When Not-Good-Enough Became Great

In a 2016 interview with the Daily Excelsior, Sting confessed, “I love my songs as I love my children;” a proclamation which must’ve made his six children wonder if their father put his songs down as benefactors in his will.  But if songs are children, then many have been put up for adoption by their creators to be scooped up by rock stars who treated them right.  Such was the case of Paul McCartney’s “World Without Love.”

Paul, who wrote the song when he was sixteen, agreed with John Lennon who believed it wasn’t up to snuff to be on a Beatles’ album. McCartney recalled: “The funny first line always used to please John. ‘Please lock me away.’ John would say: ‘Yes!  End of song.’”  But what sounded sour to the Beatles was sweet music for Peter and Gordon, whose version went to #1 in 1964.

 

The song jumpstarted their career as did another throwaway tune for Linda Ronstadt.  Monkee Michael Nesmith recalled: “I sang ‘Different Drum’ for John Herald of the Greenbriar Boys. He turned it into the ballad that it became. Linda heard the ballad and made us all rich [#13 hit in 1968].”

 

Mickey Dolenz told the tale to Ultimate Classic Rock: “Michael went to the producers in the early days and brought them ‘Different Drum.’ He played it for them and they said, ‘Well, that’s nice, but it’s not a Monkees tune.’ He said, ‘Wait a minute. I am one of the Monkees.’ They said, ‘Yeah, yeah, we know. But no thanks.’ So he said, ‘Okay,’ and gave it to Linda Ronstadt.”

Perhaps the producers wanted to make amends by later offering them a sure-fire hit only for the group to give them a taste of their own medicine and tell them that “Sugar, Sugar” was not a Monkees song.  Dolenz told Music Radar: “Don Kirschner [who chose the songs for the group] presented that as our next tune. I was going to record it. That’s when Mike led the palace revolt and we fought for the right to have at least some sort of control over the music. I didn’t go to the session. I’d gone to England and that’s when I met the Beatles. Don got fired but then he recorded the song with the Archies.”  Kirschner, fed up with egos constantly clashing, joked that the Archies never talked back to him because they were a cartoon band.

The Monkees would always remember the hits that got away. Tom Petty would’ve been in the same boat when he gave up on “Don’t Do Me Like That” and then threw a cassette of it in an envelope to J. Geil’s Peter Wolf.  Wolf told Billboard in 2017: “I got this package and in it was a cassette. And there was a note: ‘Hey, I think this would be a cool song for you. I think you and the [Geils] band can really do something with it.  Maybe we thought we had all the songs for our album. We can do it for the next one. I called up Jimmy [Iovine, Petty’s producer] and Tom and said, ‘Love the song. I’m not sure we’re gonna get to it.’ Tom wasn’t sure of it for himself. It was almost like ‘As soon as I finished writing it, I thought of sending it to you.’ It’s funny.  It came up in our last conversation.  And he said, ‘I gotta thank you for that. When you didn’t end up doing it, everybody talked me into putting it on the record [Damn the Torpedoes]. And it became one of my big hits.’”

Bruce Springsteen could also relate to the kindness of his inner circle.  In his case, he was advised that the Ramones shouldn’t record a song he wrote for them.  In 2015, Springsteen said on The Tonight Show: “I saw the Ramones in Asbury Park. And I was like, ‘Man, I’ve got to write the Ramones a song.’ So I went home and I wrote ‘Hungry Heart’ in about the time it took me to sing it. I brought it in and we went to make a demo for it and I played it for Johnny Ramone.”  Johnny didn’t hear a hit and told Bruce, “Nah, you better keep that one.”

Bruce also played it to his producer.  In the liner notes to his Greatest Hits album, Bruce wrote: “I played it for Jon Landau and earning his money, he advised me to keep it.”

Then there are the guys who don’t know what they got until they lose it—namely the Great Society band.  The group could never turn Grace Slick’s “White Rabbit” into a hit; they lost her to the Jefferson Airplane who took her song to the top of the charts (#8 hit in 1967).  The tune worked wonders for the band and Grace’s bank account. In a 2002 interview with The Guardian, Slick explained: “If they put your song in a movie, that’s $30,000. If they put it in a movie twice, that’s $60,000.  I’ve been lucky in life. Whatever I choose to do for fun, people pay me to do it.”

Indeed, one band’s lost song(s) is another band’s gain.  In George Harrison’s case, his three-record opus, All Things Must Pass, included songs Lennon and McCartney overlooked and/or underestimated.  It went to #1 in 1970.

Despite its success, Lennon was still dismissive of George’s talent.  In Peter Doggett’s 2009 book, You Never Give Me Your Money, Harrison noted: “John was really negative at the time but I was away and he came ‘round to my house and there was a friend of mine living there who was a friend of John’s. He saw the album cover and said, ‘He must be bad, putting three records out. And look at the picture on the front. He looks like an asthmatic Leon Russell.’”

-Mark Daponte

Photo: Tom Petty (Getty)