I believe I recorded this my senior year as well, likely in the fall, which would be 1990. I would like to have something profound to say about it, methodologically or in terms of content. This is one of a slew of instrumental doodlings I have made over the course of my life, more memorable than most, broadly speaking respectable, and not particularly brilliant.
Having said that, there is definitely a role for respectable but not brilliant tunes in one’s repertoire. Realistically, there are times when one hits a streak and is brilliant non-stop, but those are rare. More often one hits and misses. If the misses are close and don’t take up too much time, they can help structure a record, which is precisely why I chose to put this on Tangerine, the second cassette-only release (initially) I put out under my own name, which collected a series of 4-track recordings that none of the bands I’d been in ever managed to do well but which I liked. I always liked Beatles records because they fit a lot of range into a short amount of time. If “Dr. Robert” were a five-minute tune, I’d skip it every time, but at around two minutes it adds rather than subtracts from Revolver. “Where Has My Blanket Gone?” works the same way.
As for the title: when I was very young my family took a trip to Anaheim and we stayed in the Disneyland Hotel. I had a blanket, with which I had a relationship similar to that of Linus and his. I left the blanket, which I called, appropriately, “Blankey,” in the hotel but only realized it when we’d driven half-way back down to San Diego. Of course we didn’t go back for it, and I cried quite a bit. The song evoked that memory very quickly when I, compiling the record, sought a title for it.
