The Stand writer continued, “I had the dance mix. I loved those extended play things, and I played both sides of it. And one of them was just total instrumental. And I played that thing until my wife just said, ‘One more time, and I’m going to f—ing leave you.’”
It isn’t the first time King has admitted that the song almost led to the dissolution of his marriage to wife Tabitha, whom he married in 1971.
“I want to share that my wife once informed me that she would disembowel me with her sharpest Ginsu knife if I played the extended version one more time,” he wrote in a 2009 Entertainment Weekly essay about earworms.
But he couldn’t let it go.
“I waited until [Tabitha] was running errands, then played it … not once but several times,” he wrote. “Because that’s the thing with earworms: They attract even as they repulse.”
Originally composed and recorded by Cuban musician Dámaso Pérez Prado in the 1940s, German singer Lou Bega updated the song and added lyrics to it for his 1999 debut A Little Bit of Mambo. The album went five-times platinum in Canada and three-times platinum in the U.S.
But his sales success was fleeting. Bega’s subsequent releases all failed to make a dent on the charts.
Asked whether his short-lived fame was a blessing or a curse, Bega chose the former. “It can only be a blessing because it opened all the doors and changed my whole life,” he told Vanity Fair when the song celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2019.
Elsewhere in King’s interview with Rolling Stone, the author spoke about setting his latest book during COVID. The novel centres on Holly Gibney, a quirky investigator that also appeared in King’s Mr. Mercedes trilogy, The Outsider and the short story, If It Bleeds, tracking two killers during the height of the pandemic.
“I think that a lot of people are not going to like it,” King admitted. “I think that a lot of people — particularly people on the other side of the COVID issue and the Trump issue — are going to give it one-star reviews on Amazon. But all I can say to those people is, ‘Knock yourself out.’”
X: @markhdaniell