Georgie Fame - Because I Love You (and how the recording of this affected rock history) [View all]

[highplainsdem]

It's George Fame's birthday today, and I was going to add this as a reply in a thread about that, but I know people often don't look at other replies in a thread after first glancing at it and maybe adding their own.

And I thought this was an interesting bit of music history. The recording of this song got several pages in producer Tony Visconti's autobiography, because British producer Denny Cordell was in NYC in early 1967 to finish recording the track, which had already been partly recorded in England. Cordell had hired some great American musicians including trumpeter Clark Terry, but what he hadn't done was write out an arrangement for them to play. He'd expected them to do that themselves, with only a few hours of studio time booked.

Tony, who worked for the American sister company of the label Cordell worked for, knew that wouldn't work. He also knew how to write arrangements, and could write them if he simply knew the key. So he quickly wrote out the arrangements -- wrote down all the notes without using a piano, wrote separate parts for two trumpets, drum fills, etc. -- and photocopied them (Tony mentions in his autobiography that the Xerox copier was "a cool new gadget" then), and they managed to get what Denny wanted recorded, after Tony had found out there were no charts just an hour before the session was to begin.

Denny had come to the US looking for an assistant, and he'd actually thought at first he might be able to get Phil Spector to take the job. When that, unsurprisingly, didn't work out, Denny remembered how helpful Tony had been and offered him the job.

Which is how Tony ended up going to London in 1967 and meeting Bowie (who was basically handed over to Tony when others at the label didn't know what to do with him) and discovering Marc Bolan, then producing early albums for both of them as well as becoming a close friend.

Tony might have eventually moved to England to work there anyway, and might have met Bowie and Bolan anyway...but the extra instrumentals recorded for this song are why he made the move when he did, and met Bowie and Bolan then.

Details on pages 26-30 of Bowie, Bolan and the Brooklyn Boy.

There's also a very brief account of what happened, from an interview with Tony for Music Producers: Conversations with Today's Top Hit Makers (edited by Barbara Schultz), and here's a link to that section of the book at Google Books:

https://books.google.com/books?id=-27gxuqGCTQC&pg=PA151&lpg=PA151&dq=%22clark+terry%22+%22because+i+love+you%22+georgie+fame&source=bl&ots=Ep0uYEFVjt&sig=ACfU3U15l-vQ22p6ukM2kMeNU6MPBG68IQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwik1dHnvsv4AhXGEmIAHdlQA5cQ6AF6BAgUEAM#v=onepage&q=%22clark%20terry%22%20%22because%20i%20love%20you%22%20georgie%20fame&f=false