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.

Wit Sorely Missed At Bizarro 2021 Oscars

Anthony Hopkins over Chadwick Boseman? Frances McDormand howling like a wolf? Glenn Close dancing to Da Butt?

What the fuck happened to the Oscars this year? In the midst of the ongoing Covid pandemic the show had to go on. But did it have to go on quite like this?

Taking place at the Union Station in Los Angeles, a spacious environment once redressed for Blade Runner and Catch Me If You Can decades earlier, the 93rd annual Academy Awards felt like a more stripped down, subdued and deeply glum Golden Globes. You had to treasure levity when it appeared. And it did not appear nearly enough.

As expected, Nomadland took home Best Picture. What wasn’t expected was that it wasn’t the last award of the evening. It was third to last, the first time this has happened in 50 years. Equally weird was how early Best Director was announced. Out of the 23 competitive Oscars handed out tonight, it was presented 7th. The Chinese-born Chloe Zhao made history as the second woman (after Kathryn Bigelow in 2010) but the first woman of colour to collect the golden naked man in this category.

Wacky Frances McDormand kept it short and odd when she collected her third Best Actress gong for playing the lead which Variety and Vulture correctly called and I completely botched. With the academy spreading out the awards, it was the big winner with a mere three.

While fellow Best Picture nominees Mank, Sound Of Metal and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom all took home two technical trinkets apiece, Judas And The Black Messiah won Best Original Song for Fight For You, the only worthy nominee with its catchy, understated uptempo soul, and Best Supporting Actor for the appreciative Brit Daniel Kaluuya who appeared to embarrass his sister and confuse his mom with a very funny acknowledgement of how he came to be. He also paid gracious tribute to Fred Hampton Sr., the civil rights icon he immortalizes on film.

Speaking of Soul, it won Best Animated Feature as expected and took home Best Original Score, making Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross two-time winners. They previously won for their terrific techno work on The Social Network. Checking their white privilege, they let first-time winner Jon Batiste, Stephen Colbert’s Black late night musical director, cut an acceptance promo all on his own. Umm, we all know about the 12 notes, dude. Or is it 13?

I don’t know what Glenn Close has to do to win a fucking Oscar but she’s now 0 for 8. The good news is she didn’t lose to Olivia Colman. Charmingly funny Yuh-Jung Youn (Minari) was named Best Supporting Actress which everybody except my family anticipated. The first ever Korean acting winner, she seemed as pleased to finally meet Brad Pitt as she was to be called up onstage. With funny quips about her sons and how she really feels about award competitions (she said she doesn’t believe in them, then zinged, in reference to her fellow nominees, “I’m luckier than you.”), she thankfully brought to life if just for a moment a very quiet room that seemed confused about whether to applaud at all during any of the presentations.

But the biggest stunner of the night would come at the very end.

In the past, the previous year’s Best Actor winner would present the current year’s Best Actress award and vice versa. Not at this bizarro Oscars. Men honoured men and women honoured women, not that that’s such a big deal, honestly.

Following McDormand’s win for Best Actress (looks like Carey Mulligan got punished after all), the final award was for Best Actor. Let’s face it. We were all thinking it. They saved this category for last so they could give the late Chadwick Boseman, who was acknowledged in the quick-paced, Stevie Wonder-soundtracked In Memoriam, a gracious farewell.

But no. When Joaquin Phoenix opened the envelope, he announced Anthony Hopkins (The Father) as the winner for Best Actor. (Variety wisely suggested he could be a spoiler (like me, they picked Boseman to take it) and they were right.) Hopkins was nowhere to be found. He wasn’t even on Zoom. Considering how well Black talent performed this year, what a slap in the face to Boseman. And what a sour note to end a very strange ceremony.

The Father was also named Best Adapted Screenplay, another upset victory over the expected recipient Nomadland. As for Promising Young Woman, it had to settle for Best Original Screenplay, its only reward. The only Best Picture nominee to be completely snubbed was The Trial Of The Chicago 7.

Because all the Best Original Song nominees were performed during the typically asskissy and overlong pre-show, there was far less filler during the actual ceremony, although what was the point of Name That Tune other than to make Black people look stupid on camera? Not sure if Glenn Close really knew that song from Spike Lee’s School Daze (it felt like a scripted moment) but I did appreciate her twerking. And thank God for Harrison Ford reading those humourously brutal notes an unnamed Warner Bros. studio exec gave the classic Blade Runner.

As for Laura Dern’s hideous feather dress, bring back Bjork’s dead, wraparound swan. All is forgiven.

The complete list of winners:

BEST PICTURE – NOMADLAND

BEST DIRECTOR – Chloe Zhao (NOMADLAND)

BEST ACTRESS – Frances McDormand (NOMADLAND)

BEST ACTOR – Anthony Hopkins (THE FATHER)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS – Yuh-Jung Youn (MINARI)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR – Daniel Kaluuya (JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH)

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE – SOUL

BEST INTERNATIONAL FEATURE – ANOTHER ROUND

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE – MY OCTOPUS TEACHER

BEST ORIGINAL SONG – Fight For You (JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH)

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE – SOUL

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY – PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY – THE FATHER

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS – TENET

BEST FILM EDITING – SOUND OF METAL

BEST SOUND – SOUND OF METAL

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY – MANK

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN – MANK

BEST MAKE-UP & HAIRSTYLING – MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM

BEST COSTUME DESIGN – MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM

BEST ANIMATED SHORT – IF ANYTHING HAPPENS I LOVE YOU

BEST LIVE ACTION SHORT – TWO DISTANT STRANGERS

BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT SUBJECT – COLETTE

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Monday, April 26, 2021
2:40 a.m.

Twitter Still Thinks I’m A Bot Overdoing It On Election Day

It happened again.  Twitter has locked me out of my account for enthusiastically tweeting and retweeting about an American election.

Two years ago, during the US midterms, it wrongly believed I was a bot for “excessively” retweeting comments and election results, despite sharing my own thoughts multiple times.  Well, here we are again.  I’m getting fucking sick to death of this bullshit.

As of this writing, we do not know who the next President will be.  Democratic nominee Joe Biden has a significant lead over Republican incumbent Donald Trump.  Right now, according to CNN which has been the most patient in making projections, he only needs 17 electoral votes to win the Presidency. There are just six states left to declare a winner.

Very early in the morning last night Trump was leading in the most important ones:  Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, South Carolina and Wisconsin.  But since then, Biden has become the frontrunner in Pennsylvania while maintaining his hold on Arizona and Nevada.  The former Vice President just won Wisconsin and Michigan this afternoon.  Trump’s team is demanding a recount in the former (and likely the latter) which will be a waste of time.

If these races end where they currently stand, Trump will not have enough remaining electoral votes to declare victory.  But the tallying isn’t quite finished.  We will likely not know the winner until the end of the week, if that.

Trump’s impulsive, vague decision to announce from The White House last night his intent to go to the Supreme Court feels remarkably premature and more than a little paranoid.  He has just begun the process of filing lawsuits to either stop the count where he’s winning or have ballots rejected where he’s not.

Ever determined to cover all his bases, because he can’t stand failure, Trump will do everything in his power to win re-election, even if he rigs the system in his favour, a privilege he did not have at his disposal four years ago. 

This should not have been such a close contest.  It’s absolutely astounding considering how badly he’s fucked up the pandemic but not at all surprising when his opponent promised to be the opposite of Bernie Sanders, the most popular politician in America.

But I can’t continue tweeting about it at the moment because Twitter’s error-plagued algorithms continue to mistake me for a fucking soulless android. 

Here’s the thing that really pisses me off.  There are steps one can take to restore access to one’s account.  First, you do that stupid reCaptha thing where you declare “I’m not a robot” and then pick out the palm trees seen in a picture broken up by nine squares.  I can’t get it to work on FireFox but it works fine on Microsoft Edge.

Then, you type in your cell phone number and Twitter is supposed to text you a confirmation number which you then enter and presto, everything’s back to normal.

But I don’t have a fucking cell phone.  I hate fucking cell phones.  They’re annoying.  And Twitter doesn’t give you any other fucking options to restore the account.  So, once again, I have to send them a fucking angry message grumbling I’ve been locked out of my fucking account because for the second time in two years they’ve mistaken me for a fucking bot.

None of this would be happening if they would just verify my fucking account.  I wrote ten goddamn articles for The Huffington Post, one that drew private praise from a world renowned mathematician, and I’m followed by a number of prominent journalists and academics.  I’ve earned the right to get that fucking checkmark.  And I should be able to retweet as much as I fucking want.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Wednesday, November 4, 2020
4:34 p.m.

UPDATE: After waiting for four long days, after taking Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania, Joe Biden has finally won the Presidency. But I still can’t tweet about it because I remain locked out of my account. I have complained half a dozen times to Twitter and they have not responded. Also, my 99-year-old grandmother has died suddenly and I can’t tweet about that, either. It would be nice to not feel so goddamn aggravated and powerless. If any of my readers have any pull with Twitter and can convince them I’m not a fucking bot, I would be most appreciative.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Saturday, November 7, 2020
10:23 p.m.

Three Men Who Survived WrestleMania Retirement Matches

If you’re a professional wrestler, what’s the best way to humiliate your rival?

Is it smacking them repeatedly with a steel chair until they beg you to stop?  Is it breaking a certain part of their body forcing them out of action for an indeterminate amount of time?  What about cockblocking them so you can date their love interest and rub this new relationship in their face?  Or how about forcing them to tap out to a particularly excruciating submission hold during a title match?

Nope.

The most surefire way to destroy your enemy’s self-esteem is to retire them.  What’s more satisfying than that?  Not only are you free to move on to the next program, you can take comfort in the fact that your vanquished rival will be seething powerlessly wondering where it all went wrong.

The retirement match, where one or both wrestlers put their careers on the line if they lose, is as old as the hills.  It’s a gimmick best reserved for the most heated disputes that require permanent social distancing.  What better place to showcase such a special encounter than at WrestleMania.

From the very first show 35 years ago to last year’s event, there have been special occasions where specific superstars were placed in career threatening situations only to have to work a little harder to get the duke.  Otherwise, they’d have to join the audience while watching someone else take their spot.

Several years ago in this space, I noted five wrestlers who had their last match at Mania, whether they succumbed to an advertised stipulation or made a quiet off-camera decision.  This was expanded to eight for a Huffington Post article in 2015.  Kurt Angle is the most recent superstar to end his career, in this case willingly, at the Showcase Of The Immortals.  He put over Baron…pardon me, King Corbin, on his way out the door in 2019.

Not mentioned in either of those pieces was the fact that Shawn Michaels is the only man in WWE history to retire twice at WrestleMania.  12 years before his final singles match with The Undertaker in 2010, a seriously injured Heartbreak Kid struggled through a back problem to give Stone Cold Steve Austin his first World title push at WrestleMania 14.  It wasn’t a retirement match per se but because Michaels was in rough shape, he effectively ended his in-ring career immediately after.  Thanks to a long, slow rehabilitation, he returned to full-time competition in the summer of 2002.

But not everyone put in the awkward position of having to defend their employment with the McMahon Family has had to say a premature good-bye to the job they love.  Here are the three superstars who survived their retirement matches, including a certain son-in-law (twice, in his case), on the grandest stage of them all.

1. Andre The Giant (WrestleMania – March 31, 1985)

On the December 18, 1982 edition of Championship Wrestling, as noted by TheHistoryOfWWE.com, Big John Studd issued an open challenge on Buddy Rogers’ Corner.  If you could somehow scoop him up and slam his giant ass to the mat, he would give you 500 smackers.

Curiously, fans from the audience were the first to try (or were they plants?).  All would fail.

Then, it was up to the jobbers to have a go.  Same result.

As the weeks went by, also recounted by The History Of WWE, the reward for bodyslaming Studd would continuously rise.  During the Christmas 1982 episode of Championship Wrestling, it had doubled to a thousand.  By early January 1983, it was raised to $3000.  By the end of January, it was up to seven.

The future Mr. Perfect Curt Hennig made an attempt when it was $8000.  No dice.  SD Jones went for it when it was $8500.  Nope.  Tony Garea wasn’t able to do it when it was $9000 nor the much missed Gorilla Monsoon who tried when it got up to ten.

On the February 26, 1983 episode of Championship Wrestling, The History Of WWE website acknowledges Andre The Giant’s first encounter with his second most famous rival as he took his own shot.  Thanks to the well timed interference of his manager “Classy” Freddie Blassie, Studd was spared from forking over the money.  A couple of weeks later during a March 12 broadcast, the bodyslam challenge was suspended because, according to Blassie, as recounted by The History Of WWE, there were “no more worthy challengers”.  Uh huh.

Andre and Studd had their first singles match two weeks later at the Boston Garden.  The Giant won by count-out.  Over the next two years, as The History Of WWE thoroughly documents, they would face off in countless more encounters at live events, only some of which were taped, and not always in one-on-one situations.

Early on, there were bodyslam teases where Andre would almost get the job done but either Studd would manage to wiggle free, hold onto the top rope or be saved by outside interference.  According to TheHistoryOfWWE.com, during an September 18, 1983 episode of All-American Wrestling, it took all three future Conquistadors to stop Andre from winning the challenge.

In the build to the first WrestleMania in 1985, Studd, now represented by Bobby “The Brain” Heenan who took over for Blassie in the summer of 1984, issued his ultimatum.  He would fight Andre in Madison Square Garden.  It would not be a regular match.  The Bodyslam Challenge, which had never really gone away despite no longer being a specific TV segment, would be the sole purpose of the bout.  If Andre could get ‘er done, he’d earn $15000, the highest amount that would ever be offered.  If he failed, he would have to retire.  He’d have 60 minutes to make it happen.

It took him less than six.  And when he got the money, Andre decided to throw it out to the fans until Heenan swooped in to take back the officially licensed WWF gym bag which held the remaining amount.

The result was probably not a surprise to those intimately familiar with the Andre/Studd rivalry.  They already had a number of Bodyslam matches before back when the reward was $10000.  (After losing one such encounter, it was Studd himself who stopped his rival from being generous with his reward.)  Long before the first WrestleMania, Andre first slammed Studd, according to The History Of WWE, during an earlier MSG event on June 17, 1983 in one of the rare times he won by pinfall.

2. Hulk Hogan (WrestleMania 19 – March 30, 2003)

After the New World Order split in the aftermath of WrestleMania 18 and the end of his brief stint as Edge’s tag partner, The Racist One resumed being a solo act in the company that made him an icon.  In the build-up to WrestleMania 19, Vince McMahon, in his thinly disguised Mr. McMahon heel persona, started being a pest to the former six-time World champion.

Having cost him a victory in a return match with The Rock at No Way Out in 2003, McMahon made it clear he hated Hogan.  (He was ahead of his time.)  He resented his departure for WCW a decade earlier and still held a grudge against him for testifying for the prosecution in the ultimately unsuccessful steroid trial that rocked the entire business.

McMahon went so far as to pull a Bobby Heenan.  “Hulkamania is dead!” he unconvincingly declared.  It has been replaced by McMahonmania.  Sure.

All of this lead to a no holds barred street fight between the two at WrestleMania 19.  McMahon challenged Hogan to put his career on the line as a key stipulation which he readily accepted.

During their inevitable on-screen contract signing on an episode of Smackdown!, the WWE chairman whacked Hogan in the head several times causing him to bleed.  He then forced him to sign the deal with his own blood, as noted by Wikipedia.

During the match, Hogan was attacked by a mystery man with a lead pipe.  That mystery man turned out to be “Rowdy” Roddy Piper in what would become his final, ill-fated heel run.  It ultimately didn’t matter.  Having already cashed in his receipt against his boss (he made him shed some blood in his own right), Hogan delivered a trio of leg drops to secure the victory and remain a WWE superstar.

3. Triple H (WrestleMania 29 – April 7, 2013 & WrestleMania 35 – April 7, 2019)

Stephanie McMahon’s husband is the only performer in the history of the event to have survived two retirement matches on the grandest stage of them all.

Back in 2012, when a returning Brock Lesnar started making unreasonable demands during an episode of Monday Night Raw, Triple H tried to reason with him hoping he would reconsider.  Instead, he got attacked from behind setting up a trio of pay-per-view matches.

Lesnar won round one at SummerSlam 2012.  As he did on Raw to kickstart the feud, Lesnar ultimately “broke” Triple H’s arm with a kimura lock.  Just before the event, he made sure H’s old pal Shawn Michaels wouldn’t be in his corner so he F5’d him and broke his arm, too, assuring his absence.

Two months before round two at WrestleMania 29 nearly a year later, a now fully recovered Triple H, who didn’t make it to the bathroom before this Raw segment, went out to the ring to prevent The Beast from attacking his father-in-law for the second time.  As he pissed his pants (there was no mistaking that big stain), The Cerebral Assassin slammed Lesnar’s head in the post causing him to accidentally bleed profusely (which, upon re-aired, repackaged replays looked even cooler in black and white).

Lesnar’s mouthpiece Paul Heyman insisted that H retire if The former Next Big Thing could beat him in their anything goes contest.  With a fully recovered Michaels now ready to be in his corner, the tide turned.  Triple H won with a pedigree on the bottom half of one of the steel steps inside the ring.  (Lesnar would go on to win their final encounter inside a steel cage at Extreme Rules.)

Six years later, while Raw was celebrating Ric Flair’s 70th Birthday, a stunned Triple H watched his former Evolution brother Batista drag out The Nature Boy’s groggy carcass from his dressing room backstage.  So began the build to another WrestleMania retirement angle.

Like Kurt Angle, Batista wanted one last pay-per-view match before signing off for good.  (When you’re a big-time movie star, why continue to subject yourself to any more staged beatings for less money?)  Triple H wasn’t interested in a fight, even though he had never pinned The Animal in their three previous high profile encounters.  Batista pressured him to change his mind and also convinced him to put his own career at risk.

At WrestleMania 35, after clumsily tripping over his own feet as he first entered the ring, which led to a momentary break of character and a more cautious re-do, Batista went to war with The Game.  Triple H was up for the fight.  In a memorable spot, he pulled out the Blade Runner 2049 star’s nose piercing and later ran across a couple of announce tables to spear him through a third, stealing one of The Animal’s signature moves.

With a concerned Shawn Michaels on commentary and a returning Flair arriving in the final stages, H was handed his trusty sledgehammer from his still loyal Evolution compadre.  Batista’s goal of having a clean sweep and finishing off The Game for good was lost.  Triple H survived.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Tuesday, April 7, 2020
12:35 a.m.

Parasite Surprise Historic Winner At 2020 Oscars

When you’re wrong, you’re wrong.

Here I was thinking the academy was too old and too white to honour a foreign language film in the two biggest categories and they prove me wrong.

Parasite, the South Korean film, which as expected took home Best Original Screenplay and the newly named Best International Feature Oscars, was also named Best Picture over 1917 and Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood, the first time a non-English speaking film has ever achieved such an honour.  There was a terrible moment, though, where the lights dimmed before the acceptances were over so the crowd starting chanting “Up!  Up!  Up!” until they were turned back on which led to big cheers and the resumption of thank yous.

Bong Joon Ho was also awarded Best Director over the DGA winner Sam Mendes.  He gave shout-outs to his fellow nominees, emphasizing his respect for Scorsese and his appreciation for Tarantino admiring Ho’s filmography.  Hope his translator got a bonus every time he won.  Now that the show is over, the man can finally get sloshed.

1917 had to settle for technical trinkets:  Best Visual Effects (in an unusually competitive category this year), Best Sound Mixing (over Ford V Ferrari) and Best Cinematography (the second gong awarded to Roger Deakins who first won for his excellent work on Blade Runner 2049).

All the acting prizes went to the frontrunners.  Brad Pitt was named Best Supporting Actor for Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood.  He thanked his kids saying they “colour everything I do” and correctly pointed out that stunt coordinators deserve their own Academy Award category.  “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.  Ain’t that the truth?” he said in amazement.  He’s come a long way from stealing half of that guy’s sandwich.

Marriage Story’s Laura Dern acknowledged her “heroes”, dad Bruce Dern and mom Diane Ladd, as she went on to accept her Best Supporting Actress honour.  Not a bad birthday present for the second generation performer.

Joaquin Phoenix didn’t thank anybody but he did cut a promo on a bunch of political subjects including his own “cruelty” and “selfish” dickishness (without really getting specific, unfortunately) and the meat industry as he climbed on stage to collect the golden gong for Best Actor.  He did however give a shout-out to his late brother River quoting one of his song lyrics.  Even more long winded was Best Actress winner Renee Zellweger who at least thanked a bunch of people including her family and the woman she played, Judy Garland.

Other predictable winners included Best Animated Feature Toy Story 4 and Best Documentary Feature American Factory.  Longtime collaborators Elton John and Bernie Taupin won Best Original Song for their catchy Rocketman track, (I’m Gonna) Love Me Again.  “This doesn’t suck,” Taupin admitted.  This is Elton’s second gong after Can You Feel The Love Tonight? from The Lion King 25 years ago.

The World War 2 satire JoJo Rabbit won Best Adapted Screenplay, Little Women was given Best Costume Design while Ford V Ferrari picked up golden dust collectors for Best Sound Editing and Best Film Editing.  Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman was the only Best Picture nominee not to be awarded a single trophy.

As for the show, Steve Martin was really funny, more so than the hit-and-miss Chris Rock, during the unofficial monologue.  John Travolta is still getting hilariously roasted for butchering Idina Menzel’s name.  The opening medley was lame and overlong, much like many of the annoyingly drawn out presentations.  But it was great seeing Eminem finally perform his Oscar-winning song Lose Yourself after refusing to do so 17 years ago.

The complete list of winners:

BEST PICTURE – PARASITE

BEST DIRECTOR – Bong Joon Ho (PARASITE)

BEST ACTRESS – Renee Zellweger (JUDY)

BEST ACTOR – Joaquin Phoenix (JOKER)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS – Laura Dern (MARRIAGE STORY)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR – Brad Pitt (ONCE UPON A TIME…IN HOLLYWOOD)

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE – AMERICAN FACTORY

BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT SUBJECT – LEARNING TO SKATEBOARD IN A WARZONE (IF YOU’RE A GIRL)

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE – TOY STORY 4

BEST ANIMATED SHORT – HAIR LOVE

BEST LIVE ACTION SHORT -THE NEIGHBOUR’S WINDOW

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY – PARASITE

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY – JOJO RABBIT

BEST ORIGINAL SONG – (I’m Gonna) Love Me Again (ROCKETMAN)

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE – JOKER

BEST INTERNATIONAL FEATURE – PARASITE

BEST FILM EDITING – FORD V FERRARI

BEST SOUND EDITING – FORD V FERRARI

BEST SOUND MIXING – 1917

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS – 1917

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY – 1917

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN – ONCE UPON A TIME…IN HOLLYWOOD

BEST MAKE-UP & HAIRSTYLING – BOMBSHELL

BEST COSTUME DESIGN – LITTLE WOMEN

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Monday, February 10, 2020
12:45 a.m.

Last Year Aside, The Golden Globes Are Still Not A Major Predictor Of Oscar Winners

Tonight, the 77th annual Golden Globe Awards, the most unprestigious back patting event in human history, will be airing live on national Television.  Essentially a glorified bowling banquet organized by the ever mysterious and yet easily bribed “Hollywood Foreign Press Association”, for decades it’s been nonetheless widely considered a sharp predictor of the Academy Awards.

On two past occasions, I’ve closely examined the results of both ceremonies and noted that its reputation as an influencer is not exactly deserved.  It’s been six years since I last focused on past results, so let’s play catch up with the last half decade.  Have things significantly changed?

2014

Of the last five Golden Globe events, this one had the most misses when it came to duplicating Oscar results.

Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, an experimental epic that was filmed slowly over a decade so its child star could legitimately grow up before the camera, snagged the Best Motion Picture – Drama bowling trophy with Linklater himself named Best Director.  At the Oscars, it was another offbeat title Birdman and its celebrated director Alejandro G. Innaritu who would win the more respected prizes in the same categories respectively.

How To Train Your Dragon 2 won the Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature while the Oscar went to Big Hero 6.  The Russian film Leviathan won Best Foreign Language Film but it was the Polish Holocaust movie Ida that the Motion Picture Academy preferred.  And as for Best Original Score, Oscar went with Wes Anderson’s overrated The Grand Budapest Hotel over the GG’s pick The Theory Of Everything about Stephen Hawking.

At least J.K. Simmons, Eddie Redmayne, Julianne Moore and Patricia Arquette were all double winners.

2015

A year later, Inarritu was once again in contention for some major dust collectors.  At the Golden Globes, he won Best Director and his movie The Revenant was named Best Motion Picture – Drama.  Because he won the DGA prize, he took home the equivalent Oscar but the academy selected Spotlight, the highly regarded drama about the Boston Globe’s expose on the Catholic Church’s cover-up of rampant childhood abuse, for Best Picture.

Sylvester Stallone, who the Globes named Best Supporting Actor and, to be fair, was seen as a favourite to win the biggest prize of all, was upset by first time nominee Bridge Of Spies’ Mark Rylance at the Academy Awards.  Kate Winslet, a previous Oscar winner for The Reader, lost the Best Supporting Actress gong to the hot young Swede Alicia Vikander, the second Tomb Raider, who starred in The Danish Girl with Redmayne, the Best Actor winner for The Theory Of Everything.  Curiously, Vikander was nominated for Best Actress – Drama at the Globes.  She lost to Brie Larson, the Best Actress Oscar winner.

Unlike its lead acting categories which are separated by genre, the Golden Globes doesn’t distinguish original scripts from adaptations.  They’re all lumped together into the Best Screenplay category.  Regardless, GG winner Aaron Sorkin did not win a second writing Oscar for penning Steve Jobs.  In fact, he wasn’t even nominated.

2016

A slight improvement over the two previous years, the Globes only missed three categories this time.

Kick Ass star Aaron Taylor-Johnson somehow snagged the Best Supporting Actor trinket at the GGs for appearing in Nocturnal Animals but it was his fellow nominee Mahershala Ali who won his first Oscar in this category for his revered performance in Moonlight.  Taylor-Johnson wasn’t even in the running.  His name was left off the list.  Paradoxically, his co-star, Michael Shannon, was an Oscar nominee in the same category but not a contender at the Globes.

Meanwhile, La La Land won the Globe for its screenplay but was defeated by Manchester By The Sea at the Academy Awards.  Best Foreign Language Film went to Elle at the bowling ceremony.  The Iranian film, The Salesman, secured the golden naked man.  Elle didn’t even make the Oscar shortlist.

2017

For this particular year, The GGs and the Motion Picture Academy both agreed on all four acting winners but split on four other categories.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, the story of a determined mom hoping to get justice for her murdered daughter, won the bowling gong for Best Picture – Drama.  The Oscars selected The Shape Of Water for Best Picture.

Three Billboards also won the Best Screenplay Globe.  The MPA named Get Out and Call Me By Your Name as its Best Original and Adapted Screenplays, respectively.  Neither were nominated for Globes.

For Best Original Song, the Globes championed This Is Me from The Greatest Showman while the Oscars pushed Remember Me from the animated blockbuster Coco.

Finally, the Best Foreign Language Film category.  The GGs embraced In The Fade (not nominated for an Academy Award) while The Oscars went with the trans drama A Fantastic Woman.

2018

It’s a Festivus miracle.  Only one miss and only in a technical category to boot.  The Globes selected the music from the excellent Neil Armstrong biopic First Man, a Best Visual Effects Oscar winner, for Best Original Score.  The Motion Picture Academy went with Black Panther instead.  First Man was excluded from the running.

So does this mean that this longtime public embarrassment is suddenly relevant again?  We’ll know for sure in the coming years but for now, based on its entire history, consider this a rare anomaly.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Sunday, January 5, 2020
7:50 p.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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Howie:  Hey, hey, wait up!  Wait up!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The song was Satisfaction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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