This is movie music week at the ol’ Classic Song of the Day blog, and today’s classic movie song of the day is “Up Where We Belong” from the 1982 film An Officer and a Gentleman. Recorded as a duet by Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes, this tune was a huge hit worldwide. It went all the way to #1 in Australia, Canada, South Africa, and the U.S. (on both the Billboard Hot 100 and Cash Box Top 100). It peaked just short of the top position in Austria, Finland, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, and West Germany.
“Up Where We Belong” was written for An Officer and a Gentleman by Jack Nitzsche, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Will Jennings. Their composition won both the Academy Award and the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song. Released as a single in July of 1982, the recording by Cocker and Warnes took home a Grammy for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals.
The film’s director (Taylor Hackford) and studio (Paramount Pictures) were both interested in having a hit song to promote the movie. Jack Nitzsche, who composed the film’s score, was having trouble coming up with a theme, so he went to his friend, folksinger Buffy Sainte-Marie, who had a short melody she’d been working on. Nitzsche and Sainte-Marie finished off the music and went to lyricist Will Jennings to write the words.
The song in hand, the next question was, who would sing it? Director Hackford consulted with his friend Gary George, who happened to be the manager for singer Jennifer Warnes, and he suggested his client to do the vocals. Ms. Warnes was coming off two previous movie songs (“One More Hour” from Ragtime and the Oscar-winning “It Goes Like It Goes” from Norma Rae), as well as a #1 single with 1977’s “Right Time of the Night,” so she was a hot property. After hearing a demo of “Up Where We Belong,” Ms. Warnes suggested doing it as a duet and further suggested singing it with Joe Cocker, who she’d been a fan of for some time. The recently sober Mr. Cocker was initially reluctant but got talked into it. In his own words, he was particularly impressed with “the ‘Up’ part, which is what made me realize it had hit potential. It was so unusual—that ‘Love, lift us up ..'”
Joe Cocker was nervous about recording the song and initially insisted that he and Ms. Warnes record their parts separately, which they did. However, the record’s producer, Stewart Levine, didn’t think splicing their two parts together really worked, so he persuaded Cocker and Warnes to sing the song together in the studio. As Jennifer Warnes remembers:
“Stewart Levine was gently insistent on the duet. Stewart understood that the contrast in our voices, the aural chemistry, would work. So Joe and I sang the song together. One or two takes, that was all.”
The result was magic, a song that not only captured the essence of the movie’s romance but also was a huge radio hit. It ended up selling more than a million copies and led to Jennifer Warnes recording even more movie themes, including (with Bill Medley) “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” for the 1987 blockbuster, Dirty Dancing. (It was another #1 hit.)
An Officer and a Gentleman was about a young Navy officer-in-training (Richard Gere) falling in love with a local girl (Debra Winger). The film was a smash and won an Oscar for Lou Gossett as Best Supporting Actor. Movie critic Roger Ebert gave it four out of four stars, calling it “a wonderful movie precisely because it’s so willing to deal with matters of the heart.”
So here’s your daily bonus video of the day, the original trailer for An Officer and a Gentleman. That rousing score is by Jack Nitzsche.
