The things you learn when you’re trying to place the news events of the day into a musical context: Did you guys know that Steam’s “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye”—made famous to the MTV generation by Remote Control, and sung to former President George W. Bush’s departing helicopter by a Washington, D.C., crowd earlier this afternoon—has verses? OK, you probably did. So here’s another fact I learned about the track: Its path to being a No. 1 hit in the late ’60s, and a catcall at gymnasiums and arenas all over the world in the years that followed, was both accidental and kind of resented by its principal songwriters.
“Na Na” was apparently recorded and mixed in a night, according to The Billboard Book Of No. 1 Hits, and intended to be a b-side for a single that friends Paul Leka and Gary De Carlo were putting out on Mercury. The song was originally only two minutes long, and the two wanted to stretch out its length so as to discourage radio programmers from playing it:
“I said we should put a chorus to it.” Paul recalls. “I started writing while I was sitting at the piano, going *na na na na, na na na na…’ Everything was ‘na na’ when you didn’t have a lyric.” Someone else added, ‘hey hey hey.’”
By 1 a.m. the track was done, but the vocal track included the dummy lyrics. “We agreed it was just a B-side and said, ‘The hell with it, let’s leave those lyrics in.’ We fattened it up by singing it a couple more times.
“When we came out of the studio at five in the morning, it looked like there was a big fire. There was a manhole, and someone said, ‘Wow, look at all the steam!’ I put that in the back of my head for a group name,” says Paul.
A day later, an employee at the mastering lab called Paul. The track was so long, he couldn’t make a good pressing of it without the record skipping. He asked Paul if he could shorten it, and Paul suggested he fade it out earlier. Meanwhile, Reno heard it and said it sounded loo good for a B-side. He told Leka that Mercury had to release so many records per year on its Fontana subsidiary, and he wanted “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye’* as a separate single.
“It was an embarassing record,” Paul confides. “Not that Gary sang it badly. But compared to his four songs, it was an insult.”
Of course, it became the hit, after Leka decided to name the group that sang the song “Steam” (thanks, manhole!). And the four “better” songs, you may not be surprised to hear, didn’t fare as well in the public eye, which made De Carlo kind of upset—well, actually, so upset that he declared that there was no way he was going to record music under the Steam name. So Leka recruited a bunch of ringers and passed them off as Steam (NB: this may be why the lip-syncing in the above clip is so shaky), and the rest is one-hit-history.
Steam - Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye [YouTube]
The Billboard Book Of No. 1 Hits: “Na Na Hey Hey” [Google Books]
The verses (and yes, I was aware of their existence) always reminded me of the Foundations, the British soul band that did “Build Me Up Buttercup” and “Baby Now That I Found You.” (Among others!–the Foundations’ catalog of would-be hits is DEEP.)
That said, there was football in 1969, right? These guys should have seen it coming.
And the first line taken from “He Doesn’t Love You Like I Love You”. Jerry Butler? On of the ex-Impressions.
Anyway, I missed that. Got chased away by the living American poet. Saddy face.
Ha. That’s pretty awesome.
No matter who sings it–the Supremes, Bananarama, anybody else–that song is horrible.
In my opinion- an opinion I have held since I was a child- “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye” is one of the best pop songs ever written. The simple chorus, the longing lyrics, the brilliant instrumentation, the repetitive-but-superb drumming… it all just comes together perfectly. If you ask me to name my ten favorite songs (not including those by Splashdown, who would otherwise take up half the top ten) of all-time, the list might change from week to week; on different days, there might be more White Stripes, or more Beatles, or more Feist, or more Yeah Yeah Yeahs, or more Police. But the one and only song that has always been and will always be on that list is “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye”.
There’s a similar explanation behind the recording and release of “Be Here Now”.
A certain new White House man / old White Sox fan approves, I’m sure. Of somebody’s taste in song selection, anyway, maybe not of the whole mocking his predecessor part.
In my old high school, we were instructed by our administrators to refrain from singing “The Goodbye Song” (as we Gen-Xers knew it) when we were victorious at athletic events of any sort — it was considered poor sportsmanship. (Not that my third-tier school had that many winning seasons, anyway.)
But when my class won Spring Day at the end of my…junior year, I think it was…I ran to fetch a CD with the Steam song, and asked the PA kid to blast it. We weren’t competing against another school, so there was no harm, and the faculty couldn’t stop us. Watching my classmates realize what song they were hearing and sing heartily along is still one of my happiest musical memories.
So Leka recruited a bunch of ringers and passed them off as Steam
I guess they couldn’t find a drummer with a moustache on short notice, eh? What a great looking bunch of guys!