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Hey, Little Cobra, don’t you know
you’re gonna to shut ’em down
I took my Cobra down to the track,
hitched to the back of my Cadillac,
Everyone was there just a waiting for me
There were plenty of Stingrays and XKEs,
Spring little Cobra getting ready to strike
Spring Little Cobra with all your might
Spring little Cobra getting ready to strike
Spring Little Cobra with all your might
Hey, Little Cobra, don’t you know
you are going to shut them down
When the flag went down, you could hear rubber burn,
The Stingray pulled me going into the turn
I hung a big shift, and I got into high,
When I when I flew by the Stingray, I waved bye bye.
Spring little Cobra getting ready to strike
Spring Little Cobra with all your might
Spring little Cobra getting ready to strike
Spring Little Cobra with all your might
Hey, Little Cobra, Don’t you know
you are going to shut ’em down
Around the turn into the straight away
I was blowing off everything that got in my way,
Stingrays and Jags were so far behind
I took my Cobra out of gear and let it coast to the line.
Spring little Cobra getting ready to strike
Spring Little Cobra with all your might
Spring little Cobra getting ready to strike
Spring Little Cobra with all your might
Hey, Little Cobra, Don’t you know
you are going to shut ’em down
Shut’em down, shut’em down, shut’em down…
| “Hey, Little Cobra” was written by Carol Conners in 1964. She apparently wrote “Hey, Little Cobra after she’d gone to Shelby American and purchased her very own Little Cobra. Her biggest hit was “To Know Him is to Love Him”, selling 2 million copies. “Hey, Little Cobra” was introduced by a group called the Rip Chords. The Rip Chords were Bruce Johnston and Terry Day (Melcher). Both Bruce and Terry played with other surfer groups like the Beach Boys as well as under a lot of different named groups of their own. These two studio surfers laid the foundations on which the California sound of the 60’s would be built. They recorded and released “Hey, Little Cobra.” in 1964. Terry Melcher was Doris Day’s son, if you are old enough to know who Doris Day, a movie star and singer, was. |
| Some Footnotes: Here’s a good side note for you. I’d been looking for a copy of “Hey, Little Cobra” for some time in the music stores. I thought the words should be added to this web site. I’ve looked for the words to the song on the net with no success so I decided to buy the the Rip Chords’ version of the song. It looked like I was going to have to special order it but I hadn’t gotten around to doing so. The summer of 1998, my wife and I visited her parents in Nagoya, Japan. Hawaiian shirts and surfing stuff were real popular in Japan at that time, and so was surfing music. Wandering around a music store called Tower Records in Akita, Japan, I happened to see a CD called The Best of the Surf Sound and there, down the list, near the bottom was, sure enough, track #15, “Hey, Little Cobra”. The CD was 2,200 yen (that was about $15.45). It’s a copy of the original Rip Chords version in English but the title on the back of the CD is in Japanese Kanji as well as English. This page was written on August 2, 1998, on the Komachi #20 Superexpress Shinkensan, one of the bullet trains, on a Compaq laptop computer traveling over 250 mph cross country on the way from Akita, Japan, to Tokyo as I made my way alone to Nagoya to catch a plane back to Minnesota. My little portable Mini Disc headphones came in handy on the laptop to listen for the words to “Hey, Little Cobra.” I bet my Japanese seatmate wondered what the heck I was doing…- Dennis |