New Finds of Old Jeffy Originals

My old and good friend Loren Michaels.

When I first moved to California in 1986 he was the first true friend I made. A friend of T.C. Tahoe whom was the only person I knew at all in SoCal, Loren and I hit it off immediately. Here we are circa early '90's...note Jeffy still had orange hair. More significantly, note the ultra-hip Sherman and Peabody tie. That's right. We were cool.

As mentioned before here on this blog, Loren and I would get together and write songs. This was centuries before I myself could form a simple "G" chord, and Loren was the multi-instrumentalist in our little garage combo.

We started off writing a silly little tribute song to our friend Jerry Camarro (yes...as far as I knew, that was his real name) and then it took off from there.

We wrote a country song. Then a reggae song. Then a rap song. And on and on. When we had a half dozen or so that we would play at backyard BBQ's, we recorded a little album to annoy our friends and families with. Since we had covered so many genres of music from around the world, we called the album "Pissin' Off the World".

I haven't seen my old buddy Loren in about a decade, but thanks to the World-Wide-InnerWebs, we found each other again through Face (timewaster) Book. Loren lives in Las Vegas now. True it's only 4 hours away by car, but who knows the next time we'll bump heads.

Loren still had a copy of that tape though. Over 20 years old and getting warbly, he digitized the "Pissin' Off the World" master tapes. I'd like to share a few selections with you here.

Our first mega hit, a country love song already featured here. "Gimme A Woman", the song that would NOT die.

Here's one that has actually turned into a standard joke. I've seen this take used on TV and commercials lots of time. I believe we were the first though. "Rappin' Rabbis".

I also talked here about Loren's daughter Ashley. I used to babysit her and this is the lullabye I wrote one night. Recorded a la Rudy Vallee 1920's style..."Pookie Eyed Baby".

I was also deep into blues back then. So we wrote Ashley a blues song. The crying baby at the end is Ashley herself and there was no overdubbing. Ashley was on my lap during the recording, and perfectly on cue, she chimes in at the coda. "Blues Rockin' Baby".

Thanks Loren for hanging on to these. They are very raw and some cuts are down-right embarrassing...but that was us. Raw and embarrassing. And a whole lot of fun.

Talk to you soon.