Song of the Day 8/2: Rupert Holmes, “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)”

These hot, sticky days call for tropical drinks with tiny umbrellas in them, and no tropical drink with a tiny umbrella is more popular than the piña colada – nobody ever wrote a song about the mai tai, did they? Sorry, Parrotheads, margaritas aren’t served with cocktail umbrellas, and “Margaritaville” wasn’t a No. 1 hit. “The Piña Colada Song” was, in both 1979 and 1980.

In the days before dating apps, people hooked up through the personal ads in alternative newspapers. Rupert Holmes, a songwriter-turned-singer who had released four albums of soft rock in the ’70s, had written a song but didn’t like the lyrics. Looking for ideas, an ad in the Village Voice caught his eye.

I thought to myself, ‘What would happen if I answered this ad,’ and I thought, ‘With my stupid luck, I would answer the ad and find out it had been placed by the woman I was living with, never realizing that she was bored with me.’

The story sort of took hold of my mind. People always ask me if it was based on something true, and I know they would love to know it was based on a true incident, but it wasn’t, it was based on the ‘What If’ scenario that I conjured up in my mind that evening.

The proof is in the pudding – Holmes has been married to the same woman since 1969. And until he started promoting his hit, he had never tasted a piña colada.

He thought up the immortal first line of the chorus minutes before recording it. The lyric was originally “If you like Humphrey Bogart,” but Holmes thought he used movie references too frequently. A tropical drink, he decided, better conveyed the feeling of “Escape.” That was the song’s original title, until the record company realized people were calling radio stations to request “The Piña Colada Song.” It was retitled accordingly.

The earlier version of the tune was called “The Law of the Jungle.” Holmes released it on a career retrospective box set in 2006.

Holmes actually had a wide and varied career. He wrote the music for a half-dozen Broadway shows. He’s won both a Tony and an Emmy, and though he never won a Grammy, this easily could have been honored – it was one of the best-selling singles of 1980. But he’s remembered for just one thing, and he knows it. He’s told more than one interviewer, “I have a feeling that if I saved an entire orphanage from a fire and carried the last child out on my shoulders, as I stood there charred and smoking, they’d say, ‘Aren’t you the guy who wrote the piña colada song?'”

The tune has become a cultural touchstone. Covers pop up regularly; I’m partial to the lo-fi acoustic version Jack Johnson recorded for Ben Stiller’s 2013 film “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.”

The song’s happy ending always seemed unlikely to me, and a real life incident supports my skepticism. Adnan and Sana Klaric were a married couple in Bosnia back in the ’00s. Their avatars met in a chatroom and established a flirty relationship, each one complaining about the poor state of their marriage. So they decided to meet, realized they had been talking to each other – and promptly divorced. Both said the same thing afterwards: They never talked to me that way in real life.