Making ROOTS AND BRANCHES: “Till There Was You”

My parents’ record collection was slim pickings when I was a kid. My dad mostly chose the records. He had Al Hirt, Pete Fountain, Mitch (“I hate rock and roll”) Miller, The Harmonicats, 101 Strings, and, although my parents never attended the theater, Carousel, Oklahoma!, Hello Dolly! (so many exclamation points), West Side Story, and The Music Man

They also had Louis Armstrong because of his rousing 1964 single of the title song from Hello Dolly! And of course he was awesome. But at a ripe young age my fave was The Music Man, which led the league in rousing and should have had an exclamation point. It was chock-fulla Broadway.  Who can forget “Seventy-six Trombones,” “Ya Got Trouble,” “Marian the Librarian,” “Gary, Indiana,” and (tenderly) “Till There Was You?”

I thought all those songs existed only in the sealed-in-a bottle-reality of my parents’ music collection until the Beatles did The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964…and there it was, “Till There Was You,” the second song of five they performed that fateful evening.

Worlds collided. All music was part and parcel of the world of music. A song could be anything, do anything. It was a tiny salvation in a pop song.

Beatlesbooks.com claims that having this song in the band’s repertoire sealed the deal on their signing to EMI records in 1962. It demonstrated their potential beyond Merseybeat. They recorded it for the first time on their first-ever day in the studio at their failed DECCA Records audition on January 1, 1962 and introduced it to their live set that year. Years later it would be obvious that show-tune lover Paul McCartney was behind the introduction of that song to the group. 

Sometime after George Harrison died in November 2001, listening to the Beatles album Live at the BBC, or some derivation thereof, I heard “Till There Was You” again, from a March 30, 1964 recording. It was one of no less than eight versions of the song the Beatles recorded for the BBC over the span of a couple of years. I figured George had mastered the song in 1961, at the age of 18. And I thought it was a poignant reminder of how overlooked he was as a guitarist.

Future Beatles: 1957

The song contains about 20 chords and they go by fast. You pass through many for just a single beat. I had read somewhere that George and Paul would take the bus crosstown in Liverpool to ask jazz guitarist Jim Gretty who worked at a guitar shop to show them chords. At first it was chords as simple as B7.  Later it was chords like the one Paul called “F demented.” They were just kids who didn’t really have a clue about music. That, I could relate to. 

“Till There Was You,” played in F, as I do, and as I think they did, (the score is in storage) has a some lovely chords that I would never have known at 18. A simple example would be something like the F sharp diminished— F#dim (XX1212). Two that really get me are the C+ (C augmented (demented?))—XXX554) which is the chord used on “…and dew.” It just hangs out there by itself so it has to be perfectly executed. Then there’s F#7#9 “F sharp seven sharp nine” (XX4355), which is a Tal Farlow-like stumper that only lasts two beats. That these chords came out of the Brill Building or thereabouts, through the fingers of babes a continent away, and played a part in the launch of The Band That Shook the World is a thought that comforted me in a world in which we had lost two of the Fab Four and a somewhat horrific new millennium had dawned.

So, this song is my little tribute to teenage George, figuring out guitar as so many of us did back then…catch as catch can—and doing it superbly. One part of the genius of the Beatles was their ability to write and execute beyond the three-chord wonder dynamic of what would become rock. Songs like “Til There Was You” point the way to that expanded palette.

It was a while ago when I recorded this song in my NoName Studio. I wanted to make it similar to the feel I heard on the BBC tapes. I laid down the rhythm track on my Godin A6 acoustic-electric recorded to a click track, dry, direct to the board (DI) with only a tiny bit of limiting, then bass via DI also.

The lead vocal was a flat-out crooner, something you’d be hard-pressed to find anywhere else in my catalogue. Nobody compares to Paul in doing what he does best. So I went with the vibe, straight-ahead, not a bit of irony, just sing the lyric. And it is a beautiful lyric that takes us pretty close to some of Paul’s sentimental side.

Where I chose to take it was into a duet with Lenne. And it’s our only duet through the three records of mine on which she has appeared. Personally, I took it over a little bit to the vibe of Elton John’s “Your Song,” as a celebration of the person being in the world. And Lenne’s soaring chorus, “…then there was music / and wonderful roses / they’d send me…” They did.

I doubled a few of my lines and added a very low, very croony, vibratoed harmony on the verse-end “…till there was you.” Lenne doubled some lines of her chorus and polished off a couple harmony lines, then I switched to the harmony on the outro.

We had recorded Eliza Blue’s harmonies before Lenne joined me in the studio and I asked Neilson Hubbard to mix Eliza as if she was Lenne’s backup singer and that set the focus of the vocal production.

Now back to George. I adapted the lead guitar part from the score of his solos and riffs from The Beatles: Complete Scores, published by Hal Leonard. It was like a little journey through George’s young mind. I felt that his read of the song was close to an approach Les Paul might take, and so shaded things in that direction. I thought that would be true also to the time period during which this song was a huge hit for several artists, including those that Paul McCartney would have heard when he fell in love with the song. I think in particular of the Peggy Lee version.

I recorded it in on my Gibson 335, which is a close stand-in for his Epiphone Casino—dry, middle pickup, brand-new strings, through my Fender Twin to a single track and let Neilson pick the reverb to best suit the song. It’s meant to sound very simple but in fact it isn’t and I’m relieved that I am not called upon to reprise it routinely onstage.

I finished off the production with an exquisite bongo track that sits in the foreground against the trap kit. This little wonder was performed and recorded by Henry Fagenson, (son of Don Was) at his own studio. His version was inspired by Ringo Starr’s work on the BBC recordings.

Neilson mixed Lenne’s voice up throughout (me texting, “Neilson, take my voice down!”). I think he channeled some of the late-50’s early 60’s vibe—some clarity and punch as if through a ribbon mic with the meters near the red line—a bit like Peggy Lee—and of Broadway recordings of leading women.

TMI? I hope not. But I think it’s important to convey why the world could use another cover of a hit Broadway tune. (McCartney had no idea it came from Broadway when he heard it!) I think to do it right more than four decades after the Beatles did it you’ve got to look under the hood a bit. This, then, concludes my little tour. Enjoy!

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