Thursday, June 9, 2016

Musical Interlude: Take This Job & Shove It (1978)

After 2 years on NBC, Chuck Barris and his talent show parody, The Gong Show, were given the ol' heave-ho due to declining ratings and Barris continually pushing the envelope with NBC censors.

Barris let a staff member guest host the series finale, bookended by a Chuckie's Fables skit, and Chuck passed himself off as a contestant, fronting the Hollywood Cowboys to do a lyrically altered cover of Johnny Paycheck's "Take This Job & Shove It".



Well, you knew Chuck was singing badly on purpose, didn't you?

Anyway, Paycheck recorded "Job" a year earlier and took it to the top of the country charts. It spawned a feature film, released in 1981. Now, since any video I run across of Paycheck singing it has some lyrics missing or altered, here's an audio version. The YouTube poster assumed it was from 1980 because of the Pickwick Records reissue, the cover of which is in this here video:



David Allen Coe, who wrote "Job", recorded it himself, and Paycheck re-did it in 1993.

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