“Banditos” by The Refreshments

"Banditos" began as a broke college kid's daydream and ended up the Refreshments' best-known hit. Roger Clyne, the band's singer, imagined making a run to Mexico and knocking over a store, a Circle K say, for cash on the way. He wrote it one morning over coffee while his friends laughed at him, and a shared Star Trek habit earned Jean-Luc Picard a cameo. His outlaw is the soft-hearted kind, a bandit who wouldn't hurt a fly.

Clyne split the credit with Brian Blush, Art "Buddy" Edwards and P.H. Naffah. The song first surfaced on Wheelie in 1994 before moving to Fizzy Fuzzy Big & Buzzy, where a coin flip upstairs in the studio decided whether it or "Blue Collar Suicide" led off the singles. David Dobkin's video has the band robbing a Mexican bank, bolting in Clyne's Toyota Land Cruiser and shaking the cops with a ridiculous disguise.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.