Napoleon XIV

The weirdest novelty record to hit the Top Forty -- indeed, a strong candidate for the weirdest hit record of any kind, period -- was Napoleon XIV's "They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!" Against a clomp-clomp tambourine beat, Napoleon spoke-chanted his manic-depressive tale of failed romance, the vocals suddenly speeding up into an unsettlingly cheerful giddiness as sirens revved up in the background. Not a single note of music was played or sung throughout the track, which zoomed up to #3 in the summer of 1966, as the necessary counterpoint to Barry Sadler's insipid, similarly off-the-wall smash that year, "The Ballad of the Green Berets." The implications of a song in which the narrator describes himself going crazy and being carted off to the loony bin selling a million copies had unsettling implications for a nation that prides itself on its stability and character. It engendered great controversy and only stayed in the Top Twenty for five weeks, partially because many radio stations withdrew the record from their playlists, possibly because of complaints from concerned parents and other righteous citizens. Napoleon XIV was actually Jerry Samuels, a 28-year-old recording engineer who had previously written small hit singles for pop crooners Johnny Ray and Sammy Davis, Jr., as well as making a conventional single of his own. "They're Coming to Take Me Away" was a sophisticated production feat for its time, with a maddening beat produced by tambourines, drums, and thigh slaps. The principal drum pattern was crafted by looping a ten-second piece of tape, and Samuels varied the speed of the vocals to simulate the off-the-rails state of a man going crazy while keeping the background tempo constant. Even weirder was the flip side, "!aaah-aH, yawA eM ekaT ot gnimoC...