01 mark of episode three as we see the rest of the scene play out. Ozzy simply goes from the cart to an awaiting plane. Later that episode, close to nine and a half minutes in, he screams the phrase again as he climbs out of a helicopter.

Track 8 features the original version of You Really Got Me by The Kinks, one of the first songs that turned Ozzy onto rock and roll. It remains a scrappy blast of teenage lust.

Track 9 is also two show clips edited into one. It begins with a gasping Kelly complaining to her mother:

“Oh my God, Mom!  The valet guy farted in my car.”

Sharon (appalled):  “Ohhh! Ohhhh! I hate that!”

Kelly: “No. No…”

This is also from episode four and follows a longer conversation about their annoyingly rude neighbours at 11:13. Then, suddenly, Sharon takes a shot at a certain famous domestic goddess:

“Martha Stewart can lick my scrotum.”

This is actually from the start of the fifth episode Tour Of Duty as Sharon complains about working in the kitchen. It’s heard right at the start of the show at the 12-second mark. She then turns to the cameraperson and sincerely asks, “Do I have a scrotum?”

System Of A Down’s eccentric and offbeat cover of Black Sabbath’s Snowblind from Vol. 4 (in the liner notes, Jack felt it was overlooked) follows on track 10. Never included on any of their proper albums, the song originally appeared on the 2000 tribute sequel, Nativity In Black II. Snowblind also became a B-Side to their original singles Aerial (strictly the vinyl release in 2002) and Lonely Day (in 2006).

Another quick clip of Ozzy screaming appears on track 11. “Stop shouting at me!” he yells at a silent Jack in his den for some unknown reason 19 minutes and 37 seconds into the opening episode of this first season.

After John Lennon’s memorable left-wing manifesto concludes on track 12, Ozzy’s youngest son is heard asserting some questionable science about his generation:

“Studies show a teenager’s brain doesn’t really become functional until past 10:30, I think.” It’s not clear in that moment if he means a.m. or p.m. but judging by how often he stays out late at night (his parents give him a 2:30 curfew which he rarely follows), it sure sounds like the latter.

He then makes some weird animal noises (while uttering the word “dirty”), something that frequently drives Ozzy and Kelly batty throughout the season and even on the looping scene shown on the menu page of disc one of the first season DVD box set. The whole clip is heard 25 seconds into the premiere episode.

Track 14 showcases one of Aimee’s all-time favourite songs, Drive by The Cars. Sobering and reflective, it has held up remarkably well since its original release in 1984. In the liner notes, Sharon explains that a young Aimee developed, shall we say, an unhealthy attachment to the track:

“Aimee was obsessed with the song to the point where Ozzy and I had to play it for her at least twenty times a day to keep her happy.”

Listening to the song happily reminds Sharon of watching her eldest daughter “as a baby dancing around to the music,” even though it’s a slow-paced ballad.

Track 15 takes us back to the fourth episode as Sharon tries to dissuade Ozzy from throwing firewood towards the house of their new enemies:

“Sharon: “Ozzy!”

Ozzy: “What?”

Sharon: “No, no, no, no, no, here’s the fruit! [pause] Ozzy!  Not wood!  [pause] You can be picked up for manslaughter! [chuckling through last word] [glass breaks]”

This exchange happens near the end of the show at 19:53. By the way, Ozzy didn’t actually break a window. (MTV added a sound effect.) According to Sharon on the DVD commentary, it was actually open and landed on the neighbours’ coffee table. Since the original airing, in that same commentary Jack reveals relations between the two warring parties actually improved and there were no further confrontations.

Starsailor, a fave of Kelly’s, performs a faithful live version of Good Souls, their engaging hit single from their 2002 debut Love Is Here, on track 16. The UK band played it during their August 28, 2001 gig at the famous Troubadour club in Los Angeles, the same venue that turned Elton John into a star on the rise more than 30 years earlier. It’s an exclusive to this release.

Next up on track 17 is a very relatable Ozzy rant about one of the family pets:

“Who’s pissed…who’s pissed on my fucking carpet?  That bastard fucking dog, man.  I’m gonna throw ya in the fucking pool. Where is he?  Get the fuck out of my house, you fucking…get the fuck out.  Go on. Get the fuck out!  [opens sliding door and lets out dog] It’s that fucking terrorist, he’s part of Bin Laden’s gang.”

This is from episode two Bark At The Moon and is easily the funniest clip on the whole CD. It begins at the 9:30 mark. After asking, “Why do they do it, Sharon?”, the response is actually spliced in from another clip seven minutes and 21 seconds later:

Sharon:  “It’s the therapist.  And she’s gonna help us with the dog.”

Ozzy:  “No, darling, you don’t need a therapist, you just need to get up at 7 and open the fucking door!”

Part of Ozzy’s opening line (“…who’s pissed on my…carpet?”) returns in the season finale as part of the overall wrap-up at 18:51.

As for the therapist, who makes a brief cameo, her efforts to prevent future in-house dumping by the family’s canine pets (the cats actually go regularly in a litter box) are a predictable failure.

Despite only being in his mid-teens, following an internship at Virgin Records, Jack had somehow been hired by Epic Records, a label owned by Sony, to do A&R to scope out fresh talent. In the first season, we only see one such signing: Dillusion, the same band Kelly takes credit for discovering on the show much to Jack’s irritation. On track 18, this derivative post-grunge outfit dust off the old soft/loud routine, a technique Nirvana perfected a decade earlier, while performing a forgettable song called Mirror Image. In the liner notes, Jack says he had been “developing” them for “over a year” but ultimately, the band would not survive. In fact, this would mark their only official major label release.

A self-titled self-released six-song EP, which excludes Mirror Image, would be available through the band’s official website in 2003. Unfortunately, the website no longer exists. (You can’t even call up a cached version.) In 2004, two songs ended up on an Australian compilation entitled Adelaide Energy – 100% Local Produce. There has been nothing since.

Moving on to track 19, the next unlisted audio track:

Ozzy: “I’ve gotta box of, box of those Viagra, I’m all loaded and I fire blanks, you know?”

Jack: “Aww. [singing in a high voice] La, la, la, la, laaaa!”

Sharon: “No, but he started to take Viagra and we’d wait and wait for it to work. [Ozzy chuckles] I’d fall asleep…

Ozzy: “And I’ll be a…”

Sharon: “…and he’d be there with a big boner and I’m fast asleep and [lightly laughing] he can’t wake me up!”

Ozzy: “I go [louder], ‘ Sharon!  I’m ready!’ [Sharon lightly chuckles] She’s going, ‘Get lost!’ [Sharon laughs] I’m lying there like I’m camping with a tentpole. [Sharon laughs]

Jack [singing in a high voice]: “La, la, la, la, laaaa!”

Ozzy and Sharon are discussing their sex life on a 2001 episode of the KROQ radio series Loveline with Dr. Drew Pinsky and Adam Carolla, as replayed on episode 3, Like Father Like Daughter. (Additional footage from the interview, more than 20 minutes worth, is included on disc two of the first season DVD box set. Ozzy reveals that his anti-depressant medication made him impotent, hence the need for Viagra.)

Jack isn’t in the studio with them. He’s listening with Melinda the nanny in one of the family cars because they aren’t able to listen in the house. Grossed out by the frank conversation, Jack sticks his fingers in his ears and starts singing to block out the objectionable revelations.

In an outtake found on the first season DVD box set, Sharon frankly discusses giving Ozzy a blowjob in front of a repulsed Kelly, who like Jack, already has a problem with her parents kissing in public.

Eric Clapton’s bland tribute to his abused ex-wife Pattie Boyd, Wonderful Tonight, a favourite of The Osbourne parents, is found on track 20. In the liner notes, they declare it “the best love song ever recorded”.

Despite being perhaps the dullest single Slowhand ever released (and apparently a cautionary tale about drunk driving), the song continues to live on through movies and other TV shows. (Curiously, it’s not heard at all during The Osbournes.) Its most famous use was at the end of the Friends episode where Chandler and Monica get engaged (it’s the song they dance to during the closing credits). Less well-known, because it’s only faintly heard, is its mercifully brief presence in an early scene from Captain Phillips as Tom Hanks checks his email on his ship before the hijacking by Somali pirates.

Ozzy is next heard screaming his wife’s name on track 21. This is heard at 12:30 of the Thanksgiving-themed seventh episode Get Stuffed (he screams her name again 28 seconds later) when the singer is outside his property trying to catch the reluctant Puss, the eldest of the family cats, in order to bring her back inside the family mansion. He doesn’t have much luck hence the familiar cry of “Sharon!!!!”

Track 22 features Ozzy’s only American Top 40 single, Mama, I’m Coming Home (co-written with Lemmy from Motorhead) from the 1991 No More Tears album, a fitting tribute to Sharon who frequently calls him Daddy, sometimes in an annoying baby voice, on the TV show. Heartfelt and appropriately bittersweet, it alludes to Sharon saving Ozzy’s career when he was fired from Black Sabbath in the late 70s while also acknowledging their turbulent history. In the liner notes, Sharon recalls that a lonesome, homesick Ozzy wrote it during a long tour and didn’t record it until after he sent his wife the lyrics to look over. “This is my favourite Ozzy song,” she declares.

A brief snippet of Mama, I’m Coming Home is heard close to the nine-minute mark of episode six.

Track 23 captures a moment from midway through season one. Ozzy was preparing for a Christmas show at the end of 2001 and was not exactly pleased with some of the proposed special effects he was looking at when he walked into the venue:

As his wife sings the title of the old Don Ho song Tiny Bubbles (not seen on TV), a grumpy Ozzy remarks:

“Bubbles!  Oh, come on, Sharon!  I’m fucking Ozzy Osbourne, the prince of fucking darkness!  Evil, evil, what’s fucking evil about a buttload of fucking bubbles, then?”

He’s got a point. This famous comment is heard in the fifth episode at 15:46. It returns for the montage in the season finale, five episodes later at 19:59.

The original version of Crazy Train pops up on track 24. (Live portions from a couple of Ozzy’s 2001 concerts appear at the end of episode five and the start of episode six. Episode five also features a brief band rehearsal of it.) First heard on Ozzy’s solo debut Blizzard Of Oz in 1980, it features the late great Randy Rhoads shredding like a motherfucker all the way through. A modest success during its initial release (rock radio embraced it more than Top 40), it has since become a Jock Jam, a frequent rabblerousing crowd pleaser for sporting events like NHL games. A precursor to Dreamer, it also pleads for humanity to come together while also correctly predicting a lot of personal woes for Ozzy. It might be his greatest single.

Track 25 is actually two clips separated by a bit of silence.

It begins with Kelly screaming while being chased by Jack around the family’s pool table as seen 1:37 into episode six, Break A Leg, and again 20:22 near the end of the season finale. In the actual moment, she screams twice, the second time a bit longer. The one-second scream on the CD is followed by an explosion. This appears to be the moment from episode five Tour Of Duty when Ozzy tests out the firework cannon on his Christmas sleigh for his Merry Mayhem show at the 13:59 mark. It’s seen again at the 18:40 mark of the season finale, Dinner With Ozzy.

Then, Sharon asks her family a question:

“Did anybody feed the dogs? [water running]”

Kelly angrily retorts, “NO!”

This part can be seen eight minutes and 33 seconds into episode 2. This exchange is reprised at 18:41 of the finale.

Immediately following is an unrelated quip from Ozzy:

“Maybe we have too many dogs?”

Same episode, but it’s actually said much earlier at 4:51. This is actually snipped from a longer comment. Ozzy begins by saying, “The Osbourne family is a great family of wasting money and saying, ‘Well…,” which leads to his line from the CD, followed by “and we’ll throw the cat in just for fun.” Ozzy isn’t pleased that Sharon has adopted another feline despite saying she wouldn’t.

Right after he says it, you’ll hear a bunch of the family dogs panting and then Lola the bulldog pukes, the latter of which is just after the 17-minute mark in episode eight. All of this is seen and heard again in the season finale round-up starting at 18:41. Seemingly reacting to Lola, an unseen Ozzy moans “Oh.”

In that tenth episode, Ozzy is interviewed while sampling a multi-coursed meal. His comment, “That’s the way we are. [pause] We’re, we’re the Osbournes. [pause] I love it.”, is the very last scene before the end credits roll at 20:55.

The final song is Chevelle’s Family System on track 26. An effective cross between Tool and Incubus, it’s the only song not commented on in the liner notes. The opening track from their breakthrough 2002 album Wonder What’s Next (which ultimately went double platinum), the band would end up playing the 2003 Ozzfest tour. Still active today, they released their most recent album, Niratias, in March 2021.

The compilation concludes with one last clip from the TV show on track 27. As usual, Jack and Kelly are sniping at each other. Both accuse the other of name dropping their famous dad to get into clubs. As Jack tries to defend himself (“Yeah, but…”), a peeved Sharon intervenes:

“I’ll tell you what.  I’m Ozzy Osbourne’s wife.  Now shut the fuck up and go to bed.”

Sharon’s comment, preceded by Jack’s protest, is heard in the premiere episode 22 seconds in. All the excised digs that lead up to this moment are shown later on in the 14th minute.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Wednesday, June 1, 2021
2:03 a.m.

The History Of The Mystery Track – Lauryn Hill Covers Frankie Valli

On August 8, 1997, a new film opened in theatres. Released by Warner Bros., Conspiracy Theory is a comic thriller about a paranoid cabbie who produces a regular newsletter filled with his outlandish ideas about government malfeasance. One such theory, however, turns out to be dead-on accurate suddenly putting his life in danger.

Early on in the film there’s a scene where he’s sitting in his cab. With tiny binoculars he watches a young woman through her window in her apartment building singing along while running on a treadmill. He figures she’s listening to the radio so he flips through the stations in his car hoping to match what he’s hearing to what she’s singing.

In the original script written by Brian Helgeland, the song was supposed to be Blue Moon, an old Rodgers & Hart number from 1934. Instead of securing the rights to the original recording, Helgeland wanted the song covered by Annie Lennox who conveniently was riding high at the time with her hit covers album Medusa. (The screenplay was completed in 1995.)

But by the time Conspiracy Theory had reached the post-production stage of completion in mid-1997, producers ultimately wanted a younger, hotter talent to cover a different song from a more contemporary era.

In February 1996, The Fugees released their second album, The Score. One of the big singles was Killing Me Softly, an uptempo cover of an old Roberta Flack ballad, vocalized by the charismatic 21-year-old Lauryn Hill. Along with other original hits like Fu-Gee-La and Ready Or Not, The Score would go to sell more than 20 million copies worldwide.

But complicated personal entanglements and internal struggles for outside creative freedom involving two members of the trio would ultimately derail the band just as they finally figured out how to get over with a mass audience.

Hill was having an affair with Jean and they were both cheating on each other. Jean actually married his other lover while Hill was having what would become a longterm common law relationship with one of Bob Marley’s sons, the father of their eventual five children.

The final straw was Jean’s refusal to support Hill’s desire to work on her own music outside the group, an idea she had openly expressed internally for a while but denied publicly to the press. At one point, probably realizing this might be the end of the band, Jean then offered to produce her but she refused. By 1997, Hill, Jean and their bandmate Pras would all focus exclusively on their own separate solo projects. Despite occasional live reunions in the 2000s and at least one single, there would be no collective follow-up to The Score.

By the time the producers of Conspiracy Theory came calling, Hill was in the third trimester of her first pregnancy and already working on her first batch of individual songs.

“The recording took about a year and a half,” Commissioner Gordon Williams, the engineer of that eventual solo debut told Rolling Stone magazine in 2008. “Sony never wanted her to make a solo record; they wanted her to make another Fugees record.”

In the midst of all of this, Hill agreed to record a cover for Conspiracy Theory. With Blue Moon discarded as the possible song that Julia Roberts sings along to while Mel Gibson spies on her, producers had cleared another tune that had already been redone by countless artists before.

In 1966, Bob Crewe had suggested a title to his songwriting partner Bob Gaudio. From there, the two worked out a musical scenario, based very loosely on various real-life situations Gaudio knew about and personally experienced, involving a guy madly in love with a woman so beautiful he cannot look away, he is completely transfixed. Rather than record this new song with his vocal quartet The Four Seasons (which included Gaudio as a founding member), the song was constructed strictly for lead singer Frankie Valli who released it under his own name.

Delayed for a full year, after a slow start, Can’t Take My Eyes Off You would go on to become a legitimate smash in 1967, peaking at number two on the Billboard Hot 100. Eleven years later, cast members of The Deer Hunter would sing along to its famous chorus in a scene before they get shipped off to Vietnam, a moment which eventually inspired the Broadway musical Jersey Boys.

Unfortunately, Lauryn Hill had a big problem as the deadline to complete the sessions for her album was fast approaching.

“She called me and said she was behind and had to get it done.” Commissioner Gordon told Rolling Stone. “She didn’t know how the arrangement of the song went, so we went and got a copy from Coconuts or Sam Goody.”

From there, Hill and her creative team quickly put together their own version of the song, updating the arrangement with a more consistent, hip-swiveling gallop without losing any of its heart or soul. The famous horn and string sections from the Motown-inspired original may be gone (although that sure sounds like a slight sample of the former before the first chorus) but in its place is a funky contemporary take on the basic framework. There’s imitative Bobby McFerrinesque instrumentation, beatboxing, an old-timey organ and a smooth, laidback vocal from Hill who name checks the Warner Bros. film that commissioned this performance.

Commissioner Gordon “had a little one-room 16-track studio in my apartment in Jersey. Lauryn was eight months pregnant, laying on her back on the floor, half asleep, holding a handheld mike. She did all of those vocals off the top of her head pretty much in one take, with the beat box and all of that. That blew me away.”

When the song was completed, it was sent to Warner Bros. and quickly forgotten about. Hill gave birth to her son Zion four days after Conspiracy Theory began its late summer theatrical run.

Around the same time of the film’s cinematic debut, the soundtrack was released. Curiously, Hill’s new cover was not included. In fact, there are no pop songs on the album, just 40 minutes or so of composer Carter Burwell’s classical score. Whether Sony, Hill’s label, played any role in Can’t Take My Eyes Off You being left off the record is unclear.

Regardless, Hill told Muse magazine in 1998 that it was “a song that was never intended for radio play or even release.” With a new baby in her life and a solo album still to complete, Hill was too preoccupied with more important matters.

Five months after Conspiracy Theory’s disappointing stint in North American theatres (it didn’t even make back its 80 million dollar budget), the movie debuted on home video and in February 1998, it started playing on pay-per-view and became available on satellite channels like DirecTV.

It had been nearly two years since the arrival of The Score. At the tail end of 1997, Wyclef Jean was the first ex-Fugee out of the gate with a solo album. The Carnival would spawn the Top 10 hit Gone Til November and ultimately go double platinum.

But fans were starved for more. Pras’ Ghetto Supastar album (the title song would get a huge boost from its association with Warren Beatty’s political satire Bulworth in the summer of 1998) wouldn’t be available until the autumn.

Lauryn Hill’s debut was still many months away at the start of the new year. But some of her more enterprising supporters were so impatient for this collection of new music to arrive, realizing there already was something out there in the public domain, they took matters into their own hands.

In the May 9, 1998 edition of Billboard Magazine, writer Datu Faison had a small entry in his regular Rhythm Section column under the header Bootleggers.

“There’s a new recording from Fugees diva Lauryn Hill titled ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’ that has everyone scratching their heads. The single was not serviced to radio by Ruffhouse/Columbia [Hill’s label which is owned by Sony], yet managed to garner 188 R&B spins according to Broadcast Data Systems (BDS).” BDS is the official Neilsen ratings system for radio.

According to the brief report, some unknown parties had managed to tape the song as it plays during the middle of Conspiracy Theory’s closing credits. (It begins right after a snipped reprise of Frankie Valli’s original starts to fade at exactly two hours and eleven minutes.)

“[S]omehow a pirate recording was made that was pressed onto CD and DAT [Digital Audio Tape]. It is also possible that someone who had access to the recording and/or master tapes could have also made pirate copies,” Faison speculated not unreasonably in Billboard since the full song is presented through the rest of the remaining end titles.

According to BDS employee Lana Goodman, somehow, a bootleg copy of the song first ended up at KMEL, a San Francisco station. This was confirmed by another industry insider in the May 29, 1998 issue of Entertainment Weekly:

“According to Michelle Santosuosso, program director at Los Angeles’ KKBT, some enterprising soul(s) taped it from the satellite dish when the movie made its pay-per-view television premiere recently and got the bootleg into the hands of deejays, who jumped at the chance to play the phantom single.”

Once KMEL started playing this cover of Can’t Take My Eyes Off You, it created a gradual domino effect. According to Faison’s Billboard column, “The song was aired again in April on top 40/rhythm [station] KUBE Seattle, and additional patterns were assigned.”

Southern outlets like WBHJ in Birmingham, Alabama and Baton Rouge, Louisiana’s KTBT ended up playing the song far more than the California stations on the west coast: 140 spins altogether compared to the measly 48 accumulated in San Francisco and Los Angeles. And that was just the beginning. Within a short period of time, the song was added to more and more playlists across the country and even on stations in neighbouring Canada. When all was said and done, the track modestly peaked at #35 on Billboard’s Hot 100 Radio Airplay chart but reached a far more impressive #2 on its Rhythmic chart.

This unexpected development greatly concerned Sony who had already drawn up big plans for Hill’s solo album. It had already been decided that Doo Wop (That Thing) was going to be the first single. (It would drop in June.) They feared it would be overshadowed by Can’t Take My Eyes Off You and therefore not as popular, a silly fear in retrospect since Doo Wop debuted at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and would be the biggest of all the singles from The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.

Hill, on the other hand, had a different reaction. She told Entertainment Weekly in their May 29, 1998 issue that it was “flattering that they’re playing [the song]…” She told Muse that same year, “I thought it was kind of funny, another cover version taking off like that.” (According to the official Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons website, there are at least 200 remakes in existence.)

Uncertain at first about how to proceed, Sony was left with few options. They could ignore the whole situation and let the bootleg airings continue until the hoopla died down which was ridiculous considering how popular the song was getting. They could demand radio stations stop playing the song altogether which would have resulted in bad publicity and a fan backlash. As a reasonable alternative, they could simply release an official version as a CD single.

With The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill scheduled for an August release in the United States (September in Canada), Sony ultimately came to an obvious conclusion. With expectations growing to a fever pitch, that damn Conspiracy Theory track had to go on the album. (There would be no single release after all (although Sony would send promo copies to radio stations all over the world), hence its absence from the Hot 100 which only counted physical commercial releases at the time.) It had unwittingly become an effective marketing tool.

With the artwork and packaging already completed, and far too expensive to replace, Can’t Take My Eyes Off You would become a Stickered Bonus Track. (It would otherwise go completely unmentioned in the liner notes and track listing.) Even print ads would prominently promote the song making note of its unlisted status. (You’ll find it on track 15. It actually runs six seconds shorter than the movie version and rather than fading out, it ends cold.) As she later told Muse Magazine, Hill was far from happy about the decision:

“I hadn’t intended to have a cover on the album at all…Naturally there was some record company pressure, but if I had my way it wouldn’t be on it at all.”

By this point, Hill was in the middle trimester of her second pregnancy and probably not in any real condition to put up a significant fight. (She would give birth to her second child, a daughter, that November.)

In early January 1999, the nominations for the 41st annual Grammy Awards were announced. Lauryn Hill would make history by securing ten, the most ever for an individual woman. One of those nominations was for Best Pop Vocal Female Performance. Her version of Can’t Take My Eyes Off You, a song that was only supposed to be heard during the end titles of a bad movie, was now in contention for a major prize. It had marked the first time a mystery track had secured a nomination since the full version of I’ll Be There For You by The Rembrandts just a few years earlier.

A month later at the actual ceremony, Hill would bat .500 overall. Besides taking the golden gramophone for Best R&B Album, The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill was also named Album Of The Year beating out the likes of Garbage and Madonna. Hill would also win Best New Artist over The Backstreet Boys and The Dixie Chicks. Despite being denied nominations for Song and Single Of The Year, Doo Wop still managed to win Best R&B Song and Best Female R&B Vocal Performance.

Interestingly, Hill found herself competing with her ex-boyfriend and bandmate in the Best Rap Solo Performance category. It was Wyclef Jean’s Gone Til November vs. her diss track of him, Lost Ones, another Miseducation song that initially got an unauthorized pre-album release. In the end, Will Smith’s Gettin’ Jiggy With It proved too irresistible for Grammy voters to deny.

When the winner was announced for Best Pop Vocal Female Performance, Hill’s Can’t Take My Eyes Off You was beaten by Celine Dion’s unstoppable Titanic anthem, My Heart Will Go On, already an Oscar winner from the previous year. Still, five for ten was a very good night for the former member of The Fugees.

Five months later, the song would find its way in an episode of the short-lived NBC daytime soap opera Sunset Beach. In the final quarter of its July 6, 1999 noon hour broadcast, journalist Vanessa (Sherri Saum) and her rescuer Michael (Jason Winston George) have a romantic picnic while Hill’s cover plays throughout. There’s no dialogue as the couple make out and walk around. On the final episode of the series, which aired on New Year’s Eve that same year, they were married.

Two months before that at the 26th Annual Daytime Emmys in May, Hill’s version of Can’t Take My Eyes Off You played in the background throughout a clip montage showcasing past winners of the Best Actor and Best Actress in a Dramatic Series categories. At the 27th ceremony in 2000, a taped bit involving Susan Lucci spending the day with her long sought after Emmy (she had famously lost eighteen times in a row before winning in 1999) was scored curiously to Frankie Valli’s original.

In 2008, ten years after its official release on The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill, an unauthorized remix started circulating exclusively in Europe.

In 2016, Hill’s cover would re-appear in the romantic comedy How To Be Single, albeit for a mere 75 seconds. It pops up at the 99-minute mark near the end of the scene when Dakota Johnson visits “best friend” Rebel Wilson and realizes she’s “super rich”. (If you listen closely, you can hear the shout-out to Conspiracy Theory when the girls sit down on the floor to eat.) Four members of the film’s cast, including Johnson, sing the song a cappella in a couple of scenes. (Damon Wayans Jr.’s on-screen daughter refers to it as the “Eyes Of You” song.) Hill’s Grammy-nominated version, however, was curiously left off the soundtrack. Conspicuously absent from the film, another remake by Walk Off The Earth, replaced it on the CD. (In the movie, an instrumental organ version chimes in just as the Hill version fades out.) In 2020, Hill’s take popped up again in the straight-to-streaming Disney+ sports feature Safety.

With the definitive Valli classic already a standard for more than 30 years and Hill’s song reviving interest near the end of the millennium, Can’t Take My Eyes Off You would continue to be covered in the decades to come and sometimes by the most unlikely people.

The late Heath Ledger would woo bitchy Julia Stiles with an a cappella version in the 1999 romantic comedy 10 Things I Hate About You, a modernized take on Shakespeare’s Taming Of The Shrew. The late Andy Williams, best known for singing the Christmas staple It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year, covered the song in 1968 and many years later it found its way in Bridget Jones’s Diary in 2001. He re-recorded it as a duet with Broadway star Denise Van Outen (Chicago) the following year.

In a deleted scene from the 2002 live action Scooby Doo remake, Linda Cardellini’s Velma has a go Michelle Pfeiffer-style while the bald-headed villain tickles the ivories. In the 2005 sequel Son Of The Mask, there are multiple genre versions (rap, disco, country) heard during the Halloween party sequence, most of them sung by Jamie Kennedy.

Even Howard Stern favourite Mr. Methane, the gonzo comedian who can fart on command, has attempted his own unique spin on Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.

On a March 2021 episode of her self-named daytime talk show, the first American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson covered Hill’s version as part of her regular Kellyoke segment where she performs famous remakes with a backing band. In 96 seconds, she more than holds her own as she confidentally rolls through the first verse and chorus in this shortened version. Her back-up singers even recreate the “bah dah” bit near the end.

Interestingly, this is not the first time Clarkson has performed Hill’s R&B recreation. During a live gig in February 2019, before performing a complete version of Can’t Take My Eyes Off You, she dedicated the song to her then-husband. Nineteen months later, after seven years of marriage, they would be divorced.

While it’s not exactly clear what Frankie Valli thinks of Hill’s rendition (his official website only acknowledges its “hip-hop makeover”, although in the very next sentence, which offers celebrity testimonials, she appears to be obliquely referenced as one of the “many other great recording artists” his band “influenced”), co-writer and former bandmate Bob Gaudio is most definitely a fan. When asked by Songfacts.com for his opinion, he offered the following:

“I love the record, it’s one of my favorite versions.”

And although initially disappointed by the absence of the famous horn section, Gaudio realized Hill’s version didn’t really need it to succeed:

“But when I first heard it I thought she had the audacity to do this song without the horns. How dare she? [Laughing]

Songfacts: That’s such a big part of the song, right?

Gaudio: I thought it was when I first wrote it. That was my big assignment: take the verse, which was soft and sweet and melodic, and then kick into the drums of the chorus. How do I bridge that gap? And the horns was the filler. I thought building with the horns to get to the chorus was the setup. And she comes along and doesn’t use the horns. But it still worked. So it was quite an interesting lesson for me.”

Why are there so many versions of Can’t Take My Eyes Off You? Valli offered his theory to Songfacts:

“It’s a very, very tough song to do badly. When the song is that strong to start off with, that’s the kind of song you look for.”

Lauryn Hill proved him right.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Thursday, May 27, 2021
3:41 a.m.

The History Of The Mystery Track – Alanis Morissette Fantasizes About Stalking Her Ex

There are two mystery tracks on Jagged Little Pill, both found on track 13. The Jimmy The Saint Blend of You Oughta Know runs 4 minutes and 11 seconds. After 61 seconds of silence, Alanis takes a big breath and starts singing a new song.

Most of the material on the album is autobiographical, but not Your House, at least, not entirely.

Co-written by producer Glen Ballard, it tells a mostly fictional tale about Alanis literally breaking into her ex-boyfriend’s place. (“I went to your house/walked up the stairs/I opened your door without ringing the bell”)

Once inside, knowing full well what she’s doing is wrong, she can’t help but go further:

“I walked down the hall/into your room/where I could smell you/And I shouldn’t be here/without permission/I shouldn’t be here”

Her actions are compulsive and needy. She’s not ready to completely let go yet:

“Would you forgive me, love/if I danced in your shower?/Would you forgive me, love/if I laid in your bed?/Would you forgive, love/if I stayed all afternoon?”

“Some of that was fictional obviously,” Morissette told CBC.ca in 2015, “I’m not that creepy, but some of it was based on my having stayed at this person’s house, whom I was dating, and just how awkward I felt being in this person’s house and everything was so vulnerable and out in the open.”

In an interview with Spotify, Alanis revealed that the guy would let her stay at her home while he was away which was “often”.

“I was interested in this gentleman, so I didn’t want to look anywhere, but I did want to look. It felt like I was invading, but at the same time, I’d been welcomed.”

“I was staying in this guy’s house in Hollywood and he wasn’t there for a week.” Morissette recalled to Spin for their November 1995 cover story. “I remember being overly curious and sleeping in his bed. It felt eerie and unnerving; I also had kind of a crush on him.”

Who the mystery guy is in this instance is not as clear as You Oughta Know. All we know from Paul Cantin’s 1997 biography is that he lived in Hollywood and the relationship was not nearly as intense and serious as the one she had with Dave Coulier.

Lingering uncomfortably in his home, Alanis continues to do inappropriate things with her ex’s belongings:

“I took off my clothes/put on your robe/I went through your drawers/and found your cologne”

Done with snooping in his bedroom, she then proceeds elsewhere:

“Went down to the den/found your CDs/And I played your Joni”

Morissette is a fan of Joni Mitchell and so was her ex. He really did have some of her music in his CD collection.

However, Mitchell is not a fan of Alanis.

In the July 1996 issue of Details Magazine, she declared, “I am an arrogant artist…I get really arrogant when they start pitting me against people and saying something or someone’s like me when that something is mediocre!”

Mitchell must’ve read David Wild’s 1995 Rolling Stone cover story on Alanis where he described her as “a sort of twentysomething Joni Mitchell backed by thrashy guitar.”

“I’m a musical explorer,” she continued in Details, “and not just a pop songwriter or an occasional writer of a song or half a song, like these other women. Alanis Morissette writes words, someone else helps set it to music, and then she’s kind of stylized into the part.”

It’s bad enough she minimizes Morissette’s own personal songwriting contributions (she didn’t just write lyrics), it’s even worse that she doesn’t hold the same rigid standards for men. Are Lennon/McCartney and Jagger/Richards “mediocre” as well because for the most part they wrote many of their classics together? She’s arrogant, alright. And a misogynist.

Furthermore, some of Mitchell’s own compositions were co-written with others. Like The Hissing Of Summer Lawns from 1975, The Tenth World from Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter (1977), almost half of her 1979 collaboration with Charlie Mingus, two songs from 1985’s Dog Eat Dog, half of Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm (1988), two songs from Night Ride Home (1991), Yvette In English from Turbulent Indigo (1994) and The Crazy Cries Of Love from Taming The Tiger (1998). Her opposition to Morissette is clearly not principled.

Speaking of Taming The Tiger, although not mentioned by name, the title song expands on Mitchell’s disdain for the Canadian singer/songwriter. Pointed lyrics like “I’m a runaway from the record biz/From the hoods in the hood and the whiny white kids/Boring” and “As the radio blared so bland…Every song just a one-night stand/Formula music, girly guile/Genuine junk food for juveniles” also make her alienation from contemporary music in the late 90s very clear. It wasn’t just the Ottawa superstar she detested and rejected.

Five months after panning her work, in the December 1st, 1996 edition of the New York Times, Alanis reportedly “wept after reading Mitchell’s comments” in Details. Incredibly, for a time she was considered to personally induct her into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 1997. Although this didn’t happen (the honour went to Shawn Colvin), it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Mitchell was a no-show that night.

Greatly worried about being caught by her ex (“And I shouldn’t stay long/you might be home soon/I shouldn’t stay long”), following a reprise of the chorus, it’s time for this stalker to disrobe:

“I burned your incense/I ran a bath”

And then reality hits. There’s someone else:

“I noticed a letter that sat on your desk/It said, ‘Hello, love/I love you so, love/meet me at midnight’/And no, it wasn’t my writing/I’d better go soon/it wasn’t my writing”

Completely broken by this revelation, Alanis breaks down:

“So, forgive me, love/if I cry in your shower/so, forgive me, love/for the salt in your bed/so, forgive me, love/if I cry all afternoon”

“I get burned at the end of the song,” she explained to Spin in 1995, “because if I had really snooped around as much as I wanted to, it would have been wrong. I probably would have found something I didn’t want to find. I deserved it.”

It’s fitting that Your House shares track space with the superior version of You Oughta Know on Jagged Little Pill. It feels like a sequel despite it being about a different guy. No longer angry about being cast aside, the rage has now turned to deep sorrow as an unlawful entry has resulted in unwanted discovery. He’s moved on. She’s still struggling with boundaries. Curiosity did indeed kill the cat.

“I had really good boundaries back then in that sense,” Morissette told CBC.ca, noting her own personal self-control while cryptically adding, “but it was my fantasy of, unfortunately, things that wound up happening later, prophetically [laughs].”

She was much clearer to Entertainment Weekly in 2015. While discussing why she wrote You Oughta Know, she could’ve easily been talking about Your House.

“I wrote it so I wouldn’t get sick. It was the humble beginnings of my love addiction. The withdrawal from love addiction is probably the most excruciating pain. Having had many addictions in my life, that withdrawal is the most horrifying.”

Originally, Your House was set to music. But something didn’t feel right about the arrangement.

“I started to write that song with nothing, and we tried to envelop it with chords and music but it just didn’t quite denote that haunted combination of shame and fear and grief and hope and vulnerability.”

“I thought I had maybe played piano, and actually, it’s a song that I played electric guitar on and she sang to,” remembered Ballard, “and I just felt electric guitar didn’t sound right, we just took it out.”

Despite a slew of bonus cuts added to the 20th Anniversary box set of Jagged Little Pill, this particular version of the song wasn’t included. It remains unreleased.

Also locked in the vaults is a rare dance remix of the song by the British electronica outfit Hybrid, although a vinyl bootleg from 1999 has leaked out.

“It is not even synched up to the track,” Ballard told Paul Cantin about the a cappella version in his 1997 biography, You Oughta Know. “She’s not singing to a click track. It modulates up and down, up and down. And she was nailing it.”

“The whole song just wrote itself,” Alanis told Spotify.

It’s not clear when the song was actually written. Both Ballard and Morissette have noted that they generally wrote a song a day during their sessions on and off throughout 1994. Ballard told Stereogum in 2015 that the last song was written and recorded in January 1995, long after most of the album had been completed. Was Your House the last song they worked on? Again, it’s not certain.

During the year and a half long Jagged tour that began in the summer of 1995 and finally wrapped in December 1996, Your House was usually the encore. (A mix of performances of the song from various shows including the last one were edited together for the end of the 1997 Jagged Little Pill, Live video.) In the early days, her touring band would exit and she would sing the song like the studio recording. But as the tour progressed, Nick Lashey’s acoustic guitar would chime in during the second verse. On the international version of the You Learn CD single, a live take of the song from a gig in Tokyo, Japan was included as a bonus track.

When Alanis and her touring band visited the BBC studios in November 1998, for the first time the song was performed with full, proper accompaniment. It was released the following year as a B-Side to the Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie single Joining You.

Ten years after the mammoth success of Jagged Little Pill, Alanis first honoured its anniversary with an all-acoustic version of every song on the original record, including Your House. Once again, the song shares space with another on the very last track of the CD and is uncredited in the track listing. In this case, it’s Wake Up on track 12. This buried unplugged take begins with a little more than three and a half minutes left on the album.

Now featuring a piano and drums played with brushes, as well as an acoustic guitar, unfortunately it lacks the edge of the a cappella original. In fact, the soft, middling arrangement greatly dilutes the overall feel. Ballard and Morissette’s instincts the first time around were correct. Although the BBC version is actually quite good, Your House really didn’t need to be redone. They got it right the first time.

So why was the original Your House not listed on the original Jagged Little Pill? In an interview with WITZ radio, Morissette “thought it would sort of stick out like a sore thumb if it was in the middle of the record.”

Ballard told CBC.ca that “we wanted to scare people…you think it’s over, you’re thinking about something else, and you hear her singing. It’s spooky. It’s scared me a few times, I love it. We’re grateful to everybody who sticks around to hear it [laughs].”

25 years after its secret arrival, Your House lives on in the Jagged Little Pill Broadway musical in a key scene where a lesbian teen discovers her bisexual girlfriend in bed with a guy, their high school classmate, ultimately destroying their relationship. (A separate performance of You Oughta Know follows the betrayal.) Keeping with tradition, this abbreviated snippet isn’t given its own space on the 2019 soundtrack but it’s not a mystery track. Instead, it’s been paired with another song (in this case, Head Over Feet) as part of a medley, a common occurrence throughout the show.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the live music business, Morissette was still singing Your House in concert as recently as early 2020. At the time, she was doing a 25th Anniversary tour of Jagged. When the box set was re-released last year, a March 2020 gig from the UK was added to the collection. Ironically, Your House is the opening track.

By hiding it on the same track as the Jimmy The Saint Blend of You Oughta Know, Your House becomes the resigned sedative to the former’s unhinged histrionics. From the burning high of a finally released rage to the plunging depression following the unexpected revelation and deeply realized fear of being replaced, despite being about different situations – one very real, the other highly fictionalized – these lyrical connections are emotional mirror images of the same problem. Finding herself in unhealthy relationships where her insecurity is heightened when mutual goals are elusive and she’s on the losing end of the power struggle, she first lashes out in a way she couldn’t in real life and then in the imagined scenario where she stalks and invades, she weeps in final acceptance of her thorough rejection. Her nosiness is thoroughly punished.

Unlike Dave Coulier’s undeniable connection to You Oughta Know (despite his sudden distancing from it after years of free admission), we don’t know much about the real inspiration behind Your House. For once, Alanis successfully protected an ex’s privacy.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Wednesday, May 19, 2021
12:07 a.m.

The History Of The Mystery Track – Nirvana Gets Sappy For Charity

On October 26, 1993, a new compilation went on sale.  No Alternative was the third album spearheaded by The Red Hot Organization, a New York-based non-profit co-founded by lawyer John Carlin and Leigh Blake, a longtime activist and TV/film producer.

Established in 1989, there were two goals for the organization:  raise awareness about the dangers of AIDS & HIV through TV documentaries & public awareness campaigns, and raise money for a cure through the sales of CDs & associated home videos.  Following 1990’s Red Hot + Blue (a various artists tribute to Cole Porter, a legendary closeted gay songwriter) and 1992’s Red Hot + Dance, it was modern rock’s turn to join the cause.

The CD version of No Alternative lists eighteen songs by some of the biggest and most influential acts of that era, some of which were written and recorded exclusively for the compilation.  But as purchasers of that record immediately discovered upon placing their copies in their players, there are actually nineteen.

Sometime in the late 80s, a young Kurt Cobain made a demo at his family home in Washington State.  Accompanied solely by his electric guitar, he laid down this unpolished first version of a song he would revisit and revise constantly for the next several years.  (This original recording, long bootlegged, would make its official debut on both versions of the soundtrack to the 2015 documentary, Kurt Cobain: Montage Of Heck.)

Originally titled Sad, the song would alternately be known as Verse Chorus Verse and Sappy.  According to Wikipedia, Nirvana first played it in concert at a show in Germany on November 13, 1989.  Another live version, this one from a gig in Switzerland captured sixteen days later, almost made the cut for what ultimately became From The Muddy Banks Of The Wishkah.

In the first week of the new year, while still signed to Sub Pop, Nirvana worked with producer Jack Endino at his Reciprocal Studios.  On January 2, 1990, according to Endino, the band, with Chad Channing on drums, spent seven hours trying to record one solitary track.  The next day, they returned for an additional three hour session.

“This was when they came in and just did one song, ‘Sappy.’  That was the first time I knew that Kurt was fallible, because everything he’d done had been brilliant to me up to then.  And then there was this song which just didn’t seem that interesting.  And he was determined to get it.  And I was like, ‘No, write some more songs, Kurt!'” he later told Gillian Gaar.

Why was the futile process taking so long?

“They literally wanted an Albini drum sound,” Endino told Gaar.  They also “spent a lot of time experimenting with reverbs and gated room mics and just doing lots of strange stuff during the mix.”

This version finally emerged on Sliver: The Best Of The Box in 2005.

While continuing to play it in concert (the DVD on the With The Lights Out box set features a performance captured during a California show on February 16, 1990 while the expanded version of Bleach includes another audio rendition from a show a week earlier in Portland), Nirvana would return to the studio to try again.

In the first week of April that same year, they began the demo sessions for Nevermind with Butch Vig at his Smart Studios in Wisconsin.  Seven songs, including Sappy, were put on tape.  20 years later, it would finally make its official debut on the deluxe edition of Nevermind.  By the time Nirvana relocated to Sound City in California to record the album in 1991, Channing had been replaced by Dave Grohl.

During the sessions that spring, Sappy was dusted off for another go.  This time, Cobain seemed happier with the result.  In his Journals (later released in 2003) the song was continually appearing on hypothetical track listings for a time.  But when Smells Like Teen Spirit was completed, Sappy suddenly disappeared from contention.  This version remains unreleased and might possibly be lost forever thanks to that covered up fire in Universal’s music archives.

“Sometimes you get a song and you record it one way and you go, ‘The song just didn’t happen,’ Vig explained to Gaar.  “Then you try it again.  But after three tries, you’ve gotta give up.  You have to realize the song is not meant to happen.  But maybe Kurt heard something that we didn’t hear, and that’s what he was trying to get, and he never got it.  Sometimes that happens; you get these mental images of a song, and you know it’s going to be good, but if it gets to a certain point and it never gets there, it kind of drives you crazy.”

It wasn’t until the band recorded In Utero with Steve Albini in Minnesota’s Pachyderm Studios in the dead of winter in February 1993 that the song was finally recorded in a manner Cobain deemed acceptable for eventual release in his lifetime.  A serious contender for the album (when it was still Verse Chorus Verse which was also an early title for the overall collection), when the Red Hot Organization came calling for a song, rather than work up a new one, they offered Sappy instead as an exclusive.

With In Utero scheduled for a mid-September release, over a month before No Alternative’s debut, the cold hearted Geffen Records didn’t want Nirvana’s name attached to the charity project.  (Ironically, its founder David Geffen has long donated and raised millions for AIDS charities.  Red Hot itself has generated over ten million for the cause in its own right.)

It’s not clear if the company resorted to threatening a lawsuit in order to assure that Sappy, still known as Verse Chorus Verse at this point, would become a mystery track, but Red Hot ultimately relented and agreed not to mention it in the track listing, in the liner notes (which do mention that there are actually “nineteen songs” instead of the credited 18) and in any promotion published in magazines.  (On their official website, where they finally publicly acknowledge the song, they diplomatically explain that Sappy was hidden “for legal reasons”.)

By not advertising Nirvana’s association with the project, since they were the highest profile act on the disc, No Alternative was doomed to be a poor seller, at least in North America.  Despite selling less than 300000 copies, however, it still managed to raise a million dollars for AIDS charities.  (It did better overseas.  To date, it’s been purchased more than a million times globally.)

Curiously, Sappy wasn’t the only song to be named Verse Chorus Verse in the Nirvana catalogue.  During the making of Nevermind, there was another Verse Chorus Verse (also known as In His Hands), with a completely different melody and lyric, first laid down during those 1990 demo sessions.  (It was briefly added to live setlists in 1990 before being dropped forever.)  Because it remained unreleased for years (until it appeared on the 20th Anniversary reissue of Nevermind), Cobain simply recycled the title for Sappy.

Despite Geffen’s insistence on downplaying Nirvana’s involvement in order to not interfere with In Utero’s promotion and sales, the song still generated some decent radio airplay and became a fan favourite both in its live and studio incarnations.  When the With The Lights Out box set emerged in 2004 (Courtney Love told Spin magazine that Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl wanted to call it Sappy which she opposed), only the No Alternative version was included and properly listed.  In 2013, when In Utero was expanded into a two-disc set, the mystery track was remastered and fully credited in a new mix by Albini.

As for live shows, after a four-year break, Cobain revived it for some selected dates on the final Nirvana tour.  It was performed for the last time on February 25, 1994 during a gig in Milan, Italy.

Three months earlier, the band taped their famous Unplugged show for MTV.  After they played the Ledbelly cover, Where Did You Sleep Last Night?, the band walked off stage and never returned.  In her 2013 memoir, former VJ Kennedy reveals that wasn’t supposed to happen:

“…Unplugged producer Alex Coletti told me they all disappeared into the control room at Sony Studios where he and other executives begged the band to go out and do an encore with some better known songs (‘Teen Spirit,’ cough, cough…) but no one was down for that, though Dave and Krist were more accommodating and were willing to try ‘Sappy’ from the No Alternative record, but Kurt flexed his fascist muscle and said no bueno, so the thing was wrapped.”

When he spoke to Gillian Gaar, Jack Endino remained unimpressed with Cobain’s tenacity:

“It’s just not a memorable tune…I mean, Kurt just could not give up on that song!”

But on his website, Endino admits that the No Alternative version of Sappy is “the definitive and best version“.

He’s absolutely right.  In his original demo, where he open picks instead of strumming chords, Cobain plays a brief intro before singing the opening verse, the same way he played it in concert before Nevermind.  On No Alternative, he sings and plays right at the top with Grohl and Novoselic jumping in just after the first couplet.  A much stronger approach.

On the Montage Of Heck recording, which is decidedly slower than the full band versions, Cobain sings low and deep (something he almost never did on disc which makes it all the more special), whereas on all the other takes he adopts his signature mid-range melodic croak.

Although there are some slight lyrical tweaks on all the available versions, the basic sentiment is the same.  Cobain warns his female friend that she’s in an abusive relationship.  First, she can’t be sexual with anyone else.  (“And if you save yourself, you will make him happy”)  Second, she won’t have any freedom (“He’ll keep you in a jar”) and be treated like a caged animal (“He’ll give you breathing holes”).

Some of the lines are repeated while others (“And if you cut yourself…And if you fool yourself…You’ll wallow in the shit”) are only sung once.  All the while, there is always an urgency and deep concern for her well being.

The peculiar chorus (“You’re in a laundry room/Conclusion came to you” or is it “The clues that came to you”?) suggests the bitter irony of a victim belatedly recognizing she’s a prisoner forever stuck in this dilemma.  Endino seriously undervalued this song.  It’s the best Nirvana mystery track.

Speaking of stubbornness, Cobain also wouldn’t give up on the name Verse Chorus Verse.

As first noted by Charles Cross in Heavier Than Heaven, his excellent biography of Cobain, when Geffen Records rejected the first mix of In Utero, the frontman had a somewhat sarcastic back-up plan as he noted in his journals at the time:

“After many lame reviews and reports on carmudgeonly, uncompromising vinyl, cassette, eight-track-only release <of I Hate Myself And Want To Die [another working title for In Utero], the Steve Albini original mix of the album>, we release the remixed version under the title Verse, Chorus, Verse.”

According to Cross, Cobain also wanted a disclaimer that read “Radio-Friendly, Unit-Shifting, Compromise Version”.  Geffen refused.  Less than a handful of the original mixes would officially surface 20 years later on the 20th Anniversary reissue of In Utero.  The rest have long been bootlegged.

In 2013, No Alternative, which had previously only been available on CD and cassette (the latter excluded Sappy but included two extra tracks only found on the analog format), was finally pressed and released on limited edition double vinyl for its own 20th Anniversary.  On all three thousand copies, Sappy remains an Unlisted Bonus Track on track six at the end of side four.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Sunday, January 5, 2020
2:15 a.m.

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.