Straight-to-Audio

Musical Jokes

2008-01-13T20:06:00.000-06:00

I've been inspired by many different forms of storytelling and music and have a vision of what I think would be interesting on stage and through a car stereo. I don't have much time to pursue them right now, though. But, here's an early version of a few jokes strung together with music. I was thrilled with it at the time, because I was just playing around with Band-in-a-Box, my new Roland Sound Canvas and Cool Edit Pro. I'm not as impressed with it ten years later and my wife just rolled her eyes at me when she heard it.

Listen to "Tree Elephants"

I remember putting a lot of these up on mp3.com, back in the heyday when you could make money for people listening to your stuff. The "Star Wars Gangsta Rap" was huge on mp3.com, even making something like $40k or $50k one year (probably about 1998 or 1999). I was trying everything to come up with something different and cool. Hey, not all experiments work, but you don't really know it until you try it.

I don't remember for sure, but I probably played around with "Tree Elephants" for hours. And, yes, what you hear there was the result. But, it was better than watching TV!

Bloggers Wall

2007-12-07T13:45:00.000-06:00

Big delay between posts... the Bloggers Wall. You think you can do it regularly, but life interferes. Here's another joke:

Indian Weather Forecaster

Joke: Tire Iron

2007-10-25T09:47:00.000-05:00

Here's another joke I produced back in the last century. It's kind of a lame joke but it was around the time I was experimenting with doing different voices and narrating over some of it. It didn't work out very well -- my voice sounds pretty distinctive in it's rhythm. If I did this one over, I'd probably try to get someone else to do the other voices.

Tire Iron

Seafood Joint

2007-10-17T13:58:00.000-05:00

This is one of my favorite pieces, because it was one of the first original ideas I had that I wrote and produced based on a fictional-fantasy type situation that had roots in real life. Fact was, I did go to a Red Lobster with a black family -- their 9 year old was best friends with my 9 year old. Fact is, I got some dirty looks. I couldn't believe it. I now live in the south, but spent most of my life in the north. No one actually said anything to me, but I felt like they were pretty peeved I was eating at a table with these friends of ours. If you want to be ultra-liberal, you might make a case that I was the racist one, because in real life I may have felt something that didn't actually exist. Were the eyes booring holes through me my imagination? I maintain: no. But, make your case if you want.

At any rate, the thing that I most noticed was that these friends didn't even seem to notice or care. That's where the line "been through this too many times" comes from. I imagined that yes, racism probably still happens so much they didn't even notice anymore. What a shame. I also say toward the end of the piece that I understand how they must feel. Looking back, this is so ridiculous I wish I could easily redo the piece. There isn't any way a white male adult American can understand how 99% of the world feels. Guys like me are just about as free from repression as anyone has ever been.

Warning: I use the "s" word here -- a couple of minutes in. Some people have complained about the music, but I think it works. Like it or don't, but this piece is one of my favorites because now whenever I have one of these stories pop into my mind, I write it down. Seafood Joint was the first time I did that.

Seafood Joint

Parodies

2007-10-03T08:24:00.000-05:00

Back in 2000 the big news was the Presidential election; the even bigger news was the way it ended, with a near concession by Al Gore, a prolonged fight in Florida with "hanging chad's" entering our vernacular and an eventual Supreme Court decision to stop the endless recounts.

In the middle of it all I decided to write a parody. It only took me an hour or two to get the lyrics, but I bet I spent several days trying to get the vocals right. I'm a better singer now, but then I had no confidence.

But, there's the result: Stuck in the Middle (of a Zoo)

Personality Test #2

2007-09-28T10:18:00.000-05:00

Lawyer Jokes

2007-09-25T22:06:00.000-05:00

My Wife calls lawyers law-yers; most people say "loy-yers" she says "law-yers." She claims she's pronouncing it correctly. At any rate, lawyer jokes are fun, especially when you string together a couple dozen and split the telling with your Dad (whose voice is similar to your own... in this piece there are two deep voiced guys telling jokes). This is from circa 1999, when I was doing a lot of work on goofiness.com (I have since sold the domain name). There were a couple of times we were laughing too much to tell the jokes right and I had to edit it down. It was a lot of fun doing this, especially with my Dad helping.

Lawyer Jokes

Birthday Cakes

2007-09-19T13:50:00.000-05:00

I've been learning guitar so I could do spontaneous audio... I tend to overproduce some of the audio, spending a lot of time tweaking. This is okay if you have time, but I don't. I also like the spontaneity and energy of doing it once and leaving it at that. So, after a couple of years of guitar, I had a story happen, wrote it up and laid it down, quickly. This was really a test, just to see how it would sound. I think it is a good format. The actual quality of this audio isn't good -- there is some clipping in about a half-dozen places -- but the format is good, and I've used it again, on a George Carlin-esque "Dirty Words" piece I'll post someday.

Listen to Birthday Cakes

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More Jokes

2007-09-15T16:51:00.000-05:00

Here's another joke I produced:

Dozen Penguins

I loved this joke when I first heard it. What is it about kid jokes that make them so much fun? They aren't so much just funny, but funny and... something else? Innocent? Why does a gorilla have big nostrils? Because it has big fingers. See?

Hell's Bells

2007-09-10T08:16:00.000-05:00

I arrived at AC/DC a few years late. Because of my age, they hit their popularity peak about 10 years before I was old enough to care. So, while I'm not sure how good of an influence they are on me, a trying-but-failing Christian man, I've always liked their songs. My favorite obscure AC/DC song is the mellow "Ride On."

Anyway, one night I found my old "AC/DC Greatest Hits" cassette and I was listening toand thinking about the song "Hell's Bells" and how wild it would be to hear that song 100 years ago. Back then, there wasn't any recorded music and pop music was orchestral marches and symphonies. The guitar wasn't that popular and the electric guitar was unheard. Reverb, feedback and heavy distortion and the modern drum set where also years away.

Now, this little daydream was happening around the time the HBO series Band of Brothers was debuting. So my little daydream took me to a foxhole around Bastogne, during the Battle-of-the-Bulge seige.

What would it be like to hear a song like that without all the stuff leading up to it? Would it be recognized as post-modern music, or some sort of noise that didn't resemble music at all? I mean, I'm no hardcore fan but I really like most of the popular AC/DC songs. I consider them music. But I had Chuck Berry, the Beach Boys and Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, etc. I experienced an evolution to the music. But what if I hadn't?

Hells Bells (mp3)

Public Radio Shortlists

2007-09-06T20:31:00.000-05:00

So, I've been able to get some goofy stuff on the airwaves, too. Two of these shortlists made it on Day-to-Day, a public radio show that plays nationwide. I've had other pieces on various stations around the nation, but this is the only nationwide airplay I've had. This is all really just a hobby. It'd be a lot harder doing this for a living instead of the work I already do.

The gig with this short lists was to try to guess what the list is about before it ends (I tell you at the end).

Short list 1, Short list 2, Short list 3, Short list 4

First Audio

2007-09-04T20:19:00.000-05:00

I've made some audio I don't have, or have on cassettes somewhere (I got to get my old demo tape online sometime!). But, this is the first piece I did for my goofiness.com web site (which I sold a few years ago... I kept the content, sold the domain name). It's called Darrell and God and basically fulfilled one of my concepts... that a good joke can be turned into an audio "story" pretty easily. All the things that make a decent story are there.

Click here to listen to Darrell and God

Hey, it's not hilarious, but I wanted to show something early.

New Personality Test

2007-09-04T08:29:00.000-05:00

Knitting w/Spaghetti

2007-09-03T17:48:00.000-05:00

Knitting with Dog Hair -- [link] by Natalie Kestecher -- this show is superb!

"place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best." -- Harvest of Spaghetti [link] -- this was a BBC Television special and it ended up going over so well, people sent in money to buy spaghetti seeds!

Watch a fuzzy postage stamp of the broadcast here.

Here's more a great list of Mockumentaries, and some history on the word.

Moving

2007-09-03T17:35:00.000-05:00

I've made a few mockumentaries, simple ones. The best are the more elaborate, involving actors. I will do those one day. I have many, many ideas. Not short of ideas. Just time (and a trust fund) to do them.

3. My third mockumentary, a mockumentary about a diarist with his own revelation of strange humanity (the diarist, not his neighbors): Garbage [mp3] by Hans Anderson

2. My second mockumentary, of people with a personal risk story: SHARK! [mp3] by Hans Anderson

1. My first mockumentary, of the over-the-top first person essay: Switched Bags [mp3]