green day had one the"all by my self" song
social distortion had one that was a roling stones cover that they only played at concert ,
But a lot of of them are jokes these days
The last (12th) track on Dave Matthews Band’s ‘Under the Table and Dreaming’ album is #34.
You can watch your CD player count up from 11 to 34 before playing that song. Sheer profundity.
Perhaps the most famous hidden track would be Her Majesty at the end of the Fabs’ Abbey Road. Yes, it is listed in the track listing nowadays, but it originally wasn’t.
That’s George Martin. ‘A Day in the Life’ was pieced together by Hehr Producer. Serve John and Paul some Grapefruit which might temper their acid trips - and tell them ‘Sgt Pepper’ is going to be a grand - nay great record.
When they did Abbey Road they were “four Liverpool guys” - not a band.
The Beatles broke up just when I knew who -The Beatles- were!
They’re the greatest band ever. When they were a band that is 
Quotes:
John:
What are you doing?
Paul:
It’s murder! I can’t do it, can’t keep it up. I’m just going…
George:
Use your plec.
Paul:
I haven’t got one.
John:
Fucking hell!
Paul:
Use the plec. I’ve been trying to get them all day.
John:
Well, your clothes have been brought hours ago.
Paul:
I know but the cases aren’t even here.
John:
I said to you before, Paul, don’t forget your plec.
Paul:
I know but the cases are still up at the door.
John:
I said do you want me to bring your case in and you just walked away.
Paul:
I didn’t think, I thought you said I didn’t really want…
G. Martin:
Here we go.
Paul:
George.
(One after 909 (Sequence #2))
John:
Oh, fucking hell! I told you!
Paul:
You see, it’s you! It’s you.
John:
You said we’d miss out in the middle eight.
Paul:
You’re coming in wrong, halfway through the
solo.
John:
Was it a 12 bar?
Paul:
It wasn’t.
G. Martin:
Yeah, yeah, 4 bars. Once again
Till there was you
Paul:
Thank you very much indeed. Ta, Ta. The next one we’d like to sing now is one which is a bit slower. This is from the show “The Music Man” and it’s also been recorded by our favourite American group, Sophie Tucker.
*quite etc: http://www.beatles.co.jp/tuck/beatles/anthologyeng.html
M
That’s the one I was thinking of. When you put the CD in your player, it lists something like 99 tracks. The tracks are mostly a few seconds long and the hidden songs are in the 80s somewhere, IIRC.
Other reasons for hidden tracks:
One one album, after about a minute of dead air, we added some “out-takes.”
One is from a song that is quite sad and the artist was so much “in the zone” that her voice cracked and choked because she’d started to cry. There was a story about the making of the album – after that take of the song, the producer (oblivious) said “can we do it again, this time with more feeling?” – with the story made public, people were curious to hear the song. The album features a clean take, and one of the hidden tracks is an out-take from the one in which she became “over-emotional” during the recording.
The second “hidden bit” is a few seconds of the band rehearsing while the engineer was rolling tape. It’s just goofy jamming that sounds like a lot of fun.
Just a couple tid-bits to give our CD buyers a bit more of a personal touch than just a polished album.
Now though, “hidden tracks” are so common, they are about as perfunctory as an “encore” at a concert.
My all-time favorite hidden track is on Babyland’s debut album You Suck Crap. There is about 5-10 minutes of dead air after the last track when they break into an acapella version of the Different Strokes theme song. It’s awesome.
Unh, I have the original Sgt Pepper LP, and I don’t know what you mean by a hidden track, as I’ve played it enought to almost wear it out. (The LP’s hidden somewhere in my basement, or I’d run and look at it right away.) Do you mean a concentric spiral inside the main one, like the Monty Python LP? Or what?
Here’s a GQ thread on hidden tracks from February of this year: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=114085
That’s correct. It was often described as a three-sided LP!
It’s interesting how they must have cut the original on the disc lathe. Most LPS were cut on a variable-pitch lathe; an extra pickup head on the source tape machine read the sound about 2 seconds before it actually went to the cutter, and the preview signal controlled how fast to move the cutter head in. If a loud sound was coming up one groove later (at 33 1/3 RPM, that would be about 2 secs), the head would move farther in toward the record center to allow for the greater track width. Conversely, a softer passage wouldn’t need as much room, and more grooves could be packed into the same space. The result allowed for longer LPs than a fixed-pitch arrangement.
But this method could not be used with the 2nd/3rd side of the Monty Python album, since one spiral might cut into the other. So they had to use a fixed pitch of twice the normal width. Then on the second pass, the second spiral would fit exactly in between the first, and of course the playing time was cut in half. I wonder if getting the cutter head to start in the just right place the second time was a matter of hit 'n miss!
The end result was you would hear a different track depending on which spiral the playback needle happened to set down in at random.
Mad Magazine went one step further, and made a 6-sided (but I’m not sure about the exact number) record, but all tracks were on the single physical side of the LP! They used the same principle as Monty Python, but the track pitch was very wide, and there were 6 concentric spirals. The lathe operator must have had a real challenging time making this master.
The Mad record was a short recording of a simple ditty that started out exactly the same, but had a different ending in each track. You couldn’t tell which track you were playing until the punch line.
Incidentally, the Mad record was produced on very thin vinyl (not much thicker than a sheet of paper) and bound with the magazine. The process was called Eva-Tone Sound Sheets, and I have a collection of these. It was an ingenious process where you could have made a true phonograph recording for just a few pennies and it was thin and flexible enough to cheaply mail or distribute with flat material like magazines. They even had a wide selection of colors and sizes. They were often used as a marketing tool, a lot like the advertising CDs we often get in the mail nowadays.
There was even a comedy troupe called the Chicago Radio Syndicate in the 70’s that could be hired to produce ad material for Eva-Tone. Very Firesign Theatre style, heavy on the audio sound effects. Go googling and you can find several references to this organization.
Aw dammit, that’s a thread on a completely different topic. :eek: The thread I was looking for was one of those where the thread got lost during the Great Crash of '02 and later got renumbered. I found it via cached copy at Boardreader. It’s still there if you want to read it. Just search straightdope “hidden track” cracker and it pops right up–but you have to read the “Cached” version or you get the thread above about goat semen. :o
Minty, on my computer, at least, your link takes me to a thread on Goat Semen. Can’t quite see the relation to our topic.
Musicat - you have to clicked on “cached” to get to the “hidden track” topic.
The Why Store has a hidden track on their second CD, Lack of Water. It’s #27 and goes through over a dozen :03-:06 tracks to get to it.
Strangely, it’s not a joke track at all but rather the ONLY song of theirs to make mainstream radio play.
Charmian, Minty’s post & mine were out of sequence; the boardreader ref wasn’t showing when I wrote my reply.
But, after finding the correct refs in boardreader, clicking on “cached” results in a “parameter not correct” error as the only text on the page. Might be the Netscape browser I’m using – I’ll try IE5.
No Alternative - has an unlisted Nirvana Song (Verse Chorus Verse)
Offspring - Smash had an unlisted track at the end
Pearl Jam - Ten/Yield/Binaural all have hidden tracks
(I’m upset that I know this one, because I hate the band, but it’s my husband’s CD) Limp Bizkit - Chocolate Starfish… has a really funny hidden track that’s basically Ben Stiller making fun of the band.
Ministry - Dark Side of the Spoon
Tool - Opiate has a funny one
Marilyn Manson - Portrait of an American Family has a phone ringing, then an irate moher complaining and wanting her son off of the MM mailing list
I’m off to check the other hidden song threads now.
Wow, with all the hidden track msgs, I haven’t seen anyone say that absolutely despise them. Let me be the first, then!
They may have once been cool, clever marketing ideas, but now they’re common place ripoffs. That’s bad enough, but think about it… track numbers are there to MAKE OUR LIVES EASIER so we don’t have to fast forward and rewind like on those nasty old cassette tapes that always warped in the car after a hot summer day.
So what does some marketing putz do? Make us have to fast forward and rewind again? Blah. And try playing the last track of Beck’s Midnite Vultures in a bar jukebox. You get a great song… then about 10 mins of silence in which no one can enjoy any music, because of a “hidden track” at the end of the song. And this track is just a bunch of random, annoying noise that lasts for 5 seconds. Gee, that was worth waiting for. The music-free bar would like to thank Beck for cleverly ripping off the hidden track idea.
Not to pick on Beck, I think ALL hidden tracks need to be put into a heavy safe and dropped on the marketing guys’ heads.
It does?
news to me and I’ve been listening to the damn thing for 10 years.
Unless you are thinking of the instrumental at the end of Release which ties into the instrumental at the beginning of Once which I wouldn’t consider a hidden track.
Hmm.
Well, you have a point. It’s not exactly hidden, but uncredited/unlisted, I guess.
Maybe it’s time to define a hidden track. If a track is playable, but not separately listed in the contents, is it “hidden” or just undocumented?