The Heart of Rock and Soul by Dave Marsh 5 YOU'VE LOST THAT LOVIN' FEELIN', The Righteous Brothers Produced by Phil Spector; written by Barry Mann, Cynthia Weill, and Phil Spector Philles 124 1964 Billboard: #1 (2 weeks) The radio on my boyhood dresser was an old tabletop model with tubes. The top was cracked and at high volume, the busted brown plastic made it screech. My father got it when my great-aunt died but it looked the kind of thing you'd pick up at a junkyard. It was the greatest treasure he ever gave me. One night, just before Christmas 1964, a strange noise began to emerge from the ancient box. A doleful male voice sang notes so draggy that it seemed someone down at the station must have slowed the turntable with his finger. Annoyed, I switched the radio off. And right back on again. Already warm, the unreliable old tubes responded immediately, for once. In those brief seconds the record had transformed itself. A wall of sound-drums, tambourines, pianos, full female chorus, maracas, who knew what else was carrying an uncountable number of male voices into the pits of hell. At first, they seemed content to ride the melody together, so much so that by the end of the first verse they reminded me of Little Anthony and the Imperials, although nothing Anthony and the boys had ever done was half this weird. The second verse began lugubriously again, strings swirling up out of the mix, as the harmonies built back up. I was hooked. Then came the bridge. Now the voices were distinctly a pair, one mordantly growling, the other so high it was almost falsetto. No longer did they work in tandem. Now. even though they were ostensibly singing alternate lines to the same lover, they were also battling between themselves. The lower voice sang four sharp "Don'ts," and then -- I never did figure out another way to describe it -- they just started to wig out. "Baby!" sang one. "Baby!" responded the other. "Baby!" "Baby!" Then "I'm beggin' you please . I need your love" and finally "Bring it on back," they screamed at one another, relentlessly, as if trapped in a nightmare of what would happen if they didn't or couldn't. "Bring back that lovin' feelin', whoah, that lovin' feelin'," they sang and the rhythm broke back down again. As they faded away, it felt shattered and pieced back together. The deejay told me that this was the Righteous Brothers, who I already knew from TV's Shindig. They were a Mutt and Jeff act. Sombervoiced Bill Medley stood way over six feet, dark and halfways handsome; tenor Bobby Hatfield was blond, five five or so and greaser cute. They were good but there was nothing in "Little Latin Lupe Lu" that suggested they had anything like "Lovin' Feelin'" in them. Naturally, I bought the record, surprised at its red and yellow Philles label: Producer/impresario Phil Spector made girl group records with the Crystals and the Ronettes. But then again, finding "Lovin' Feelin'" among them made a kind of sense, for a couple of Spector's girl group hits approached this single's orchestrated grandiosity. About Spector I knew only that he'd once told a TV interviewer that he was the first teen genius millionaire, or something equally astute and captivating, and that he'd been responsible for the T.A. M.I. Show, the only decent representation of rock and roll music ever to appear at a drive-in. So I sat and stared at the label and being in another line of work at the time -- eighth grade -- came to no unnecessary conclusions. I loved the record (wore out one copy, picked up another used), harbored a half-secret devotion to the Righteous Brothers no matter what they did well into adulthood, moved on to other things but still turned "Lovin' Feelin'" way up whenever it came across the radio. Created: September 28, 2021 at 12.52 pm at http://www.lexjansen.com with FPDF 1.81 Page 1 The Heart of Rock and Soul by Dave Marsh In the spring of 1987, staying at a hotel in downtown Chicago, I strapped on headphones and went for a run. There was a parade on Michigan Avenue, and I dodged in and out among the crowd until I got down by the lake, where there was almost nobody. I'd been on the road a couple of weeks, and felt homesick, a little afraid, frightfully lonely. The tape I listened to was composed of random favorites, deliberately jumbled so I couldn't remember what came next. Somewhere over by the lake, "Lovin' Feelin'" came on. I jammed the volume all the way up and the clash of those voices came through again. When they started begging and pleading -- "-Baby, baby, I'd get down on my knees for you," sang Medley, "If you would only love me like you used to do," responded Hatfield -- tears sprang from my eyes. In the center of the continent. at the heart of a population of six million, I was suddenly, unmistakably, nerve -- tinglingly abandoned and alone. God knows what passersby thought. But with the title -- "You've lost that lovin' feelin' " -- echoing in my ears I understood at last: We worship the thing we fear. Created: September 28, 2021 at 12.52 pm at http://www.lexjansen.com with FPDF 1.81 Page 2.