Jason Heller at The Onion AV Club, for instance, loved the song. While I enjoy the song and count Barnes & Barnes among some of my favorite artists-especially the albums where they mix comedy and serious music, like Amazing Adult Fantasy-there are others who have their own unique takes on the song. Whether you love it or hate it, there’s no denying the song provokes some rather interesting opinions. ( Jeremy Keith/Flickr) The song occupies a strange place in our collective pop cultural minds At the end of it all, Mumy’s idea won out and the rest is demented history. The iconic high-pitched vocals were a source of contention between the two where Mumy wanted to keep them sped up and Haimer wanted to have them at normal speed. Per Mumy, the chorus was written by Haimer, while Mumy penned the verses. I had the same feeling from Dead Puppies, which came in almost exactly a year earlier, and indeed those two are rivals to this day. After a few weeks of that, I knew it was going to be an all-time Dr Demento Show classic. Requests started coming in the same night I first played it, and continued to roll in steadily. I knew it would go over well on my show about 20 seconds into my first listen to it. Demento knew it was something special, as he told Tedium via email: Though their first song, “The Vomit Song,” was rejected for various reasons (predominantly because it was a bit “too gross,” as Mumy writes in the Voobaha liner notes), the next tape they sent contained “Fish Heads,” which became a bit of an overnight sensation on the show. Demento Show and wanted to send some of their Barnes & Barnes songs to the good doctor for airplay on the program. As Mumy explains in an Archive of American Television interview, Robert Haimer was a big fan of The Dr. Occasionally, he and recording partner Robert Haimer would get together and write/record weird, funny, irreverent, groovy songs that were never really meant to see release. Mumy was (and still very much is) a talented musician who mostly made straight ahead serious music. It probably wasn’t a $600 fish head soup, though. In the liner notes of the 1996 reissue of the first Barnes & Barnes album, Voobaha, Mumy writes that Haimer came up with the idea for the song after experiencing the infamous meal. Voobaha, the first Barnes & Barnes record. It was a sort of side project for channeling a “certain type of energy,” as he would later write in the liner notes to most of the Barnes & Barnes album reissues. In between acting gigs, he pursued music and associated with the likes of Gerry Beckley from the folk rock group America.ĭuring more manic times from the age of 16 onward, he comprised one half of a strange musical duo called Barnes & Barnes, with his friend Robert Haimer. (Remember the kid who magically wished people into “the cornfield?” That was Mumy.) Much later, he became better known for his portrayal of Lennier in Babylon 5 and had bit parts in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. But it’s also the product of a musical vessel well-suited to making songs inspired by disgusting meals at Chinese restaurants.īill Mumy was a child actor known for his iconic roles in Lost in Space (as Will Robinson) and The Twilight Zone. The story of “Fish Heads” was inspired by a disgusting meal at a Chinese restaurant. ( ginnerobot/Flickr) Sometimes a bad meal at a restaurant can turn into something legendary
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