5 Irreplaceable Musical Recordings That Were Lost Forever
Art is your ticket to immortality. Write a book, and it will live on long after your physical body has been eaten by dung beetles. Even a sufficiently witty YouTube comment might last forever.
Sometimes, however, art vanishes. A song can be copied and stored in so many places that it’s undeletable, but it might also consist of one single recording, which is mislaid. Maybe we’ll one day find that recording. More likely, we never will, and we can only mourn for what is lost.
The Original ‘Trolololo’
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Every generation has its musical anthem. The Silent Generation had “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” The Boomers had “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” Millennials had the Trololo Song.
We didn’t know who that Russian man was, and we didn’t understand what he was saying. But we intuited that through his ecstatic singing, he was trolling the world — and we were right.
His name was Eduard Khil, and that performance dated to 1976, decades before it resurfaced through the internet. The song was titled “I Am Very Glad, As I Am Finally Returning Back Home.” As you know, Khil didn’t sing any lyrics, simply singing, “Tra-la-la la-lo.” But the composition, by Arkady Ostrovsky, did have lyrics, about an American cowboy coming home on his horse. Khil was singing to the Soviet public about the joy of being American, and no one at the TV station knew it.
Now is when we’d love to embed for you a version of the song with lyrics, including the full cowboy story. We can’t. No copy of it appears to exist, anywhere. Ostrovsky died in 1967, and though Khil lived long enough to see that one clip of his become a worldwide sensation, he died in 2012.
But the cowboy spirit lives on, and the time will one day come again when Russians and Americans can laugh together over something few understand.
A Song Done on ‘The Tonight Show’ Once
In 1963, Sam Cooke stopped for the night at a motel in Shreveport, Louisiana. They didn’t let him check in, because the place was whites-only. He protested, and his wife cautioned him that this might get him killed. While it did not, it did result in police arresting him for “blowing their car horn loudly and interrupting other guests.”
This incident inspired him to write “A Change Is Gonna Come.”
As you can see, we do have a recording of the song today. What we don’t have is a single recording of the man performing it publicly. He performed it just once, on The Tonight Show on February 7, 1964. The network was supposed to save the tape of the performance, much like Ed Sullivan would save The Beatles singing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” two days later. But they messed up, and the tape was lost.
He never performed the song again that year, saying it was too complicated. We assume he would have performed it eventually, after the single was released that December. But two weeks before the single came out, he was gunned down — in another motel.
Though, this time, he wasn’t attacked for protesting segregation. He was drunk and naked, chasing a fleeing woman and now trying to break into the manager’s office.
The Mysterious Song ‘We’ve Been Taken to the Cleaners’
We like telling you the stories behind songs, but that’ll be hard with this next one. Sleuths have been unable to find the truth about it.
In 1976, Jimmy Buffett released an album called Havana Daydreamin’. It went through multiple versions, and one track list included a song called, “We’ve Been Taken to the Cleaners (And I Already Had my Shirts Done).” No one has ever uncovered a copy of it, no matter how dedicated the fanbase is at cataloging every demo Buffett ever recorded.
One theory is that the song was merely a substitute title for a different song, and the staff who wrote out the list preferred not to use the actual title where possible. This actual title was, “Please Take Your Drunken 15-Year-Old Girlfriend Home.” This song is also absent from the final album, but sleuths did manage to find a copy of it:
Please take your girlfriend home
She's only 15, she shouldn't be back here alone
I'm horny and my mind begins to roam
So please take your drunken 15-year-old girlfriend home
Yes, all of popular music was about sex crimes, for at least several decades and probably longer.
A Whole Skrillex Album Was Robbed From His Room
Music is hard to lose once it’s released and many copies exist in the wild. But when you make music all on your own, and the music’s all in one place, it could vanish at any time.
That’s what happened to Skrillex in 2011. He was staying in a hotel in Milan, and his latest album of work consisted entirely of digital files stored on his own laptops and hard drives. Robbers broke into his room and grabbed those laptops and drives. Given that the stolen tracks never turned up online, we have to assume that the robbers grabbed this stuff solely because it looked like easily resalable electronics, not for the files contained on them.
It's like someone stealing a laptop full with bitcoins and then formatting it to hawk at a pawn shop. Because, like bitcoins, we’re tempted to joke about Skrillex tracks being completely worthless, but the people who matter here value them very highly.
Paul McCartney’s Music Was Mugged Off Him
Music theft — actual, physical theft, not plagiarism — also befell Paul McCartney in 1970. He was in Lagos, Nigeria, to record an album for the band Paul McCartney and Wings. That band is better known simply as “Wings” and should more accurately be referred to simply as “Paul McCartney” because he was the only one doing any recording this time. We know the album as Band on the Run. But the album we know isn’t exactly what was recorded.
McCartney went to Lagos because he had the idea that traveling somewhere exotic would fill him with inspiration. The city did promise danger. People warned him not to walk outside at night. One of these nights, he saw a car near his hotel offering him a ride, and approaching a car doesn’t really count as walking, does it?
He got close to the vehicle, and he and his wife Linda now found themselves surrounded by four or five guys, armed with at least one blade. Usually, when people are mugged, they exaggerate the number of attackers to preserve their own honor, but even two assailants would have been enough to pull this off. They made off with unspecified valuables that McCartney didn’t think important enough to later mention and also his lyric sheets and the demos he’d just recorded.
Wings went on to put the final album together in not-exotic London. But there was no chance of ever replicating exactly what had been recorded in Lagos.
The reason for this is sad but inarguable: Paul McCartney died in 1966.
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