"King Tut," by Steve Martin. I think I was in 6th grade when I picked up this 45. The first time I heard it was on the radio and it was love at first hear. This song is just plain silly. It's a work of stupid perfection. I remember there being a big deal about the King Tut exhibit and all my teachers were blathering on about its significance and bla bla bla.
Then Steve Martin wrote this silly song and… well, it's a dead guy who got dug up a few thousand years later and he was "buried with a donkey" and he's Steve's "favorite honkey." I doubt a song like this would get any airplay today for the honkey line alone.
There used to be other novelty songs that would bust out and get radio play. Some of them were really bad, like "Disco Duck." But they were so bad, they were good, like the movie "Red Dawn." Some of them were kind of amusing, like CW McCall's "Convoy." Some of them were a real riot, like Chuck Berry's "My Ding-A-Ling," or even Ray Stevens's "The Streak." (I had Berry's and Stevens's songs on 45s but cannot find them). I'd even argue that "Bad Bad Leroy Brown" had a bit of a novelty to it.
I'm not going to address the soft-porn nature of today's top 40 pop songs, with all that annoying pitch bending and idiotic moaning. And it seems today's "rockers" are too froggin serious with their pseudo-deep meanings and bogus college English 101-style literary devices (think Nickel Back meets John Mayer). Enough. Somebody write a good novelty song and will some damn radio station play it? Or is Clear Channel going to bore us all to death (like TS Eliot implied--there, there's your English 101 literary allusion).
The B-side of King Tut had not one but TWO songs: Sally Goodin and Hoedown at Alice's, featuring Steve Martin's banjo playing. This 45 was worth every one of the 99 pennies I paid for it.
