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Bob Rivers, a beloved Seattle radio disc jockey who was responsible for creating a prolific assortment of inspired music parody songs, has recently passed away after a battle with cancer. <\/p>\n
Bob’s radio career began as a teenager in Connecticut, but things got really interesting when he wound up at WAAF in Worcester, Massachusetts (Boston area) as one of the two hosts of the successful “Bob and Zip” morning show with fellow on-air personality Peter “Zip” Zipfel. During this period, he started producing parody and novelty songs, both for WAAF and for the KATZ\/Newcity “American Comedy Network”, a radio syndication service that provided comedy material to local U.S. and Canadian radio stations.<\/p>\n
One of his first parodies was “Breakin’ Up Is Hard On You”, which made fun of the court-ordered split up of U.S. telecommunications company AT&T’s Bell System. The song was a satiric revision of Neil Sedaka’s #1 1962 hit “Breaking Up Is Hard To Do” and peaked at #70 on the Billboard Hot 100 pop music chart. He followed it up with “Just a Big Ego” a parody of “Just a Gigolo”- a 1928 tango popularized by Louis Prima that had recently been covered by David Lee Roth in 1985. That particular track would be included on Volume 2 of The “Rhino Brothers Present the World’s Worst Records” compilation and was featured as a music video produced by Steve Rotfeld for Bob Uecker’s Wacky World of Sports TV show.<\/p>\n
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A few years later, in 1987, Rivers released “Twisted Christmas” a collection of his funny Christmas parodies, which contained the radio hit “Twelve Pains of Christmas” – a spoof based on the holiday standard “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” He branded his music as “Twisted Tunes,” and would sign a record deal with Atlantic Records. “Twisted Christmas” provided Bob with his first gold record.<\/p>\n
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After six years at WAAF, Bob Rivers moved to Baltimore, where he became a lead morning show personality at “98 Rock” WIYY-FM between 1987 and 1989. He gained national attention for an 11-day, on-the-air marathon during a Baltimore Orioles losing streak. He vowed to remain on the air until the Orioles won a game. He kept his vow and became a local hero for Orioles fans for his pledge. <\/p>\n
In 1989, Bob Rivers landed at KISW-FM in Seattle with a morning show with fellow radio host Sean Donahue, who also came from Baltimore, along with Bob’s pal Spike O’Neill, who served as sportscaster, writer, and impressionist. They spent six weeks brainstorming, writing and pre-production before their first show on air.<\/p>\n
It was in Seattle where Bob Rivers and his team seemed to have their most creative run. They had an extremely popular radio show and prolific output of Twisted Tunes novelty-parody recordings, many of which were released on assorted CD compilations.<\/p>\n
After 10 years, Rivers had the distinction of having the longest tenure of any radio personality in the local Seattle market. After the initial run with KISW-FM, Rivers would continue his popular radio shows in Seattle until he finally retired from early morning radio shows in 2014 to pursue other projects.<\/p>\n
As I did some research of his career, I was thinking there had to be some type of a LOUIE LOUIE connection, considering Bob’s 25+ years in the Pacific Northwest. <\/p>\n
Here’s a couple things I found…<\/p>\n
1) One of the Bob’s parody songs had a LOUIE connection. It wasn’t another version of the song, but it was a song that discussed the song LOUIE LOUIE.<\/p>\n
The song is called “Take Some Lessons (Learn Some New Chords)” which is a parody of “Get a Haircut,” a song by George Thorogood. Here’s how it goes…<\/p>\n