Forever No. 1 is a Billboard series that pays special tribute to the recently deceased artists who achieved the highest honor our charts have to offer — a Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 single — by taking an extended look back at the chart-topping songs that made them part of this exclusive club. Here, we honor Neil Sedaka, who died on Feb. 27 at age 86, by looking at his second of three No. 1 hits, the mellow ballad “Laughter in the Rain.”
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Just 18 months after Neil Sedaka topped the Billboard Hot 100 in August 1962 with “Breaking Up Is Hard To Do,” it appeared that his career as a hitmaker was over. And for more than a decade, it was, at least in the U.S.
When The Beatles exploded in the U.S. in early 1964, they consigned many early 1960s hitmakers to the oldies circuit – Sedaka among them. The Brooklyn-born musician, who was not yet 25 when The Fab Four appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show and turned the pop world upside down, didn’t crack the top 40 on the Hot 100 for 11 years, from late 1963 through late 1974.
In his years in the wilderness, he proved that he hadn’t lost his knack for coming up with catchy songs by co-writing a pair of hits for The 5th Dimension – “Workin’ on a Groovy Thing” (No. 20 in 1969) and “Puppet Man” (No. 24 in 1970). Tom Jones also had a top 30 hit with “Puppet Man” in 1971.
But there was little demand for Sedaka’s own recordings – at least in the U.S. He had better luck in Australia, where he had a hit in 1969 titled “Star-Crossed Lovers.” He had high hopes for a U.S. comeback in 1971, the year his one-time girlfriend Carole King had a massive hit with her era-defining Tapestry album. But his album, with the optimistic title Emergence, was DOA. He next focused on the U.K., where he worked with Graham Gouldman, Lol Creme, Kevin Godley and Eric Stewart, who would soon form 10cc and achieve global success with hits of their own. Sedaka scored a pair of top 20 hits on the Official U.K. Singles Chart – the peppy “That’s When the Music Takes Me” (No. 18 in March 1973) and a sleek, adult contemporary ballad, “Laughter in the Rain” (No. 15 in July 1974).
Elton John, who was then just about the hottest pop star on the planet (he would get even hotter in 1975), took notice of what Sedaka was doing and signed him to his fledgling Rocket Records label. Rocket compiled the best songs from Sedaka’s three most recent English albums on Sedaka’s Back. “Laughter in the Rain” was chosen as the album’s first single.
Sedaka had written almost all of his 1960s hits with Howard Greenfield, but their working relationship frayed by decade’s end. Sedaka co-wrote “Laughter in the Rain” with Phil Cody, with whom he had written “Solitaire,” the title track of his 1972 British album. He recorded “Laughter in the Rain” in Los Angeles with such studio pros as Danny Kortchmar, Dean Parks, Leland Sklar and Russ Kunkel. Sedaka co-produced the track with Robert Appère. Artie Butler wrote the orchestral arrangement.
The lilting, midtempo ballad is a middle-of-the-road (to borrow another former name for adult contemporary) gem. The piano opening immediately locks listeners into Sedaka’s signature sound. His clear, high tenor vocal stretches toward falsetto on the lines “I feel the warmth of her hand in mine” and “Sharing our love under stormy skies,” suggesting romantic ecstasy.
The song’s most notable feature is a 20-second sax solo by saxophonist, woodwind player and session musician Jim Horn, who was also featured on recordings by The Beatles, John Denver and Garth Brooks, among many others. Sax solos were a prominent feature of many 1970s hits, witness such other hits of the era as Carole King’s “Jazzman” (sax solo: Tom Scott), James Taylor’s “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You” (David Sanborn) and Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are” (Phil Woods).
While all signs pointed to “Laughter in the Rain” becoming a big hit, there was a potential problem: Shortly before the record’s U.S. release, United Artists Records released a soulful cover version of the song by Lea Roberts, a singer who had had a couple of previous entries on Hot Soul Singles, as the chart was then known, but was still looking for her breakthrough hit. Sedaka heard her recording on the radio and got in touch with Rocket and urged them to hurry and get his single on the market.
He was right to be concerned: Roberts’ version, co-produced by Denny Diante and Spencer Proffer and arranged by Gene Page, is very good. The soulfulness she brought to the song gave it a flavor that is missing in his version. (Roberts’ version ultimately reached No. 69 on Hot Soul Singles, and bubbled under the Hot 100, peaking at No. 109.)
Still, Sedaka’s version cracked Billboard’s Easy Listening chart (the chart’s name was changed to Adult Contemporary in 1979) in the week of Oct. 12, 1974, one week before it broke onto the Hot 100. The song entered the Hot 100 at No. 95 as that week’s seventh-highest new entry (behind another future No. 1, Helen Reddy’s “Angie Baby”). In its sixth chart week (Nov. 23), it became Sedaka’s first top 40 hit since “Bad Girl” in 1963. It kept climbing and for the week of Feb. 1, 1975, its 16th week on the chart, it dislodged Carpenters’ “Please Mr. Postman” from the top spot. It stayed in pole position for a single week before it was dethroned by a much funkier record, The Ohio Players’ R&B smash “Fire.”
“Laughter in the Rain” had topped the Easy Listening chart for two weeks in November 1974. There was a great deal of overlap between the pop and AC charts in that era. In the six-month period between September 1974 and March 1975, six other hits topped both the Hot 100 and Easy Listening charts – Olivia Newton-John’s “I Honestly Love You,” Reddy’s “Angie Baby,” Barry Manilow’s “Mandy,” Carpenters’ “Please Mr. Postman,” Eagles’ “Best of My Love” and Newton-John’s “Have You Never Been Mellow.”
BillboardSedaka was the third 1960s hitmaker to launch a major comeback in 1974-75. Paul Anka, assisted by Odia Coates, topped the Hot 100 for three weeks in August 1974 with “(You’re) Having My Baby,” which proved that things had progressed well beyond “Puppy Love.” Bobby Vinton hit No. 3 in November with the old-fashioned polka hit “My Melody of Love,” earning him the nickname “the Polish Prince.” And this spate of comebacks didn’t end with Sedaka. Frankie Valli reached No. 1 in March 1975 with the dreamy ballad “My Eyes Adored You.”
Why did the door open for so many former hitmakers? It may have had something to do with Watergate. On becoming president in August 1974, Gerald Ford famously called that two-year ordeal “our long national nightmare.” Maybe, just maybe, people were turning back to what seemed then like a more innocent time.
“Laughter in the Rain” joined a long line of rain songs to become major hits, including such then-recent songs as The Dramatics‘ “In the Rain” and Love Unlimited’s “Walkin’ in the Rain With the One I Love” With the line “Without an umbrella, we’re soaked to the skin,” it also belongs to a smaller sub-set of songs about umbrellas, the most famous being the Rihanna/Jay-Z megahit “Umbrella.”
In an interview with Billboard managing editor Eliot Tiegel that ran in the year-end issue of Billboard in 1975, Sedaka said that he initially scoffed at Cody’s lyric. Sedaka recalled that he told his lyricist, “No one laughs in the rain. It’s ridiculous.” Sedaka’s friends told him they liked it and the composer dropped his objections.
Sedaka followed “Laughter in the Rain” with “The Immigrant,” which he also co-wrote with Cody. The midtempo ballad has a pro-immigrant message (“There was a time when strangers were welcome here”) that is even more timely today. The song reached No. 24 on the Hot 100 – and, like “Laughter in the Rain,” reached No. 1 on Easy Listening.
Sedaka had a much bigger hit on the Hot 100 at the time, thanks to Captain & Tennille’s cover version of “Love Will Keep Us Together,” a song Sedaka had written with Greenfield that first appeared on his U.K. album The Tra-La Days Are Over in 1973. C&T’s dynamic recording was No. 1 for four weeks in June and July 1975 and wound up as Billboard’s No. 1 year-end Hot 100 single of 1975. In February 1976, it won a Grammy for record of the year. Sedaka and Greenfield were nominated for song of the year for writing the tune.
Sedaka followed “The Immigrant” with a belated U.S. release of that previous U.K. hit “That’s When the Music Takes Me,” which was the first song Sedaka wrote entirely by himself. The song, which reached No. 27 on the Hot 100, did for Sedaka what “It’s a Miracle” did for Manilow earlier in 1975 – it showed that these balladeers also had some pep in their step. While “That’s When the Music Takes Me” was in the top 40, so too was Carpenters’ cover version of “Solitaire.” That was one of Sedaka’s most-covered songs, with notable versions also by Andy Williams (the title track of a Billboard 200-charting album in 1973), Elvis Presley (he recorded the song in 1976, the year before his death), and Clay Aiken (whose version made the top five on the Hot 100 in 2004).
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