1962: An Unplanned David Rose Song Becomes a #1 Hit

Ironically, just about everyone and their grandma is familiar with a song that is related to stripteases. How is this so? David Rose was a composer and arranger for television from the 1950s to the 1980s. One show that he worked on, was short lived, but one piece of music from the show lives on in infamy. It turns out that Rose worked on a short dressing room scene with music playing softly in the background, as if it were being played on stage. He didn’t think too much about it, but on a whim, he used a few spare minutes of studio time to have the brass and other instruments record a one minute, 55-second version that he pressed on vinyl and gave out as novelty gifts. However, four years later, MGM Records pulled the recording from their archives and put it on the “B” side of Rose’s version of “Ebb Tide.” A L.A. disc jockey thought that the flip side song for so funny, that he played it over and over again during his show. Soon, the song, “The Stripper,” became a regional and then national #1 hit on this day in 1962.