Tube Snake Boogie by ZZ Top (1981)

Tube Snake Boogie comes from El Loco, the 1981 album that caught ZZ Top between their blues-boogie years and the MTV machine of Eliminator. It is a shuffle with a list: a string of girls, each introduced by name, each of whom likes to do the title dance. The verses are the roll call and the chorus is the invitation, and the whole thing runs on the safe assumption that nobody in the audience is thinking about surfing.

It reached number four on Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart and bubbled under the Hot 100 at 103. Gibbons told Spin in 1985 that the name came from a surfboard, then added that a "tube snake" is first cousin to a "tube steak", which is the slang he knew listeners would hear and the closest a Texan has come to a confession in print without a lawyer present.

Its afterlife is radio. It is a classic-rock regular forty years on, played in daylight hours by programmers who have decided the surfboard story is good enough, and by listeners who have decided not to ask. Pearl Necklace, from the same album, has a different subject; Tube Snake Boogie is the ZZ Top entry because the "snake" is the song and the song is the snake.