Some nice feedback regarding our latest OOB Blog posts featuring "ultra rare and priceless" finds from the (ahem!) Capitol Records collection - including my sis, Becky who told me Dan sounds like Mick Jagger! I was reminded also that way before "Green Tangerine" was an OOB Blog post it was the background song for this animated cartoon of Dan's... The Origin of his Ka Ka Cat!... ENJOY!
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Cartoon and Music by Dan Banic, added sound effects and editing by Donald Jefferes
Opened my front door this wintery morning and my peripheral vision picked up a brief yet unmistakable image of an old man scampering down the block, sideways like a crab, diving into bushes and disappearing behind a snowdrift... he might've also been naked, I'm sort of trying to block out that part.
As I stepped out from my doorway I almost tripped on a box he had left at my door. At closer inspection I discovered, aside from a few back issues of Juggs Magazine, it was a box of old 45rpm records - and a note which read "My wife will no longer allow me to keep these in the house. I've heard you might be interested - please do not throw out as I might be encouraged to scour through your trash and take 'em back! Please - they are yours now... ENJOY them as I used to ............in my younger days. Signed, Old Man".
The most bizarre discovery in this collection of random records (we'll just forget about the magazines, shall we?) was an ULTRA RARE and priceless record from The Out of Bodies, Green Tangerine! Apparently aside from being completely insane this old man had taste! I must tell Dan about this!
(Click below to hear the songs)
More extremely rare and priceless finds coming SOON! Stay tuned!
Hey, would you look at THAT!! Yet ANOTHER extremely RARE and priceless find! Gee, they seem to be falling out of the sky, now - don't they? Well - here's two great tracks of Dan's - The "Boogah Boogah Song" backed with "Come Out & Play"!
(Click below to hear the songs)
More extremely rare and priceless finds coming SOON! Stay tuned!
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Oh - - if only!! Gee, what a cheap way to get Blogger hits with a title like that! (I'm sorry!)
Still, enjoy this (ahem!!) extremely RARE and PRICELESS find... "Crazy Boy", featuring Joe Vento, Dan Banic and Donald Jefferes... backed with "All Over Now" an even rarer audio track salvaged from the cutting room floor during the filming of the Out Of Bodies documentary "Let Me Pee" - their last ever jam session.
(Click below to hear the songs!)
(Watch Out For That) Crazy Boy
More to come as we continue to dig through the archives! Stay tuned, friends!
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'Tis that time where it is somewhat acceptable to say the word 'Tis and get away with it! Yes, we're talking Christmas Time, folks! Immediate households only, please! Let's face it - we can barely stand the sight of each other, much less the thought of all those germs! No thank you!
But I digress - what sort of Holiday Spirit is THAT? Let's think about the GOOD things, shall we?
Family... Friends...
...and ventriloquist dummies...
"Donald, I tried a test with a frame grab. Color apps always work best with high quality pics, but what I did was colorize it and then fix it up in my photo editor to make it even better. Not too bad! You can put this up in the OOB site! Ha Ha!"
- Dan
November 24, 2020
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As promised, here are some long-lost gems discovered while sifting through the cassettes mentioned in our previous OOB Blog post, The Out Of Bodies - UNEARTHED!
These songs, among others, have already been added to our EXTRAS page in the downloads section, for your listening enjoyment! As we dig deeper there will undoubtedly be even more!
This one's just a funny little impromptu skit we did one day at Dan's house in the Bronx - Dan, Mark, my son Craig and I - imagining a taping of the Barney & Friends kid's show (which was popular in the early 90s) going HORRIBLY wrong ...for reasons unknown. I had completely forgotten we had done this - and hearing my son at 9 years old playing the part of the kid in the audience just made me smile! Oh, HA!... and that's ME doing Barney...
I dared to wonder aloud about THIS ONE about 5 years ago... when I wrote The Mystery of the Strange Man With A Lightweight Trunk... and since then, within the past 5 years, the strange, unexplained VIDEO that Dan made for it disappeared FOREVER - and with it (or so we thought) the only audio copy of the SONG known to exist.
That was, until I rediscovered a lone stash of cassettes I hadn't looked through for years! And wouldn't you know it - there it was, buried among a collection of mixed tapes - I FOUND IT!! Dan was thrilled!! So again, I got the chance to ask him, "Hey Dan, what the Ffff??" Dan revealed only that the inspiration for the song came from an old children's book that we both grew up with, The Five Chinese Brothers by Claire Huchet Bishop. We laughed about how we were both horrified and enchanted by it's strange drawings, originally published in 1938 - depicting five Chinese brothers who looked exactly alike and possessed special talents, which they used to evade execution for an accidental crime one of them committed.
While Dan might've been inspired by The Five Chinese Brothers it doesn't even come CLOSE to explaining what's going on here!!... there's STILL some mystery surrounding an odd character going around with a lightweight trunk handing candy out to children. What's in the trunk? Does Chris Hansen know about this guy?
Oh, and I should add that while Dan was in Chinese-mode he also recorded THIS, just because, well - I suppose, why NOT?
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Still to come...
Even MORE tunes as I continue to dig deeper!
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| What's on these tapes? (and yes, that's Dan with Tony Randall - but that's a story for another day!) |
Seems somewhat fitting that this happened on Halloween... like Igor scouring through the graveyard, there I was - digging through the archives - when I came across an old box simply labelled "cassettes". I was expecting to find a lot of home-made mixed tapes, which was the norm back in the early 90s. I used to make tons of them for myself and friends - and yes, there were quite a few of those... but what I wasn't expecting was to hit a vein of long lost Out Of Bodies tapes! What the H - E - double hockey sticks were these doing in here? I thought for sure I had gone through every imaginable cassette I was aware of when I painstakingly compiled the music selections for this website. Then again, an earlier embryonic version of this website would most undoubtedly be much less all-inclusive than what this site eventually became - so it makes perfect sense that I was at least aware of these tapes, but just couldn't get to all of them. I mean - who could?
I remember listening a lot to an old radio program called "The Lost Lennon Tapes" where the host, Elliot Mintz (underground radio deejay, publicist, friend of Yoko's) would play super rare recordings from John Lennon's personal collection. He was responsible for listening to hours upon hours of recorded material and then put them in chronological order. His close affiliation to the Lennon's, especially after John's death, made him somewhat of a spokesperson/archivist of Lennon's unreleased recordings and demos. Yoko had personally handed Mintz cassettes that she was finding all over their Dakota home - many hidden away in closets and drawers, unheard by anyone.
Mintz's radio program was almost painful to listen to at times - not just because the author of these recordings was no longer with us - but because Mintz was a stickler for detail - and would talk seemingly endlessly, revealing every subtle reference and backstory to every recording that he would eventually get to (and of course, it was always after a commercial or two) and I can remember many a night laying in bed with my finger on the boom box record button, waiting for Mintz to play the damn song already! He also had one of those voices where every word would be enunciated ever-so-clearly. It was almost a type of Chinese water torture listening to his program - but with all these somewhat annoying aspects I gotta hand it to him - he took an unfathomable huge undertaking and didn't give up. I'm staring at these cassettes now and my eyes are glazing over. Where do I even begin? I'm not going to find "Imagine" in here, for cryin' out loud - I might find a live version of "Doggy Poo", but who's gonna give a rats ass, really?
Wooaaahh! Hold on there fella! Where'd that come from? I'm sure you'll find something meaningful to yourself just based on the fact that you were part of it and it's all kind of exciting to rediscover stuff you've forgotten even existed! Right? Hey why am I suddenly talking to myself? What's going on - - what? Oh.... right... it's Halloween!!
Okay, so here's what I'll do. I'll start at the top of the pile and just work my way through it, one cassette at a time. I'll be listening for those special, quirky moments that make this lovable rag-tag bunch of guys as lovable as they are - and when it merits digitizing, that's when I'll pop it in my IONTape 2 PC cassette to digital recorder - and share it with the masses.*
Disclaimer: The *masses* may be just a handful of really bored people surfing the internet looking for something - anything - to be entertained by, such as yourself. No offense intended!
Hey, you! I hope you appreciate all this hard work you son of a...
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Submitted by Lisa Velez-Estrella
(She might've added the flower!)
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| 1976 |
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| 1940-1948 |
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| From WOW Comics 1976 |
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| An early version of our WOW Comics |
I don't really remember why, but Don and I were down in the lunchroom, and except for us, the place was empty. I was doing' Mrs. Glaser impressions (nervously looking over my shoulder after each performance) and Donald was giggling (we used to "giggle"). But we weren't there just to make fun of mean ole, fat ole Mrs. Glaser - no sir! We were third graders! We was on serious business. A "mission" you might say.
I didn't really know why we were there, but Don did (and that was good enuff for me!) So we fooled around (a little tap dance on the table - a pantomime vomit because of the hot lunch...) while we waited for our "contact".
It was a girl. Not just any girl though - it was a real ugly girl. It was a real yucky girl. The yuckiest girl in the school... Hermione Galumph!* (Blechhh!)
[*editor's note: Okay, yes - that's an OBVIOUSLY made up name - just GO with it!]
But, like I said, we was on important business! (What else would keep us in the lunchroom alone with Hermione (yuck) Galumph?
She "schlepped" in from Stairway 6. She was wearing an extremely wrinkled shirt and an old lady sweater that was missing most of the buttons. And, though I really don't recall clearly, it's pretty fair to guess to say that she had a fairly large bubble of snot hanging from either nostril. But, the most important detail, and the reason we were there, was the large shopping bag she lugged along behind her.
