Australian singles chart:
Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye entered the Kent charts on 26 January 1970 and peaked at #22.
Songwriters:
Paul Leka, Gary DeCarlo, Dale Frashuer
Producer:
Paul Leka
Record label of Australian release:
Fontana
Songfacts:
Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye, written and recorded by Paul Leka, Gary DeCarlo and Dale Frashuer, was attributed to a then-fictitious band they named ‘Steam’.
The trio wrote a blues shuffle version of the song in the early 1960s when they were members of a doo-wop group called the Glenwoods, the Citations, and the Chateaus, of which Leka was the piano player. The group disbanded when Leka talked Frashuer into going into New York City with him to write and possibly produce. In 1968, DeCarlo recorded four songs at Mercury Records in New York with Leka as producer. The singles impressed the company’s executives, who wanted to issue all of them as A-side singles. In need of a B-side, Leka and DeCarlo resurrected an old song from their days as the Glenwoods, Kiss Him Goodbye, with their old bandmate, Frashuer.
With DeCarlo as lead vocalist, they recorded the song in one session. Instead of using a full band, Leka played keyboards and had engineer Warren Dewey splice together a drum track from one of DeCarlo’s four singles and a conga drum solo by Ange DiGeronimo recorded in Leka’s Bridgeport, Connecticut studio for an entirely different session.
“I said we should put a chorus to it (to make it longer)”, Leka told Fred Bronson in The Billboard Book of Number One Hits. “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.” Gary added “hey hey”.
The group that is seen on the album cover and in the old black and white video was a road group that had nothing to do with the recording. The road group was lip syncing to DeCarlo’s vocal in the video.
Read more: www.songfacts.com/facts/steam/na-na-hey-hey-kiss-him-goodbye
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