Bakery Specials

In moments of cynicism, Songwriter Bob Merrill has a special theory to explain why the U.S. public buys hit records. "For every one who takes the record home to play," he says, "two buy it for the pleasure of breaking it to bits." If there was any truth in the hypothesis, a great many U.S. citizens were smashing up Bob Merrill's own records last week. One lightweight little number, If I Knew You Were Comin' I'd 've Baked a Cake, has topped the hit parade three weeks in a row, with record sales passing the 1,000,000 mark.

Tunesmith Merrill, 28, the son of a Philadelphia candy manufacturer, has an easy recipe for cooking up a song. Several years ago he began filling notebooks with catch phrases, slang and cliches ("Cliches make the best songs; I put down every one I can find"). Last April, with three notebooks full, he went to Veteran Songwriter Al (Mairzy Doats) Hoffman, who chose Baked a Cake as the most promising title, helped Merrill whip up the words & music in a couple of hours. The lyrics asked very little of the U.S. mind. Sample:

If I knew you were comin' I'd 've baked a cake,

Baked a cake, baked a cake, If I knew you were comin' I'd 've baked a cake,

How-ja do. How-ja do. How-ja do . . .

No one developed much of an appetite for the song until January, when a strong-lunged little singer named Eileen Barton decided it was to her taste and National Records thought it was worth putting on wax. Her bouncy version, complete with hand clapping and group singing, was just the frosting Merrill's ditty needed. Disc jockeys, singers and jukeboxes began serving it up in more & more generous helpings.

Merrill, who cannot read music and picks out his tune ideas on a toy xylophone, has another bestselling confection with practically the same ingredients, Candy and Cake. He hopes his most recent release, The Donut Song, will catch on before the public loses its stomach for pastry.

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