Pretty much anyone over the age of 25 who’s not a cave dweller can sing that line in their head, and then reflexively add the next line: “Whoa, that lovin’ feelin’.”
Those who can name the act that made “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” a No. 1 hit in 1965 probably break across generational lines. The Righteous Brothers were two Southern California kids—Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield—scuffling along with $100-a-week gigs until hotshot producer Phil Spector saw them on a show, signed them to a record deal, commissioned a song to be written specifically for them, and brought them into the studio.
Medley applied his sultry baritone to the opening verse, starting with the smoldering “you never close your eyes / anymore when I kiss your lips,” then artfully building to on-bended-knee pleading. Hatfield’s crystalline tenor shines later in the song when he reaches the heavens in a scintillating call-and-response with Medley’s raspy bellow. “He sang the hell out of it,” Medley, 82, told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay in a phone interview. “Bobby’s parts made it a different record.”
Over the years, “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin’” has been almost universally regarded as three minutes and 45 seconds of perfect songcraft. A masterpiece. Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI) ranked it the most played song on American radio and television in the 20th Century. The record established The Righteous Brothers as the prototype for a musical subgenre known as “blue-eyed soul.”
On “Lovin’ Feelin’,” the Righteous Brothers’ vocals were laid over Spector’s famous “wall of sound” production, which utilized layer upon layer of tracks recorded by an army of top L.A. studio musicians.
The most charitable view of Spector was that of a mercurial sonic genius. He was also, as it happens, a lunatic. Horror stories are legion: viciously bullying female artists; holding a pistol to musicians’ heads in the studio; imprisoning his wife Ronnie Spector in his estate for months. Spector died in 2021 from complications due to Covid 19, 12 years into a prison sentence for murdering 40-year-old actor Lana Clarkson in his Los Angeles mansion. He was 81.
“Everyone wants a horror story,” Medley said of working with Spector. “But the truth is, he was very good to us. He had done a lot of ‘girl groups,’ like The Ronettes and The Crystals and Darlene Love, and we’d heard stories about how he had treated them [badly].
“Bobby and I were a couple of street guys singing rock ’n’ roll and hard R&B. I think Spector (who was 5-foot-5, and scrawny at the time) pulled his shit back a little bit with us. I’m sure he knew he couldn’t get away with what he did with the girls. He was cool. We were fine. He wasn’t an asshole. We weren’t assholes.”
That didn’t mean Spector went easy on the work. In late-September ’64, when Medley and Hatfield entered L.A.’s Gold Star Studios to cut vocals, most of the instrumental tracks had already been recorded and stacked. “When we did the vocals, the rhythm track was done but I don’t think the horns were on yet,” Medley recalled. “In those days, we recorded with a two- or three-track [machine]. So every time I sang, ‘You never close your eyes,’ he’d punch me in and erase what I already did.
“We [cut vocals] for about four hours a day over two days (reportedly 38 takes). He wanted it perfect. We were OK with it because we had the sense that every suggestion he made was right. At a certain point, though, we thought, ‘He’s killing us.’ It was tough, but it was a good tough. For our previous couple of records, we went in the studio and had fun with it. ‘Lovin’ Feelin’ really became work. It was good work, and fun to do, but stressful.”
Medley told me that during the recording of “Lovin’ Feelin’” he had no sense that the song would become a mega-hit, let alone a piece of music for the ages. “We didn’t have a clue about anything,” he said. “We weren’t trying to build anything. It was, ‘Let’s do the show,’ then, ‘Where is the beer and where are the girls?’”
That’s probably one reason why The Righteous Brothers did not enjoy a long-lasting recording career, or ascend to superstardom. The duo notched two more Top 10 singles with Spector—“Unchained Melody” (with Hatfield the only singer) and “Just Once in My Life”—but the relationship between artists and producer soon fractured, then broke.
In 1967, the Righteous Brothers ran headlong into the Summer of Love and the dawn of hippies and psychedelia. The clean-cut duo, and their music, didn’t fit. They split up the following year. Medley pursued a solo career that failed to yield much commercial fruit. I asked him if, despite coming up in an era of singles, he lamented never creating a highly regarded album. He paused. “I don’t, oddly enough,” he said. “I’ve never been asked that. There’s been a couple of albums that I feel great about, but they never caught on commercially.”
Then he mused, “The Righteous Brothers—we didn’t really put it together. It just didn’t quite happen for us.”
Hatfield and Medley reunited in the mid-’70s, primarily as a live act, and performed on and off until Hatfield died in 2003 at the age of 63 during a Righteous Brothers tour. Medley and the band’s manager found Hatfield’s body in a hotel in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Medley allows that, while he loved and respected his longtime partner, they were not friends, per se. “We didn’t hang around together,” he said. “When we finished the gig, we left and went our separate ways. We were very different people. If we had done just those early gigs and our career had not caught on, we probably would’ve never seen each other again.”
While Medley said that the partners “never really had any fights,” one rub was the duo’s road schedule. “At a certain point, we would pretty much do three weeks in Vegas, and then go out and do concerts on the fourth week,” Medley recalled. “We did that about five times a year. At one point, Bobby says, ‘I don’t mind going out, but instead of doing six shows a week, can we do two?’
Medley laughed. “I said, ‘Bobby, if I’m going to be away from home, I’m going to get paid.”
After Hatfield’s death, Medley continued touring as a solo act, sometimes along with old film footage of his former partner. But as time went on, the regimen put too much strain on his voice. In 2016, Medley enlisted 49-year-old Bucky Heard to perform Hatfield’s parts. “He really gets it,” Medley said. “And the cool thing is that Bucky’s a huge Bobby Hatfield fan. When we got together, I told him, ‘I don’t want you to sound like Bobby. I want you to sing like Bobby.”
The Righteous Brothers have 60 shows on the books this year, a substantial load for an 82-year-old singer. The duo has one basic goal—perform music from decades ago as faithfully and authentically as possible.
At the end of our 50-minute interview, I thanked Medley for his willingness to talk about the past, as opposed to relentlessly promoting the current tour, as some oldies acts are wont to do.
“Oh, I understand I’m the past,” he said lightheartedly, just before hanging up.
This article appears in Mar 2-8, 2023.