Episode 123: “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin'” by the Righteous Brothers

Episode 123 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'", the Righteous Brothers, Shindig! and "blue-eyed soul".  Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.

Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Wooly Bully" by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs.

Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/

Erratum

I say the music in the bridge drops down to “just the bass”. Obviously there is also a celeste on that section.

Resources

No Mixcloud this week due to the number of Righteous Brothers songs.

A lot of resources were used for this episode.

Time of My Life: A Righteous Brother's Memoir is Bill Medley's autobiography.

Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era by Ken Emerson is a good overview of the Brill Building scene, and I used it for bits about how Mann and Weil wrote their songs.

I’ve referred to two biographies of Spector in this episode, Phil Spector: Out of His Head by Richard Williams and He’s a Rebel by Mark Ribkowsky.

This two-CD set contains all of the Righteous Brothers recordings excerpted here, all their hits, and a selection of Medley and Hatfield's solo work. It would be an absolutely definitive set, except for the Spector-era tracks being in stereo.

There are many compilations available with some of the hits Spector produced, but I recommend getting Back to Mono, a four-CD overview of his career containing all the major singles put out by Philles.

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Transcript

Today we're going to look at a record that according to BMI is the most-played song of the twentieth century on American radio, and continued to be the most played song for the first two decades of the twenty-first as well, a record that was arguably the artistic highpoint of Phil Spector's career, and certainly the commercial highpoint for everyone involved. We're going to look at "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" by the Righteous Brothers:

[Excerpt: The Righteous Brothers, "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'"]

In this episode we're going to take one of our first looks at an American act who owed their success to TV. We've seen these before, of course -- we've talked in passing about Ricky Nelson, and there was an episode on Chubby Checker -- but there have been relatively few. But as we pass into the mid-sixties, and television becomes an even more important part of the culture, we'll see more of this.

In 1964, ABC TV had a problem. Two years before, they'd started a prime-time folk TV show called Hootenanny:

[Excerpt: Jack Linkletter introducing Hootenanny]

That programme was the source of some controversy -- it blacklisted Pete Seeger and a few other Communist folk musicians, and while Seeger himself argued against a boycott, other musicians were enraged, in part because the term Hootenanny had been popularised by Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and other Communist musicians. As a result, several of the top names in the folk scene, like Joan Baez and Ramblin' Jack Elliott, refused to appear on the show. 

But plenty of performers did appear on the show, usually those at the poppier end of the spectrum, like the New Christie Minstrels:

[Excerpt: The New Christie Minstrels, "This Train (live on Hootenanny)"]

That lineup of the New Christie Minstrels featured, among others, Barry McGuire, Gene Clark, and Larry Ramos, all of whom we should be seeing in future episodes. 

But that in itself says something about the programme's problems, because in 1964, the music industry changed drastically. Suddenly, folk music was out, and rock music was in. Half the younger musicians who appeared on Hootenanny -- like those three, but also John Sebastian, Jo