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!
Just had my first listen to these - Dan's first three songs took me far away to this off-beat one man circus performance act. I found it intriguing and yet sad. U know the way clowns can make u feel without the funny. Barney takes were real funny. Craig's participation was priceless. The Chinese song was great, I saw a cartoon playing out in my head. Dan really put a lot together in this one and did it very well. I get the Tony Randall Dr Lao reference!
ReplyDeleteBecky...is that you? What people don't realise is the incredible amount of work Dan put into these..and the rest of the Out of Bodies...all the late nights, all the watered down iced tea, taking a dinner break and going to a diner and screaming out of there because Dan had to take us to the one greasy spoon in NYC that was built around a cemetery. Hey, that's good eats!!!!
ReplyDeleteYep, that was Becky - and yes, I too remember that horrid diner! I also remember white knuckle rides through the toughest part of the Bronx as my gas tank was running on fumes! GOOD TIMES!!!
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