The song was written by Tin Pan Alley alums Al Dubin (lyrics) and Harry Warren (music) for a campy movie-musical called Dames (1934), which is pretty light on plot but heavy on lavishly choreographed dance sequences by Busby Berkeley. (If you've ever seen random footage from Depression-era movie-musicals, where the dancers are creating insanely intricate geometric patterns as they move, you're viewing the work of Berkeley.)
The Flamingos got ahold of the song in 1959 after signing a recording contract with New York's End Records. End's chief, George Goldner, and the group's artists & repertoire director, Richard Barrett (who'd discovered fellow doo-wop group Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers), had picked out several dozen songs for the group to practice with the ultimate goal of choosing a handful of the best cuts for an album. One of the songs was Dubin and Warren's "I Only Have Eyes for You."
Out of the 30 or so tunes that Goldner and Barrett had picked, "I Only Have Eyes for You" gave the most trouble to Terry "Buzzy" Johnson, the group's lead singer and resident arranger. After hours of working on the song, Johnson just couldn't come up with an arrangement that satisfied him, feeling that the chord changes were too mundane or too derivative of other versions that had come before.
So he slept on it.
Actually, he fell asleep with his guitar on his chest in the midst of working on it, and the full arrangement—including the unearthly doo-bop sh-bop backing vocals, the triplet piano pattern, and the stacked vocals on every chorus—came to him in a dream.
As Johnson told Sound on Sound magazine in March 2009, "As soon as I woke up, I grabbed the guitar off my chest and it was like God put my fingers just where they were supposed to be. I played those chords and I heard the harmonies, and so I called the guys. I woke them all up and I said, 'Come over to my room right now! I've got 'I Only Have Eyes For You'!"
No comments:
Post a Comment