I Saw Her Again, and the real story behind that famous 'mistake'

I Saw Her Again is one of the great doormat songs of pop music; that is, a tune about how a cad knows he's stringing along a woman, but does it anyway. Even though it's so sunny, its lyrics are acidic: "And it makes me feel so good to know/ she'll never leave me." It's even creepier knowing that the authors are the Papas, John Phillips and Denny Doherty, writing together about Doherty's affair with Mama Michelle Phillips, who was married to John Phillips. 

The song is also well-known for a "mistake" that has been discussed, I would imagine, since it came out: namely how Denny Doherty appears to have a false start on the third chorus. "I saw her ... I saw her again last night," he sings. 

But it turns out the error is not Doherty coming in too early, but an error in the editing process. 

Here's engineer Bones Howe, telling the tale from the board, in a documentary about the Wrecking Crew, the legendary L.A. musicians who played on countless recordings in the Sixties. 

 

Here's the tune itself ... the song of the day here on Dot Dot Dot. 

 

Comments

[Chuckles]

An editing error? Mmmm... not really, nothing that simple. This was a tracking session, not an editing session. After hearing Howe's explanation, it's evident that what happened was a "punch-in" error. A "punch-in" is not a simple edit of an existing recording, but the insertion of a live performance into a limited (hopefully unused) portion of an existing track that already carries some part of the whole performance. Punching-in involves switching an individual track from "playback' to "record" mode at a certain time during a playback so that new material is added to the mix. Hopefully, the engineer "punches-out" (returns the track to playback mode) before the tape reaches anything on the track that is supposed to be kept.

From his account, Howe punched in early, but the singer took the cue and began to sing early as well, otherwise there would have been nothing going onto the track at that point. Bottom line: It took simultaneous mistakes by two different people to make this happen. Very interesting!

[John Hyland]

This would help to explain why it was always said that Denny Doherty came in too early. He apparently did, but so, apparently, did Bones Howe.

[eric]

of course u would know better than the engineer that was there 🙄