Lost Whack Liner Notes

For every SD/WB record release I was around for, the record company asked for a “bio”, and other promotional materials. These things are usually generated in-house at the record companies or by their publicity agents…but they may have been conditioned, through baleful experience, to ask W+D to provide the material themselves because of W+D’s early “feedback” on the dreck generated by the so-called publicity professionals. For instance, they started writing their own press releases starting with the ’03 EMG release, and had heavily edited those before then.

Some of you may recall (or even own) the result of what might have been Walter and Donald's finest hour in producing the promotional material so lusted after by the suits: the bio produced for 2 Against Nature, in time-wheel form (below right; for the wheel content, see this page on the SDArchive site). We enjoyed each time an interviewer asked a question indicating they had taken the "bio" information seriously; this happened most frequently in Japan as I recall...

Flash back to the 11 Tracks of Whack days. Walter wrote a few little confections that were never used (and probably never even submitted) — at least as far as I can tell. Here’s one he must have considered, for a minute anyway, as some liner notes for Whack.

Most of us could probably read this text with identifiers stripped out and immediately recognize the author. Does our boy have a distinctive “voice”, or what?

• When, in the course of a checkered twenty five year career in and out of the music business, having blazed through the good years and persisted through the less-than-good, giving no quarter and taking none, but smiling, always smiling as you go; having reclaimed one’s dignity and fine-tuned one’s appreciation of the keen pleasures of life, and after all miraculously finding oneself in a mild and sunny clime, surrounded by peace and abundance; hunkered down in the midst of a delightful and loving family, would now, in the midst of his middle years, undertake the writing and recording of his first solo album - then God help him. Let him lean heavily on the sparkling talents of his loyal and generous colleagues, let him learn to grab the good things as they occur and be grateful for the result, whatsoever it may show itself to be at the end of the long and proverbial day. Let him complain noisily at every setback, and let him rejoice mightily when the damn thing is finally ruined beyond all repair. The typical product of just such a bold but misguided enterprise is contained herein.

Walter Becker

Maui HI