Darlene Love on Her 60-Year Friendship With Cher, New ‘Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)’ Duet
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Earlier this year, Darlene Love picked up the phone and heard a voice on the other end she didn’t quite recognize at first. “Doll, hi!” she heard. “This is Cher.” Love asked her to repeat who was calling. “Cher, bitch!”
She was calling to see if Love would sing “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” with her on her upcoming holiday album Christmas, revisiting a tune they sang together exactly 60 years ago on A Christmas Gift for You From Phil Spector, one of the greatest Christmas albums in music history.
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Love said yes, and their duet appears on Cher’s Christmas, out next week. It’s the latest chapter in a friendship that goes back more than half a century. The two singers got a chance to catch up recently when Love flew in to L.A. for a listening party that Cher hosted. “We recorded the song virtually, so I hadn’t actually seen her yet,” Love says. “I said, ‘Do you want me to make a reservation at a hotel?’ She said, ‘Hotel? You’re going to stay here with me!’ It was so funny. The driver they sent to pick my husband and I up at the airport pulled up to her house and went, ‘Wow, this is a beautiful hotel.’ The two of us had so much fun that night. We were like, ‘Let’s gossip a while.'”
They first met in 1962, when Love was working alongside Phil Spector to craft hits like “He’s a Rebel” and “He’s Sure the Boy I Love,” which were credited to other artists at the time of their release despite her signature lead vocals. “Sonny Bono was working for Spector at that time,” says Love. “He was one of those guys that would go get whatever Phil needed. We used to call him ‘The Gopher.’ And then one time, he brought this girl to the session. She was very quiet, very humble, very shy. I said, ‘Sonny, who is that?’ He goes, ‘This is Cher. This is my new girlfriend.’ She was just 17 years old.”
Later that year, Spector brought Love, the Ronettes, Bob B. Soxx & the Blue Jeans, and the Crystals together to record A Christmas Gift for You From Phil Spector. When Love was called in to lay down a lead vocal on “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home),” which Spector wrote with Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry, she was surprised to see Cher recording background vocals. “Phil said to Sonny, ‘Didn’t you tell me your girl can sing?'” recalls Love. “He said, ‘Yes, she can sing.’ And before I even got there, she was putting her voice on it.”
Six decades later, Love still has a vivid image in her head of Spector repeatedly telling Cher to back away from the mic and sing in a softer voice. “Her voice was so strong and so heavy,” says Love. “Phil didn’t realize, ‘This is a 17-year-old girl that’s never been in a recording studio before. She’s never recorded. She doesn’t know how to sing background.’ But this is how she started singing.”
Cher and Love were joined on the song by an incredible group of musicians that included pianist Leon Russell, saxophonist Steve Douglas, drummer Hal Blaine, and guitarist Barney Kessel. “I think I only sang my vocal part about 10 times,” says Love. “Leon Russell was just a master on the keys. He added stuff to that song that made it even better. Everyone in the room contributed something to it. When it was done, all of us, including the choir, just kind of looked at each other. We were like, ‘What did we just do?'”
They’d created a classic pop song, destined to be covered by everyone from U2 to Mariah Carey, Joey Ramone, Michael Bublé, Foo Fighters, and countless others. But it took a little while to catch on, since A Christmas Gift for You From Phil Spector had the misfortune of landing in record stores on on Nov. 22, 1963, the same day President Kennedy was assassinated.
“I was in my kitchen that morning ironing a blouse,” says Love. “The TV was on in the living room, and I couldn’t hear it well. I said to myself, ‘What did they say? Did they say JFK just got shot? Nah. They couldn’t have said that.’ Then they really started talking about it and showing pictures. I put the ironing down and sat frozen in front of the television set. They kept playing it over and over, and I kept getting more and more depressed. I knew it wasn’t going to be a great Christmas.”
An attempt was made to repromote the Christmas album a year later, when the country was in a more festive mode, but by then it was the peak of Beatlemania and the beginning of a very rough time for acts like Darlene Love and the Ronettes. Sonny and Cher had branded themselves as Caesar and Cleo and were trying to make it as a duo. “I bumped into them on Shindig!, a television show I was doing,” says Love. “I went, ‘What’s happening?’ And from there, it just went to glory.”
Love’s own career hit some bumpy times in the Seventies and Eighties, but Cher never forgot her old friend. In 1989, she hired Love as a background singer on her Hearts of Stone world tour. “I wasn’t just a background singer,” Love says. “I was Cher’s friend. And whenever we got together over the past few years, we’d sit down for an hour or so just to reminiscence. We have a unique relationship. We’re buddies.”
That’s why Love didn’t hesitate earlier this year when Cher asked her to contribute to her new recording of “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).” The call came in July, when Cher’s album — which also features guests spots by Stevie Wonder, Cyndi Lauper, Michael Bublé, and Tyga — was practically done. Love recorded her parts in a New York studio while Cher was in Los Angeles.
“The whole thing only took an hour,” says Love. “They legitimately just wanted me to sing it the way I sing it when I perform it live, which is amazing. We got it in just four takes. They said, ‘That’s it. We got what we want.’ And I had no idea what they were going to do with it until I heard the final product, but we sing the verses together in unison. I was really surprised by how wonderful it turned out.”
Love is in remarkable shape for 82, due in part to her daily kickboxing class and decision to quit cigarettes 25 years ago, but she’s booking fewer Christmas shows than she has in years past. This year, she has only seven on the books. She’ll also be performing “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” on The View for the eighth year in a row, a tradition established back in the Eighties on David Letterman.
In the meantime, she’s looking forward to hitting the road. “I want everyone to have a good time, forget about what’s happening in their lives, and just have fun,” she says. “That’s the whole idea. When it becomes work, that’s when I’ll retire.”
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