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.

Gimme A Woman - an Uncle Jeffy Classic!

As I referenced back in my "Pookie-Eyed Baby" post, about a zillion years ago I would whittle away the hours with my old pal Loren Christopher Michaels in his garage and write songs. A country song, a stripper-rock-&-roll song, a reggae song, a rap song, a 1920's style lullaby...most all with a humorous point of view.

At some point we had about 11 songs and we recorded a for-fun album for our friends, and going on the premise that we had covered every style of music, we titled the album "Walkin' Boy & The Scratch: Pissin' Off the World!".

Here's a re-imagining of the cover art work:

Loren was the musician on all tracks (I hadn't popped my guitar cherry yet) and I nick-named him "Walkin' Boy" as a reference to his fingers "walking" up and down the frets of the guitar. Pretty neo-pseudo-hip, huh?

Loren nick-named me "The Scratch" because, at the time I was working in a sandwich shop, and used to tell long drawn out stories at the end of the day, about how I had made the daily soup, the chili, the salsa, et al, from scratch. Pretty Alton-Brown-hip, huh?

I think the first song we truly collaborated on was "Gimme A Woman", the song you're about to see and hear.

I had made up the first stanza and was annoying people for months as I walked around singing it.

Over and over.

and over.

One night after I got off work, Loren and I got a silly bug up our kiesters to drive to Las Vegas. We had about 40 bucks between us, but seeing as I had to be back at work in 12 hours, we wouldn't be there long enough to spend much more than that anyway.

We got to Vegas about 10:30 p.m., wandered up and down the strip for 3 hours, then at 2 a.m. it was time to head back. This would give me time to shower and go make more soup at the sandwich shop.

On the way home we were both ready to sleep pretty hard. We were passing through Barstow, CA. and still had 2+ hours to get home. Knowing that the car couldn't drive itself, and feeling pretty punchy, we decided to finish the obnoxious, misogynistic, foul song I had been beating into the ground and my friends' heads for months, as an excercise to keep ourselves awake.

"Gimme A Woman" was born. Here it is:



This is not really a misogynistic song. It's a love song. All songs are love songs...you can't write a song unless you're in love.

So get over it.

Besides, we were just doing our job. Doing our best to piss off the whole world.