Americans have an unhealthy obsession with success. Our televisions and newspapers are filled with innumerable stories of people overcoming impossible odds in order to become successful. However inspiring these stories may be, they are almost all uniformly dull. The truth of the matter is that any idiot with talent has a good chance of becoming successful. Failure, however, requires elements of character that are far more intriguing than talent, such as self-delusion, arrogance, and pig-headedness. Besides, most of us aren’t talented and can never hope to succeed at anything anyway. Failure, however, can be experienced by just about anybody. Perhaps this explains the popularity of “reality” television programs in which untalented people like ourselves fail in humiliating contests before an audience of millions. Deep down inside, I guess we all love to watch people fail. A cynic might say this is because man is self-centered by nature, but I would disagree. I believe we love failure because it makes the world a more interesting and beautiful place. Imagine, for a moment, a world without failure; every major league team wins the World Series and every child gets straight A grades. No CEO is ever handcuffed and led away to prison for securities fraud, and no film school graduate ever has to work the counter at Starbucks. Such a world would be hopelessly, interminably boring. There would probably be an epidemic of suicides, all successful. I developed this website, a tribute to the music career which I had the good sense to abandon in 1996, as a sort of paean to the spirit of failure. After keeping the master tapes of my recordings in a dusty box for years, I realized that I was denying the public the right to enjoy this amazing personal failure, in all of its embarrassing glory. So please, read the history and download the mp3 files. Load them into your iPods, burn them onto CDs, do with them as you will. My hope is that this site will inspire some of you to go out and try failing on your own. It’s not as hard as you might expect, and it can actually be quite fun when done correctly. Gary Wicker July 2003, California