"Classical Gas" is an instrumental musical piece composed and originally performed by Mason Williams. Originally released in 1968 on the album The Mason Williams Phonograph Record, it has been re-recorded and re-released numerous times since by Williams. One later version served as the title track of a 1987 album by Williams and the band Mannheim Steamroller.

Williams re-recorded "Classical Gas" as a solo guitar piece on his 1970 album Handmade. The song was also re-released by Sony in 2003, after being featured in the film Cheaper by the Dozen.^[1]

Williams was the head writer for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour at the time of the piece's release and premiered the composition on the show. Williams performed it several times over several episodes. After the piece had reached the Top Ten, Williams asked an experimental filmmaker named Dan McLaughlin to create a video montage of classical art works edited in time to the music, using the visual effect now known as kinestasis. The pioneering work, 3000 Years of Art, premiered in 1968 and may have helped push the song high on the charts; it peaked at Number 2 for two weeks in August that year.^[2]

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_gas

Mason Williams (born August 24, 1938) is an American guitarist and composer, best known for his guitar instrumental "Classical Gas". He is also a comedy writer, known for his writing on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, and Saturday Night Live. He is also an eclectic poet and lyricist who has published several books.

continued:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mason_Williams

What can you say except this brings back memories of the young depressed chain-smoking fornicating too-much-drinking miserable old bohemian black-turtlenecked  chess-playing manic coast-to-coast-to-coast wheelman me.