60-Year-Old Songs: It Hurts to Be in Love

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Wow, what a nice day! The weather guy says to enjoy this because we’ll be sweating by the end of the week. Well, it is June, so I’d expect that instead of shoveling snow. We’re a third of the way through the look at the year 1964, and here’s the next song that’s now 60 years old. It Hurts to Be in Love - Gene Pitney Well, lookie here! It’s another Brill Building songwriter! Carole King and Gerry Goffin, who wrote yesterday’s song, were part of the songwriting group who worked in the Brill Building. The list of songwriters in that group include Neil Diamond, Burt Bacharach, Leiber & Stoller, Boyce and Hart…and Sedaka and Greenfield. Both Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield wrote with others. (Some trivia: Greenfield co-wrote the Bewitched TV series theme song.) Here we see one of Greenfield’s most successful compositions away from Sedaka (one of the other massive hits he wrote without Neil was “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool,” a big success for Connie Francis). Now, the funny thing was, this was actually supposed to be a Sedaka hit. Sedaka had recorded it: in fact, everything except the vocals came from Sedaka’s session! RCA, Sedaka’s record label during the 60s, wouldn’t release Sedaka’s version because he hadn’t recorded it in an RCA-owned studio! In place of Sedaka, the great Gene Pitney, who could handle just about anything thrown at him, provided the vocals. (A year after this he recorded a country music album of duets with George Jones!) Would this have been as big a hit without Pitney singing? We can only speculate, enjoy Pitney’s great performance...and wonder how long it took RCA to wipe the egg off their face from their mistake. It Hurts to Be in Love Written by Howard Greenfield and Helen Miller Recorded by Gene Pitney From It Hurts to Be in Love and Eleven More Hits, 1964 She thinks I’m just a friend: