THE LAST OPEN ROAD AUDIOBOOK

The idea was simple enough. Let's do an audiobook version of The Last Open Road so all those "people who don't read" (you know who you are) can enjoy the story. Especially since most all of you car crazies, motorsports enthusiasts and racer types travel long distances to get to various and sundry petrolhead events. And what better traveling companions than Buddy, Julie, Big Ed, Butch Bohunk, Cal Carrington, Sally Enderle, Skippy Welcher, Creighton Pendleton III and the gang from Finzio's Sinclair? And that gave me an excruciatingly brilliant idea. Why not do it as a 1950's radio play? You know, with different character voices and sound effects and period music and authentic car sounds and...

The first hurdle was re-writing the book into a radio-play script. I mean, how hard could that be? I figured it would take me a couple weeks, tops. Well, four months later I was still at it. Then came finding a production house that could, and moreover wanted, to do it. Which, after a few stumbles and mostly thanks to Carol, we did. And then there was finding the right narrator. I tired it and, in a word, I stink. Or make that "stunk." So we hunted around and held auditions and finally found the right guy: a Hollywood-based professional voice actor named Greg Beastrom, who has done an unbelievable job.

And then I had my second self-inflicted fragmentation bomb of a brilliant idea: why not use a bunch of famous motoring/motorsports celebrities in some of the smaller roles throughout the book? The good news was how many of them (David Hobbs, Brian Redman, Tommy Kendall, Patrick Long, Ray Evernham, Dario Franchitti, Skip Barber, John Morton, Bill Warner, George Bruggenthies, Bob McKee, Greg Rickes, Andy Reid, Dan Scanlan, Mark Hamilton Peters, Phil Airey and more) were willing and even eager to do it. The bad news was chasing all over the map to get them all recorded. Not to mention traveling all over the map with my recording gear to get the authentic car sounds we needed. Special thanks to Fred Simeone of the Simeone Museum in Philadelphia, who helped us with some of the difficult-to-find vehicular voices. And then came the other sound effects and the music (you would not believe what it costs to use a 5-second slice of Nat King Cole's "When I Fall in Love" or an even shorter snippet of "Count Your Blessings." And don't even get me started on the gauntlet run quest for the right-mood version of "Your Cheatin' Heart."

And then you've got the re-recording of lines that didn't come out right or matching two recording sessions done in different rooms with different audio environments and...

Bottom line is that our budget is approaching six figures. Gulp. And we still don't have a corporate "presenting sponsor," which would really help (and would be a good deal for the sponsor, too).

But here's the good news: we're almost done. There are 19 chapters in The Last Open Road, and we've had to go through each one three and sometimes four times in order to cut and chop and paste and stitch and putty-in and fade together and re-record and smooth-sand everything to a fine, glossy finish. But, as you heard from the sample (and remember, those are just a few little snippets from the first two chapters), I think it's gonna be worth it.

Let me know what you think after you give it a wee listen.