This week’s oldie is a back to school special.

In 1973 lead singer/guitarist Michael “Cub” Koda, bass player Michael Lutz and drummer Henry Weck recorded a one-hit wonder expressing the frustration of school kids.

Koda got the idea for the song from memories of hanging out at a movie theater with his childhood friends. They’d smuggle cigarettes lifted from their parents into the men’s room at the Clinton Theater in Ann Arbor, Michigan on Friday nights. Koda says the “old duffer” who owned the theater would come after them, but never caught them in the act.

When he got into a band, Koda, who wrote the song in a half hour, changed the scene from the movie house to the schoolhouse.

The song that went to #3 on the Billboard chart opened with this spoken intro:

How you doin’ out there
Ya ever seem to have one of those days
Where it just seems like everybody’s gettin’ on your case?
From your teacher all the way down to your best girlfriend?
Well, ya know, I used to have ’em just about all the time
But I found a way to get out of ’em
Let me tell you about it

And then…

Koda died of kidney disease in 2000. Read more about him here.