The “Golden Hits Of The 70s”
Main MenuConcept Refinement The Author..Wayne JancikGolden Age Of The 50sGolden Age Of The 60s1970s and There After
HURRICANE SMITH
“OH, BABE, WHAT WOULD YOU SAY?”
(Hurricane Smith)
Capitol 3383
No. 3 February 17, 1973
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Born in northern England in 1923, reportedly to a family of gypsies, little Norman Smith began messing
with instruments as diverse as the drums, piano, vibes, trombone, and stand-up bass. As a young adult,
he held down gigs as a jazz trumpeter for years. With the offer of an eventual apprenticeship as a
recording engineer, Norman went to work as a “gofer” in 1955 at EMI’s legendary Abbey Road studios.
One of his first shots at being a full fledged engineer came with the FRANK IFIELD session that produced
“I Remember You” (#5, 1962).
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Norman was present as the engineer on June 6, 1962, when the Beatles auditioned for George Martin. “I
couldn’t believe what louts they looked with their funny hair cuts–they didn’t impress me at all,” Smith
said in Brian Southall’s Abbey Road. Impressed or not, Smith engineered nearly all the Beatles sessions
through Rubber Soul and Revolver. In the late ’60s, Norman was given the chance to produce Pink
Floyd, a bizarre new group named after Georgia bluesmen Pink Anderson and Floyd Council. From Pink
Floyd’s earliest singles–such as “Arnold Layne,” the tale of an undergarment-stealing transvestite–
through many of their albums, it was Norman Smith who attempted to manage the occasionally chaotic
Pink Floyd sessions.
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Smith had always secretly wanted to be a pop star. He had written something called “Don’t Let It Die,”
and one day when things were not going too well at a Floyd session and all the band members had left for
a break, Norman taped the song. When noted producer Mickie Most (Animals, Jeff Beck, Donovan,
Herman’s Hermits, NASHVILLE TEENS …) overheard the recording session, he encouraged Norman to
release the disk himself rather than approach John Lennon with the song, as Smith had intended.
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Naming himself after the title character in a 1952 Forest Tucker-Yvonne de Carlo flick, Norman “Hurri
cane” Smith, at age 49, had his first British Top 5 hit with “Don’t Let It Die” in June 1971. His follow-up,
the charming “Oh, Babe, What Would You Say?” made Hurricane a genuine pop star–at least for a
possibly pleasant moment, or so.
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“The melody [was] happy and simple,” he told Rolling Stone’s Pete Gambaccini. “It was the producer in
me that designed the lyric to recapture almost the era I grew up in. It’s almost a true story of my life. I
would go to a ballroom, but I was so shy I couldn’t even ask someone to dance. I’d walk home imagining
a romance when I’d never even reached first base. ‘Oh, Babe’ was about those fantasies.”
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