were you here,
in person or in spirit?
let's hear ...

There on the corner, we could almost imagine a time-warp Walter looking out of his childhood window over a happy, laughing crowd, celebrating his future self, the full blossoming of his talent, and the joy he was to bring them during the too short time he had ahead.

Now his name will be riveted there — for however long rivets last. It's possible, after all, that the young Walter looked out from that window to dream of his actual future ... and of ours. But as well as we thought we understood him, we never really knew his dreams for himself at that young age, did we?

We can only urgently hope that whatever they were, we helped some of them come true.

Happily, however, we did manage to distribute our prize party favor; a USB stick containing both of WB's solo albums in high fidelity audio, a small sample of unreleased gems from The Walter Becker Media Site, and a song exclusively previewed for the day's dedication; a Becker/Klein Circus Money-era demo called This Is My Building.[Now posted there!]

It's certainly out-of-bounds in terms of audio fidelity —or infidelity, should we say. It was demo'd exactly once, in Walter's living room, and the audio includes media damage that we cannot seem to repair. But its obvious shortcomings aside, it was just too good to pass up given the occasion.

Walter and Larry had so much fun writing this one, and even though they knew it would not be finished in time to make the album, it delighted them enough to get it down in even this rudimentary form. We are very glad they did, and hope you agree that the trade-offs are worth it.

Thank you to Larry Klein for his unerring support, and to Matt Kerns for all the heavy lifting on this one

No - we intend to give away as much of this stuff as we can. We can hold that "Captions Contest" here; we can find a way to run that "Name That Tune" competition -- somehow -- (?) --and we'll do our damndest to get these things to loving forever homes (as the no-kill kennels like to say).

Watch this space.

Let's do the Caption Contest now :-)

The hour did include some wonderful words from wonderful folk: we reprint some of them here.

• Jim Kerr introduces Matt Kerns
• Matt speaks
• Matt introduces Howard Rodman
• Howard's Keynote speech