It’s tempting to simply drop this song here without further comment in order to let its sheer lyrical weirdness stand on its own.

But that would do a disservice to the man who worked so hard for so long to find success as a singer, even if he himself found this success only after hiding his identity. 

After serving in WWII, Harmon Bethea stayed in the Army as a mail clerk in Washington DC, but in his spare time devoted all his efforts to music, year after year, changing styles, changing groups, changing names. He booked live gigs and recorded the occasional single, but booking a hit remained a distant dream.

Everything changed in 1968 when Bethea tried a bold new approach. In order to stand out from the crowded R&B scene, he streaked his hair pink, donned a mask, and changed the name of his backing group to The Agents in a bid to take advantage of that decade’s spy craze (the 60s, of course, gave us James Bond, “Secret Agent Man,” Get Smart, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., and the novels of John Le Carré). He didn’t adopt any spy-themed musical changes, but Bethea did begin recording comedy novelty songs, often with a social message, or sometimes just for the sheer fun of it. 

And it worked.

As The Maskman & The Agents, Bethea just scraped into the charts that year with “One Eye Open,” and in 1969 scored his biggest hit with the uniquely titled “My Wife, My Dog, My Cat” reaching #91. (Who needs a chorus? Not this guy.) It was technically the smallest of hits, but enough to keep Bethea in the game for another decade, and that’s the only place he wanted to be.