Thursday June 9, 2022 “Timothy” The Buoys
For anyone keeping lists we’ve had “Timothy” on song of the day before but it’s such a fun story I couldn’t resist a quick return to the only top forty song that I am aware of that covers a topic that just doesn’t get enough musical coverage…cannibalism.
So there’s this young songwriter and he’s doing everything he can to get a start in the business, he’s writing jingles for commercials, a classically trained multi-instrumentalist he's doing session work, arranging songs for other artists, he’s writing songs that he thinks will be hits but no-one is paying attention. So what’s a struggling singer/songwriter to do…write a tune that will get banned, become a hit and get him the attention he wants.
How did this song get started? According to the songwriter, "At the time, I was working on an arrangement of 'Sixteen Tons,' the Tennessee Ernie Ford hit from the '50s, for an artist named Andy Kim. While I was working on the arrangement, there was a cooking show on the TV in the kitchen. It was called The Galloping Gourmet with Graham Kerr.”
“And I think, you know, that almost sounds like a recipe - muscle and blood and skin and bones, bake in a moderate oven for two hours, top with Miracle Whip.”
Here’s the song’s story if you’re not following the lyrics: three boys get trapped in a mine and when they are finally rescued several days later, there’s only two of them and they can’t remember what happened to Timothy, but they’re really not that hungry.
A happy, poppy sound and radio stations liked it enough to start giving it some airplay…until one of these DJ wizards listened to the lyrics and exclaimed, “Wait, they ate that Timothy kid!!” and immediately pulled the song, after all, what well respected radio station plays songs about cannibalism.
Their audiences loved the song, perhaps as a result of the topic, but it is a happy, poppy tune, and demanded it to be played, so many of the Jell-O backboned stations dropped it back onto their playlists and “Timothy” became a moderate hit. If you lived in NY though you have probably never heard this song because those stations did drop it permanently possibly because there are so many restaurants in NYC and they feared it might inspire their listeners to start eating each other and ruin the business for some of their sponsors.
Stay safe and well…and BTW the songwriter of “Timothy” was Rupert Holmes who would write and sing the famous number one earworm song “Escape (The Pina Colada Song)”, and several additional top forty hits, as well as the Tony award winning play The Mystery of Edwin Drood