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The Hit
You might know Nazareth’s “Love Hurts” from commercials for Aspercreme, Esurance, or mabye even a vintage Gatorade ad; all you NHL fans out there might recognize it from a promo for…some season or another. That’s all I could find easily, but I’m confident that’s the short list of buyers.
Older fans, or even just fans of Scotland’s Nazareth, might actually recall hearing it on the radio, maybe pulling that special someone close. I don’t know, maybe you don’t listen closely to lyrics. No judgment.
One thing I can say for sure is that, unless you bought your album in the U.S. market you did not hear “Love Hurts” on Nazareth’s sixth album, 1975’s Hair of the Dog, because that’s the only release of the album that includes it. It only ended up there thanks to a savvy intervention by A&M Records’ Jerry Moss. As recalled by Pete Agnew, the band’s bassist and only remaining original member, the original 45 offered the title track (“Hair of the Dog,” but there’s a story there) b/w a song called “Guilty.” In a couple interviews (the quote below comes from a site called The College Crowd Digs Me), Agnew explained how bands released singles back in Nazareth's hey-day - e.g., “So what bands started doing was to record just B-sides. Just throwaway tracks that they didn't necessarily spend a lot of time on.” In any case, Moss heard “Love Hurts” before he heard all of Hair of the Dog, and he gave dropping “Guilty” (a Randy Newman song, btw) for their eventual hit as his first piece of advice. Agnew remains graciously grateful for the tip.
The original came from the Boudleaux-Bryant songwriting team by way of The Everly Brothers, but Agnew says the band listened to a version by Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris during the long nights on the road touring around Europe. All members of the band loved it, something that helped it come readily to mind when they knocked about for one of their B-sides. And yet there’s more to the story. As the album was coming together, Agnew and Nazareth front-man, Dan McCafferty, traveled north for a wedding, leaving the remaining members, Manny Charlton (guitar) and Darrell Sweet (drums) alone in the studio for a night. As related to Classic Bands in 2008:
"So, when we came down the next day, they recorded it and recorded it in exactly the same key as Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris. Of course in the octave they were singing, it's too low, far too low. Then you have to take that up an octave. So that's how it ended up being sung in that key. If we had been in the studio when they did that, it probably would never have been a hit 'cause we would have never have done it in that key.”
Accident upon accident upon oddity; that’s what it takes sometimes. For Nazareth, it took the better part of a decade...
You might know Nazareth’s “Love Hurts” from commercials for Aspercreme, Esurance, or mabye even a vintage Gatorade ad; all you NHL fans out there might recognize it from a promo for…some season or another. That’s all I could find easily, but I’m confident that’s the short list of buyers.
Older fans, or even just fans of Scotland’s Nazareth, might actually recall hearing it on the radio, maybe pulling that special someone close. I don’t know, maybe you don’t listen closely to lyrics. No judgment.
One thing I can say for sure is that, unless you bought your album in the U.S. market you did not hear “Love Hurts” on Nazareth’s sixth album, 1975’s Hair of the Dog, because that’s the only release of the album that includes it. It only ended up there thanks to a savvy intervention by A&M Records’ Jerry Moss. As recalled by Pete Agnew, the band’s bassist and only remaining original member, the original 45 offered the title track (“Hair of the Dog,” but there’s a story there) b/w a song called “Guilty.” In a couple interviews (the quote below comes from a site called The College Crowd Digs Me), Agnew explained how bands released singles back in Nazareth's hey-day - e.g., “So what bands started doing was to record just B-sides. Just throwaway tracks that they didn't necessarily spend a lot of time on.” In any case, Moss heard “Love Hurts” before he heard all of Hair of the Dog, and he gave dropping “Guilty” (a Randy Newman song, btw) for their eventual hit as his first piece of advice. Agnew remains graciously grateful for the tip.
The original came from the Boudleaux-Bryant songwriting team by way of The Everly Brothers, but Agnew says the band listened to a version by Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris during the long nights on the road touring around Europe. All members of the band loved it, something that helped it come readily to mind when they knocked about for one of their B-sides. And yet there’s more to the story. As the album was coming together, Agnew and Nazareth front-man, Dan McCafferty, traveled north for a wedding, leaving the remaining members, Manny Charlton (guitar) and Darrell Sweet (drums) alone in the studio for a night. As related to Classic Bands in 2008:
"So, when we came down the next day, they recorded it and recorded it in exactly the same key as Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris. Of course in the octave they were singing, it's too low, far too low. Then you have to take that up an octave. So that's how it ended up being sung in that key. If we had been in the studio when they did that, it probably would never have been a hit 'cause we would have never have done it in that key.”
Accident upon accident upon oddity; that’s what it takes sometimes. For Nazareth, it took the better part of a decade...
