I'm a believer
| I'm a believer | |
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| The Monkees | |
| publication | November 21, 1966 |
| length | 2:47 |
| Genre (s) | Pop music , pop rock |
| Author (s) | Neil Diamond |
| album | More of The Monkees |
| Cover version | |
| 1971 | Neil Diamond |
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Chart positions Explanation of the data |
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I'm a Believer is the title of a song by the American pop group The Monkees from 1966. The piece was the band's most successful single and one of the fastest-selling records. The song was written by Neil Diamond .
history
The casting band The Monkees had accepted that the music of their pieces was played by studio musicians and that the head of their record label Don Kirshner found their skills to be inadequate. That was also the case on the two days of recording I'm a Believer / (I'm Not Your) Steppin 'Stone , October 15 and 23, 1966, in New York City. Jeff Barry, as producer of the A-side, hired the young composer of the title, Neil Diamond, as the acoustic guitarist, Buddy Salzman as drummer and Carol Kaye from The Wrecking Crew as bassist . Only Micky Dolenz was allowed to sing , whose singing in Hollywood was added to the instrumental playback prepared in this way by means of overdubbing .
Diamond's text about the first true love, which is not only found in fairy tales and only for others, was underlined by the interplay between guitar and organ, which forms the dominant bracket of the piece. Take 18 was eventually used as a master and went into record production. On November 12, 1966, the single was released as Colgems # 1002, only the young label's second record. RCA took over the distribution of the pop song.
Million seller
After the Monkees had played their first concert in Honolulu on December 3, 1966 , I'm a Believer was featured on December 5, 1966 in episode 13 (“One Man Shy” or “Peter and the Debutante”) of the sitcom series “The Monkees ”presented.
At that time there were a total of 1,051,280 pre-orders for the single. From December 1966, and until the beginning of 1967, over three million copies of the single were sold within two months in the United States. She received a gold record just because of the pre-orders . 750,000 units were sold in Great Britain and an estimated ten million worldwide. It became the top-selling single of 1967. In that year, the Monkees sold more records than the Beatles and the Rolling Stones combined. Five million LPs in 1967 alone was a previously unknown order of magnitude for the music industry.
After entering the charts on December 10, 1966, the single soared to number one on December 31, 1966, where it remained for seven weeks. At the turn of the year it was listed in first place in the charts in 16 countries, including for four weeks in Great Britain and from February 11, 1967 for five weeks in Germany.
Background of the song
After the Monkees had their first, fairly successful hit, Last Train to Clarksville , Don Kirshner looked for more material for the group. He noticed Neil Diamond, who had landed his first hit in August 1966 with his own composition Cherry, Cherry . Diamond was under contract with Aldon Music Publishing, which Kirshner had sold to Columbia-Screen Gems in 1963. The buyer of the music publisher was his current employer. Kirshner asked Diamond producers Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich if Diamond could offer anything more. This left the Monkees not only with I'm a Believer , but also the title for the follow-up single A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You and a variety of other compositions.
Tommy Boyce , who had produced the first Monkees single (and the B-side of I'm a Believer ) and also supervised other recordings, wasn't exactly convinced of the group's vocal qualities: “Micky Dolenz could sing, Davy had a passable one Ballad voice, Michael felt like Merle Haggard and Peter couldn't sing at all; Taken together, that didn't make the TV series' rock band image ". The vocal problems and the instrumental deficiencies of the group were compensated for by professional studio musicians such as Hal Blaine , James Burton or Leon Russell.
Cover versions
The best-known cover version comes from the composer Neil Diamond himself. He recorded the song for his LP Just for You , which was released on September 16, 1967. 25 other versions followed, including those by EMF and Smash Mouth .