Motion in the Ocean

The B-52's : Rock Lobster/ 52 Girls (DB Records version)

[Purchase]

In 1978 The B-52's released two thousand copies of  "Rock Lobster" b/w "52 Girls" upon the world. Self-produced and recorded for DB Records, an independent label out of Atlanta, the 7 inch single sold out almost instantly. 

"The first version is crisper and pokier," Fred Schneider told People Magazine. " Commercial radio wouldn’t touch it, but the independent single turned out to be, I think, the biggest selling independent single that year."

Schneider got the idea for the song on a visit to an Atlanta disco club that could only afford to put up slides of animals. The slideshow obviously included a lobster. "Rock Lobster" sounded like a good song title to Schneider. Keith Strickland came up with the guitar line.

Kate Pierson remembers:

Keith would play instrumentation and Fred would do a poem. And Ricky had that riff, so we put it together. Then we jammed. Cindy and I added the fish sounds that sound Cindy does at the end. But we also incorporated some Yoko Ono-isms in our fish sound. She was really an inspiration to us. We listened to Elephant’s Memory and we were into Yoko, genuinely. So that was like an homage to Yoko. It was just all out of jamming, because nobody would sit down and go, “Hey, let’s add Yoko Ono fish sounds.”