Unchained Melody

Are you still mine? I *need* your love.

If there is a meaning to life, then love will factor into it. There is a reason why the most cynical try to cheapen love by perverting it, selling it, over-saturating it, redefining it, and every other way to milk love for all it’s worth. Yet we still crave love. We yearn to express love, and we feel empty inside without it. Perhaps the greatest expression of love is between a man and his woman. Despite what modernity tells you, it is such a self-evident truth; it requires years of indoctrination to refuse it and decades to refute the claim, yet only the spark of a moment to bring the cynic back from the brink.

One of the great expressions of love is through music. Since the medieval troubadours, men have boasted through song about their great deeds in pursuit of women, asking very little in return, namely, that the woman to whom he is professing is his and no one else’s.

We then come to what I believe is the greatest love song of all time. Since its inception in the 1950s, it has been the subject of over 1,500 different covers, many of which have placed in the Top 100 chart, some at the same time. “Unchained Melody” was created for a film that no one saw, and it shot through the cultural zeitgeist like a rocket until it was featured in a film that most everyone has seen or at least knows of.

In 1955, Unchained was released in theaters, the story of a man’s struggle between serving his prison sentence or using an oversight to escape. The prisoner’s dilemma rests with his wife and her faithfulness. Steve, our protagonist, wrestles with the fact that every day he is away, his wife could be searching for another man. If he were to get to her sooner, he would subject his family to a life on the run, but if he stays, he risks losing them forever. At the pivotal moment in the film, “Unchained Melody” is performed by singer, actor, and college professor Todd Duncan. This somber and melancholy performance acts as the catalyst for Steve’s decision to escape, as the thought of being away from his wife and child is too great to bear, and only a man made of stone could see a way out and not take it. In the Duncan version of the song, we hear the lyrics “Are you still mine?” as the most prominent and focused of the performance, capping off the themes of loneliness and longing that Steve feels being so far from his family.

Unchained was not a good film. However, “Unchained Melody” carried it away from obscurity, garnering an Academy Award Nomination for Best Song as well as countless covers from artists of the day. Then, in 1965, the definitive version of the song was recorded. The Righteous Brothers, a singing duo from California and one of the most popular musical acts of the 1960s, recorded the song as a B-side that producer Phil Spector hated and tried to get pulled from the radio, to no avail. While many others had covered the song, it was Righteous Brother Bobby Hatfield’s vocal range and raw emotion that set the standard for the song and any subsequent recording, particularly in his improvisation mid-recording to a higher pitch in the words “I need your love” (italics added for emphasis). Hatfield’s version was later featured in the 1990 film Ghost, where Patrick Swayze’s poltergeist guides Demi Moore through her pottery to the tune, in a scene that has been long parodied as well as beloved and is an example of what love means to men and women.

While the Righteous Brothers’ version is definitive, there is one more version that deserves to be mentioned. In June 1977, Elvis Presley, the King of Rock & Roll, performed the song live, a mere two months before his death. Years of drinking and touring as well as the abuse of prescription medication had taken a toll on the King, and prior to the song, his introduction to the audience shows he’s not all right. He’s stumbling over his words, he’s joking that he can’t play the notes, and he’s sweating like he’s in an oven, even though it’s a cool June evening in South Dakota.

All of that disappears, however, once he starts playing the notes. Muscle memory kicks in, and he shows the world why he is the King. Elvis, like Hatfield, enunciated and elongated the word need in his version, but while Hatfield’s sounds persuasive and impressive, Elvis’s sounds longing and desperate. You get the sense of urgency, of need, from Elvis in his performance that Hatfield could not reproduce on his best day. Elvis was probably just as surprised at his untimely death as the rest of the world was two months after this performance, but watching the video, you can see a man who is close to the end. That he sings the song with so much life and so much passion in spite of his failing health is nothing short of miraculous.

“Unchained Melody” taps into something primal about love. The emphasis that each performer puts into the song changes the exact meaning he or she is trying to give to the audience, while the overall message is still the same. A man will do anything to be with the woman he loves, so long as she can endure the separation without betraying him. I cannot think of a more perfect summary of love between a man and a woman. Trust and honor are at the root of intercourse between the sexes, and although it is performed differently between men and women, without those ingredients, you’re left with either lust or simping, neither of which people can write a song about, at least not one with any staying power.