![]() Maybe “Alley Oop” wasn’t a serious exercise, but it holds up a lot better today than most of the era’s #1s that actively seemed to be trying to hit #1. ![]() ![]() Musically, “Alley Oop” is punk-level rudimentary, and Paxton’s stretched-out, exaggerated voice was doing Mick Jagger things two years before the Rolling Stones even formed. It’s hard to imagine that anyone involved thought anything much would happen with this song, so maybe that’s why they played with such nasty force. Everyone in the session was apparently drunk, and Paxton (who would go on to produce “Monster Mash,” another novelty-song #1) co-produced it with Kim Fowley, who would later become a punk scenester, Runaways manager, and accused rapist. So he named his new “band” after the intersection of Hollywood and Argyle Boulevards, near where he was recording. Paxton, then a member of a group called Skip & Flip, wasn’t contractually allowed to record anything under his own name, since he made “Alley Oop” for another label. But the version that hit #1, full of Paxton’s fake-beatnik ad-libs, is one of those classic happy-accident pop music stories. And Paxton stretches his degenerate drawl to cartoonish extremes: “He got a chauffeur that’s a gen-you-wine dino- so“Alley Oop” songwriter Dallas Frazier originally recorded “Alley Oop” as a no-less-schticky country song, and his version is plenty fun. Musically, it’s a simple, almost bloodthirsty piano boogie. Another key reason: Unlike something like “ The Chipmunk Song,” it’s a perfectly functional piece of music, one that’s actually fun to hear even if you’re over five years old. It’s a defiantly, overwhelmingly silly song, and that’s one of the key reasons why it works. Paxton crows madly about how cool this caveman is: “He’s the toughest man there is alive / Wears clothes from a wildcat’s hive / He’s the king of the jungle jive / Look at that caveman goooooo!” More specifically, it’s a song about a time-traveling caveman who was the subject of a newspaper comic strip. “Alley Oop” is a song that did not even remotely need to exist. See, this is how you make a novelty song. Alley-Oop was likewise to be a solo single, until someone advised. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Dals musical day had not come just yethis songs Mohair Sam and Elvira were.
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