A few weeks ago, I heard the song “Dah Dah DahDah” by Nardo Wick. It opens with an interpolation of the melody from Suzanne Vega’s song “Tom’s Diner.”
When I heard it, I thought “that’s funny someone’s quoting the theme song from I Dream of Jeannie?”1
These two songs aren’t similar. Vega’s is a folk-pop gem that’s more widely known for its British dance club remix, which features some of the most 1990s-sounding drumbeats you’ll ever hear. I Dream of Jeannie is a midcentury kitsch marvel that calls to mind atomic-age bachelor pads, boomerang pattern wallpaper, conversation pits, and chrome martini shakers.2
I know these songs are different. I will never stop confusing them. Writing the first paragraph of this post, I had to pause before typing “Suzanne Vega,” to make sure I was referring to the right song. When I think of I Dream of Jeannie, I hum “Tom’s Diner.” But if you asked me to sing “Tom’s Diner,” I would give you the melody of I Dream of Jeannie.3 It gets weirder. When I hear “Tom’s Diner,” I’m thrown off when the lyrics aren’t about I Dream of Jeannie. Instead of, “I am sitting in the morning at the diner on the corner,” I expect Vega to sing “I am sitting on the sofa, there’s a TV in the corner.” And from there, I keep imagining lines about the show. This is how, despite only seeing a couple episodes of the show and having a terrible memory for actors’ names, I know the sitcom starred Barbara Eden and Larry Hagman (this helped me win at pub trivia once). It’s how I know Hagman’s character is named Major Nelson and that he “works at NASA with suspicious Doctor Bellows.” It all fits the melody of “Tom’s Diner.”
Now I know why this is. It all goes back to a Nick at Nite promo that ran in 1995. The song is the work of parodist Mark Jonathan Davis, who also tours as a lounge act with the name Richard Cheese. While the lyrics of the parody follow the melody of “Tom’s Diner,” Davis replaces Vega’s first use of the melody, in which she sings it to “dah dah dah” syllables, with the I Dream of Jeannie tune.4 I know this now. I know this because I found this promo on YouTube, with appropriate credits.
Until this month, I didn’t know this. I suspected the promo was real, but I had no proof. I remembered seeing it, but I couldn’t find any record of it. For years, if either the show or Suzanne Vega came up in conversation, I would ask if anyone else remembered the ad. No one did. When I searched online, I couldn’t find references to it.
The video above was posted in 2017. This is years after I gave up on confirming whether this song existed. This month was the first time since that video’s upload that I tried, inspired by hearing “Dah Dah DahDah.”
The comments on the YouTube video for “Jeannie’s Diner” tell me I’m not alone. Dozens of people have the same story—they thought they made up the parody and couldn’t place its origin. It’s a relief to know I’m not the only person to have a piece of ephemeral pop culture lodged so deeply in my head that it plays tricks with my memory.
I watch videos like this a lot. It usually starts as research or verification. I want to know if I really saw what I think I saw. I’ll scan through hours of old VHS tapes uploaded to YouTube by a stranger who grew up near me just to verify the local car dealer wore a poinsettia-patterned blazer in his ads around the holidays. It’s a little bleak to have to watch new ads served up by YouTube’s algorithm in order to see old ads programmed by my brain, but the reward of confirmation and nostalgia is usually a worthwhile payoff. My laptop takes me back where I was the first time I saw an old ad or TV clip.
I’m surprised by how well I remember these clips—I know the lyrics and lighting and punchlines. When my memory doesn’t match up to the real thing, it’s jarring. I’ve spent years holding on to an idea until it’s worn smooth only to suddenly have it turn rough when I see the actual clip. It’s like when you switch phones or drive a different car and are reminded of all the ways your body and mind adjusted to the size and weight and feel of your old one. It’s familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.
This feeling is relatively new. It wasn’t possible to compare our memories with the original at all until recorded media. And it wasn’t until YouTube that we could do this without a library, a huge collection of home recordings, or a lot of requests to TV stations and their advertisers. This leads to the mismatch of memory and media, and the need to correct our personal records. It can be unsettling, but it’s not as unsettling as the other common result of these searches: finding nothing. We have proof and documentation of so much at our fingertips, so when something is missing, the easy conclusion is that it never existed and we made it up.
This is what I worry about with one particular memory. It’s a TV ad for gum. A man is in the dentist chair and the doctor tells him that dentists, as a profession, say it’s ok to chew certain types of Wrigley’s gum. Then one of them begins to sing: “American Dental Association, you’ve given me reason for jubilation.” At this, the office walls slide away to reveal a city street. People should “hooray!” from the windows of buildings. They throw confetti. The music picks up as the newly assembled crowd sings and dances.
Go tell it to your neighborhood
The A.D.A. calls these gums good
Chew not on chocolate-chili chips
Chew Orbit, Extra, and Eclipse.
I saw this ad a few times around 2007 or 2008. I was drawn to it because I recognized the singer’s voice. It belonged to Stephen Merritt, one of my favorite songwriters. Around the same time, Merritt had a song in a Volvo ad. And the gum commercial’s showtunes-adjacent pop was very much in line with Merritt’s style. But this ad doesn’t exist online. The only reference I can find to it is in an interview Merritt gave in 2008, where he says the opportunity to write a jingle for sugar-free gum “was too Archies to pass up. I couldn’t really live down refusing a chewing gum commercial.” He verifies the “chocolate chili-chips” line, too.
I wrote to Wrigley’s last year to ask if they would send me the ad, or at least verify it exists. I haven’t heard back. The interview with Merritt makes me confident I didn’t invent the ad, but I still have a desire to see it again. It’s not so I can hear the song or check a memory—it’s deeper than that. The memory of this ad is so firmly planted in my head, I can barely chew a piece of gum or book a dentist appointment without thinking of it. It may have started as ephemera, but it became part of my lived experience. Humming a little ditty when I unwrap a new pack of Orbit is a habit. It’s a little comfort. The routine gives security. I know that seeing the ad won’t change this. It could even take this away from me, if the melody or the words are different from how I remember them. But it still feels like something is missing.
Of everything uploaded to the internet, all the ads, the poorly shot home videos, and the general junk, why is my particular bit of the past not there? Why has technology that remembers everything forgotten the one thing that I want to see?
What I’m really asking, I suppose is: Does it matter if it ever existed if it doesn’t exist now?
But the mystery could be a relief. Maybe it’s not like I remember it. Instead, it’s how I want it to be.
I struggle sometimes with how much I should explain certain things for clarity. I have a hard time knowing how esoteric a reference might be, especially in these post-monoculture days.
And neither of these songs should be confused with the Stephen Foster song “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,” which features the phrase “I dream of Jeanie” in the lyrics.
No one has asked me to sing “Tom’s Diner,” or any song, but maybe someone will now, after reading this.
Singing syllables instead of words is commonly called scatting, but I associate that with a certain type of jazz performance. The technical term for things like “dah dah dah” is “non-lexical vocables.”
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