They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!

Napoleon is Jerry Samuels, a recording engineer from New York City. "They're Coming To Take Me Away, Ha-haaa" is about a guy who goes insane (like, to the funny farm) when his girl leaves him. Except it's not his girl who left - at the end of the song we find out it's his dog when Samuels intones: They'll put you in the A.S.P.C.A. You mangy mutt In a Songfacts interview with Samuels, he explained: "It took me nine months to finish it. I wrote one verse and the chorus, and immediately I realized I was writing a sick joke. So I said, 'This is no good, I'll put it away.' Three months later it was still running through my head; I pulled it out again and wrote the second verse and it was an even sicker joke. Finally about six months after that I decided I was going to finish it, and I was going to do something in that last verse that would throw things off a little bit, so I referred to the object - 'They're coming to take me away because of what YOU did - I referred to YOU as a dog. The dog ran away. By doing that I felt I was lightening the sickness of the joke, and I probably was and it probably did some good for me, but that was the reason I went for that afterthought."

The song is known for the unusual vocal effect - the voice gradually goes up in pitch but stays the same tempo. David Seville had been speeding up vocals to create The Chipmunks, but "They're Coming To Take Me Away" used a different effect that was quite ear-catching and very hard to pull off in 1966. In his Songfacts interview, Jerry Samuels explained how he did it: "I was a recording engineer in New York at one of the hottest demo studios in town - Associated Recording Studios. I'd worked for them for quite a few years and we had started to do creative things together before that. We opened our own publishing company which I owned in conjunction with the owners of the studio and I'd written a hit song for Sammy Davis, a song called 'The Shelter Of Your Arms' and we published it. We were doing some work for some advertising agencies - I think one of them was BBDO - we were doing 60-second spots - actually a 60-second spot is really 59 seconds. The spot had to come in at exactly 59 seconds, so if it was recorded and it came in a little slow or a little fast, we used a device called a VFO. The VFO was a Variable Frequency Oscillator. It connected directly to the hysteresis motor of the machine. That is the motor that controls the speed of the capstan. We're talking about a 15 IPS (inches per second) analog tape. A hysteresis motor works on 60 hertz. If you want to change the speed, you can't change the wattage because it will stop; you have to change the hertz, and the only way you can do that is with a VFO. The VFO is connected to that hysteresis motor, and then if you move it from 60 to 59 to 58 to 57, it slows down, and if you move it up it speeds up. They had the VFO rigged only to the mono machines, but I saw something. I realized that if you hooked it up to the multitrack machine - and we only had four tracks at the time, we had a Scully 1/2 inch 4-track - if you hooked it up to the 4-track, you could do things that weren't done before. I would be able to raise or lower the pitch of a voice without changing the tempo by hooking it up to that 4-track machine. Based on that, I came up with the idea of 'They're Coming To Take Me Away.' I was sitting in a nice easy-chair one night. It had a little vibrator on it and I was stoned because I loved to smoke grass. What popped into my head was the old Scottish tune, 'The Campbell's Are Coming.' I didn't know the title, but I'll tell you who did - my friend Barry Hansen. He's Dr. Demento; we've known each other for many, many years. I hummed it to him and he said, 'Yeah, that's 'The Cambpell's Are Coming,'' and I thought, 'da da dat dat da dat da da da da da... they're coming to take me away, ha ha.' There it was, and by understanding what I could do with that piece of equipment, I wrote this thing. I asked the owner of the studio, who was my partner in my publishing company, to adapt the VFO to connect to the Scully 4-track. He said, 'Why?' and I said, 'I can't explain it, all I can tell you is we're going to make a record called They're Coming To Take Me Away Ha Ha, and that's the only way to do it.' He had enough trust in me to say, 'OK, I'll do it,' so he built the necessary adapters and connected it, and he was in the control room when I dubbed the voice in."

When this novelty song became a surprise hit, the record company sent other people to perform it at live appearances while Samuels kept working in the studio.