This Blog Post is Dedicated to a Band Named Steam

Chances are that you have never head of the late 1960's-early 1970's band Steam. However, there's a very good chance that you have heard of Steam's first and only hit song: "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye". Here's a clip of the band performing (okay, they are more likely lip synching) that song in their heyday.

Over the years that song has been resurrected many times in the form of covers by other bands (such as Bananarama's 1980's version) and being used in ad jingles (like the one for Tide to Go in 2005). This week, the song was resurrected once again on Inauguration Day as Former President George W. Bush (God, how I love saying that!) was boarding a helicopter out of DC and crowds of people were singing that song to him. Of course, there have been a few YouTube clips posted of that incident already such as these gems.

The Wikipedia page about the song has even been updated to include this sentence:

On January 20, 2009, after the 2009 Inauguration of President Barack Obama, the crowd outside the Capitol (which had been estimated at 2 million people at its peak) began singing the song as the helicopter lifted off carrying the former President George W. Bush out of town.

That same page also has an interesting background story about the song that became more famous and longer lasting than the band. The song was originally written by Gary DeCarlo, Paul Leka, and Dave Frashuer in the early 1960's when they were members of a short-lived band called The Chateaus. In 1969 Paul Leka produced a few songs that his ex-Chateaus bandmate Gary DeCarlo recorded for Mercury Records.

This was back in the days of vinyl records when record labels routinely issued seven-inch singles that played at 45 r.p.m. (which was why singles were sometimes called "45's"). Normally a seven-inch vinyl single has two sides: an "A" side featuring the song that is generally played by the radio stations and is considered to have potential as a hit single and a "B" side that includes another song mainly as filler and it is usually considered to be inferior to the "A" side.

The record label liked all the songs that Gary DeCarlo recorded and wanted to issue them as A-sides on the singles. That left the challenge of finding and recording more songs to serve as the B-sides. So Paul Leka and DeCarlo decided to resurrect that song from their former band because they felt that it was inferior enough to serve as a B-side so, together with fellow ex-Chateaus bandmate Dave Frashuer, they recorded it. They improvised parts of the song by singing "na na na" and recycling a drum track from one of DeCarlo's other recording sessions.

Well the record label liked that song so much that they decided to release it to the public as the "A" side of the 45 r.p.m. The musicians who created that record felt too embarrassed by the song to be publicly associated with it so the record label created a fictional band named Steam and the song was released under the Steam name. The song became a hit single in 1969 so Paul Leka assembled a touring band under the Steam name and the group even made a few subsequent recordings that went nowhere.

Steam quickly ran out of, well, steam and they disbanded in 1970. But the song lives on and will probably continue to live on for years to come.