Oh, Stop Your Sobbing with These Songs About Crying
- edgarstreetbooks
- 6 days ago
- 5 min read
Frank Mastropolo
“When the tides of life turn against you, and the current upsets your boat, don’t waste those tears on what might have been, just lay on your back and float.” — Ed Norton
“As Tears Go By” by Marianne Faithfull
“As Tears Go By” was one of the first songs written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. The Rolling Stones to that point had mainly recorded old blues standards. Manager Andrew Loog Oldham wanted the pair to earn the publishing royalties songwriters receive.
“We thought, what a terrible piece of tripe,” Richards wrote in his autobiography Life. “We came out and played it to Andrew and he said, ‘It’s a hit.’ We actually sold this stuff, and it actually made money. Mick and I were thinking, this is money for old rope!”
“It’s a very melancholy song for a 21-year-old to write,” Jagger said in uDiscover Music. “The evening of the day, watching children play — it’s very dumb and naive, but it’s got a very sad sort of thing about it, almost like an older person might write. You know, it’s like a metaphor for being old: You’re watching children playing and realizing you’re not a child. It’s a relatively mature song considering the rest of the output at the time.”
Marianne Faithfull was the first to record “As Tears Go By,” which reached number 22 in 1964. The Stones recorded their version in 1965, a number six hit. “It was a very weird thing to do, to give me that song to sing when I was only 17,” Faithfull told Rolling Stone. “Both Mick and Keith were 21 or 22 when they wrote it, but they are very brilliant.”
“Tears in Heaven” by Eric Clapton
Eric Clapton was inspired to write “Tears in Heaven” by the death of his four-year-old son Conor, who fell from an apartment building in 1991. Clapton asked Will Jennings to write the song with him, which reached number two on the Billboard chart in 1992. The song appeared on the 1991 Rush film soundtrack and Clapton recorded it in 1992 for MTV Unplugged.
After his son’s funeral, Clapton went to Antigua. “I rented a little cottage there, in a sort of a community,” Clapton told BBC Radio.
“And I just swatted mosquitoes all day and played this guitar and stayed there for almost a whole year without much contact with the outside world. I tried to heal myself, and all I could do was play and write these songs, and I rewrote and re-performed them again and again and again until I felt like I’d made some sort of move towards the surface of my being. And then I was able to come out.”
“The key thing that I learned about life from the death of my son was that we only have this moment,” Clapton explained on 60 Minutes. “That we don’t have tomorrow. Tomorrow doesn’t exist and you can… and anything can happen even before the sun sets.”
“Don’t Cry Out Loud” by Melissa Manchester
Although Melissa Manchester is an accomplished songwriter who penned the 1975 hit “Midnight Blue” with Carole Bayer Sager, her next Top 10 hit was 1978’s “Don’t Cry Out Loud,” written by Bayer Sager and Peter Allen. “I finally understand what it meant,”
Manchester told Billboard in 2004. “I [originally] thought it was a brilliant song but it seemed like the antithesis of everything Carole and I were writing which was always about self-affirmation and crying out and sharpening your communication skills. But it’s a beautifully crafted song that was all about how in the end you just have to learn to cope — and that’s no easy thing.”
“I gave her “Don’t Cry Out Loud.” Arista Records president Clive Davis said on NPR, “but she in her head did not want to be a female Barry Manilow. She saw herself as Joni Mitchell. Well, she was not Joni Mitchell.”
Manchester disagrees with the music mogul’s version of the events. “He remembers history his way and I remember history my way,” Manchester told Scott Holleran.
“He remembers bringing me ‘Don’t Cry Out Loud.’ I remember being friends with Peter Allen and Carole Bayer Sager and hearing ‘Don’t Cry Out Loud’ as a very quiet song, bringing it to him and saying yes, it’s gorgeous, let’s do it the way Peter did it — as beautiful and quiet. When I showed up in the studio and the cannons blew on this huge version — which turned out beautifully, it turned out as a gift.”
“While My Guitar Gently Weeps” by the Beatles
“While My Guitar Gently Weeps” was written by George Harrison for the Beatles’ 1968 White Album. It was the B-side of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La Da.” Its title was inspired by the I Ching or Book of Changes, a Chinese book on religion.
“The Eastern concept is that whatever happens is all meant to be… every little item that’s going down has a purpose,” Harrison explained in Far Out. “‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ was a simple study based on that theory… I picked up a book at random, opened it, saw ‘gently weeps,’ then laid the book down again and started the song.”
Harrison first recorded an acoustic demo with additional lyrics that were not in the final version. For the album cut, Eric Clapton performed the lead guitar solo at Harrison’s request. “I worked on that song with John, Paul and Ringo one day, and they were not interested in it at all. And I knew inside of me that it was a nice song,” Harrison recalled in Guitar Player.
“The next day, I was with Eric, and I was going into the session, and I said, ‘We’re going to do this song. Come on and play on it.’ He said, ‘Oh, no. I can’t do that. Nobody ever plays on the Beatles records.’ I said, ‘Look, it’s my song, and I want you to play on it.’
“So Eric came in and the other guys were as good as gold — because he was there. Also, it left me free to just play the rhythm and do the vocal.”
“Stop Your Sobbing” by the Pretenders
The success of the Kinks’ first single, 1964’s “You Really Got Me,” led the British Invasion band to quickly turn out their self-titled debut album. One of the six songs Ray Davies wrote for the LP was “Stop Your Sobbing.” The tune was not released as a single but was loved by Chrissie Hynde, then a teenager in Akron, Ohio.
Hynde would move to the UK and formed the Pretenders. The band’s 1979 debut album included “Stop Your Sobbing.” “I pulled it out of the air when we were in rehearsals, surprised that no one had heard it before,” Hynde said in Louder Sound.
“Stop Your Sobbing” was one of three demos given to Nick Lowe, then a member of Rockpile. “Chrissie and I were friends before that,” Lowe told Shawn Conner. “She asked me to produce her group because her guitar player, Jimmy Honeyman-Scott, was a fan of mine. He liked Rockpile, which I was in by that time.
“Anyway, it shows what I knew — I didn’t really think Chrissie’s songs were very good. But she kept going on with me about making a record with her, with her new group. And she sent me a tape. The one song that jumped out at me was this Kinks song, the one cover song that she wanted to do, ‘Stop Your Sobbing.’ I thought it was so fantastic. So I said, ‘I’ll definitely do that one.’”
The Pretenders’ “Stop Your Sobbing” reached number 65 on the Billboard chart in 1979. Hynde and Davies eventually had a relationship that produced a daughter, Natalie, in 1983.
Frank Mastropolo is the author of the new series, New York Rock & Roll History. For more on our latest projects, visit Edgar Street Books.
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