MCA 390
Producer: Marvin Hamlisch
Track listing: Solace / The Entertainer / Easy Winners / Hooker’s Hooker / Luther / Pine Apple Rag / Gladiolus Rag / The Entertainer / The Glove / Little Girl / Pineapple Rag / Merry-Go-Round Music / Solace / The Entertainer / Rag Time Dancer
May 4, 1974
5 weeks
When ragtime pianist Scott Joplin wrote “The Entertainer” in 1902, The Billboard, as it was called back then, had yet to include charts of the hottest hits of the day. Seventy-two years later, Joplin and “The Entertainer” finally got their due, thanks to pianist/composer Marvin Hamlisch and a film starring Robert Redford and Paul Newman as a pair of con men.
Hamlisch became involved in The Sting at the request of director George Roy Hill. The pair had been friends for years, dating back to Hill’s days as a director of Broadway plays for which Hamlisch would occasionally serve as a rehearsal pianist. But a lot had changed for Hamlisch since those days of warming up the piano stool. On February 2, 1974, Barbra Streisand scored her first Number One single with “The Way We Were,” a song co-written by Hamlisch, and Alan and Marilyn Bergman. The song would be featured as the title track Streisand’s second Number One album, and would garner the Bergmans and Hamlisch a Grammy for song of the year and an Oscar for best song in a motion picture.
Writing for Streisand, however, was a lot different than working on The Sting. For one thing, Hamlisch wasn’t a particularly big fan of Joplin’s music. Yet Hamlisch had to choose which Joplin pieces would work the best in the context of the film. “The way George cut the film was very musical,” Hamlisch says. “But Joplin’s music wasn’t always a perfect fit, so I had to do things to make it fit.”
Initially, a soundtrack album wasn’t planned. “It was an afterthought,” Hamlisch admits. “I don’t think anyone realized that it would be a big hit.” Since the music was recorded with a relatively small band of 10 or 11 players, or album could be recorded inexpensively, even if it wasn’t a big seller.
While performing the music for the film, Hamlisch grew to have a greater appreciation for Joplin’s music. “We really used the creme de la creme of Scott Joplin,” Hamlisch says. Included on the album were three different takes of “The Entertainer.” To fill in the places in the film where Joplin’s music didn’t work, Hamlisch wrote originals such as “Luther” and “The Glove.” Says Hamlisch, “Anything I wrote was written in a very Scott Joplin manner, and hopefully no one could tell my originals from his music.”
It was the success of the film, which went on to win an Oscar for best picture, and the single, “The Entertainer,” that propelled The Sting to Number One in its 15th week on the chart, making it the first instrumental album to hit the summit since the similarly left-field soundtrack album “Dueling Banjos” from the Original Soundtrack Deliverance. “The Entertainer,” like “Dueling Banjos,” did not hit the top of the Hot 100 — it stalled at number three — but the fact that it was a hit at all was a shock to Hamlisch.
“We were totally surprised when ‘The Entertainer’ became a hit single,” he says. “We had no idea that in the midst of all the rock ‘n’ roll that was dominating the charts, we could have a hit with some Scott Joplin ragtime.”
THE TOP FIVE
Week of May 4, 1974
1. The Sting, Soundtrack
2. Chicago VII, Chicago
3. Greatest Hits, John Denver
4. Buddah & the Chocolate Box, Cat Stevens
5. Shinin’ On, Grand Funk