Song of the Day 10/12: The Flamingos, “I Only Have Eyes For You”

I always thought of this as a quintessential doo-wop song, because the Flamingos version is the only one I had ever heard. That’s because I was never a fan of old movies, so I had never seen the 1934 Busby Berkeley musical “Dames,” in which Dick Powell sings it to Ruby Keeler. Several big bands recorded it soon after the film came out.

How did that turn into the Flamingos hit 25 years later? Terry “Buzzy” Johnson, who joined the Flamingos as a tenor in 1956 and later worked as a songwriter and producer at Motown, arranged the vocals and co-produced the record. He told Sound on Sound:

I was laying down in my room with the guitar on my chest, playing around with the chords, but no matter what I tried it just didn’t fit. Finally, it was about 12 or 1 in the morning, and I was so tired that I fell asleep, and in my dream I heard “I Only Have Eyes For You” just the way it came out on our record. I heard the “doo-bop sh-bop,” I heard the way the harmony would sound — I heard the harmony so clear, and I heard the structure of the chords.

Worried that he’d forget everything if he went back to sleep, he gathered the rest of the group to play it for them. They weren’t impressed.

When they heard me do it they looked at me like, “What the hell is this?” They laughed at me: “What’s ‘doo-bop sh-bop, goo-bop sh-bop, boo-bop sh-bop, loo-bop sh-bop, shoo-bop sh-bop’?” You see, although in my dream it was “doo-bop sh-bop,” I had everybody doing a different thing, changing things around to make sure no one could really pick out what we were saying.”

The doo-bop sh-bops and aren’t Johnson’s only radical change to the original. He slowed the tempo dramatically and drenched the whole production in reverb. It topped out at No. 11 on the Hot 100, but its popularity endures — it’s been used in dozens of movies and TV shows from “American Graffiti” onward because it so perfectly evokes its era.

Johnson’s arrangement became the standard treatment of the tune. Art Garfunkel, who had a spell of post-Simon success in the ’70s and ’80s redoing ’50s ballads, returned the song to the charts in 1975, when it reached No. 18.