by Ryan Gray

Created on: July 29, 2011

Versions of the song have been released by everyone from Louis Prima to the Village People to Tiny Tim and many others. This has made the medley “Just a Gigolo/I Ain’t Got Nobody” a timeless classic.

The song was originally released by Prima in 1956. But one particular version of the tune, released by Van Halen lead singer David Lee Roth in 1985, stands out from the rest.

Diamond Dave just had a way of drawing attention to himself, and to keep that theme in order he put his own stamp on this popular song in the 1980s with loud horns, guitars and a wild and crazy video. It’s impossible for me to listen to the song without envisioning Roth prancing around with his huge sunglasses and gaudy outfits.

Despite Roth’s efforts to make the song his own, the lyrics came from Prima. And they featured a series of “words” that a person won’t find in a dictionary. The “words” are more like sounds, but the song would not be the same without them. And some of these “words” make up my favorite bizarre lyric in any song I have heard.

According to the original lyrics in one part of the chorus, “I ain’t got nobody, ‘cept love songs in love. I ain’t got nobody, nobody, nobody cares for me…”

But in the middle of those two sentences is a short pause, before Prima or Roth or whoever is singing the tune belts out an unforgettable chant.

“Humala bebuhla zeebuhla boobuhla
Humala bebuhla zeebuhla bop.”

The chant is not made up of actual words and it’s not a sentence. But whatever it is called, the imprint left behind in a person’s music “memory jukebox” will last for a long time.

Experience has revealed that this imprint was left on more people than just me. For example, during a call to a peer one day after work, the phone rang four times. Following a short silent period, I was stunned when the chant printed above came blaring through the receiver. He had decided to use the lyric/chant to start his answering machine and let others know that he could not come to the phone. (Another example of someone trying to use the song to draw attention to himself.)

Bizarre is defined as “odd or unusual, especially in an interesting or amusing way” (Collins English Dictionary). The lyrics chosen for this story are exactly that. But anytime a person is listening to “Just A Gigolo/I Ain’t Got Nobody” and he gets the opportunity to belt out the memorable chant printed above, he gets an extra burst of energy that feels anything but odd.

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