Joe Manfre wrote and recorded this song. It came about like this:

Here is a description of a crazy, bizarre dream I had last night.

In the dream, I was watching a TV documentary about an extremely embarrassing event that played out on TV in the 1970s involving the singer Gary Puckett. None of this stuff actually happened in real life, of course; it was all invented by my sleeping brain last night.

It makes sense that I would want to watch something embarrassing about Gary Puckett, because in the late 1960s he was the lead singer for Gary Puckett & The Union Gap, which is my least favorite rock/pop band of all time. When I was a little kid, it was the frequent oldies-radio airplay of Gary Puckett & The Union Gap's songs "Young Girl" and "Woman, Woman" (clips of both of these songs are available on this Amazon page) that taught me just how much I could despise some music. I hate Gary Puckett & The Union Gap.

So the imaginary documentary I was watching included lots of clips from imaginary mid-1970s episodes of Saturday Night Live that Gary Puckett appeared on. Gary Puckett never actually appeared on Saturday Night Live in real life, of course, but in my dream he appeared at least three times. The first time, he was the musical guest, and he sang a song with this intensely memorable chorus:

Hey, little gal
I wanna get your cal!
Hey little gal
I wanna get your cal-dal!
Hey, little gal
I wanna get your cal!
Hey little gal
I wanna get your cal-dal!

There was actually an explanation for these strange lyrics in my dream: "cal" was an abbreviation for "calendar" and meant birthday (important in the 1970s, when people wanted to know each other's zodiac sign), while "dal" was short for "dial" and meant "phone number". In other words, Gary wants to know the little gal's birthday (hence zodiac sign) and phone number.

(In the dream, I also had this strange memory that I had heard the song before and mistakenly thought it was by the 1970s art-rock band Jethro Tull, and that I had always wanted to ask [fellow Interrobang Cartel member] Talysman about the song because he's a Jethro Tull fan. In fact, Talysman really is a Jethro Tull fan in real life, but all the rest of this stuff was just invented by my dreaming brain while I slept.)

The documentary explained that Gary Puckett had written this song himself in an attempt to woo a young woman named Laurie who was the musical talent booker for Saturday Night Live. The fictional "Laurie" in my dream actually looked exactly like TV newscaster Jane Pauley did in the 1970s when she was a young woman just starting out on the Today show. So Gary Puckett sang this song on the show and made it clear that he was interested in romance with Laurie, and the following week Laurie herself appeared as the musical guest on the show, dressed up in a frilly Marie Antoinette-like costume and singing her own version of the "I Wanna Get Your Cal-Dal" song in some fancy operatic voice.

Gary Puckett thought that she was enthusiastically accepting his romantic overtures, the documentary explained, but everyone else understood that she was making fun of him because she thought he was a big doofus. So the week after Laurie's performance on Saturday Night Live, there was a performance by the members of the Beatles other than John Lennon. The documentary showed a clip of this performance, during which Gary Puckett could be seen standing in the wings of the stage grinning like an idiot because he thought he had impressed the heck out of Laurie -- thus, he had come back to the show to try to find her and romance her some more. But in fact, everybody was laughing at him because he had only embarrassed himself by singing a really stupid song to try to woo a woman who wasn't interested in him at all.

After having this dream he decided to record the song in a very Gary Puckettish manner. For this endeavor he wrote some additional lyrics:

When I... saw you at the audition, my heart skipped a beat
I knew at that moment that I was destined to love you
From your face like the young Jane Pauley
To the painted toes on your feet,
That's why I want your cal-dal, Laurie my sweet

Hey little gal, I wanna get your cal; Hey little gal, I wanna get your cal-dal...

Baby... cal is short for calendar and it means birthday
Dal is short for dial and it means telephone number
Does your star sign entwine with mine, dear?
Are you a local call away?
That's why I want your cal-dal, that's why I say:

Hey little gal, I wanna get your cal; Hey little gal, I wanna get your cal-dal...