Fooled You! 10 Notable Songs with Tricky, False Endings
April Fools Day is a time when we celebrate pranks, and perhaps the musical equivalent is when an artist fools us by giving a song a false ending. Just when you think it’s over — surprise! — the song starts up again and you come away feeling like you’ve been tricked. Clearly in music sometimes things aren’t really over when you think they are, and so here are 10 examples of tricky popular songs that seem to end… but don’t. Whether it’s a full stop or a brief pause, all of these songs have false endings. There are many, many examples I could have chosen from, and in order to narrow it down I chose 10 examples that occupied a position in the Top 40 on the Billboard charts. Stop times listed are keyed to the accompanying videos, so they may differ if you play the songs on your computer’s iTunes interface. The recordings are in alphabetical order by group name.
1) “The Little Girl I Once Knew,” The Beach Boys (1965); Billboard #20
The Beach Boys had experimented with false endings before “The Little Girl I Once Knew,” and in fact one of my all-time favorites — and the song that gave me the idea to do this article — is “Drive In,” from the 1964 album All Summer Long. It wasn’t released as a single though, but “The Little Girl I Once Knew” was, false endings and all. The first comes at the 0:33 mark, the second at the 1:09 mark, and both stops last about three seconds, which is longer than average for any of the songs here. According to music lore, radio stations didn’t like to play songs with false endings because listeners might cut off the radio or change stations when they thought the song was over (which I guess explains why they like to overlap songs to keep things moving). I don’t know if this is true or not, but the chart performance for the song was certainly worse than the singles that preceded and followed it. It was immediately preceded by “Help Me Rhonda” (#1) and “California Girls”(#3), and immediately followed by “Barbara Ann”(#2). Maybe Brian Wilson‘s trickery was a little too clever…
2) “Good Vibrations,” The Beach Boys (1966); Billboard #1
…or maybe not, since this song with a two-second stop at the 2:55 mark went all the way to #1. Go figure.
3) “All By Myself,” Eric Carmen (1975); Billboard #2
As the lead singer of the Raspberries, Carmen had already sung a song with a false ending in “Overnight Sensation.” When he released “All By Myself” as the first single from his solo LP, he apparently decided to go with the song with a false ending. Here, at about the 3:40 mark, the song seems to end, but restarts and powers on for about another minute.
4) “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” The Four Seasons (1966); Billboard #9
When the Four Seasons recorded “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” in 1966, it was already an old song, having been written by Cole Porter in 1936. A number of artists had recorded it it, and the most iconic version was Frank Sinatra’s, which he recorded in 1963 after decades of performing it as part of his act. If you’re the Four Seasons, how do you follow the Chairman of the Board and outdo his version of the song? Maybe the answer was to have two false endings. The songs seems to be over at the 2:58 mark, then starts again and it seems as if the real ending comes at the 3:03 mark. But no! It starts again. There are also brief pauses at about the 2:05 and 2:38 mark before the two false endings. The result is a confusing song with at least four places where it might be over, but that didn’t seem to deter listeners: the Four Seasons’ version went to #9.
5) “Bernadette,” The Four Tops (1967); Billboard #4
“Bernadette” was one of the Four Tops biggest hits, going all the way to #4 on the charts. While the sensational Holland-Dozier-Holland lyrics, backing by the Funk Brothers, and Levi Stubbs and the group’s raw passionate sound were all Four Tops’ staples, the false ending was a little something different. At about the 2:39 mark the instruments stop playing , the vocals fade out — and then after a couple of seconds, Stubbs belts out “Bernadette!” and the song resumes. A powerful and effective use of a false ending, and one that doesn’t come across as being quite as arbitrary as some of the others.
6) “I Need Your Lovin’,” Don Gardner and Dee Dee Ford (1962); Billboard #20
This 1962 “screamer” hit was Don Gardner and Dee Dee Ford’s most successful pairing, and though the song to some extent has been forgotten in the aftermath of Motown, Stax, the British Invasion, and so on, it’s an R&B classic. It pretty much comes to a screeching halt at about the 1:50 mark and ends about as conclusively as a song can. Yet then it starts again, and rolls on for 1:10 more.
7) “Keep On Dancing,” The Gentrys (1965); Billboard #4
The Gentrys “Keep on Dancing,” which went to #4 on the charts, had originally been recorded for their tiny Youngstown, OH, label before being picked up by MGM, but the song was way too short as originally recorded. Ultimately, the first 40 seconds or so of the song was looped onto the end to make a suitable-length song of over two minutes. It’s not hard to hear where the addition was made; around the 1:30 mark the song fades completely out before starting all over again.
8) “Wild Night,” Van Morrison (1971); Billboard #28
This song is very similar to the Gentrys’ entry in that it comes to a complete stop at the 2:51 mark — it’s a definitive ending — then it starts again. If you listen to the song a sax breaks in, then plays on to the end, an ending that is identical to the break at the false ending. As critic Rob Kirkpatrick says, “The song arrives at a raucous, cacophonous ‘false ending,’ and then the band returns for a frenzied coda because they’re ‘having so much fun it can’t end yet.'”
9) “I Can Help,” Billy Swan (1974); Billboard #1
This song has a interesting back story. In the regular AM radio Top 40 version that went to #1, the song fades out at about the 2:53 mark to clapping and cheering. The story goes that Swan sometimes took his dog into the recording studio, and on the day they recorded this song the dog started to get playful and was tugging on his clothes. When they finished with the song, everyone broke into cheering and applause after having made it all the way through without the dog barking and ruining the take. This was apparently a reason to see if they could tempt fate, so they started the song again and played until the 3:37 mark, then starting again at the 3:44 mark. This longer version was often played on FM radio, and clearly has two (or three) distinct endings.
10) “Good Lovin’,” The Young Rascals (1966); Billboard #1
This song, which in my opinion is one of the greatest American #1 records of the 1960s, uses a full stop at the 2:03 mark as it comes to a complete halt. Unlike some recordings, in this case you know it’s going to start again, and the question becomes how long will they pause. A couple of seconds later the song starts again. This pause was used for great dramatic effect in the film The Big Chill.
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George L