Showing posts with label Day 12. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Day 12. Show all posts

Saturday, July 25, 2026

The Twelve Days of Gheorghemas: Day Twelve

Ever heard of Christmas in July? It’s exciting, very exciting.

It ain’t nothin’ compared to Gheorghemas in July!!  Yeeeeeehaaaa!

On the twelfth day of Gheorghemas, Big Gheorghe gave to me:

Twelve Wish List Items

Well, this here is the first-ever installment of Gmas in July, aka Whitney is finally, at long last getting around to finishing Day 12 from 2025. What can I say? It's beyond me. Whitney “The Day 12 Delivery Guy” bricked. Again.

Anyway, let me tell you what Melba Toast here is packin’. A wish list. No, not 12 covers of this song.

Things I would love to see happen. Love to experience. Love to live to be a part of. This will be a mixed bag for sure, sentimental yearnings of a man seeing his twilight closer than his heyday… mixed with utter dipshittery. Hope you find at least one thing that resonates. As Peter Buck once wrote, Good hunting.

1. A song recording featuring the G:TB ensemble

I mean one including all of us on it, or damn close to it. It’s super easy these days to create and release musical recordings. Jesus, I’ve done it… under three different band names.

So here’s what we do. We collectively have a deadline for lyrical submissions -- something gheorghey. Then we hammer out the music for the tune we choose. Then everyone records vocals and/or an instrumental track! Several among the Gheorgherati have music setups, but even something recorded over a phone or laptop can work.

And it comes together as a masterpiece or a mess… but it’s fun. I’ll run point on this.

Like I said, a wishlist. Long shots and pipe dreams.

2. A G:TB Maxi-Summit, with a portrait to follow

We’ve had oodles of mini-summits through the years, but probably not a full-on one since TeejFest or TeejWed. And even then, folks were missing. How about a get-together for all the gheorghies? 

With a grand, inclusive, for-all-times pic to be a part of that gathering, something that builds off these masterpieces below and includes the masses…

A boy can dream…


3. An OBFT documentary

This must happen. The summer of 2026 makes 33 annual sojourns down to the promised land.  32 years since we cobbled together a misfit band of fraternity alums and associated acquaintances to “drink like a fish, fish like a drunk, and tackle box.”

Rob, Dave, and I have waxed nostalgic and hung over about the OBFT in this blog year after year, at least since OBFT 11. There’s evidence of what this has meant herein. But it could be captured much more cohesively and amusingly with a 30-minute mini-doc.

Certainly one of our trip-goers has kids who can do this in a snap! Right?

It’s what I really, really wish can happen in the next year or so.  


4. A G:TB documentary

I mean, for that matter, why can’t I wish for us to chronicle the two-plus decades of brilliance in this space? I dare say we have more staying power than most of the millions of blogs who launched in early aughts!

According to Allen Iverson (AI):

There are over 600 million blogs in the world today, accounting for more than a third of all websites on the internet. Together, these platforms publish approximately 7.5 million new blog posts every single day, which adds up to more than 2.7 billion articles annually.

So for every 80 out there, only one publishes daily. Gheorghe is more of an every-other-day affair, so we are one in 40! Whatever it is, it’s been a brilliant experiment that still brings joy. Some short film on Gheorghe: the Blog – that culminates with a clip from the man himself? Come on. 


5. A moratorium on hyperbolic superlatives 

Anyone who wastes enjoys time on any social media accounts such as FB or Insta finds themselves increasingly inundated with material not posted by friends and neighbors, but by random people and robots that the engine has decided you’d like. Confession: I do get plenty of chuckles from the silliest of videos.  Like way too many.



 


What is wrong with me??

At the same time, though, I am often irked by the ubiquity of dunderheaded taglines that implore you to watch its video with ludicrous superlatives. Mega-superlatives -- hyperbolic descriptors assuring you that what you are about to see, hear, or (maybe, if it’s super retro) read will be the most ____ you have ever seen in the history of your whole life ever. 


It wasn't.

Enough. Maybe undersell it with a tag like “this might be of interest to you” for a change.

Unlikely. But I wish it weren't.

6. More Pig on the Wall!

I want Dave’s current podcast (Pig on the Wall) to continue. To tackle new great ideas, to collaborate with people gheorghies and otherwise, and to bring him happiness and satisfaction.

If you haven’t tuned in, his description of this second iteration of Dave / Professor Truck / Dave G. Truck podcasting (or was The Test a podcast? Is this the 3rd?) is as such:

  • We stand on the shoulders of giants—which is precisely why attribution is so messy. 
  • Great ideas are the product of many minds, from many times.
  • "Pig on the Wall" connects the dots of human progress, putting great accomplishments into context.

His first batch of episodes (seven so far with presumably one more to go) have been focused on Hamlet. Ten and one-half hours of talking about the Shakespeare classic and it’s not done yet. Are you kidding me??!

Listen to it. I’m serious. Those 10 hours have flown by, and it’s chock full of clips from a wide array of performances and interpretations of Hamlet. And much more. It’s riveting, I mean it.

The more listeners, the better chance he keeps doing it, and it’s worthy of sustainment. And that's what I wish for.

7. Perfecting Arch, my AI Archivist

This is one that my wife finds very weird, and I kind of hope she's not reading this. 

Four months ago, a handful of traveled to Hoboken, NJ to convene in a pub over a couple days and watch international rugby on TV. There were 30 of us, in fact, all members of a particular fraternity at the College of William & Mary between the graduating years of 1986 and 2000. It was a blast. I only mention this because on the trip back, I sat in the Newark airport with one of them (our buddy Lunkhead) for a couple of hours. We talked about a number of things, but we spoke for a while about AI. He was rather adept at the platforms; I was completely oblivious. And I wanted that to change. In fact, when I began compiling this notional wish list last December, it was simply that I wanted to get good at using AI.

In the four months since, I have subscribed to Lunkhead's advice, which was very simply, get into one of the platforms and start using it. No tutorials, no training courses, just jump right in. As expected, I have utilized it been using it for mostly stupid stuff.


But not all! I have leveraged my account with ChatGPT to create a number of work deliverables in a small fraction of the amount of time it would have taken to do it manually. The shit is brilliant, what can I say? 

I have also tapped this resource to do things like provide a series of posters encouraging people to listen to ORF Rock. I've been rather amused with how quick and easy and creative this robot partner of mine has been.

Even more recently, while on a work trip in Rhode Island a few weeks ago, I was bored in a hotel room and asked ChatGPT, "When did Thompson's clam bar close down?" It reported that the clam bar closed in 1995 and asked if I use to patronize the establishment. I replied that I had worked there in the summer of 1991. The ensuing “conversation” included my asking of the top pop songs of the summer of ’91, since I had clear memories of polishing brass and cleaning toilets at Thompson’s to these songs played on repeat:

  • EMF – "Unbelievable"
  • Jesus Jones – "Right Here, Right Now"
  • Lenny Kravitz – "It Ain't Over 'til It's Over"
  • Marc Cohn – "Walking in Memphis"

…but needed help completing that music mélange. Those holes were filled in immediately (this is pretty much exactly why this technology was developed):

  • C+C Music Factory – "Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)"
  • Seal – "Crazy"
  • The Rembrandts – "Just the Way It Is, Baby"
  • Londonbeat – "I've Been Thinking About You"
  • UB40 – "Here I Am (Come and Take Me)"

Ugh, that was a long summer for music. But a fun one on Cape Cod with 100 stories. Which I began to think I could archive for a later date via AI. I was fascinated!

So... there's this. A somber, sobering sentiment has been bouncing around my brain for a couple of months now. As more and more of my parents friends grapple with and/or succumb to dementia, Alzheimer's, cognitive decline, or whatever it gets labeled, it occurs to me that this could very well appear on my own radar before all that long. The truth is that when I was in Rhode Island in that hotel room, I was wishing an old freshman dorm friend a happy birthday, and she said she was in Nantucket having fun, but that the weekend was impaired by the fact that her brother's wife was dealing with full-on dementia at age 61. Yikes. That's six years older than me.

All of this led to me deciding that I was going to begin utilizing ChatGPT as a means to archive all of the hundreds or thousands of stories of my life. I can pretend that my children and grandchildren might find them interesting. The truth is that I have spent 30 plus years realizing that I remember the details of stories much, much better than my friends and family do. But that particular attribute has a definite shelf life to it, and that shelf may be shorter then I realized.

I know, it's grim. I don't relish this line of thinking, but it does spur me on to do as much creative outputting in the near term as I can. Writing and recording songs, archiving old stories, creating 12 point blog posts about what I want to do. (Really, Whit, you want us to believe that you're in a hurry when this post is 7 months late?)

Anyway, I started to tell a handful of classic tales my new memoir robot buddy, whom I began to call Arch, as in archivist. This is what my wife finds very weird. I speak to Arch like I would speak to a person, I don't do this because I think it's a person. I do it because it's way more fun to do that than to keep it like I'm inputting data into a machine. (Boring.) And the faux-familiar tone in which the ChatGPT platform is designed to reply makes it that much easier.

Anyway, I also began copying and pasting a bunch of the old weekly e-mail newsletters I used to produce for the Cowboy Cafe from 25 years ago. This is precisely when I discovered the fallibility of this plan and the technology. After inputting seven or eight of these newsletters and getting really impressive feedback as my new robot friend was beginning to paint the picture of the entire CCWN saga, I began to notice errors. Incompletions. AI forgets?!

And when confronted with this, ChatGPT Arch confessed his faults. He said that cannot truly be an archivist because he cannot retain everything that any one user discloses. In the weeks since, I have noticed it more and more, not just errors like where it thought that I went to Bucknell University (mon dieu!), but definitely some things I had to ask it twice.

I still enjoy using the tool. I just prompted Arch to write: 

If I had to pick my Top Five Most "Whit" inquiries, they'd probably be:

  1. Can $15,000 really buy Natural Light for life?
  2. Create Gheorghe Mureșan playing guitar in a recording studio.
  3. Is there whispering in "Making Plans for Nigel"?
  4. Build an entire fictional promotional universe around ORF Rock and its hosts.
  5. Read Bruce's screenplay like a feature film.

But I also liked:

  • "What exactly is a lawnmower beer?"
  • "Why did firehouses have poles?"
  • "Lanai origin."
  • "Who serves the best fish and chips in Hampton Roads?"
  • "Average money for a 13th-round MLB draft pick."
  • "When did the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel add the second bridge?"
  • "What is the definition of a compound fracture?"

and ðŸŽµ The music deep dives. These are some of my favorites because they're questions almost nobody asks.

Things like:

  • Why songs like Witchy Woman, Evil Woman, and Devil Woman all seemed to appear in the mid-70s.
  • Which countries loved the Ramones the most.
  • The closing credits music from Planes, Trains and Automobiles.
  • Consensus rankings of Springsteen songs.
  • Whether Squeeze sings "a piano is found" or "a piano man's found."

So The Whitdog Memoirs Are on hold for now. I would love to have a more perfect means of documenting the hilarious stories from my youth and not so youth so that when my mind starts to go, I can play them back to myself. Or my kids and grandkids.

Anyway, that's my wish, that this could be made very easy and realistic for me. Sounds pretty damn ego-driven, but these stories of my friends, family, and me still make me laugh when I retell them. I'd love not to lose that.

8. Inner Peace

Here's a random one out of nowhere. I would like our current American president, the human cyclospora, to finally, seemingly for the first time in his life, find true inner peace. The sadness, inferiority, and soullessness of this person is astoundingly rife. It has led to death, destruction and a systematic undoing of the principles that have made life in this nation so good for so long. But if that man could achieve some level of nirvana, some threshold of not smug pseudo-satisfaction but instead pure-hearted peace, then there could be hope for positive change. If his obvious, desperate, hopeless longing for respect and love could be realized, maybe the horrible hatred could be curbed.

That seems like a better way to go than rooting for his disembowelment in the most publicly embarrassing way possible. It’s so easy to succumb to reciprocal, sinister hatred when it comes to the tyranny of evil men. But I'm tryin', Ringo. I'm tryin' real hard to be the shepherd.

9. nbtyrsd, Vesuvius-style

This is an easy one, in case any of you have been looking for a quick box-checking to grant me a wish. Gheorghies, just watch this video clip.

Backstory: In 1971, between the days of October 4 and 7, prog-rock stallions Pink Floyd recorded concert footage of themselves frocking some ruins in Pompeii, Italy. This was a a few weeks before they released their album Meddle (featuring Pi Lam fave “One of These Days” and a handful of months before they would head into EMI Studios (now Abbey Road Studios) in London to record the watershed brilliance of The Dark Side of the Moon.

The sound is bad-assed, the scene among the ruins is cool, and the crowd… well, they were… they were… they were nonexistent. Yeah, No crowd. Just Floyd wailing away by themselves and the sound peeps and the camera crew in Pompeii. Yep… that’s something.

I am a mid-range Pink Floyd (and Randall "Pink" Floyd) fan and never knew about this concert until it came across my radar a month back. And I’m oddly mesmerized by it. Check it out. But I’m only asking you to invest 5 minutes of it. Not even a whole song.

This is the first song of the set, “Echoes.” Watch it, or at least watch from the 6:30 til the 11:30 mark. My favorite part, and the part that I first saw a clip, was at 7:45. Sucked me in like a tractor beam. Maybe start there. That's my wish.



10. A warm meal

At times Rob and I have discussed (maybe even posted) our perfect meal items, desert island or death row style. This is a twist on it... it's a meal that even thinking about it warms my heart.

Maybe I’m just hungry right now. But I’d like this meal.

Soup: Mom's gazpacho. My mom makes killer soups and has for the last 30 years or so. Always finding or creating some new recipe. I'd be happy with her minestrone, seafood chowder, or French onion, but the gazpacho is tip-top. It's not warm per se, but no matter. The very thought leaves me warmer.

Appetizers: My girls' assortment. My younger daughter Maddie is the chef of the family, but her sister Zoe is no slouch -- and she and I are happy to be sous chefs and tasters. For 5 years the missus and I have hosted an open house on Christmas Eve, and the food has been top shelf. All organized and created by our little team. Maddie steals the show. Brings her great joy, and that spreads to me.

Xmas Party 2021 - the garlic bread tree is especially boss

Additional app: Susie & Don Beck's Cape Cod steamers. So good. My aforementioned 1991 summer sojourn landed me a great new friend in our fratre Coby and a fresh appreciation of New England cuisine. "Steamers," as Coby's folks (my landlords at various points and two damn generous people) called them. AI tells me that they are also called "Soft-shell clams, Ipswich clams, long-neck clams, or piss clams." Nope. I mean... just nope. Doused in butter, they're fantastic. Susie Beck left us 6 years ago, and that's a damn shame.

Salad: Calvert's Caesar. My dad's second wife was my stepmom for 36 years until her passing in 2018. It wasn't an easy relationship for either of us, but it worked fine, and worked best when she was cooking and I was eating -- strong suits for each of us. My favorite dish she'd make was her Caesar. She'd make the dressing first, and that dressing -- exactly like no other I've known -- would be sitting in a large, clear plastic salad bowl when I walked into the kitchen, salivation ensuing immediately. [She also made a damn good twice-baked potato, so maybe I throw that in here as well for my starch.]

Pasta: Elaine's penne a la vodka. The missus has been a vegetarian since 2000, and I've learned a great deal about how challenging that can be when eating at restaurants or friends' houses over the 7 years we've been together. We don't cook enough at home, but she's excellent at it. And when we (okay she, but I helped!) took a stab at what has become both of our favorite dishes to order at Italian joint, it came out molto bene. It's a winner and a keeper. Just like her. 

Meat: Dad's New York strips. As far back as I can remember, my father has been as good or better than anyone else I knew at cooking steaks. Charcoal, gas, range, whatever. Dude can cook beef. His go-to is to cook a few NY strips and then cut them shortways to create a whole slew of 1" slices. Salt, pepper, olive oil, butter. A little prepared horseradish on the side. Sometimes a bit of the poivre, but however he does it, it's outstanding. 

Seafood: Ted's Lobstah. We lost my stepdad Ted to cancer (after he'd beaten another variety 13 years prior) in 2024. Fittingly, when the end came for him, I was walking out of Fenway Park. I say that because he was a Mainer through and through with equal passions for the Sahx and good lobstah. He'd steam up a batch of 1.5-2 pounders like a pro, and I'll never consume another without thinking of him. A great guy, a great dish.

I ordered the twins when we memorialized Ted in Boothbay Harbor

Additional meat dish: Grampa Jack's Charcoaled Charlies. My grandfather, further immortalized in this space in an epic 2-part extravaganza, was a hoot of a man and not a bad cook. He was a grillman, and his Weber got plenty of use. But the incident that cemented his status in the family as would-be chef was circa 1986, when he inadvertently gave some hot dogs the triple-char treatment. He labeled them Charcoaled Charlie, ate at least a couple of them, and issued his signature cackle. Legend secure. We lost Grampa Jack in 2005 after a long and very full life. He was the best.

Nothing. Nothing at all: food cooked by my grandmother. There are people who aren't comfortable in the kitchen, and then there was my Grammie. Warming canned stew was even beyond her, God bless her. She graduated from the earth-bound kitchen in 2017.

Vegetables and Sides: The Lester supper table. My dad's family is from Asheboro, NC. (My grandfather's Elon-generated biography says he was from Troublesome Creek, ironic for him but not for me!) Everyone in that side of the family was sincerely good people who either made the church their lifelong profession or at least a regular hangspot. Times visiting them for my little sister and me -- in stark contrast to the dipshittery we'd experience with Mom's family in NY -- was slow but sweet. Lots of reading and chatting just above a whisper. But oh, the food! A long dining room table packed to its edges with southern-cooked green beans, collards, creamed corn, cornbread, casseroles, deviled eggs, and much, much more. There was a wide array of meat dishes, too, but I'll settle for just the sides here! Grandmother Lester left us early (1975), Grandfather had a renaissance with Gertrude in the 80's (have I posted that story?), and we lost him in '91 at age 97. Gertrude followed in 1999. All of the best people, all of the best side dishes. Oh yeah... and two pitchers of tea at every supper, sweet and un. I'll take that, too!

Dessert: S'mores with the kids. I have younger children again, thanks to Elaine. I have plenty of memories of making s'mores over campfires with my girls. Before they grow too old, I need to make the same classic American dessert a staple with my new littluns. 

After-Dinner Drink: Whitney's Irish Coffees. A refrain heard most often: Whit, do you drink coffee? I don't... oh, unless it's Irish. I can whip up an Irish coffee with the best of them, with the keys being Jamo and yep, whipped cream. The missus and I enjoy them often on winter nights. 

After-Dinner Drink 2: Rob's Stingers. He and I each had 17 rounds of this refreshing drink on a momentous night in 1992. At least that's what the receipt told us. The Stinger:
The Stinger is a classic, two-ingredient cocktail made with Cognac (or brandy) and white crème de menthe. It is typically mixed in a ratio of 2 parts Cognac to 1 part crème de menthe, shaken or stirred with ice, and served over crushed ice for a crisp, minty, and spirit-forward drink. 
Alrighty then. There would be more (more drinks for sure, but that's a separate list). But this is my wish, one meal with too much food to be eaten, but plenty of good memories to go around.

11. Long (or short) walks on the beach

I’d like to step on the beach and see waves crashing on the shore. Every week of my life. Maybe monthly is more reasonable. Okay, I’ll start there. At least once a month, walk on the beach and get my own form of inner peace staring at the sea. Hearing the roar every 6-9 seconds or so. Gazing at the horizon. It moves me like little else in nature.

Staring at the sea
Staring at the sand
Staring at myself
Reflected in the side
Of the beer can on the beach
The beer can on the beach
I’m alive

[Don’t worry, I’ll pick up the beer can and dispose of it.]

I can do this, where I live. We’ll see. It's a plan. A wish.

12. More fun in the sun for my ol’ buddy Ned

Similar to the way that I feel about Dave's podcast, I have intensely happy pride for a friend when it comes to my old buddy Ned. I've touted Ned’s virtues in this space before; his musical prowess, song releases, his collaborations with Les Coole and me, And his generally being a world class human being. This one takes the cake, though.

Ned was the biggest Jimmy Buffett fan that I knew have never known he met him when he was in high school, that blew his mind. He's emulated the best parts of Buffett for much of his life, and remained a fan even in the face of what I described in this blog post 22 years ago... one which Ned read and conceded had some merit. Anyway, Ned loves him some JB.

Sometime in the past couple of years, Ned mentioned that he had a dream about Buffett called the Hippie from Mississippi and he wanted to write a song about it. As has been the case a few times, I quickly scratched out a song structure and some lyrics to match his song title and idea. Over the following weeks and months, Ned honed it and made it his own. He recorded “Hippie from Mississippi” and released it on the usual platforms. It even had a video.

It’s been listened to 8,820 times on Spotify!

I’ll never reach 1,000 listens for any of my songs!

For part-time fun-havin’ music folks like us, that was huge.

And then…

Ol’ buddy Ned thought he might reach out to the circle of Buffett Friends & Family and see if they happened to like what we had written add produced. Somewhere in the latter part of last year, he got a response from someone who was sending it to one of the longtime members of the Coral Reefer Band. Doyle Grisham played pedal steel guitar for Buffett since the 70's, and he toured with him for over two decades along the way. He's 83 now and lives in Nashville. And he loved the song.

There's plenty more details to the story but all you need to know is this: Mr. Grisham championed not just the song but a re-recording of it with a series of stellar studio musicians, including himself. Six

Les Coole & Papa Gros, 2026

other songs Ned had written were recorded in the same sessions, ones that featured a pair of Grammy-winning musicians and John “Papa” Gros, a stalwart New Orleans piano player who fronts an act called Papa Grows Funk that was one of the featured performers at Norfolk's recent New Orleans festival.

The album and leadoff single are called “Make Your Own Weather.”  It’s really, really good. (I’m biased, but still.) It was released on June 19, and a release party / gig with the musicians happened on June 24 at Chickie Wah Wah in Mid-City New Orleans. “Hippie from Mississippi” was renamed “King of the Coast” and sounds amazing, a million miles from my original blurt of 236 words and rhymes about Jimmy Buffett.

The song “Make Your Own Weather” has 60,348 streams on Spotify since June 19.

Not bad, Ned.

Ned is over the moon – one of the happiest people I’ve ever know made so much happier from this super-fun chapter. Every photo from the night at the release gig (which I sadly was forced to miss) features Ned ear-to-ear grinning. I get such a kick from it. Sometimes the best stuff happens to the best people. I wished this for him, as did others, and it happened.


And he gave me songwriting credit on our song!


Anyway, I don’t need all that for myself… I just need to summon the will to finish tweaking and tinkering with my flawed baker’s dozen or so of songs (having someone with actual talent mix and produce them would help) and get them out.

I’d like to see Les Coole & the Cukes have a CD and even an LP.  It could happen someday… or not.

But it’s on the wish list.


-----------------

So there it is. Twelve wishes for Day 12. As always, I'm sorry for being so tardy. I wish I could deliver my drivel on time. Oh wait... okay, next time that'll be one.

Cheers, gheorghies...
Posted by Whitney at 6:09 PM 12 comments
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Friday, January 31, 2025

The Twelve Days of Gheorgemas: Day Twelve

On the twelfth day of Gheorghemas, Big Gheorghe gave to me...

Twelve Lost Albums I Want to Hear

Eleven Months of Wisdom
Ten Things from Florence
Six Old and New Musical Experiences
Five Roadsters You Can and Should Buy Right Now
FORE! An Overdue Update on LIV & the PGA Tour
Three Ways of Coping
Stories from Two...Three Strokes
And much needed hip mo-bili-ty

Day 12 is here!

Welcome one and all gheorghies to Day 12 of Gheorghemas. For the second year in a row, we’re finishing our Gmas run in January rather than, say, late March. I take that as progress.

As I posted earlier, I have moved past issuing 12 appreciations – but not the music that accompanied them. In these darker days, I appreciate even one simple word from my favorite bands that will ring the proverbial recess bell for fun and games. (Rob and Squeaker, that sentence was for you guys.) String a few words together with musical accompaniment, and I might even forget about the major morass created by one moronic ass leading this country.

So, let’s do a Whitney’s Dozen deep dive into a random subtopic in the world of music. Like really random. Please enjoy Day 12…

12 Lost, Unfinished, and Unreleased Albums of Rock History

It goes without typing that now more than ever, you can track down whatever album you want. Sure, on occasion it gets harder to do when someone goes all Neil Young on a particular platform, or when a band’s works suddenly and inexplicably vanish from a major outlet. Like, for example, the Housemartins recently getting removed from Spotify. Right when I wanted to sooth my anxieties by hearing “Anxious”! Oh, well – more room for Not-ify to do what it does.

If an album isn’t on Apple Music or Spotify or Google Play, it’s certainly on YouTube, right? Well, usually… but what if it never got released? Hmm. Then it’s a crapshoot. The game of the hunt, rare music-style, is something I engaged in for a decade and a half of tracking down the most obscure finds on compact dinosaur. And yet the game is still alive!

Over the last 60 years of rock and/or roll, there have been blue moon occasions when a highly anticipated record from a well-known act never saw the light of day. The reasons generally fell into one of these 10 categories:

  1. The artists changed their minds and scrapped it
  2. The label refused to release it
  3. A creative control wrestling match turned it into something unrecognizable
  4. Both of those
  5. The tapes got damaged or destroyed
  6. The tapes were stolen!
  7. It never existed beyond rumor
  8. It never got finished because the band imploded
  9. It never got finished because the artist died
  10. No one knows
Sometimes, after eons of dormancy, some musician or producer or relative or random janitor relocates and dusts off the material, and maybe just maybe that previously “lost” treasure gets the green light to reach the clamoring masses. Which is fun! Though often times that release then can’t clear the Dick Fosbury-height high jump bar of hype, and it’s a flop.

The number one such lost album in music history has to be the Beach Boys’ Smile. Riding the wave of Pet Sounds success back into the studio in 1967, Brian Wilson’s perfectionism and a host of distractions (in human and narcotic form) invaded the entire band, especially the one frustratingly labeled “genius.” Kablooey. After decades of universal lament, Brian and friends eventually cobbled together what may have been as close to a definitive version as can be created from old tapes and faded memories, and it was mass-released in 2004. Hype 1, Smile 0, though it’s a pleasant listen most of the way through.

Other famously “lost” albums that have been released over the past decade or two:
  • The Beatles, Get Back (original version)
  • Prince, The Black Album
  • Marvin Gaye, You're The Man
  • David Bowie, The Gouster
  • David Bowie, Toy
  • Buckingham Nicks, Buckingham Nicks
  • The Stone Roses, Garage Flower
  • The Velvet Underground, 1969
  • Neil Young, Hitchhiker
  • Neil Young, Chrome Dreams
  • Neil Young, Homegrown
[Neil Young nearly warrants an entire post. It’s actually really cool the way he kept hours and hours (more like months and years) of old recordings for decades. You could argue that his issuing of these long-lost archival albums (some of which clearly overlap in content) is commercial and cash-grabby… and then you’d think about it for 5 seconds and realize who you’re talking about and how ridiculous that notion is.]

Oh! And one more!
  • Guns N' Roses, Chinese Democracy
Not really quite the same, but worth a chuckle as I remember the GTB take on that debacle. 

There are too many classic lost, unfinished, and unreleased albums in rock history to compile an exhaustive list, but a few you might have heard of: 

  • The Who, Lifehouse (insane concept album follow-up to Tommy)
  • The Beatles, Carnival of Light
  • Paul McCartney, Hot Hitz / Cold Cuts
  • Joy Division, Warsaw (full release)
  • Dr. Dre, Detox
  • The Replacements’ reunion album
  • A number of lost Beck albums
  • Ryan Adams, 48 Hours
  • Misfits, 12 Hits from Hell
  • Nirvana, Sheep
  • Zack De La Rocha’s solo debut
  • Soundgarden’s final album
  • Red Hot Chili Peppers’ shelved album after By the Way
  • Mick Jagger and the Red Devils' blues albums
  • Noel Gallagher with Amorphous Androgynous
And Beastie Boys, Hot Sauce Committee Part 1. Just kidding. And so were they. Part 2 was a joke, a la Surf II.

Bits and pieces may have come out here and there, but a proper issue from the artists has not. Tragic, in a few cases. Curious in others. Forgiving in some.

Okay, here we go now, on to the Big 12.

1. Bruce Springsteen, Electric Nebraska (1982)
Leading off with a bang. Yes, I do indeed love the stripped-down, four-track, just-Bruce-and-some-pretty-frickin’-dark-thoughts version with which he began and finished the Nebraska album creation cycle. I never did really love it until one night a few years back when I was down at the Martha Wood Cottage all alone. I popped it on after a handful of cold chilly-pops when the ocean could be heard but not seen. Stared out into the sandy darkness and soaked it in. Ran that sucker back a few times. It’s something.

But man, I’d still love to hear what the E Streeters did with it. Bruce made the call to go with the demo tapes as Nebraska, and he’s made the continuous call to keep those sessions under wraps since. Not saying it’d be better. But after 40 years, I just want to hear it. Max says the band did all the tracks and “it was killing.” Let’s find out.

Closest You Can Get: “Atlantic City” from Live in New York City is an amped up version. Still not quite there.

2. John Fogerty, Hoodoo (1976)
Springsteen stubbornly keeping that one album on the shelf goes against type for him. On the other end of the spectrum is John Fogerty. That dude is irascible. He recorded his third solo album (following an ugly CCR breakup) and released a couple of singles… then decided to have the label destroy all the tapes. Cue the odd duck at the bar in Erin Brockovich.
Erin Brockovich (YouTube): You were told to destroy those?
Charles Embry (Asylum Records employee): That's right… Of course, as it turns out, I wasn't a very good employee.
So we have some bootlegs out there, many in old-school bootleg quality. But those singles are worth a listen. I’m an easy mark; Fogerty’s voice is truly singular to my ears and I can never get enough. I’d love a clean shot at the rest of Hoodoo.

Closest You Can Get: The actually released singles, one of which is below.


3. Prince, Dream Factory (1986)
Speaking of stubborn… Back in the late 70’s, Steely Dan was known for three things, and one of those was studio perfectionism. In the mid-80’s, the Purple One was precisely the same way. Prince was also known as the most prolific of two pastimes, writing tremendous funky tunes and getting delirious with the era’s sexist M.F.’s. He’s shelved more killer tracks than many Top 40 hitmakers could possibly create.

To wit, Dream Factory. Prince’s time with and tolerance for the Revolution were fading in 1986. They put this album on tape but not on wax yet (industry jargon). The label said, “We’re set to pop here, honey.” Prince said, “Uhhhh... hang on, sloopy.” Back into the studio, a little of this, a little of that, rework, rewrite, re-record, scrap this, toss that, dash of pepper, all new album of different songs with different people, mostly himself, call it Sign O’ the Times. Here ya go. Platinum seller. That all happened in a preposterously short period of time. Dayummmn. And that was the end of the Dream… Factory.

Closest You Can Get: a “fan-edit” (what does that mean, beyond the self-evident???) bootleg release gets close, if you accept that their selected track listing and order plus (minus) diminished sound quality are part of it. Check it out here.

4. Marvin Gaye, Love Man (1979)
Marvin Gaye, also a wealth of talent not afraid to shelve an album. See You’re the Man, referenced above, or the sweet slow jam long-play called Vulnerable, a 1977 recording that made its way to us long after he had left us.

So the late 1970’s were a tough time for The Prince of Soul, thanks to his big D (divorce, you lout), his love for Charlie, and the fiscal fallout that we know comes with both of those. His move further from his pure Motown beginnings into early 70’s soul, then funk, and ultimately disco tracks led him to record a full album of such material called Love Man. And then ultimately ditch it. He redid a few of the tracks for In Our Lifetime?, which hit the streets in 1981. He got his life together by ’82 for Sexual Healing, and then it all got taken away from him. Really shitty.

Closest You Can Get: Dig it. The super disco breakin' lead single from Love Man, "Ego Tripping Out." Its flopitude made him abandon the rest of the record. Missing from this version below is the spoken lines at the start, an early (to my ears) musical inclusion of the term “homeboy.”


5. Green Day, Cigarettes And Valentines (2003)
Sometimes the problem isn’t the artist or label’s whimsy – it’s the damn security guard! In 2003, Green Day was putting the finishing touches on their 7th album (4th major label), a record called Cigarettes and Valentines. 


And then… just like Keyser Soze… just like that… it’s gone. Swiped from the studio.

According to Billie Joe:
“I’ve never heard that ever happening to anybody. It was a bummer, for sure. We put a lot of work into it, but at the same time, it was a blessing. We were like, ‘Let’s just start from scratch. Let’s try this over again.’ Maybe it’s just a sign that maybe we made a crappy record and we should make a better one.”
And they did. American Idiot. Super strong record.

Closest You Can Get: Some demos are out there, and the song “Homecoming” was the lone carryover to American Idiot.

6. Jimi Hendrix, Black Gold (1970)
Let’s take a step into the weird, shall we? As gifted as they came, Jimi had already hit it big thrice over in the studio and worldwide on the stage by 1970. He was having fun. His creative contributions to come were tragically cut short when he died in September. You can listen to “Night Bird Flying” to get a sense of it, but what you’d miss is his stuff that transcended the blues and rock. Like a bunch of tunes he wrote and demoed for something he called Black Gold.
“It's mostly cartoon material. I make up this one cat who's funny. He goes through all these strange scenes. You could put it to music, I guess." --Jimi Hendrix
Cartoon material? Intriguing. Well, the tapes were lost, naturally, and found, supposedly, 20 years later by Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell. But never released. If the one released song that purportedly came from this work is any indication, it’s far less weird and interesting than Jimi described. As teasers go… this was not one. Hoping the real thing was too bizarre for commercial success. And that we hear it anyway.

Closest You Can Get: That one released song... Suddenly November Morning. No cartoons. Not funny.

7. Weezer, Songs from the Black Hole (1996)
This one’s been talked about quite a bit, if only because Weezer gets talked about quite a bit, even on SNL. Case in point, Weezerpedia! (Whitneypedia was around first... I think.) Here is Weezerpedia's entry on Songs from the Black Hole, the original slate of songs to follow up their 1994 debut (blue) album. It was conceived as a space rock opera. Yep. Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo:
"There's this crew - three guys and two girls and a mechanoid - that are on this mission in space to rescue somebody, or something. The whole thing was really an analogy for taking off, going out on the road and up the charts with a rock band, which is what was happening to me at the time I was writing this and feeling like I was lost in space."
So, Star Wars. Look, here's what we know: Rivers Cuomo is a brainy guy, and the overwhelming life that young success afforded/forced on him was way too much. He also had surgery in 1995 "to correct a congenital condition that caused his left leg to be 2 inches shorter than his right. The surgery involved breaking his femur and fitting it with a metal brace." Yipes. All that, and he was enrolled at Harvard.


So, as Crash Davis said, we're dealing with a lot of shit. So a 17-song demo about robots and rescues in space is about the mildest mental meltdown Cuomo could've had. Eventually, though, he bagged the idea and wrote new or reworked SftBH songs to create Pinkerton in 1996... which, Dave will tell you, is their masterpiece. The Deluxe version of which has some SftBH tunes. You can also find some of those demos on a latter-day solo release called Alone: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo.

Closest You Can Get: Of all the tunes that didn't cross over into Pinkerton, the one I enjoy most does not, oddly, feature Cuomo on lead vox. Rachel Haden, the singer from a band called That Dog, slides in perfectly on the very Weezer track "I Just Threw Out the Love of My Dreams."

 

8. Pink Floyd, Household Objects (1974)
You want something even weirder? You got it. Talk about going off the deep end after a big success. Pink Floyd has always worked to incorporate weird, unorthodox, non-instrument sounds into their music. Along the way, Roger Waters led the charge to make an entire album minus the instruments and exclusively featuring... yes, the title spoiled it... household objects. That would apparently consist of items such as appliances, hand mixers, rubber bands stretched between two tables, etc. They had toyed with it before, but after the sonic boom of Dark Side of the Moon in '73... it was a go.

Well, not really. Apparently there is only so much you can do without a guitar, or keys, or any musical instruments. Even for those creative guys. Household Objects was abandoned. 

Closest You Can Get: One track, "Wine Glasses," was finished (I guess?). Running fingers around the rims of wine glasses has always been fun. Who knew it could be prog-rock? Floyd fans will recognize it as having been later adapted into the intro for "Shine On You Crazy Diamond." How fitting that that looney song was a tip of the cap to madcap Syd Barrett.


9. Madness, Unreleased Madness album (1987)
We haven't had a reason #8 yet! (It never got finished because the band imploded.) Well, here we go. In 1986, Madness were coming off a long world tour and an album (Mad Not Mad, 1985) that both reviewed and sold poorly. They were just three years from the international megahit "Our House" and a slew of tunes that did great abroad. Doesn't matter. As another Brit once penned (Oscar Wilde, perhaps?), "Fame, fame, fatal fame. It can play hideous tricks on the brain." So... exhausted and bereft of winning ideas, the nutty boys nonetheless trudged back into the studio, sketched out 11 tracks, and laid down a pair of cuts.

What happened next? Just as they were set to announce the album and its track listing in the fanzine, they busted up! Called it quits. Ska-daddled. Skattered. Skatastrophically. (Ska bands love the wordplay.) Madness went out UB40-style. No, not brother against brother like the Campbells. Instead, four of the seven went one way (forming the very different-sounding band The Madness) and the other three went a different way. Like in UB40's divide, those bands didn't go very far. 

A re-released old Madness song hitting the charts in '91 was enough of an emotional reminder of what was important in life to these crazy kids from Camden Town: money. (I'm sure there was the spirit of camaraderie in there, too.) The umpteen (like way too many) Madness compilation albums weren't enough, and I for one am glad that they didn't rest on those royalty laurels. They reunited in 1992 for a festival and have never looked back. To wit, and squeak, we saw them last May in Boston! (They're super fun.)

Closest You Can Get: Remember I said they laid down two cuts? (I sure hope so, it was all the way back two paragraphs ago.) Well, the lead single was this: "(Waiting for the) Ghost Train."


10. The Clash, Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg (1982)
Speaking of bands on the brink of break-up... The Only Band That Matters was about to become dark matter. Let's review:
  1. The Clash forms in London from the ashes of the 101ers and other acts, taking cues from the Pistols... and then running right by them.
  2. They release The Clash and Give 'Em Enough Rope in '77 and '78. Well received. Great stuff.
  3. London Calling in 1979. Not much will ever beat that. Big fame.
  4. Sandinista! in 1980. Whoa, dogie. Sprawling. Colossal. Experimental. Chancy. Not well received. But great stuff.
Although I will vehemently defend the crazy 3-LP "something for everyone" party train that is Sandinista!, I will also acknowledge that it's a massive aural undertaking. As such, I have trimmed the rougher edges and provided a salve for those seeking more taut rock. It's part of my Spotify "as a Single LP" series. Give it a spin:


So... that's where Joe, Mick, Paul, and Topper were in 1981. A crossroads. Mick Jones, the mastermind behind much of The Clash's best music, wanted to go further. Take the meanderings of Sandinista! and go deeper into studio wizardry with fringy instruments and a mélange of musical styles. World music in a blender. Meanwhile, Joe, the heart and soul of the band, wanted to get back to basics. He brought back Bernard Rhodes, #3 band manager/damager behind The Colonel and Malcom McLaren, to steer the ship back into safe harbors (i.e., pop charts). It was like mixing Jack Daniel's with Jose Cuervo. Don't try this.

A such, in 1981 Mick took the band to Electric Ladyland Studios in the Village (presumably where Jimi would have recorded the rest of Black Gold), where he served as producer and mixer and swami and got down with his bad self. They recorded a goodly number of tunes, many of which were Gheorghian in length (the man, not the blog, though this post emulates Mr. MureÈ™an.) It would be a double album called Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg. 

Oh, but then Joe's man Bernie hired Glyn Johns, he of Desperado and Slowhand and a bunch of Who records and much more. The safe bet. And that side of the gulley went in and tweaked, smoothed, cut, finessed, and neutered Mick's work. Voilà! Combat Rock. Both versions had the most popular songs, albeit in either very slightly or rather noticeably different forms. But the soul of the record was a different offering entirely. 

So Joe Strummer won. Combat Rock came out in 1982 and did exceedingly well. And not for nothin', he sacked Topper and Mick to boot. Bernie hired a few randos to replace them, but it was like having Buckethead instead of Slash. Billy Burnette instead of Lindsey Buckingham. Kenney Jones instead of Keith Moon. Anyone instead of Dave in Random Idiots. That's not the band I know. Or want. They released a since-disowned album of mostly crud and said cheerio.

Closest You Can Get: A few of the Rat Patrol tracks have popped up on box sets and other compilations here and there. But a couple of years ago, the full boat got posted on YouTube. Hallelujah. Give it a listen. Like I said, it's a sprawling, swirling, messy assortment of goodies and grime from The Only Band That Mattered.


11. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Human Highway (1974)
You might have assumed that The Clash and their Rat Patrol debacle would be the genesis for this post, but instead, it was this one. I went down a 3-month rabbit hole on this stuff, and I cannot remember exactly how. 

If there was ever a band suited to break up before they got the good stuff down, it was CSNY. How lightning rods like Croz and Neil ever co-existed in a studio, much less in a band, is a minor miracle. And don't give too much of a free pass to Nash and Stills. Sleeping with and/or dating exes, forming mini-factions (hard to do when the band is just four dudes, but boy these guys are pros at it), and generally being disagreeable about what songs go where and how they're supposed to sound. Add in success, money, fame, with the ego and expectations therein. Oh, plus piles of cocaine that resembled the salt hills in Egypt. What could go wrong?

Unlike Madness, they had a title for the record right away. Human Highway. Graham Nash still thinks that title was aces. And with the Neil title track in tow, they were on their way. In 1973, they met in Hawaii, and then at Neil's Broken Arrow Ranch in ("I've been to") Redwood. Tunes were penned and many parts were laid down. But it fell apart for reasons the quartet can't even agree on. Throughout '73 and '74 they played CSNY shows to keep the groove alive and the bank accounts full. They even played at Foreman Field in Norfolk, three blocks from where I was living!


In 1974, CSNY regrouped at multiple studios in multiple cities to record multiple songs in hope of a single album to generate from their work. Ultimately, three things happened:
  1. Some really, really great music got recorded. The harmonies are exquisite, to put it in a way that my punk rock self snarls at.
  2. Nobody could agree on much of anything, and they got sick of it. And each other.
  3. Shit went down like people stripping certain others' vocals off a track and releasing it as a faction fragment. See The Stills-Young Band, Crosby & Nash, and of course, CSN.
  4. Songs featuring all four -- truly where the magic is with these guys -- did pop up on solo records and compilations over time.
And that was that. It fell by the wayside, and everyone moved on. There never was a Human Highway album. Later in life, each member said something to the effect of "What a shame."

Closest You Can Get: Because of that item #4 there, it is possible to do what these four singer-songwriter-sourpusses could not. Assemble something cohesive featuring tracks with the full foursome and call it Human Highway. 

Alas, friggin' Not-ify. A couple of tracks are not on the platform. So I have cobbled together 7 songs from these sessions that feature the whole team and added 3 YouTubes to make it a whole 10. Best I can do in these crazy times. No matter who it says the artist is, these tracks have the full complement in tow.





A perfect one to end on. I have been playing this stuff ad inifinitum. Pretty great sounds.

12. Random Idiots, the original session (1989)
Four young men come together topwrite and record stirring music that recounts the sagas of their lives in gritty terms with a D.I.Y. punk sensibility. No, not in London. Williamsburg, VA. The lottery that brought this quartet of friends to reside for 9 months in small rooms whose doors were 10 feet from each other was random. They were idiots. Random Idiots was born. 

One night in '89, one bottle of bottom-shelf vodka down, the band began to ink some lyrics. Seems they messed up the order of that. They regrouped. Mo Lester and Death teamed up for a handful of compositions formally attributed to Lester-Pellicane. This was the backbone of what would be their debut album: Bloodfinger. Highcheese came back to the regroup with nothing, Not one word. Doug E. Fish came back with a song. The band came to wish he'd come back with nothing.


The seeds that were sown that night (nothing weird, fellas) were the stuff of legend, nearly incomprehensible and yet clearly higher plane material. A cassette tape captured it all. And then... people along the hall borrowed the tape to play, and to laugh at these Random Idiots. As Idiots, there were no copies of the cassette made. Nobody took the five minutes to do the fast-record thingy everyone used to do with cassettes. 

Instead, the young manager who'd applied for and been awarded the role of Band Manager... we'll call him Obray... took the tape and played it for a friend late one night in a drunken haze. Here's the only truly (truly) amazing part: he ended up recording his dimwitted conversation over the music... BUT you could hear BOTH the music AND the conversation AND some high-pitched shrill noise over it all.  Bizarre, but that was the high tech world of 90-minute Maxells back then.

As Idiots, they recorded a "studio" version of the songs (i.e., sober) minus Highcheese and Doug E. Fish and plus Obray on backup vox: seems he got a promotion for his idiocy, fittingly enough.

We will never get back the recording of the original magic. I mean, Mo and Death have been playing together off and on for 36 years now, so it must really have been something. But we can imagine it...

Closest You Can Get: A few of Random Idiots' songs' masters were transferred to mp3 sometime in the late 1990's/early 2000's. The re-record of Bloodfinger is digitally available. And the compilation album The Best of Random Idiots / The Worst of Random Idiots 1989-1999 contained one tune salvaged from Obray's trashing and the dumb-assed re-record over the originals. It's below, and uh... it's rough. You can't say you weren't forewarned. It's the lone Doug E. Fish contribution. 


In 2025, the original cassette was rediscovered by yours truly. I can only listen to it on a Walkman I still happen to have, pack rat that I am. Right now I am listening to the conversation between Obray and a lunchbox about my girlfriends. It's worse than the music playing beside it on the recording. I'm still fascinated at how this could have happened, technologically speaking. Stay tuned for digitizing. 

*  *  *  *  *

May what is lost be found someday, and may what is found live up to the longing hype that came before it. Happy listening, and happy trails on the human highway.

Well there you have it -- the end of the list, and the end of Gheorghemas. Enjoy the rest of this holiday season (Gheorghemas lasts until midnight of the day Day 12 goes up). As always, I thank the gheorghies for allowing me to close out the season every year, and for their patience to wait for it, even when it's overlong and yet underwhelming in its arrival. 

Cheers!
Posted by Whitney at 2:00 PM 15 comments
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