8 Famous Songs That Almost Never Got Recorded

By 1970, Marvin Gaye wanted to sing about the things that were actually on his mind — the war, the streets, what he was seeing on the evening news. Motown founder Berry Gordy, who liked his hits clean and uncontroversial, heard the finished recording and reportedly called it the worst thing he’d ever heard in his life. The label simply refused to put it out.

So Gaye dug in and effectively went on strike, telling Motown he wouldn’t record anything else until they released it. A couple of executives finally pressed the single quietly, almost behind Gordy’s back. It came out in January 1971, sold a hundred thousand copies in its first week, and became one of the most beloved records Motown ever made. You can still feel the relief in it, like a man who finally got to say what he meant.

Queen walked into EMI with a six-minute song that had an opera section in the middle and no real chorus to speak of, and asked the label to release it as a single. The executives balked — radio would never touch something that long, they said, and they wanted it cut down. Freddie Mercury and the band flatly refused to carve it up.

Their way around the wall was a friend named Kenny Everett, a DJ they slipped a copy to with strict instructions not to play it. He played it fourteen times in a single weekend. By Monday the phones were ringing off the hook and record shops were swamped with people asking for a song that technically wasn’t even out yet. EMI gave in, released it whole, and it sat at number one in Britain for nine weeks.

Keith Richards woke in the middle of the night with that famous riff in his head, mumbled it into a cassette recorder, and went back to sleep. In the morning he thought it was a throwaway — a decent album filler at best. The fuzzy guitar everyone now hums wasn’t even meant to stay; Richards pictured a horn section playing that part and treated the fuzz tone as a rough sketch.

He didn’t think it should be a single at all, and neither did Mick Jagger. When the band put it to a vote, the other Stones and their manager outvoted the pair of them. That “placeholder” riff went on to become one of the most recognizable sounds in rock, and the Stones’ first number one in America.

Gloria Gaynor knew what she had. When she recorded “I Will Survive,” she pushed for it to be the A-side of her single — the one that gets promoted, the one radio plays. The label said no and buried it on the B-side of a song called “Substitute,” the throwaway flip nobody was supposed to notice.

Nightclub DJs noticed anyway. The record found its way to a Studio 54 spinner who loved it, copies got passed around the discos, and dancers kept asking for the “wrong” side. The label finally flipped the single, and that supposed afterthought went to number one in early 1979 and became an anthem people still shout along to at weddings.

Brian Wilson chased “Good Vibrations” for the better part of seven months, piecing it together in fragments across several Hollywood studios and burning through stacks of tape. He called it his “pocket symphony,” but there were long stretches where it seemed like it might never come together at all, and the cost and the obsession worried the people around him.

Even once he’d finished it, Capitol Records didn’t want to release it as a single — at around three and a half minutes they thought it was too long and too strange. Wilson pleaded with them. When it shot to number one, he felt, understandably, a little vindicated.

At six and a half minutes, Dylan’s raw, sprawling single was more than twice the length of a typical radio hit, and it didn’t sound like anything Columbia Records was used to selling. The marketing people who decided what became a single wanted it cut in half. Dylan said no, and the song was quietly filed as “unassigned” — shelved before it ever had a chance.

A young release coordinator at the label couldn’t let it die. He grabbed a discarded acetate and slipped it to a DJ at a New York club, where the crowd danced through all six minutes without blinking. The demand that followed forced Columbia’s hand. It came out in July 1965, at full length, and is now routinely called one of the greatest songs ever recorded.

Otis Redding recorded this quiet, wistful song in the late fall of 1967, and even he thought it wasn’t quite done. Where the famous whistling now sits, he’d meant to put words — he either forgot the lines or hadn’t written them yet, so he whistled as a placeholder and planned to come back. Some at Stax worried the gentle, almost pop feel was wrong for him.

He never got the chance to finish it. Just three days after that session, Redding died in a plane crash. His guitarist and co-writer Steve Cropper completed the track, adding the lapping waves and crying gulls, and the placeholder whistle stayed. Released in early 1968, it became the first posthumous number one in American history.

The song itself was a Dolly Parton original, but the version you hear in your head — the one that opens with Whitney Houston singing completely alone, no instruments at all — almost didn’t happen that way. It was Kevin Costner, her co-star in The Bodyguard, who steered her toward the song in the first place and insisted that first verse be sung a cappella.

The record company wasn’t sold on it. A single that opens with naked, unaccompanied vocals felt like a risk, and there was pressure to soften that stark beginning. Houston and Costner held firm. That hushed, exposed opening — the one that makes a whole room go quiet — became one of the most famous few seconds in pop, and the song spent fourteen weeks at number one.