A few years ago, I had a mind-blowing experience that changed my life forever. I wish I could say it took place on some Himalayan mountaintop as I worshipped the sunrise with a group of Tibetan monks, but no, mine was much less spiritual—I was in my apartment one night, sitting in my boxers and scanning YouTube for music videos from the 1980s. I know, it’s weird. But I can’t help it. I am obsessed with 1980s pop music. I could listen to the stuff all day and, yes Lionel Richie, all night long. A child of the decade, I guess I’m trying to recapture my youth, one cheeseball song at a time.
That fateful night I clicked a link to the video for Whitesnake’s 1987 chart-topper “Here I Go Again.” Since it was marked “Original Version”, I expected to hear the rock version, not the pop remix that was simultaneously released to radio stations to generate more airplay. But then I realized it wasn’t either one! I lurched forward, unable to make sense of what I was seeing. It was a music video from Whitesnake and they were performing “Here I Go Again”, but everything was completely different, and by “completely different,” I mean “really, really bad.”
In the version I knew, frontman David Coverdale, sporting a shock of peroxide-blonde metal hair, aimed his eyes dead at the camera and, over a bed of haunting synths and strings, boldly declared “No, I don’t know where I’m going / But I sure know where I’ve been.” He was the archetypal 1980s rock star: cocky, brash, with just the right touch of mental illness. Check it out:
But in this version, he looked kinda pathetic. He kept his eyes closed and let his frizzy black locks dangle down, like that creepy guy at a party who nods off in the corner and makes everyone think he’s about to barf all over the carpet. His vocal was accompanied by nothing more than a sad warbling organ that drooped into a chorus full of puny drums and twangy guitars. Even the coolest lyric had been ruined. “Like a drifter / I was born to walk alone” was now “Like a hobo / I was born to walk alone.” Hobo? Yeah, nothing is cooler than being a penniless vagabond. Check it out:
Where did this come from? More importantly, when did this come from? I raced to Wikipedia and looked up the song’s original release date: 1982, five years before the second version topped the charts! Apparently, after the first attempt bombed, Coverdale replaced a few band members and producers and then, fittingly, decided to give “Here I Go Again” another go. I’d heard of artists topping the charts by covering another artist’s song, but I’d never heard about the same artist reworking his own song into a number-one hit, especially after the original had already been released. If a pop music nerd like me didn’t know about this, then I was sure most normal people didn’t.
That night I found out that several of my favorite artists re-recorded their way to the top of the charts. The Pet Shop Boys’ “West End Girls” wasn’t always moody and pensive; it was first released as a peppy dance track. Simply Red’s “Holding Back The Years” wasn’t always smooth and jazzy; lead singer Mick Hucknall originally recorded a gloomy punk version with the band Frantic Elevators. Roxette’s “It Must Have Been Love” didn’t change much between versions, but when the group slightly improved the production value and changed one lyric (“Christmas Morning” became “Winter Morning”), the song became a global smash. Even A-Ha’s insanely catchy “Take On Me” took a while to catch on. The first release sold only 300 copies. And that wasn’t even the first version! Go online and you can hear early demos in which the song is about as unrecognizable as a makeover show contestant in a “Before” photo. Play them all in succession and you can actually hear the creative process unfold before your ears.
What a grueling process that must’ve been. As a writer, I know there are few tasks more difficult than revising your own work. It’s like having Jekyll and Hyde duke it out inside your head, because the person who has to fix the mistakes is the same idiot who made them! Personally, I think there’s only one solution: get feedback. You’ve got to share your work with other people and let them tell you how horribly you’ve gone wrong. Nobody received more negative feedback than those bands; their songs were rejected by the entire world! But they didn’t give up. They hired new producers, took advice from record label executives, and kept working until they got it right. Chalk that up to persistence, inner fortitude and, given this was the record industry in the 1980s, probably a few potent amphetamines as well. It doesn’t matter what it took to get there, all that matters is that they got there.
I find that liberating. As long as you make something great rise from the ashes, nobody will bother to remember all those times you crashed and burned. Why, it’ll be like your earlier missteps never happened at all! On that note, I’ve come to the end of this article. I hope you liked it, but if you didn’t, please let me know. If I get enough negative feedback, I’m planning to make a few edits and publish an improved version a few years from now. Then you can go ahead and forget about this one. Got it?
Get Write On It. 