Sonny & Cher – I Got You Babe

The record label wanted “I Got You Babe” buried as a B-side — so Sonny Bono went around them and made it a No. 1 himself

The song that made Sonny and Cher famous was almost thrown away. Ahmet Ertegun, the head of their label Atco, heard I Got You Babe and shrugged — he wanted it filed on the B-side of a now-forgotten track called It’s Gonna Rain. Sonny Bono was certain the label had it backwards. Rather than argue, he went around them entirely, and within weeks the “filler” was the No. 1 record in America.

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Bono wrote the whole thing late one night at a cheap piano in their home, scribbling the lyrics on a scrap of dry cleaner’s cardboard — a plain, earnest set of lines about two young people with nothing but each other. He was around 30, a former apprentice to producer Phil Spector; Cher was 19, singing backup on sessions when they met. He was so pleased with the song he woke her in the middle of the night to sing it. She was not charmed. By her own later account, she agreed to sing it once and go straight back to bed, and only warmed to it after Sonny shifted the key in the bridge to sit better in her voice.

They cut it on June 7, 1965, at Gold Star Studios in Hollywood, the room where Spector built his Wall of Sound. Harold Battiste wrote the arrangement and the Wrecking Crew played the track — the plaintive melodic figure that everyone assumes is an ocarina is, Battiste always insisted, an oboe. The production borrowed Spector’s density and drama and wrapped it around a folk-rock lilt that caught the exact mood of 1965.

She hated it, went back to bed, then it sold millions

The label still wasn’t convinced, so Sonny did the promotion himself. He took the record to Ron Jacobs, program director at Los Angeles powerhouse KHJ, and cut a deal: the station could play it exclusively if it aired once an hour. Listeners latched on immediately, the saturation worked, and Ertegun relented and flipped it to the A-side. I Got You Babe spent three weeks at No. 1 in the United States in August 1965 and topped the charts in Britain and Canada too, selling more than a million copies that year for a gold record. It knocked Cher’s own solo single off the top of KHJ’s chart in the process. Decades later it found a second life as Bill Murray’s clock-radio torment in Groundhog Day, and Sonny and Cher sang it together one last time on David Letterman’s show in 1987, a decade before Sonny’s death. The whole thing had started as a throwaway on a piece of laundry cardboard — and Cher, famously, just wanted to go back to sleep.