When the Guy Behind “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” Wrote a Song About Cannibalism

Rupert Holmes is responsible for one giant hit, 1979’s “Escape (The Piña Colada Song),” that might make your mouth water—especially if you like the titular tropical beverage (or getting caught in the rain). But the multi-talented singer, songwriter, playwright, and novelist was the driving force behind another ’70s pop curiosity that’s liable to make your stomach turn.

The song is called “Timothy,” and it was released in 1970 by the Pennsylvania rock band The Buoys. Holmes penned the music and, most notably, the lyrics, which tell of a mining disaster that ends in cannibalism. That’s right: Three friends get trapped underground, and one of them gets eaten. It’s one of the strangest songs ever to make the Top 40—it reached No. 17 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1971—and weirder still, the story it tells bears striking similarity to an actual tragedy that occurred in the Buoys’ home state.

1. Banned on Purpose
2. “Where On Earth Did You Go?”
3. Coincidental Similarities

Banned on Purpose

In 1970, Holmes was a 20-year-old session musician doing all kinds of odd jobs around the music industry. He was tasked with things like organizing country singer Charlie Pride’s song folio and writing an arrangement of “Jingle Bell Rock” for marching bands. Along the way, he made friends with Michael Wright, a junior engineer at Scepter Records in New York City. Wright had access to the label’s studio on weekends, and he’d recently discovered a band from Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, called The Buoys.

Wright managed to score the group a one-single deal with Scepter, but he knew the label wasn’t going to put any promo muscle behind it. He could basically do whatever he wanted with The Buoys, so he asked Holmes for some advice. Holmes suggested they record a song that would get them banned on radio. Controversy is never a bad thing, Holmes figured, and if the song flopped, Wright could court other labels by saying the band would have had a hit if not for censorship on the airwaves. Wright liked the idea, and he asked Holmes to write him a bannable song.

What happened next was a bit of serendipity. Holmes was working on an arrangement of the Tennessee Ernie Ford classic “Sixteen Tons” for singer Andy Kim, and at the same time, there was a cooking program, The Galloping Gourmet, on his TV set. Suddenly, the “Some people say a man is made out of mud / a coal man’s made out of muscle and blood” from “Sixteen Tons” took on new meaning.

“And I think, ‘You know, that almost sounds like a recipe: muscle and blood and skin and bones, bake in a moderate oven for two hours, top with Miracle Whip,’” Holmes told Songfacts. “I had seen the movie Suddenly Last Summer about a week earlier on TV, and it had a revelation about cannibalism in it, and I thought, If it’s good enough for Tennessee Williams, it’s good enough for The Buoys. So I thought, cannibalism during a mining disaster, that’ll get banned.”

“Where On Earth Did You Go?”

Holmes cooked up a truly bizarre pop-rock tune featuring horns, strings, and nightmarish lyrics about three friends who get stuck in a mine. There’s the narrator, a guy named Joe, and Timothy, and we learn in the first verse that it doesn’t end well for one of them: ​​”The only ones left to tell the tale / Was Joe and me,” sings Buoys frontman Bill Kelly.

So what happened to poor Timothy? The song’s narrator isn’t really sure, because he’s “blacked out” some awful thing that happened down in the darkness. But it soon becomes clear what transpired. “My stomach was full as it could be,” the narrator says, remembering what happened when he woke up. “And nobody ever got around to finding Timothy.”

Scepter Records released “Timothy” in 1970, and against all expectations, it began garnering airplay. Once stations figured out what the lyrics were about, they’d pull the song, and that led listeners to call and request it. “Well, all you have to do is tell a teenage kid that he shouldn’t be listening to something because it’s disgusting and vile and loathsome, and he’ll demand it,” Holmes told Songfacts.

At one point, Scepter thought the song might go Top 10, so they started a rumor that Timothy was a mule, not a person. “I was offended at the very idea of this pure defenseless mule being eaten,” Holmes told Wayne Jancik, author of the book One Hit Wonder. “To this day, people come up and ask me, ‘Was Timothy a mule?’ I tell them, ‘No, he was a man—and they ate him.’ ”

“Timothy” peaked at No. 17, and while The Buoys managed a couple more minor hits, they never again cracked the Top 40.

“Did I have deep, personal feelings about sharing the joys of cannibalism with the listening public?” Holmes said. “No, of course not. I was a 20-year-old kid hungry not for human flesh, but hungry to do something successful in the music business. I think I diagnosed a dilemma that a friend of mine had and found an effective way of solving his problem.”

Coincidental Similarities

“Timothy” wound up being a footnote in Holmes’s career. He topped the Billboard Hot 100 in 1979 with “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” and reached No. 6 with the follow-up, “Him,” in 1980. Holmes later tried his hand at playwriting with 1985’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood, a Broadway musical based on an unfinished novel by Charles Dickens. The show earned five Tonys, including Best Book of a Musical and Best Original Score. Holmes has since written films, TV shows, and mystery novels, including 2023’s Murder Your Employer: The McMasters Guide to Homicide, a New York Times best seller.

These days, if people ask Holmes about any song he’s written, it’s probably “Escape (The Piña Colada Song),” but there is one eerie addendum to the “Timothy” saga. It turns out the song’s plot mirrors a real mining disaster that took place in Sheppton, Pennsylvania, in 1963. That August, three men were trapped in a cave-in, and only two were rescued. The survivors reported having wild visions during their time underground—some involving humanoid creatures in space suits and the recently deceased Pope John XXIII—and the third man was never found.

Holmes told author Maxim Furek that he didn’t learn about Sheppton until after “Timothy” had charted. “If I had known about that at the time,” he said, “I probably never would have written the song because I don’t want to make fun of something that’s tragic.”

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