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jimct
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| Posted: 16 June 2008 at 9:55am | IP Logged
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My commercial 45, which is mono and confirmed as Buddah 95, has a listed time of (3:09), but an actual time of (2:57). Current database CDs that feature this song have run times ranging from (3:15) to (3:17), so it appears that a 45/LP designation note will need to be added to the database.
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Hykker
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| Posted: 17 June 2008 at 5:57am | IP Logged
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Curiously, does it have "Welcome Me Love" as the B side? My (promo) of WMM shows WMM as the plug side, but has BITR on the B side. Unusual in those days unless the original A side was somewhat of a stiff and they wanted to give the single a second chance.
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jimct
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| Posted: 17 June 2008 at 8:58am | IP Logged
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Hykker, to answer your question, the flip side of my commercial 45 is "Welcome Me Love". Both sides of this 45 made the top half of the Billboard Hot 100, during distinct and individual chart runs. "Blessed Is The Rain" only got to #45 in Billboard on 4/5/69 (but it peaked at #40 in Cashbox, and appears in Pat's database, so I reported on it), while the "Welcome Me Love" side only peaked at #48 in Billboard, and at #47 in Cashbox, albeit 2 to 2 1/2 months later. This is a very important point here, Hykker. My promo 45 also has a "star" appearing on the "Welcome Me Love" side of it. Back then, different labels had different ways of indicating to radio which side of the 45 they felt was the "hit" side. But radio would ultimately make their own decision about which side they preferred/played, especially during a 45's first few weeks of release, when "the jury was still out" on a new song, and its popularity. But I am just about 100% certain that what happened in this case, in 1969, was the following: When radio initially chose to play the "Blessed Is The Rain" side, and after it had run its chart course, and was on the way down, Buddah then decided to RE-promote the "Welcome Me Love" side to radio. They had strongly preferred that side all along, anyway. Now Buddah would simply promote it as the "third single" from their self-titled, debut album. This situation was NOT the standard, 60's "double-sided hit", where both sides of the same 45 would be listed together, and share the same chart position on a radio station's survey (although a few local stations may have initially listed them this way). This was a fairly unusual case here, where each song had its own, distinct chart run. The only real link between the two songs is that they just happened to appear on the same commercial/promo 45, that's all.
Edited by jimct on 17 June 2008 at 11:49am
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Yah Shure
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| Posted: 17 June 2008 at 12:04pm | IP Logged
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My promo copy also has "Welcome Me Love" as the starred side. But in view of "Blessed Is The Rain"'s six-week chart run ending the week before WML first bubbled under, and BITR's lower matrix number (5189 vs. WML's 5190) is there a possibility that these promo copies were actually a reservice after the decision was made to work WML?
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jimct
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| Posted: 17 June 2008 at 12:58pm | IP Logged
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Yah Shure, back in the early 70's I remember asking my local mom-and-pop record store how they knew which side of a new, yet-to-chart 45 was the A-side. They told me that the lower matrix was generally their tipoff there. I always remembered that, and I have often checked, just for the heck of it, over the years to see if that thoery held up. My unofficial synopsis is that about 2/3rds of A-sides do have the lower matrix, but about 1/3 of them actually had the higher matrix #. As I understood more about the biz, I think the matrix # assignment was probably more of an indicator of which of the two tracks was recorded first. Your thoery is certainly possible, Yah Shure, but it was surprisingly common for radio of this era to disregard the "plug side" recommendations of the labels, and to play the side they liked better. I know this, based on the sheer # of 1972-and-earlier promo 45s that I own, where the indicated, label "plug side" did not turn out to be the actual hit.
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Hykker
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| Posted: 17 June 2008 at 7:15pm | IP Logged
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jimct wrote:
| Back then, different labels had different ways of indicating to radio which side of the 45 they felt was the "hit" side. |
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I seem to recall that thru much of the 60s Decca put an asterisk next to the matrix # of the B side of their promo singles!
Quote:
| This was a fairly unusual case here, where each song had its own, distinct chart run. The only real link between the two songs is that they just happened to appear on the same commercial/promo 45, that's all. |
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Actually, around '68/'69, that happened a number of times. 2 Dionne Warwick singles ("I Say A Little Prayer"/"Valley of the Dolls" and "Do You Know The Way To San Jose"/"Let Me Be Lonely") and one by Johnny Nash ("Hold Me Tight"/"Cupid") immediately come to mind as well as the Guess Who's "Laughing"/"Undun". They must have been putting something in the water for a couple years...don't think we had so many double-sided hits with separate chart runs before or since.
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Yah Shure
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| Posted: 17 June 2008 at 8:24pm | IP Logged
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Hykker wrote:
| I seem to recall that thru much of the 60s Decca put an asterisk next to the matrix # of the B side of their promo singles! |
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They did, indeed, and that was also the case with the commercial copies.
Jim, thanks for your explanation. I've always been aware of the fact that the "A-side=the lower matrix number" theory was never set in stone, especially in the cases where the two numbers are very far apart, or are based on the first letter of the song titles (like on the Swan label.) I guess until any starred "Blessed Is The Rain" promo 45 ever shows up, we'll have to assume that "Welcome Me Love" was always the intended plug side.
One thing is for sure: The flip-flopping of A-sides in this case wasn't due to issues regarding who got the publishing, since Tony Romeo wrote both songs.
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Todd Ireland
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| Posted: 21 June 2008 at 11:31am | IP Logged
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Getting back to Jim's original question as to why an :18-:20 difference exists between the 45 and CD run times of "Blessed Is the Rain"... Did the hit version ever appear on a Brooklyn Bridge parent LP release, or was it released only on 45? According to my research, lead singer Johnny Maestro released an LP in 1971 on Buddah Records called The Johnny Maestro Story, but I believe these were re-recorded versions of the band's hits.
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Gary Mack
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| Posted: 21 June 2008 at 12:08pm | IP Logged
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Todd Ireland wrote:
| Getting back to Jim's original question as to why an :18-:20 difference exists between the 45 and CD run times of "Blessed Is the Rain"... Did the hit version ever appear on a Brooklyn Bridge parent LP release, or was it released only on 45? According to my research, lead singer Johnny Maestro released an LP in 1971 on Buddah Records called The Johnny Maestro Story, but I believe these were re-recorded versions of the band's hits. |
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The Buddah album does have the original hits, although the mono Crests tunes don't sound very good. Blessed and all the Brooklyn Bridge tunes are nice stereo, and both the liner notes and label list the run time as 3:18 - and it is!
GM
Edited by Gary Mack on 21 June 2008 at 1:12pm
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Todd Ireland
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| Posted: 21 June 2008 at 12:47pm | IP Logged
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Thank you, Gary! The 3:18 LP time you site more closely resembles the CD run times, so Jim's intuition was correct regarding a run time differential between the 45 and LP. We haven't yet determined though if the 45 is an edit or an early fade of the LP.
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jimct
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| Posted: 21 June 2008 at 12:51pm | IP Logged
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You will soon be receiving a dub of my 45, Todd, so we can finally get to the bottom of this one, sir!
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Topic: Brooklyn Bridge-"Blessed Is The Rain"
