Thursday, August 26, 2010

Gone, Gone, Gone...



The Righteous Brothers You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling 1964
Written by Phil Spector, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill and produced by Phil Spector, which anyone would know because no other producer could layer sound like that on the four tape-tracks available in 1964.

It’s been reported that Bobby Hatfield hated how he was relegated to a chorus position while Bill Medley did most of the lead vocal. During the recording sessions, Hatfield supposedly asked Spector what he was supposed to do while Medley was singing and Spector replied, “You can go straight to the fucking bank.” Phil was the only person who felt so confident about the song. Being released, as it was, in the first flush of the British Invasion, the other writers thought the song was too slow and too long. At over four minutes, it was way longer than was usually allowed on AM radio in the early 60s. In fact, Spector, who refused to cut the song, had a time of 3.05 put on the single, thus tricking AM DJs about its length and enabling it to be played. As for the slowness of the vocal, when Spector initially played the finished recording to Barry Mann over the telephone, Mann said to him, “Phil, you have it on the wrong speed!”

2 comments:

Engineer of Knowledge said...

Hello Microdot,
Great rendition and brought back a lot of memories.

microdot said...

I always find stories involving Phil Spector fascinating. He was a genius, but an absolute control freak. His way or nothing, even if he had to threaten the musicians by shooting up the studio. I love the bit about the baltant falsification of the song time to dupe DJ's into laying the entire thing on air.

I was off line most of the day yesterday...We had a violent wind storm and lost our power and my cranky computer had over heated and wouldn't turn back on.

I did manage to order my new imac and have it confirmed on line before the power went out.
I will have it some time next week because I wanted an English Keyboard....

Hurrah!