999,875: The Beatles—You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)

For a band that cited Spike Milligan's Goon Show as an influence, The Beatles produced remarkably few tracks of just them fucking around in the studio. In fact, this song is pretty much it. Sure, "Yellow Submarine" was rotten with sound effects, tracks like "Only a Northern Song" were self-consciously messy, and the band certainly got a lot weirder starting with "Sgt. Pepper", but only the B-side of their last single celebrated absurdity for its own sake.

Maybe that's because just fucking around in the studio apparently takes a hell of a lot longer than you'd think. To give you a ballpark: The Beatles asked Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones to contribute a saxophone solo for the track, which he recorded in 1967, but the song wasn't finally released until a year after he drowned to death in his pool in 1969. In between, the song went through vocal overdubs, a cut-down from a maximum length of about 8 minutes (imagine what that thing sounded like for a second), and did a lot of sitting around. The entire 14-song Please Please Me album, by contrast, was recorded and mixed in about 17 minutes total, and contained 2,400 percent more lyrics than "You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)".

No song on Please Please Me, however, had a section that sounded like what your silly friend did upon discovering that Garage Band came pre-loaded with "comedy sound effects". "You Know My Name" proceeds in four separate parts of increasing dippiness, starting with a straight-forward, plodding piano rocker that only sounds strange because the lyrics never change.

The second part is a latin lounge piece, which inexplicably name-checks movie producer Denis O'Dell—this predictably led to "867-5309/Jenny" levels of botheration on the part of fans who looked up Mr. O'Dell and wanted him to know that they knew his name and number. Featuring overly honeyed vibrato singing by McCartney, this section was apparently meant to rib Trini Lopez, famous for making latin versions of popular hits, although the reference might have been timelier if "You Know My Name" hadn't been released two years after Lopez' final chart appearance.

Through parts three and four, the vocals grow more inane. In part three, Lennon and McCartney repeat the lyrical mantra in cartoonish voices while cukoo birds and other refugee effects from a Foley artist's trunk trill and fart in the background. It's the fourth part of the song that's actually the funniest, though (not that we're talking "House Party" levels of hilarious or anything). It features John grunting unintelligibly while Paul does his best impression of Yosemite Sam getting an anvil dropped on his foot, but the funny part is that they're doing it over the playing of what sounds like a very straight-faced jazz lounge combo. You know, just a bunch of union pros who come into work every day and play while two jag-offs burp out the standards.