We all know that after the releases of Everybody Jam and Let It Go in 1996 and 1997 and the little '97 concert tour, it seemed like there was a relatively long hiatus until the last year of his life in which lung cancer counted his days. A third album was being made in 1997, produced by an American producer according to John in the November 1997 AAHS World Radio interview, but it never got released. Steal The Base was composed during the same year, presumeably by the same producer from America, and then featured in an OST for a baseball movie alongside Mambo Jambo. The year after, Scatmambo, a Latin-styled song, was produced for a German romantic movie. Tony Catania and Ingo Kays left the role of being his producers and the music company assigned Kai Matthiesen, the creator of the German hit song Coco Jambo, as their successor. Official musical activity from John got less and less and it's likely that he started to slowly withdraw from the pop scene and the Scatman project and to return to his Jazz roots.
However, health issues prevented him to take this path and as he felt that he wouldn't be around for long, he meticulously continued his work on the Scatman project in mid or late 1998. It's the best after all to use the most of one's possibly last days for one's metier than to spend these days like any other and then having regrets on the death bed for not completing one's loved business. John flew to Kai Matthiesen's studio in Bremen, Germany to create Take Your Time, his very last album. The frequent appearances of backing singers is clearly noticeable and when looking at it in hindsight of his death, these backing singers were necessary to reduce the workload in regard to his health issues. This is especially apparent in his vocals. His voice sounds more gruff than usual on the low notes. When singing in higher notes, his voice comes more from his head than from his chest which makes him sound thin. These are signs that he could have had a disease related to his respiration.
More Latin-themed songs got composed like I Love Samba or The Chickadee Song, romantic songs like Take Me Away or Everyday found their way on the album, but there are no socio-political songs anymore. John still gives personal advice in Take Your Time for young men who struggle finding a love. He was still riding on the dance train with Ichi Ni San... Go and Night Train, a contribution to electroswing pioneering just like Game Over Jazz' Scatman or Everybody Jam. Dream Again on the contrast is a meditative song. He already made such tracks during his first two albums with Song Of Scatland and Message To You. It seems like that Dream Again was his true TYT song as he often preached finding inner peace in oneself through "being spiritually present in Scatland" which is a kind of meditative state. Take Your Time was even less successful than Everybody Jam. The means of promoting this album were scarce. John was ill and could not appear for shooting music videos of Take Your Time or Scatmambo. It is said that Ichi Ni San... Go, a TYT single, supposedly had a minor success in Germany like Everybody Jam's single did in Czechia, but information about it is nowhere to be found in German charts data. What should not be neglected is the impact of Take Your Time. Like Scatman's World, this song is shockingly ahead of its time. The internet nowadays is plagued by red-pill-influencers who try to poison the male youth with their "teachings" on how to treat one's female partner. The treatment they teach their young followers is often oppressive. The tragedy is that many people misunderstand this track as a farewell song, a swansong, because the pensive and patient sound of the music can also be interpreted as being sad.
Parallel to Take Your Time, John recorded his real swan song at home in his Scatland Studios entitled "Can You Hear Me". This track carries more of the essence from Scatman's World and Everybody Jam than Take Your Time. He gives the listener advice on how to live a happy life for which self-acceptance and giving and taking are key. Its tune sounds truely melancholic and can be eye-wettening. The music style is once again completely different from his earlier works, even from Take Your Time, as arrangement and text were written solely by himself. The song in its core was finished, but the polish never got completed and thus it slightly feels like a demo. In 1999, John got diagnosed with lung cancer which confirms all these signs of poor health and later that year, he was too ill to carry on the work on Can You Hear Me. A CD of the song was given to his friend Gina who then forwarded it around 20 years later to Iceberg Records for them to release it posthumously. On December 3rd, 1999, John lost the fight to lung cancer and left to a better place. All fans around the world mourned his death and it is raining on Earth since then.
Now that we have taken a look at what happened during his final year summarised, we turn our eyes to a timeline where it was not his last one, but we first have to stop his slow death process from occuring for good. So, how do we prevent John's death? We travel back in time to where we began and magically erase his first cancer cells from existence. First, everything would stay the same before Scatmambo. There was a point in our timeline where he felt that his health was deteriorating and that he would not have much time to live which was the reason why he came back to the Scatman project. This point wouldn't appear in the altered timeline. John would sit at home in best health and continue withdrawing from the Scatman project.
He would not do it without a goodbye though. So, Take Your Time would still happen, but much later because there is no time pressure. Recording would take place in early 1999 and the first self-titled TYT single would be published in April instead of January 1999. What John could not produce with lung cancer were music videos. Now, that he didn't had it, there would be a music video of Take Your Time. My imagination of the music video is that there would be a young man having a tough fight with his girlfriend for being hasty in the relationship. At home, he would turn on the TV and tune to a TV station where they would air a TV show of his idol Scatman John giving advice to the youth. The young man would hope in desperation that the Scatman tells his wisdom about love relationships in the episode that is on air, and indeed, he does. In the end of the song, the young man would apologize to his girlfriend and confess in Scatman's words that he "put the cart before the horse". In the music video of Scatman's World, there is a intro scene before the real beginning of the show which gives more context about the music. I think, that there would be such scene as well with Take Your Time. It starts with the young man being too touchy with his girlfriend. She then repels her boyfriend and tells him that she feels uncomfortable with the way he touches her. The young man responds with incomprehension and accuses her of being petty and finicky. The girl doesn't give in to him and stays persistent which results in her boyfriend getting angry. This is where the fight starts taking place. I can imagine this in our timeline as a posthumous animation. Scatmambo would also get a music video which was scrapped in our universe. The scenery would be a beach with Scatman John in front and female dancers in the background like in the FestivalBar 1995 performance.
Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word would get released one month later in May 1999. On the Japanese album release of TYT, there is a radio version of SSTBTHW as a bonus track. Re4Mation published a previously unreleased demo of the extended version. This is a sign that SSTBTHW was planned to be released as a single. In the alternative universe, it would be released as mentioned before. Instead of The Chickadee Song, a single of I Love Samba would get published in June '99 as initially planned. Ichi Ni San... Go would have its release in September that year, but only in Japan however. Normally, John's songs that are partially written in Japanese are only released in Japan (Love Me Tender, Jazzology, I'm Free and Paa Pee Poo Pae Po are exceptions!). Ichi Ni San... Go is too, but it's out there internationally for an unknown reason. If John wasn't ill, maybe he would have had more power to dictate how the album and its singles get released. Let's say he would have it in this parallel universe.
On December 3rd, 1999, John sadly died. However, in the parallel timeline, he would sit at home relaxed on a couch that day without any health problems and wait for Take Your Time to be released as it would have been scheduled to be released exactly on Christmas, December 24th, 1999. For online-shoppers, it would already be possible to pre-order the album. Because John didn't had lung cancer, the female backing singers would be unnecessary and absent from the album. His voice would be exactly as we know it in Scatman's World and Everybody Jam. He would still be able to sing high chesty notes in a dramatic manner. In our reality, his voice got less dramatic and more lyrical which made him sound thin and heady on the high notes.
The day where people say "Merry Christmas" to each other is the day where Take Your Time would finally be out. Our version of the album has a rather low amount of track numbers. With Ichi Ni San... Go being omitted from the version of the alternative timeline, although still included as a Japan-only bonus track, the total amount of tracks gets even lower. That means, that there would be space for other songs. And indeed, John would have made some political songs which convey an optimistic outlook on the world after the millennium. Europe was finally in peace in June 1999 and the political transition could finally take place without disturbances. In a 1998 email, John wrote about how excited he was about the new century and that the coming progress in the development of technology would give the average person more possibilities to participate in shaping society. People sometimes talk about "heaven on Earth", maybe there would have been Scatland on Earth, if he was still alive.
The year count got incremented by the number of 1 and John made it into the new century. To promote the TYT album, John would undertake the Take Your Time tour in February 2000. Concerts would take place in Europe and East Asia, but he would also try his luck once again in America and newly in Australia and New Zealand since he also had an audience there. In Africa, he was still unheard of, although he had hopes that his project would reach South Africa, the country that just liberated itself from racist tyranny. Songs from Take Your Time, but also Scatman's World and Everybody Jam would be presented to the attendees of the gigs. Shows in Japan would also include Pripri Scat and Super Kirei in the setlist. The tour takes its end in August 2000.
Remember Lou Bega, who released a cover of Scatman in tribute to John in 2019? In an interview, Lou states in what ways he relates to John. Both were bullied during their childhoods, John because of his stutter, Lou because of his skin colour. John died from lung cancer, Lou's father died from brain cancer. John started doing music in the Latin genre in 1998, Lou started his career around the same time as a Latin song artist. Lou reportedly heard the song Scatman in the 90s and was a fan of Scatman and even wanted to do a scat duel with him, but John was already dead when Lou had this idea. I doubt that he was telling the truth and think that he only wanted to impress the Scatman fans, so that they follow Lou and become fans of him which results in more fame. It's something similar to fan service so to say. He may have said it for a selfserving purpose, but we will never know if that's true because we cannot read Lou's mind. If he really was a fan of Scatman John and wanted to contact him, there would be a collaboration of John and Lou in late 2000. They would create a Latin version of Scatman like Lou did in our timeline, also entitled "Scatman & Hatman", with the difference that it would be produced by Kai Matthiesen instead of Roland Spremberg and that there would be no autotune. The style would also be rather vintage compared to the 2019 version of our universe. Its single would have its release in October 2000. There is a rumour that a Scatman album or EP entitled "The Heat" was released posthumously in mid 2000 in Japan. Maybe there would be such song created during the collaboration between John and Lou in the alternative world. The Heat would be released in December 2000 as a single, and because they have a strong symbiosis in their collaboration, they do much more Latin-styled song and an album with the same title "The Heat" would get published in March 2001 with a world tour starting right after album launch and ending in October '01.
Let's take the safe path and settle on the fact that it would be more probable that the collab between Lou Bega and Scatman John would not happen. John would completely withdraw from the Scatman project and start working on his jazz album "Scatology" after the Take Your Time tour. He already composed Can You Hear Me in 1999 and it was almost finished after the tour. Can You Hear Me would obviously be part of the album, although it is more of a ballad song than a jazz one. My (Beautiful) Planet would be included as well. I cannot think of the new songs as well, but I know that his old jazz numbers would be on it too, like The Misfit, a song about being an outsider, and Last Night I Dreamed. Scatology would eventually come out in early 2001 followed by a world tour in March. The American leg of the TYT tour would have been a test to see if he got a big audience there. The attendance at the US shows would have been rather decent, but much better than in the 1997 gigs. So, John would tour in the US once again. He would perform a different genre of music, Jazz, which has a better receival in the US than eurodance. The Scatology tour would start in Europe where he started his new Jazz career in 1990. Its course would go eastwards, from Western Europe to Central Europe, Eastern Europe and then Asia, until the USA got reached where he would return to the jazz world he formerly left in the late 80s. Originally, the tour would have ended in October, but 9/11 forced John to make it shorter.
On September 11th, 2001, Scatman John Larkin played a maritime jazz gig in New York City at a club near the World Trade Center. While John was jamming on his piano, a deafening explosion-like sound was heard. The audience panicked, but John didn't notice the bang as he was in a flow. He thought that the audience was cheering for being impressed. After the song was over, they still screamed in panic. Scatman John asked the audience: "Why are you in panic?" But the audience just didn't calm down. John went to the live engineers and asked them what happened that the attendees are in heavy distress. They gave him the answer that a plane crashed into the World Trade Center. John returned to the stage and told the audience: "Calm down, folks! I know what happened." As the audience calmed down, he proceeded: "Someone told me that a plane just crashed into the World Trade Center. Now, it's necessary for everybody to find peace in oneself. These events that happened recently are too disturbing for most people to handle them." He concluded the concert with a piano-jazz version of Song Of Scatland. Afterwards, the attendees got escorted to a safer place of NYC where they could finally go home. The performers returned to their hotel rooms. Everyone watched the news on their TV screens and it turned out that the plane crash was in fact an attack conducted by terrorists, not a scary accident.
Initially, John was optimistic about the 21st century that everything on the planet would change for good. In interviews during the 90s, he stressed that the world was in such transition. Now that 9/11 happened, he would have been cautious, but remain positive. In 2003, the USA under President George W. Bush declared war on the Iraq with the retaliation of 9/11 being a justification. The optimism would have been gone now, but John wouldn't allow the transition going into a negative direction. He would find that totalitarian regimes should be abolished through peaceful revolutions from its own people and not by foreign countries by force. This is one of the reasons why John would criticize the war. Another reason of course would be the tragic casualties and consequences. He'd return to producing political songs, but with ease since he would have turned 61 at the time the Iraq War started. First, he'd release his old Scatman songs that addressed social problems and the solutions to them like People Of The Generation, Shut Your Mouth And Open Your Mind or We've Got To Learn To Live Together as singles. Then, he'd carry on with new creations. John would rather have the reputation as an "anti-Bush-administration artist" than as a "jazz musician" in the US.
There are several possibilites of what would have happened if John participated artistically in US politics. The craziest imagination would be that he'd run for president as member of his own Scatland Party in 2004 and if he won the election, he'd transform the United States of America into the Republic of Scatland, decentralize political power and abolish poverty, political corruption and the military industry. It could also be possible that he would just participate in the elections to win some seats in the House of Representatives and in the Senate to have veto power and some ability to propose laws that lead to prosperty and bring society closer to the natural law. Similar to Elon Musk who just founded a party not to run as president, but to influence politics in a direction he prefers which probably differs a lot from what John would aspire. Maybe, I'm wrong because Musk's views back in the old days had more in common with John's views. Perhaps, politicians that were previously Democrats would join the Scatland Party, if his party achieved major successes.
Whether John would found a political party or not, nobody can tell for sure, but what can be certainly said is that he would influence politics. War tiredness would definitely kick in earlier in the US population because the awareness on the negative sides of war would be higher with his music than with political media alone. People would be more critical on politicians, whether they do the wrong things or don't stay true to their principles and values which happens in both political wings. Activists who want to combat climate change, but are not only against combustor cars, but also against electric cars, are not truely environmental activists. The rightists who claim to fight against child molestation are the same people who do it and/or support those dirty monsters. What the people need are faithful, honest servants who manage society based solely on a weighting of the different wishes, concerns and proposals coming from the population and admit their mistakes they've done in the past. This is what John was advocating since the beginning of the Scatman project.
We write August 2025, the date on which I wrote this page. Scatman John would be 83 at this point. Maybe he would still be alive, maybe he'd be dead because of his age. The more we move away from his death date, the more uncertain it gets when it comes to what John would have done when he was still alive. Perhaps, he'd still do music and live shows or he'd retire. Would there be a collaboration between Michael Jackson (MJ) and Scatman John (SJ)? How would he react to Mark Oh's 2009 Scatman tribute or to Lou Bega's 2019 one? What about us? You wouldn't be reading this page because I wouldn't be writing about a scenario where John didn't have lung cancer. My alter-ego from the parallel universe would probably write about a different scenario where he did have it. Possibly, I'd be pessimistic and say that John's music would get unknown. Who would come to an idea this his music gets used on YouTube in Mario gameplay or meme videos? There would still be a chance that I'd turn into a Scatman John fan because of the parallels we have. I really don't like to talk about my personal life, but for this topic, I have to do it. John was a stutterer, I am neurologically wired differently. Because we differ from most people, we both had negative social experience during our youths. John's biography gave me more hope in life and the last four years of my youth became significantly better because the environment I live in changed into a positive direction. It would be logical that I from the alternative universe would also be a SJ fan. Scatman John would be more popular if he was still alive today. Mayhaps, he'd communicate openly with his fans like during the 90s or he'd stop doing that because of the overwhelmingly big fandom. I'd love to contact him, who would not do the same, but he might not be reachable because he'd want to keep a healthy distance from his giant fanbase.
And the future? John would clearly not be alive for any longer. It's rare for someone to live at least 100 years long. We'd mourn his late death, but would be less sad about it because he lived a long life and because of this managed to enrich us with lots of songs and wisdom. If he stopped the war in the Ukraine just by his lyrical messages (Supposed they gave a war and everybody stayed home), he'd deserve the Nobel Peace price. To end it here, the world would be somewhat different if he never got lung cancer and we'd have more of his music.