I saw 'em play at frat parties and at roadhouse dives. We even had an album by these guys at one point and would play it whenever we needed to get an otherwise straight girl either in the mood for some licentiousness or grossed out. Both were amusing in their own way.
They were a bunch of black guys who came from North Carolina. They'd gotten together in Chapel Hill back in the mid-1950s. They became a staple on the frat circuit in the South in the 1960s and have been ever since, it seems.
They put out nine albums on the Jubilee label, but stopped recording in 1969. Apparently, the company declared bankruptcy in '69, taking all the royalties with them. Clark and company were so soured on the record biz that they showed no interest in recording again.
I've had some of these songs stuck in my head for my whole life, and I haven't heard them in so many years it would frighten you children here. The classics were along the lines of Roly Poly, my favorite, which had the chorus:
Roly Poly
Tickle my hole-y
Up my slimy slew.
Drag my balls
Across the halls.
I'm one of the sporting crew.
The chorus would come between each verse of women singing about how cavernous their birth canal was. Such as,
One old maid
She up and said,
"Mine's as big as the moon.
A man fell in in January
And didn't come out 'til June"
Aside from the misogynistic and decidedly unromantic notions of that delicate flower all us boys craved in the worst way, we did laugh our asses off at these guys. And just when you thought you knew them pretty well, they'd put on a smirk and shoot you the bird. It was just their nature.
They covered the infamous Baby, Let Me Bang Your Box, but this song was originally done by the Toppers. Much of their material wasn't really what you'd call original, by most standards. The limericks, the bawdy jokes, the melodies . . . it was all recycled. But these guys put it all together with a style that hadn't been seen before.
There was a portrayal of a band in Animal House which was based on Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts. Doug, himself, later told Penthouse in an interview that not being picked for Animal House was the biggest disappointment of his life. The part went instead to Otis Day and the Knights, with a brief cameo by a very young Robert Cray. "If the band they had in that film wasn't modeled after us, I don't know who it could have been," he said with not just a little bitterness.
Without Doug Clark, there'd be no Luther Campbell. Whether this is a good thing or not is for you to judge. But I can tell you that some wild times were had in the basement of those frat houses back when Mary Jane was just another clueless Tri Delt, smack was what you'd do to your buddy later on when you both were trying to drag her up to the room, and the only meaning of ecstasy had to do with banging that box.