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. “Timothy” was a last-ditch effort by the Buoys, a ragtag bunch of kids from Northeastern Pennsylvania’s coal country who, with one final chance from their label to have a hit, rolled the bones with a macabre tale of a forbidden meal.
As it turns out, there was an appetite for the song. “Timothy” launched the multifaceted career of Rupert Holmes — who would go on to write and record the 1979 Number One hit about infidelity, “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” — and landed the Buoys their coveted album deal, while making history as surely the only pop song about cannibalism to crack the Billboard Top 20. But for any of that to happen, Holmes knew he had to write a song that was both irresistible and practically unplayable. Along with producer Michael Wright, he set about crafting a hooky yet gruesome single that would entice teenagers and repulse parents.
“Hungry as hell, no food to eat/And Joe said that he would sell his soul/For just a piece of meat,” went one of Holmes’ verses.
“People think I should be embarrassed by this song, but I’m so proud,” Holmes says today. “We had this one last gasp with the Buoys and Michael said, ‘What are we going to do?’ And I said, ‘You should record a song that gets banned.’ He said, ‘Will you write one?’ And I said yes.”
Just three years ago, Rolling Stone declared 2022 “the year of the cannibal” on the heels of a string of TV series and movies with storylines about the horrors of human consumption. Real-life allegations of a cannibalism fetish against actor Armie Hammer were also making news, and continue to. But back in 1971, narratives about cannibalism were especially taboo. There certainly weren’t any songs about the practice in rotation at mainstream radio, and it was still a full year before the survivors of a 1972 plane crash in the Andes Mountains would captivate the world by recounting their gut-wrenching decision to eat their fellow passengers to stay alive.
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So, when “Timothy” arrived, a Creedence Clearwater Revival-style blast of vigorously strummed acoustic guitar, high harmonies, and an earworm chorus, it was met with shock — at least once radio programmers actually listened to the lyrics.
“Radio stations would play it because it sounded good,” Holmes says. “But eventually what would happen is some DJ or music program director for the station would suddenly look up and say, ‘Hey, wait a second. What is this song about?’ You know, there are a million people who still think ‘The Piña Colada Song’ is about ‘It’s nice to drink piña coladas.’”
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.
Those harmonies caught the ear of Wright, an engineer at Scepter Records, who brought the Buoys, led by singer-guitarist Bill Kelly, to New York to record a bubblegum pop song. Brozena was just a senior in high school and, like his bandmates, would do anything for a record deal. “Our drummer had a hearse at the time and I remember us driving it to New York,” he says. “Maybe that was a beacon of things to come.”
When Holmes heard Kelly’s vocals on the bubblegum track, he was blown away and poached him to sing on a song he had written for another band Wright was producing titled “These Days.” “Bill was an Irish tenor with a long mane of hair, and he just had a remarkable voice,” Holmes says. “We put Bill’s voice as the lead singer and I sang backup. Scepter thought it was good enough to put it out as being by ‘the Buoys.’”
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But “These Days” tanked, and the Buoys were down to their last strike. Holmes proposed his banned-at-radio scheme to Wright, who signed on, and he got to work writing “Timothy.”
“The challenge was to write something that could get played, but that some people would ban,” Holmes says. “If I wrote a song where the lyrics were obscene, or I described something sexual that was not allowed in those days, or if there was a clear drug reference, that would not work, because it would just never get played at all.”
Holmes found his muse in the odd nexus of Tennessee Ernie Ford’s coal-mining ballad “Sixteen Tons” and the cooking series The Galloping Gourmet. While watching chef Graham Kerr prepare a meal on TV, Holmes started strumming his guitar and ruminating on Ford’s lyrics, “Some people say a man is made out of mud/A poor man’s made out of muscle and blood.” “I thought to myself, ‘It almost sounds like a recipe,’ and suddenly I think, ‘Mining and dining!’ Cannibalism during a mining disaster — but I won’t say it. I’ll just do everything to imply it.”
Despite the Buoys hailing from Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal region (the site of mining tragedies like 1959’s Knox Mine Disaster), 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’ A Christmas Carol. “It sounded like a victim,” Holmes says, “and the chorus had to be a name.”
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. “He says, ‘Joe said to me, I’ll take a sip, and then there’s some for you,’ which means Joe has already decided what’s going to happen: He’s not sharing the water,” Holmes chuckles. “He has other plans for Timothy.” (Later, in the chorus, Kelly offers another ominous clue, singing, “Timothy, Timothy/Joe was looking at you!”)
With the song finished, Holmes entered the studio with Wright and the Buoys — Kelly, Brozena, drummer Chris Hanlon, guitarist Steve Furmanski, and bassist Bob Gryziec. Brozena says when they first heard Holmes play “Timothy” on piano, they thought it sounded like a funeral dirge.
“That wasn’t working, so we sped it up and gave it a Creedence feel,” he says, though the group still wasn’t fully aware of what story they were telling until an observer in the studio approached Brozena. “We’re sitting right in front of the control room, and he came over to me and said, ‘There’s a Vietnam War going on, and people are talking about peace and putting flowers in people’s guns. Do you know what you guys are singing about here? That’s about cannibalism.’”
Nonetheless, “Timothy” was released to radio in the winter of 1970 and crept, glacially slow, toward the charts. Then, according to Holmes, stations like WABC in New York started to discern the lyrics they were broadcasting and pulled it from the air. “If the kids asked, ‘Why aren’t you playing [“Timothy”]?” they would say, ‘You shouldn’t listen to that. It’s terrible.’ Well, all you have to do is tell a teenager that he shouldn’t listen to something and he’ll demand it,” Holmes says.
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.”
A 1971 review of “Timothy” by an unimpressed Rolling Stone 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. After several months programmers and listeners alike discovered that the song was about cannibalism… Everyone who understands the words gets a charge out of the grossness, so the record has been a hit wherever and whenever played.”
But Holmes’ ploy was a double-edged sword. The song stalled inside the Top 20 on Billboard, a victim of its own manufactured controversy.
“We could not get it higher than 17,” Holmes says, “because there were just certain key stations in America that would not [play] the record because of its nature.”
In an attempt to rewrite the narrative and goose the song higher on the charts, Scepter swung for the fences. According to Holmes, the label’s promotion team began to claim that “Timothy” was the name of the miners’ pack mule. Brozena recalls seeing a full-page ad in Billboard with the song title above a picture of the animal. “It said, ‘We fooled you. Timothy was a mule,’” he says. “In reality, it was never about a mule.”
When that failed to convince radio gatekeepers, the label released an edit, awkwardly replacing the line “my stomach was full as it could be” with “both of us fine as we could be.” Another edited version retained the stomach lyric but edited out one single word from the song.
“This was hilarious,” Holmes says. “In trying to get the record played, they issued a censored version of ‘Timothy.’ What did they censor? The word ‘hell’ in ‘hungry as hell.’”
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. “That was my attempt to write another ‘Timothy,’” Holmes admits.
But none of the new songs, or the album itself, matched the success of “Timothy.” The Buoys split up by the mid-Seventies. In 1980, Kelly and Hludzik formed a new band, Dakota, and joined Queen on The Game tour as their opening act, scoring a modest hit with “If It Takes All Night.” Eventually, Kelly relocated from his native Pennsylvania to Nashville, where he wrote, recorded, and produced Christian music. As this story was being reported, Kelly died in December at age 74. Says Holmes, “Bill will always be a formidable talent and astounding vocalist.” (Hludzik died in 2020, Furmanski in 2014.)
Fifty-five years since “Timothy” was first released, the song continues to rear its head. It’s heard often on SiriusXM and on oldies formats, and gets trotted out with other horror-rock songs, like Alice Cooper’s “The Ballad of Dwight Fry,” Bloodrock’s “D.O.A.,” and R. Dean Taylor’s death-by-cop opus “Indiana Wants Me,” every Halloween. YouTubers have also filmed reaction videos of them listening to it.
But it remains most revered in the Buoys’ home region of Northeastern Pennsylvania, where the band often played reunion shows in Wilkes-Barre, as recently as 2022. The following year, they were inducted into the Luzerne County Arts & Entertainment Hall of Fame. Holmes sent a speech to be read during the ceremony.
“‘Timothy’ is certainly a quirky song, due to its lyrical content, but it’s catchy as hell, with a great melody, a great riff, and superb vocals,” says Alan K. Stout, a music historian, journalist, and DJ in Northeastern Pennsylvania. “And though the Buoys didn’t write it, they did write most of their own material. We are very proud of them here.”
Holmes, meanwhile, went on to win a pair of Tony Awards for his Charles Dickens musical The Mystery of Edwin Drood and wrote a New York Times bestseller with 2023’s Murder Your Employer. Still, some listeners, even those who came of age in the Seventies, have never heard his most odd entry to the pop canon. Holmes says it’s all a matter of geography — and proof that the get-banned plan had worked.
“When I meet someone and they say, ‘You wrote ‘Timothy,’ didn’t you? I’ll ask, ‘Where did you grow up?’” he says. “It will usually be in the South or in the Midwest. It will never be L.A. or New York.”
Brozena, who now lives in North Carolina, says his friends on the pickleball court often ask him about “Timothy,” but invariably the conversation turns to Holmes’ own signature hit.
So, does Holmes think that without “Timothy” there’d be no “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)”?
He pauses. “There’s certainly no escape from Timothy.”