In 1978, CBS records were flying high and someone had the bright idea of pairing two label mates together for a massive one off duet which got to number three in the UK and number one in the States – that intentional duet was Too Much Too Little Too Late by Johnny Mathis and Deniece Williams. Later the same year a similar thing happened which was very unintentional in the way of You Don’t Bring Me Flowers by CBS label mates Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond. Rumours have floated around for years that the couple never actually sang together in the studio and then added how it came to be, all thanks to an American DJ. Well some of that was true and some wasn’t. Let’s debunk all the myths and rumours right now.
The song started life as a 45 second snippet that was intended for a TV show, but it never got used. The song’s writing credits are Neil Diamond, Alan Bergman and Marilyn Bergman. The Bergman’s were a husband and wife couple who had written songs for Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand and Gladys Knight. They had also written The Windmills Of Your Mind which was the theme to the Thomas Crown Affair.
Why was it never used? At an ASCAP songwriters’ workshop a few years ago, Marilyn began the story, “Neil Diamond was at a dinner party with Norman Lear, the television producer, and he asked if Norman had any great television series coming up, because he’d like to write the theme song. Norman said, ‘Yes, I’ve got a show that we’re getting ready to do a pilot on called All That Glitters, and I don’t have main title for it.’ Neil offered to write it, and Norman asked that he write it with us. So we wrote this 45-second (because that’s all the time we had for a theme) song called You Don’t Bring Me Flowers. The show was about the reversal of roles, a woman-dominated society was the premise of the show. Now, between the time that the song was written and the pilot was filmed, the premise of the show changed, and the song didn’t fit anymore. So we scrapped it, and about six or eight months later we ran into Neil, and he said that he was doing the song on the road and that everybody liked it. We said, ‘It’s 45 seconds long!’ He said, ‘Well, I do a little instrumental part, then I come back,’ and we decided to finish the song, and he recorded it.”
Neil explained in a Mojo interview what happened with the TV show, “I ran into a problem with Norman who said, ‘I like the song a lot but I have to own the copyright if I’m to use it in my show’ and I said no. So I put it on my next album, I’m Glad You’re Here With Me Tonight as a solo and Barbra really liked it and recorded it herself on her next album, Songbird, in the same key that I did and using the same arranger, so it was very similar. Basically, he extended the song which tells the story of a married couple who had fallen into the same old dull routine – to quote from a song that tells the same story, Rupert Holmes’ Escape (The Pina Colada Song), and were just going through the motions and slowly drifting apart. Neil had released An American Popular Song as a single and Barbra had released Love Breakdown but neither song charted in the UK. There were no plans at the time for any other tracks to be released as singles.
How did the duet come about? I mentioned earlier of rumours of an American radio DJ getting involved who, effectively, did a mash up of those versions. That person was Gary Guthrie and the story is partly true, so, in an interview relayed to Songfacts, here’s what Gary said, “There’s some misinformation about how Barbra and Neil came about. For example, most accounts have me listed as a DJ even though I was rarely on the air, I was a producer at WAKY-AM in Louisville, Kentucky and the short story is, Becky, my wife, and I were going through a very amiable divorce. The previous Fall, we had heard Neil’s version at a friend’s house and I noticed how it made her cry. Fast forward to Spring ’78 and Barbra’s (another of Becky’s favourites) new album came out and there it was again. There was just something that clicked in my head and I decided to do it for her. Since we weren’t really sleeping in the same bed at that time, my nights were open and I’d hang out at the station and play with the mix. I then took it in to Bill Purdom or whoever and have them play while I went out to my car and listened to how it sounded. There was a lot of back and forth with that late at night before I ever unleashed it on the daytime public. Once I did, however, all hell broke loose. Requests, record store calls, you name it. I had two friends who had an in at Columbia – one who had been their Nashville VP and one who was their local guy in Miami and I asked both to help me get this up the ladder. They did their job well.”
But that was not the released version. In 2008, I was working freelance for Capital Gold and we had Neil Diamond coming in for an interview to promote his then-latest album Home Before Dark and I was determined to clarify whether he and Barbra actually recorded the song together in a studio or was the mashed version the hit, he told me, “We definitely did record it together. We sat opposite each other in a studio in Hollywood, she was a delight.” Was it planned then? In Neil’s interview with Mojo, he said, “Barbra and I somehow received some copies of these mixes the DJ’s had made and we looked at each other and a light bulb appeared in a bubble above our head and we said, ‘Hey, let’s go in and do it for real.'” The duet version appeared on Neil’s next album which was also called You Don’t Bring Me Flowers.
In 1980, after keeping it secret for a while, word got out to TV viewers in Chicago that at the Grammy Awards ceremony, Barbra and Neil were going to sing the song, as a duet, live. One person who witnessed the event said, “When watching it you get the true emotion of the song and a clear sense that through the delivery you are experiencing musical theatre.
Neil has always including the song in his live shows and usually with a different member of his band. I’ve seen Neil Diamond four times and each time the song has been a showstopper, but, no disrespect to any of his duetting partner, you really need Barbra there.