The story behind the Righteous Brothers’ Unchained Melody

Only one Righteous Brother – Bobby Hatfield – sang on their famous chart-topper, but Bill Medley produced the song that has twice been a hit.

The Righteous Brothers - Bill Medley with Bobby Hatfield.

It is not often a film with no stars and no budget becomes a hit. And so it was for director Hall Bartlett’s 1955 movie Unchained. Bartlett, who served in US naval intelligence after the war, had graduated from Yale and seemed off to a good start; his first film, Navajo, a quasi-documentary about an indigenous boy’s struggles with white culture, was nominated for two Academy awards. I hope Bartlett went to New York’s NBC International Theatre that night because he’d never be asked again.

He made 14 films over 30 years of missteps and failure. One film starred a little-known Sidney Poitier, but others were lumbered with faded greats such as Joan Crawford, Alan Ladd and Bob Hope. Bartlett turned Arthur Hailey’s first novel into a forgotten film called Zero Hour! Years later it was recycled as the universally acclaimed parody Airplane! (Flying High! as it was released in Australia), making $200m and voted second greatest comedy of all time.

Bartlett’s final film was the true story of Australian journalist John Everingham escaping with his Lao­tian girlfriend across the Mek­ong River with scuba gear at the end of the Vietnam War. You couldn’t run aground with that storyline, surely. It flopped too.

Bartlett even failed with a foolproof script for Jonathan Livingston Seagull, the biggest-selling book in the US for two years. Author Richard Bach called Bartlett’s effort one of the worst movies made. More people bought Neil Diamond’s Grammy-winning soundtrack than saw the film.

Bartlett’s series of defeats began with Unchained. It was a drama based on Prisoners are People – a book written by jail reformer Kenyon Scudder, who ran a model “jail without walls”, the California Institution for Men in Chino, east of Los Angeles. From the 1940s this soft approach meant dignified treatment of inmates, who were encouraged to have family visits and to grow vegetables in the prison grounds.

Bartlett developed a storyline – during which he reportedly lived with some prisoners – in which an aggrieved inmate considers escape, but having made friends on the inside decides to serve out his sentence.

The film was shot at Chino and in one scene a prison band features an uncredited Dexter Gordon. The famous tenor sax master was inside serving two years on heroin charges. Bartlett somehow found enough in his slim budget to have Alex North compose the film’s music. North had just completed the films A Streetcar Named Desire and Death of a Salesman, and would move on to Spartacus and Cleopatra. North quickly delivered, but Bartlett said the soundtrack was missing a song and he wanted one. It was why he had cast black opera singer Todd Duncan in the first place. North, keen to move on to his next project, had a spare melody and called his friend Hyman Zaret for some lyrics. Zaret said he was busy painting his house, but North pressured him to come over. They worked so hurriedly that Zaret forgot to put the name of the film into his latest creation: Unchained Melody.

Duncan’s screen rendition lasts just a minute or so, but its appeal is instant. It was nominated for an Academy award for best song. Harry Belafonte sang a simple, faithful version of it on the night.

By then it had been covered by dozens of artists, with American singers Sam Cooke, Al Hibbler and Roy Hamilton giving it a whiff of civil rights activism. Without the context of the film, the word “time” is liberated from meaning a jail sentence.

Three versions were in the US charts simultaneously in 1955, four in Britain. Since then another 1500 have been recorded including by Elvis Presley, George Benson, Cyndi Lauper, U2 and the Goons (a 1955 parody overseen by Beatles producer George Martin).

The most famous of them was by the Righteous Brothers – Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield – and another example of the underestimated B side. The A side, Hung On You, is an understandably forgotten Gerry Goffin-Carole King composition recorded as Phil Spector searched for a grand follow-up to the Brothers’ majestic chart-topper, You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling, claimed to be the most played song of the 20th century. On each Righteous Brothers album Medley and Hatfield would sing one solo piece. They tossed for Unchained Melody and Hatfield won, his soaring tenor reshaping the by then well-known hit.

Spector – later to murder the Beatles’ Let It Be album and, later still, actor Lana Clarkson – claimed to have produced the song. Having failed to hear its potential, he wanted some credit. He had nothing to do with it. His policy was to put duds on the B side so radio DJs wouldn’t be tempted to flip what Spector knew to be the hit. He dismissed Unchained Melody and asked Medley to produce it, but later pressings carried Spector’s name. Spector was not alone. In 1982 a Los Angeles electrical engineer, William Stirrat, having changed his name to Hy Zaret, lodged copyrights for the song. In 2003 he started claiming that he had written Unchained Melody with North in 1935 while on a school camp, and fashioned it in a way that would appeal to his neighbour, Bing Crosby.

The Righteous Brothers took the song to No.4 on the Billboard charts in August 1965. It was a hit again when included in the 1990 film Ghost that starred Patrick Swayze, this time the original recording rising to No.1 around the world. The Brothers re-recorded it, notwithstanding Hatfield’s by then diminished vocal range, and that version went to No.19, the only time the same song by the same artist in two versions had charted simultaneously. (Another Swayze film, Dirty Dancing, had given Medley a further No.1 with Jennifer Warnes – The Time of My Life – three years before.)

All this kickstarted a revival for the blue-eyed soul pair and they toured again for the next 12 years. Halfway through each show they would sing Sam & Dave’s 1967 hit Soul Man, after which Medley would tell the audience while stepping away: “This is one of the prettiest songs in the whole world, and it’s sung by my little brother, called Unchained Melody.”

They were at the Radisson Plaza Hotel in Kalamazoo, Michigan, on November 5, 2003, with an hour to the first show of a short tour of the US mid-west, but Medley could not raise his sidekick by phone. He and the tour manager had Hatfield’s room unlocked.

Medley’s singing partner of 42 years was dead in bed. An autopsy revealed that the long-time addict had died from acute cocaine intoxication. He was 63. After being told the result of the autopsy, Hatfield’s wife Linda suffered a stroke.

The singer’s drug use also came as a surprise to Medley: “This is a shock to me. I never saw him (use cocaine). I knew absolutely nothing about it. If I had known, I would have said something to him.”

Saturday: The true story behind At the End of a Perfect Day