The More You Know About the Chili's Baby Back Ribs Song, the Weirder It Is

The word “earworm” came into use in English in the 1980s, thankfully arriving a decade ahead of the song most likely to become one: the Chili’s Baby Back Ribs jingle. Within five years of its introduction in the 1990s, researchers found that it ranked at the top of songs most stuck in the heads of 1,000 surveyed college students, beating out enduring classics like “Who Let the Dogs Out,” and “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”

But beyond achieving the holy grail of advertising—a song that people keep singing for days, weeks, even years after the spot runs—the fast-casual ode to messy meat lodged itself as firmly into pop culture as the song will be in your head after reading this piece. And the more you know about the 10-second song, the weirder it is.

The guy who wrote it never ate the dish it honors, the funeral of the guy who sang it included both live pigs and a giant barbecue sauce fountain, and everyone from NSYNC to rival restaurant TGI Fridays tried to cover it and capture the magic. But even Chili’s itself, with celebrity-sung remakes and a 2017 version honoring the 30th anniversary of the dish, couldn’t recapture the spontaneous, absurdist magic of the original.

When ad man Guy Bommarito first wrote the song in 1996, he was the executive creative cirector for an agency that had messed up a previous campaign for Chili’s so badly that he was scrambling to come up with something, anything, to save the account. Assigned the dreaded task of coming up with a jingle, he wrote it in five minutes, receiving lukewarm approval from the restaurant chain. But Bommarito had not then, and as of a 2017 interview still has never, eaten Chili’s Baby Back Ribs.

On the other hand, the man who sang the iconic bass line, crooning so passionately about barbecue sauce that it marked our collective memory like the foodstuff does a white shirt, sang from his heart. Wolf Johnson (originally Willie McCoy) “maintained his Southern hospitality, his passion for fishing and his culinary skills with barbecue throughout his life,” per his obituary in the Dallas Morning News. But his sauce-splashed life barely compared to the funeral honoring that passion.

TLC filmed the 2012 “Baby Back Rib Homegoing” for Johnson as part of their mercifully short-lived show Best Funeral Ever, giving the world a glimpse at the 10-foot-tall rib statues, close-ups of the barbecue sauce fountain, and the quote, “I’m not sure if having pigs at the funeral was the brightest idea.” Johnson entered the event in a smoker-shaped coffin carried by pallbearers in chef’s toques.

But as iconic as the song was in the U.S., it came out in an era when the most popular website on the internet was AOL and people looked things up on Infoseek. So, for those in other parts of the world, it was just what Fat Bastard sang when he wanted to eat Mini-Me in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.

The 1999 movie inspired a slew of pop culture renditions: Around the turn of the millennium, anyone who was anyone sang a version of it. In 2002, Chili’s sponsored NSYNC’s tour, and created a commercial where Justin Timberlake leads the boys in a pitifully somber version of the song on a deserted island. Eventually, a helicopter answers the plea they scrawled in the sand, “Send ribs,” and drops a crate of ribs, which lands on Joey Fatone. In 2006, the brand hired country rock band the Old 97’s to create an updated version of the jingle that will never die.

Sitcoms got in on the fun, too: In 2005, The Office’s Michael Scott (Steve Carrell) dueted with a client played by Tim Meadows on the song. A 2006 episode of Scrubs featured Jordan and Dr. Cox taking revenge by duct-taping the man who botched their vasectomy to a chair as Ted’s barbershop quartet sang “I want my baby back…” endlessly, without ever getting to the “ribs” line.

The urge to make a spin on the song became so irresistible, even rival chain TGI Fridays took a stab at it in 2014. The spot starts by playing a song with striking similarity to the Chili’s one, then a voice says, “They wrote a jingle about ribs, Fridays is writing a symphony.” Unfortunately for them, symphonies are far less likely to get stuck in anyone’s head on a daily basis.

It turns out, nothing lands with an audience and sticks around for decades in pop culture quite like a 10-second riff with nine words all about a plate of fast-casual pork.