It’s been described by Dave Grohl as “the most beautiful piece of music ever written” and “maybe one of the most melodically sophisticated songs I’ve ever heard in my entire life”.
The Foo Fighters frontman’s comments were made during a 2013 WTF podcast with Mark Maron and the composition he was referring to was Never Let Her Slip Away, the 1978 soft-rock classic by Andrew Gold.
It’s not a song you might single out as a potential Grohl favourite, but he recognised it for the masterpiece that it is, a composition that melds melancholy and yearning with upbeat sun-soaked production and a refined melodic structure.
Never Let Her Slip Away was released in the US in June 1978, but juddered to a halt at a rather uninspiring No 67 position on the Billboard Hot 100. In the UK, however, it was a whole different story. When it was released in March that year, it became a massive hit, climbing to No 5 in the UK Singles Chart.
In that markedly cold and wet early Spring in the UK, Never Let Her Slip Away was seemingly everywhere, a smooth, freewheeling sound with an infectious melody, which stood out amid the disco-saturated UK Singles Chart of the time.
Given his family background, it was no great surprise that Andrew Gold pursued a career in music. Born in Burbank, California in 1951, he was immersed in the industry from an early age. His mother was the singer Marni Nixon, who provided the singing voice for numerous stars in major Hollywood film productions, most notably Natalie Wood in West Side Story, Deborah Kerr in The King And I and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady.
His Austrian-born father, Ernest Gold, won an Academy Award for his score for the 1960 film Exodus, an epic historical drama about the founding of the state of Israel, produced and directed by Otto Preminger.
Andrew Gold once recalled living in Laurel Canyon with his parents when he was a teenager and waking up to the sound of his father writing film scores in his home studio.
Andrew began writing songs at the age of 13 and landed his first recording contract with Polydor at the age of 16, while at school in the UK for a year. The deal resulted in the single Of All The Little Girls, recorded with his friend and collaborator Charlie Villiers and released in 1967 under the name Villiers and Gold.
By the early 1970s, he was working full-time as a session musician, songwriter and record producer. He played with a number of groups, including the folk-rock band Bryndle. But he really rose to prominence as multi-instrumentalist and arranger on Linda Ronstadt’s breakthrough album Heart Like A Wheel (1974) and her two-follow-up albums.
By then, Gold was a major LA session musician and arranger, adept on an extraordinarily diverse range of instruments, including guitar, bass, keyboards, accordion, synthesiser, harmonica, saxophone, flute, drums and percussion, as well more esoteric instruments such as ukulele, musette, and harmonium.
In 1975, he played most of the instruments on Art Garfunkel’s hit I Only Have Eyes For You, which reached No 1 in the UK.
Also in 1975, Gold released his debut self-titled solo album, which was critically acclaimed. In a review headlined ‘Andrew Gold Is Fab’ in Rolling Stone, writer Stephen Holden concluded that “not a note or beat is wasted”, adding that the album was “one of the year’s most melodic”.
Gold’s music was at the forefront of the California soft-rock/pop sound so favoured by mainstream AM radio in the mid-’70s. He demonstrated a real maturity in his songwriting, creating an alluring, extremely polished sound forged by impeccable songwriting and studio craft. His songs spanned the Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter style and Beatles-style melodic pop.
Follow-up album What’s Wrong With This Picture? (1976) yielded mixed reviews. But it did feature the single Lonely Boy, which reached No 7 in the Billboard Hot 100 and spent five months in the US charts.
Then, in 1978, Gold released his third album All This And Heaven Too, a record brimming with strong melodic hooks and featuring a warm, sentimental piano-and-guitar driven soft rock sound. This was the album that produced the single Never Let Her Slip Away, Gold’s biggest-ever UK hit.
Gold was inspired to write Never Let Her Slip Away one week after meeting and falling hopelessly in love with actress Laraine Newman, who was a cast member on the then-hip TV comedy sketch-show, Saturday Night Live.
“I was really in love with this woman,” he said. “I thought she was absolutely it for me. It was August, we’d been going out for at least a week at that point, and I wrote a song kind of to impress her.”
Gold and his co-producer Brock Walsh reportedly created the rhythm track for the song by banging on the walls of the studio and clapping, then using overdubs to create a loop.
“That was a fun thing,” Gold recalled in a radio interview. “Back then it wasn’t so easy to get interesting effects on things. So you would just do stuff and that made it a little more fun. In that particular case Brock and I hit our hands against a wall to make a thud, and we did that like 22 times and then we clapped 22 times and then made a loop out of it.”
There were just two musicians on the track. Gold sang lead and backing vocals and played synths and percussion, while revered session musician Ernie Watts played the saxophone.
Gold’s prominent synth parts created the main melodic pads and backing texture for the song.
While Gold and Watts were the only two musicians playing on the song, there were additional backing vocalists. Bassist Timothy B. Schmit had recently joined the Eagles when he laid down his backing vocals on Never Let Her Slip Away, but he was uncredited.
Singer-songwriter J.D. Souther, who had co-written massive hits for the Eagles such as Best Of My Love (1974) and New Kid In Town (1976), also contributed backing vocals on Never Let Her Slip Away and he is credited in the liner notes.
Another artist who is widely reported to have sung backing vocals on the song is Freddie Mercury. The Queen frontman was reportedly a good friend of Gold’s and was recording in a neighbouring studio. The story goes that Mercury allegedly agreed to sing backing vocals but remained uncredited due to contractual restrictions.
Mercury’s presence on the song has become so exhaustively reported that it has become entrenched as fact. For example, a 2011 obituary of Andrew Gold in The Guardian states that Mercury sang backing vocals on the song.
The problem with this version of events is that there is no firm evidence to back it up. Finding a primary, definitive source that proves or disproves Mercury’s presence on the song seems an impossible task. And there is seemingly not one interview with Andrew Gold himself in which he said that Mercury sang on the record. Yet the story prevails.
Coincidentally, when Gold talked in a radio interview about the recording of Never Let Her Slip Away he made a joke by singing the chorus to Queen’s 1977 anthem We Will Rock You – a song built from a similar rhythmic intro. And in that same radio interview he also noted the similarity between the intros to Never Let Her Slip Away and the Eagles’ 1979 single Heartache Tonight.
Gold stated: “I may want to point out that while we were there [in the studio] one Eagle and one Eagle good friend, J. D. Souther and Timothy Schmit, came to the session and they sang one line: ‘On a school day afternoon.” And then [a year later] I’m listening to Heartache Tonight and I’m going, ‘Hey!’”
Listening to Never Let Her Slip Away almost five decades after it was released, it’s easy to dismiss it as bland West Coast pop, with little creative merit or bite. But that is to downplay Gold’s sophisticated songcraft and his easy, assured performance.
A jaunty 4/4 soft shuffle propels the 114 bpm song forward. The first few bars consist solely of Gold and Brock’s percussion loop, constructed from their spontaneous wall-pounding and handclaps. This is swiftly followed by a fat, squelchy synth melody over rhythmic chords and then Gold’s vocal enters the mix, 22 seconds in.
“I talked to my baby on the telephone long distance/I never would’ve guessed I could miss someone so bad.”
There’s an effortless feel and looseness to his voice, with its warm, smooth tones and slight huskiness. At no point do you get the sense that this is a ‘performance’. Gold sings with restraint, a wholly relaxed performance with a slight sadness and vulnerability that underpin the sweetness of the top line melody.
At 1:06, Ernie Watts’ saxophone makes its first appearance. It sounds massive but the sax’s warm and rounded tones inject a smooth jazz feel and add emotional depth.
Watts had an impressive R&B and jazz pedigree but here he does what all great session players should do – he plays for the song. In the process, his expressive phrasing and melodicism injects colour and sensuality to the track.
Melodically, there’s a real McCartney-esque feel to the song, with its graceful melodic structures encapsulated within an infectiously catchy pop song.
In the decades that have followed the release of Never Let Her Slip Away in 1978, numerous artists have covered the song.
In 1984, Trevor Walters released a reggae version of the song, which reached No 14 in the UK Singles Chart. Billy Crawford included a soulful R&B rendition of the song on his 2009 album Groove.
But the best-known and most successful cover of the song was released in 1992 by UK band Undercover, who released a Euro-dance pop rendition of the song.
This matched the success of Gold’s original when it reached No 5 in the UK Singles Chart.
Andrew Gold would go on to have more hit singles and numerous successes after his ’70s output, but Never Let Her Slip Away remains one of his most abiding and memorable songs.
Nearly five decades on from its release, Never Let Her Slip Away sounds like a timeless balm from another age. With its lush, freewheeling West Coast vibe and impeccably conceived songcraft, it remains an alluring and deeply enduring classic.
