Rupert Holmes is best known for his Number One 'Escape (The Pina Colada Song),' but his first hit was a song about cannibalism written for the Buoys.
Rupert Holmes onstage in the Seventies. Years before he had a Number One with"The Piña Colada Song," Holmes wrote a hit single about cannibalism for the band the Buoys.If you can’t beat them, eat them. That’s essentially what an ambitious, try-anything songwriter and a young rock band from Pennsylvania were thinking back in 1970 when they teamed up to write and record a song about trapped miners who kill and devour their friend.
The Buoys never set out to sing about eating their fellow man. When the band formed in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in 1965, its members, many of them still in high school, gravitated toward the sound of the Beatles and the Hollies. “We were a harmony band,” says Fran Brozena, the group’s keyboardist.
Despite the Buoys hailing from Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal region , Holmes says he wasn’t drawing on that connection when he wrote the opening lines: “Trapped in a mine that had caved in/and everyone knows the only ones left were Joe, and me, and Tim.” He chose the name “Timothy” because it reminded him of Tiny Tim in Dickens’He most relishes what he calls the “sinister” second verse, in which one of the trapped miners calculates that there’s only enough water to drink for two.
Interest in “Timothy” began to surge. Other stations chose to spin the single, and the song finally charted in January 1971, giving the Buoys, Holmes, and Scepter a hit. “It happened,” Brozena says, “just like Rupert said it was going to happen.”all but confirmed that Holmes’ ruse had worked. “Promotion men started pushing” the song “during the first two months of 1970,” it read, but the “pedestrian instrumental line obscured the lyrics.
Regardless of where the song peaked, “Timothy” had done its job: The Buoys had a hit, and they’d secured an album deal. Holmes committed himself to writing more story-songs for the band, which now featured Jerry Hludzik on bass and Carl Siracuse on guitar. “Give Up Your Guns,” inspired by Holmes’ experience scoring a Western movie, was a bank-robber tale, while “Blood Knot,” about a juvenile detention center, was the songwriter trying to make lightning strike twice.
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