So before I get to the next composer presentation which will be the late great legendary
James Horner I wanted to this next because I've talked about it for a long time on many occasions and a recent mentioning of it sparked an urge to actually go one step further and post about it. Now of course if you've given in to this digital day and age and not really into music like so many plebeians now then your probably not going to be interested at all but if you haven't, find the past better or at least more interesting than these pathetic & androgynous modern times and love music of all types then your gonna really like this and it may even bring some memories of your own back
So as I said before do you remember
Napster They were the first large & major
Peer-to-Peer/P2P sharing company that begin as
Listen.com. It was amazing the first time I saw it & used it in
1999 when it first began. It opened such a new door for Me as it was another way to get
movie soundtracks & scores. I mean like I said before you could only buy them at stores if you could find them that is cause movie scores has always been tricky items to get due to it being a hobby that most of the population doesn't get into which for decades I have found that so darn sad
However with
Napster I was able to find a lot of them via the web. Sure it was different having them as files and instead of having an actual
CD set but I was already doing this with wrestling themes since
1996 on
AOL and various wrestling pages which it was very fun to do. Like I said before I can relate so much to
wrestling themes & soundtracks as there's not much of a difference, when you watch a movie you hear the music and people talking...well its the same when you hear a wrestler's theme...the crown noise & commentators are always present so that's what I mean there is no difference if you haven't put it together yet
It's always been like that with Me since I was a youngster. So
Napster was actually free to use, I bet I downloaded hundreds if not thousands of bucks worth then came along
Metallica in the year
2000 and they caused a huge debacle by suing
Napster because they argued that their songs along with others are all copyrighted and are being downloaded & shared illegally thus forcing
Napster make their service as a membership for any user to pay for what they DL. After that I quit
Napster but I didn't want to quite the game because I was so hooked and I would be looking elsewhere for alternatives but was there any more out there in Cyberspace and if so would I be lucky enough to find'em
The following pictures are all made by Me
So here is
Napster's cool logo with the
kitty cat with the headphones, it was so cool and neat. Then there is the loading screen and what it looked like when you were downloading what what you wanted after you found it. Notice the status bar. I recall when we first got
DSL when it first came about and it was so fast. I loved seeing My files download but darn did I hate when the internet acted up but these were good times when this was first available and your like holy crap it worked & I got it
So did I find any alternatives
You bet your @$$ I did
There was many of them because this hobby was really taking flight and unlike
Napster they were all free. One of them was
BearShare which sounds like a
Care Bear but it wasn't affiliated. It was a really cool one and looked very nice but compared to
Napster there wasn't that many people using it...either people weren't liking it or just didn't know about it
Here is the cool
logos and what it looked like when you were using it.
Out of the dozen perhaps even more alternatives that I found
WinMX in
2000 was the best. It was the biggest one and there was a ton of people there, possibly even bigger numbers than
Napster. I found a ton of soundtracks there and many of them I was looking for a very long time including some very rare ones and later on I even found movies in
2002 when they were still hot at the show such as
Spider-Man & Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones. These were done via camcorders way before this dang phone age that everybody is obsessed over (look how many people just stare at them and everybody's got one and it has become more important than the people your with!!) and way before the days of
Putlocker. It had a great chat room/instant message system as well. It was arguably even better than
AOL's AIM. This was well before the all important social media craze that has been going the last decade or so and even predates
Myspace. I mean you had just about everything you needed here and really you couldn't ask for any more but of course times change, people get bored of stuff and by being like that, that caused the situations for us to be in these pathetic predicaments we're in now
Out of the hundreds of people I downloaded from and shared with there was only 4 people that I messaged because they all seemed decent and had the same liking that I have which is very rare because throughout My whole life I've met very, I mean very few people that could relate to Me and I knew a ton of people that was all monkey see, monkey do, same hive mind set and it just became really frustrating, I've talked about this before especially with wrestling, it really sucked when your a kid and only 1 friend
(Chris) liked it besides you in a classroom full of kids for years
So the first guy was I can't recall his name, he was from
Brazil so I'll just call him
Mr. Brazil. He was a bit younger than Me but he was well educated in movie soundtracks despite only being in the hobby a few years compared to Me which was great, it showed Me he had passion and understanding how fun it can be. In fact he really upped the ante to it. At the time
Jerry Goldsmith's 1989 Warlock was still extremely rare to find. He was able to find it and he shared it with Me cause he knew I wanted it bad.
John Debney's 1997 The Relic was only available through bootlegs (I talked about this in My great
Horror Topic before). He managed to find it too and some of the files were corrupted but he fixed'em and he was quite proud of himself which i was glad of that for him as that made My day that day
I don't recall what I shared with him but I know I gave him some goodies. Too bad that We just disconnected and didn't talk to each other anymore, I still don't know what happen
Next was
Wazabi from Japan. I never forgot him. We talked about & shared some great scores numerous times. He was a fun one to be with. Again, I don't know what happen with him. I can't recall his name but third was a really good one. I call him the
FTP Guy. Me and him really bonded and he trusted Me. He allowed Me to have access to his
FTP and download his scores and in return I would upload some of Mine. I found a lot of great soundtracks there, some that is quite obscure and rare even to this day. It was so fun doing that everyday but then things just changed and after a while until sometime in
2002 it was over
Here is a similar diagram of what the
FTP Guy's FTP looked like, it was simple but boy I had a ball with it
Here is an old, unedited
Text Document during
2001 that I wrote when I was much younger asking and requesting him and the few others there of what I was looking for. You can see how it was then and that it was fun. Some of these have never been released however after decades they finally released
Peter Bernstein's 1985 My Science Project but I still would love
George S. Clinton's 1994 Hellbound Last but certainly not least was
Natrebo, he was the most memorable of the quartet as I really bonded with him. It seemed like we were so close, darn near like brothers. We just didn't share on
WinMX we personally did through uploading storage sites before today's
cloud drives. He was quite different however as he never slept and only took naps as he said sleeping is a waste of time. He did a lot of stuff for Me like giving Me the
Deluxe Edition of Jerry Goldsmith's 1990 Total Recall and ripped the
isolated scores from
DVDs when
DVDs was still the relatively new home video format. I will talk about him further in a moment. Here is what
WinMX looked like with it's really cool
logos and what it looked like to find & download files that you wanted. By looking at this again it's another thing from the past that looks better than today's stuff. I really miss these times and really I hope I'm not alone like so much, surely there's others out that besides Me and the very slim community on
YouTube that does and I hope these people that I once knew are all still fine and still adoring
movie soundtracks & scores because the world needs more people like that
So now here is the big thing about
Natrebo. I've talked about him a few times here before but I don't know if anybody recalls about it. He was a bit older than Me. I became very close to him, almost like a brother I never had. We talked via IMing like every late night around 2:00 AM for a couple hours. He was always nice and like I said he never went to bed, he always napped around as he thought sleeping was a waste of time. I totally disagreed then and still do. He had an older brother that I never met and I think he had a girlfriend. He was a very talented person and he just didn't love music and movie scores, he was a bit of a very amateur composer himself as I still have his little cues & videos. He was quite handy with computers, making projects such as special effects. His name was
Nathan and he loved
Star Wars and he loved the musician
Max Rebo from
Return of the Jedi so that's how he got his name...
NATREBO which I thought was clever on his part and that was a thing I liked about him making a name like that...I've done stuff like that before then too and even now but it seems as time went people just don't give a r@t$ @$$ anymore about that of type of thing which really takes the fun out of it like that
He had his own little company called
Thoze Guyz Pictures/Productions. Like a lot of stuff from ages ago, I try to save as much as I can. His
logo looked was nice so here's his
logo & SW character he named himself after
So we talked a lot about music, I bet I could fill in a whole novel of conversations compared to how people talk about movie music now and really a lot of other stuff now...that really disturbs Me so basically we knew each others' favorite composers, movies and a ton of other stuff. His favorite composer was
Michael Kamen which I'll get to in a bit. When I revealed to him that Mine was
Jerry Goldsmith (both of these great composers were still alive & active during this time) he was really thrilled about that. He knew how much I loved his
1999 Mummy & 2000 Hollow Man so he made some special deals with Me since I didn't have a
DVD player at the time, I was still going with
VHS all the way. He either bought or rented the
DVDs and ripped their
isolated scores from them
That was a cool feature that many
DVDs have and if you know your way around computers you can rip'em and have a complete score that you always wanted
Here's the
2 custom CDs Covers he made Me together
Here is full look at
2-CD The Mummy. He put everything in it, he even put the
Universal Logo Theme and even a sample of
Alan Silvestri's score that wasn't even out yet because he knew how much I was anticipating it as I have expressed about that earlier on in
Alan Silvestri's section of the
2000s. I was pleased with this. Many years later I would buy a huge bootleg of the score and believe Me, it has the same cues that
Natreo put on his version so what I'm saying is he knew how to do this like the professionals however he named them his own titles like most composers do for their scores
If you never heard
Goldsmith's The Mummy then you seriously need to, it's one of the greatest scores ever IMO and in fact I posted a little bit of it in the beginning of this very topic
Now for
2-CD Hollow Man this was a bit different and I wanted this even more. He was a critic at times and said a lot of the same stuff that review pages said at the time but I always begged the differ of how great it was. I told him listen to it with your own way, forget about those damn critics...listen to how aggressive it is and he's like ya know...I hear what you mean about it being aggressive. Talking about this over twenty years later really brings Me back to that time when things were so different
He made it for Me but he was asking if I want this and that on there like the
End Credits and even an interview with
Jerry Goldsmith himself and I say yes do it all especially the
End Credits and he even put the
Superman Joke I posted in PB's
Zen Topic as a
Hollow Hidden Track as an inspiration of what they used to do many, many years prior (example like
Nirvana's Nevermind & Pearl Jam's TEN so he did all of this superbly well and this is how it all turned out to be
He also did an
isolated score of
Graeme Revell's really awesome
1999 Bats for Me but with no custom cover. Also He was a big
Don Davis fan. I really didn't know about him other than his
1999 The Matrix score but i knew I would have to know him because he just took the place of
James Horner for
Jurassic Park /// and when I would type
JP/// back then he loved that I came up with those lines
So
Davis had some free cues on his web page and he downloaded them all and gave Me access to his downloads and made a special
CD cover and here is this OOAK album
So, as I said earlier that his favorite composer was
Michael Kamen. I posted his soundtrack to his
What Dreams May Come in PB's
Movie Trailer Topic with pictures so you should know what he looked like. I told
Natrebo that I liked him too and that I'm a huge fan of
Metallica and he asked Me if I heard and/or saw his conducting the
San Francisco Orchestra in
Metallica's S&M Concert and said I sure did and I think it's the best concert I ever saw and this still stands even at this very moment IMO. So he got the
DVD and ripped the
isolated score from it where you hear little to no singing by
James Hetfield or music by the band, only the orchestra so he gave Me this custom 2-CD Set as well which was really sweet. By looking at this he should seem familiar and I look to post his moments with
Metallica in My
Music Videos of Yesteryear in time
Here is a close up of him plus
Natrebo's credit &
logo of his
Thoze Guyz Pictures/Productions Now here the comes the bitter end to our friendship that only lasted about a year a so and the thing is I really don't know how it started. One day he was saying that he found the bootleg to
Danny Elfman's 2000 The Family Man and then the next thing I know we got into an argument and he was calling Me a liar and all sorts of crap. I was trying to fix this but he kept it up so I ended it and that was that because I tried, he wouldn't listen to Me and I didn't want to go though it. I had originally revealed this last Christmas in PB's
Christmas Topic. So anytime I see about
The Family Man this always hits My mind and it's been over twenty years now
Now with all of the good I told about him how in the heck did it end the way it did and the pathetic thing is I don't really know what the heck it started over
OK now here is something that I hinted about...remember I said I personally knew a movie composer a while back
One theory My Grandma MiMi had was that he was jealous that I wrote to a low budget movie composer named
Jared DePasquale (Ancient Evil: Scream of the Mummy & The Dead Hate the Living) because I loved his music and he responded back to Me and I actually became pals with him and he sent Me many of his bootlegs where
Natrebo was trying to make it to the big time and didn't
I don't know, if this set him off...I didn't mean too. I was excited about it and I thought he would be amazed that it happen to Me but I guess not
I never want to make people jealous, I want them to be excited & surprised
Is all I know he went berserk on Me and I never knew why. I hate being in question and I hate it when people has gifts & talents and they just waste themselves via though such acts of ignorance
I remember him saying how crystal clear
Danny Elfman's Planet of the Apes was how you could hear it so much I mean he truly had the ear for music and he had to be a nutzo
Maybe I should have known not trust him because of his name being
Nathan remember I told you in My
Vintage Wrestling VHS & DVD Collection showcase how
Nathan & Jacob just turned on Me and stabbed Me in the back
I don't know how people can flip flop like that
I've had other kids during school time just being My friend today and My enemy tomorrow for no reason or with no explanation and people like that as
Sting said in
96 can stick it
That's why after My time with the
FTP Guy was up I look back and I'm like dang, all of that ended in
2001 I was really hesitant to make friends online as I only posted once in a while on figure boards like
He-Man.org as I was really disliking society for about a decade but when
The Matty Board came about I was ok with it yet I started noticing a lot of changes in people & times since the big bang of social media and it really irks Me sometimes how people are and I really can't believe how this country much less the world has become and I'm sure I'm not alone
That's all for this special. Did you expect Me to post this
Did you do
P2P or even know about it
These are My thoughts & recollections of My time in
2000 - 2001/2002. Next I will finally post
James Horner's Part 1 so be on the look out for that, until then I'll see you around