Wippit Theme

Back in the late nineties when I was putting together my first “solo” album Dr Wippit’s 1st Time Out I thought Dr Wippit really needed to have a theme song. I commissioned A. Wippite to put down something with turn tables that I could throw a guitar on top of and there it is, the Wippit Theme. A. Wippite put down four tracks of turntables onto the old 8 track to cassette machine we were using at the time (and which I recorded all of Dr Wippit’s 1st Time Out on) and I played some guitar on top. It came in at around four and a half minutes, and in the end we decided the right thing to do was to fade in and out the first minute and a half or so, and then bookend the rest at the end of the album. So for the ’98 version above, that’s what you’ve got, the two bookends together. I don’t remember where the beat came from, but the samples are from Doctor Detroit, and of course Devo’s Whip It.

Fast forward to 2012 I’m releasing an anthology and I want to include the Wippit Theme. I am blessed to have Eaten By Machines interested in putting together the 2012 remix for me. I give them A. Wippite’s original four turntable tracks. I can’t say enough about how cool it is that I can dump the analog tracks out of the old 8 track to cassette machine and into my pc and pass them around and screw around with them. The caveat? Well although it was an 8 track you can only record or dump four tracks simultaneously. Not a problem here because A. only put four tracks of turntables down and I’m doing new guitar from scratch, but it’s a problem on some other tracks. Anyway, Eaten By Machines did a phenomenal job of creating something entirely knew from the old tracks. And just like in ’98 I played guitar on top a couple of times, kept what I liked, and here it is. This time I’m opening the album with the full cut because you just can’t force people to listen to a whole album at once anymore, it’s all about the download. The Dr likes to keep up with the times.