SONNY AND CHER – "I Got You Babe"

A deeply felt romantic duet between two lovers is Faith Hill and Tim McGraw’s “It’s Your Love.” I’ll stick with Sonny and Cher.

What trumpet line?

isn’t it an oboe? in which case woodwind rather than brass.

— cis.

Everything that’s been said about this record is true. Bubblegum. Cheese. Cheap imitation of Dylan. Somehow strangely charming. All correct.

For me, you missed one thing, and it has nothing to do with the record. I was 13 in 1965, and deeply impressionable. The reason this record always brings a smile to my face is the Top of the Pops performance that went with it.

It’s laughable now. I admit it. But they looked so COOL.

Wasn’t there a “Ready Steady Go” featuring the Rolling Stones lip-synching to “I Got You Babe”? As I recall, Keith was holding a sousaphone.

What is often elided in assessments of Sonny and Cher is that they really weren’t something-new-under-the-sun in their pseudo-hippie equipage. Rather, they were the evolutionary product of the girl-group genre that went into decline once the British Invasion hit the US. (Remember, by this time the last grand girl-group epic, “The Leader of the Pack,” is already in past tense.) Both Sonny and Cher were alumni of the Phil Spector studio, Sonny a drummer and Cher a backing vocalist who augmented the recordings of the Crystals/Darlene Love and the Blossoms and the Ronettes. The lyrics here (“They say we’re young,” “Won’t find out until we grow,” “You to wear my ring,” etc., etc., etc.) are all recyclings of the basic concepts common to the vast majority of Spector girl group songs.

The sonic “muddiness” of the Wall of Sound is missing here, but the WoS concept remains, in this case was an incredible array of instrumentation, some rarely heard on pop recordings. (You’re right, Tom–that trumpet line that is not a trumpet is perhaps the most compelling bit of the whole thing.) Perhaps what saves it from abject cheesy-ness is the perversity of such trite and banal lyrics set to the pseudo-grandiosity of the arrangement. The same, though, can often be said of opera, which, in his way, Spector was trying to emulate in the most demotic way possible. Would it be so dreadful for me to say that, all in all, it’s just another brick in the Wall of Sound?

Doctor Mod

And one singer/songwriter/pianist.

I bought S&C’s greatest hits album at the age of 8 or 9 — the first non-Beatles album I ever bought, or maybe the first, period. But when I was about 20, and just learning to re-appreciate music that had been embarrassing in my teens — and also about irony — “I Got You Babe” came on the oldies station in the car and a friend said “it sounds like Velvet Underground,” instantly giving vintage bubble-gum the hip validity of, well, Velvet Underground. So now I hear Velvet Underground when I hear “I Got You Babe” (even before I think of “Groundhog Day,” which is saying something!)

I hope Ian Hunter has a better end than Sonny Bono did.

TOTPWatch: Sonny & Cher performed I Got You Babe on Top Of The Pops on 12 August 1965. Also in the studio that week were; Horst Jankowski, Jonathan King, The Byrds, The Shadows and The Walker Brothers. Pete Murray was the host, plus The Go Jo’s interpretation of ‘Zorba’s Dance’. No copy survives.

Where better to say RIP to Harold Ramis, director of Groundhog Day?

the oom-pa-pa motif that repeats through the song suggests circus music to me (perhaps played on a calliope), similar to the musical phrase at the start of ‘Tears of a Clown’. It would fit the line about the clown early in this song and introduces a familiar trope in psychedelic music of a return to a more innocent childhood. Within that context the syrupy blandishments are knowingly sung as a kind of baby talk. Sonny & Cher all but wink at the audience as if to say “yeah, it’s corny but just roll with it’