Some songs are so bad they're good. This song wasn't as bad as the artists who recorded it thought, and it turned out to be a smash hit.
Three musicians from Bridgeport, CT, Gary De Carlo, Dale Frashuer and Paul Leka, had a band in the early 1960s called the Chateaus. It was then that this song was written. Some years laters, DeCarlo was making some records and enlisted his old band-mates to help. DeCarlso some “B side” recordings to back the better songs they hoped would be a hit. So they dredged out this song and recorded it. They added some na-nas and some hey-heys. It was just the three of them, with no band, and they spiced drum tracks from other cuts to give it a beat. The Mercury label suits liked it better than the other songs and wanted it to be an A-side song that their publicists would promote. The guys didn't want their names associated with the song because they thought it wasn't that great, so they released it under the name “Steam” on Mercury's Fontana label.
“Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye” by Steam reached the top of the Billboard top 100 in December 1969.
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