“Mama Told Me Not To Come” by Three Dog Night

Randy Newman wrote "Mama Told Me Not to Come" in 1966 for Eric Burdon's first solo album, but it took Three Dog Night to turn it into a smash. Their cover, from the 1970 album It Ain't Easy and issued on Dunhill, parked itself at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks that July.

Newman said the song grew out of his own amused look at the late-'60s music world in Los Angeles, and one music professor hears it as the tale of a greenhorn stumbling into a debauched party, with the reefer, the whiskey and the racket all coming at him at once, plus a few veiled drug references for anyone listening closely. Even the title carries a sly double meaning. Newman hung it all on a spare, almost spoken melody.

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