Great Earworms I Have Known

I was trying to remember some of the earworms I’ve experienced in my life the other day, which is a big mistake since as soon as you remember them you can’t forget them without the assistance of a specialist.

Earworms have the bad connotation of being tunes that gets stuck in your head and interfere with all rational thought. But back in the day we used to have a much more benign terminology that we used: “That’s a catchy tune!” If you were a musician and you wrote a catchy tune that meant that you had a chance to make it “onto the charts” and maybe, with a little luck, even get your tune played on “top 40 radio”.

When I was growing up and being carted around in the big old rusted out Chevy my brother Dennis had bought for a hundred bucks, my brothers and their friends often took me with them to the drive-in to get some Big Boys and malts and give our mom a break from cooking and listening to them practice their doo-wop imitations. After Mom warned the teenagers to make sure not to let me fall through the hole in the backseat floorboards, we’d motor down the main drag with the AM radio blasting all the wonderful catchy tunes that have become the soundtrack of my life. Or, if as sometimes happened, the tunes got stuck on autoplay in my brain, the earworms of my life.

I think the main difference between a classic hit song that we have fond memories of, and an earworm that we’ll do anything to kill, is the level of ongoing cool that those classics have maintained. Songs like “Hit the Road, Jack” by Ray Charles, or “Runaway” by Del Shannon are still beloved and performed to this day by bands in bars and concert venues around the country. “Hit the Road, Jack” in particular has taken on an almost endless life in baseball parks throughout the country as the song played when the home team knocks out their opponents starting pitcher, and in particular fans who’ve drunken too much overpriced beer love to sing along with the lyrics while spilling popcorn on the folks unlucky enough to be seated in front of them.

Then there are those other catchy tunes, the ones that no one dares sing out loud, for fear of being banned from social gatherings for spreading their irresistible hooks into friends’ ears. Songs like “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini” by Brian Hyland, “I’m Henry the VIII, I Am” by Herman’s Hermits, or the ultimate bubblegum pop hit “Sugar, Sugar” by the Archies. In fact, there are probably people who will never again read this column now that I’ve reminded them of “Sugar, Sugar,” which, believe it or not was the number one song on the charts for the entire year of 1969! A year that included such other hits as “Honky Tonk Woman” by the Rolling Stones, “Everyday People” by Sly and the Family Stone, and “Proud Marie” by Creedence Clearwater Revival. Not to mention several hits by the Beatles, who may have written some of the “catchiest” tunes of all time. There was a period of many months in 1969 when you couldn’t turn on an AM radio for more than five minutes without hearing this song. Consequently, those of us who lived through that terrible bubble gum era will never be able to totally suppress this earworm returning from remission. It’s just something we’ll be forced to live with until we finally arrive at the pearly gates, and hope that it’s not too late to get a ticket for that Angel Band from a scalper.

Anyway, after a recent conversation on the Funny Times Podcast with my friend Dave Maleckar, the creator of the 100 Word Rant, I was viciously attacked by an ancient earworm that I had long forgotten: “Look What They’ve Done to My Song, Ma,” by the performer Melanie (one word, just like Prince, Cher, and Madonna, as well as Twiggy come to think of it.) The second verse of that song came flying back to me as the perfect response to having been exposed to an earworm.

Look what they’ve done to my brain, Ma,
Look what they’ve done to my brain,
Well, they picked it like a chicken bone
And I think I’m half insane, Ma
Look what they’ve done to my song.

Remember that? You do now.