It’s never a good idea to grade one’s own homework.
One of my favourite stories from the pages of music folklore is nearly 50 years old.
In the early 70s, a band that had enjoyed notable success in their native country was trying to break through internationally, which invariably meant the US. They’d been long at it in the studio, and it was shaping up to be two years between albums, an extraordinary gap in rock’s earl(y/ier) days. This one needed to hit.
Near the end of the sessions, one cut remained, and the group didn’t know quite what to do with it. A jazzy, ebbing and swelling piece, there was no lyric, but the consensus was that it needed a vocal anyway. To deliver, they brought in a young local singer of little renown and agreed to a modest stipend – the equivalent of around US$50 – for services rendered.
Story versions vary, but the commonly accepted facts held that she arrived at the studio and listened to the instrumental tracks, and was dryly told that the song ‘was about dying’. But there were no words.
Go.
She put down two takes. In the first, she improvised a free melody to ‘ooh baby, baby’ and the like.
Nope, said they. No words.
The next take had the same spirit of extemporization, but without the babies. She laid down one more in similar fashion, received with expressionless stares and monosyllabic hmphs.
She was thanked for her duties and paid the agreed pittance, and she left the studio thinking she’d served up a nothingburger with cheese.
Some months later, our singer-hero passed a record store with the band’s new album rackjobbed front and centre. Like the song she’d sung, the cover art had no words (this was not a very garrulous bunch of fellows).
She bought and spun the disc for the first time. To her astonishment, the last song on the first side of the album contained her first textless take, unedited, from wire to wire.
48 years hence, Clare Torry‘s contribution to The Great Gig in the Sky from Pink Floyd‘s Dark Side of the Moon endures as one of the most beautiful, soulful performances in the entire anthology of recorded popular music.
We never really know what we’re putting out there, do we? We just do our level best and let the world gild, pan or thoughtlessly discard it, as it will.
