Robbed hit of the week 9/27/21 - Baz Luhrmann's "Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)"...

 

 

"Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen) - The Speech Song" - Baz Luhrmann

from the album Something For Everybody (1998)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #45 

This week's "robbed hit" is credited to film director and jack-of-all-trades Baz Luhrmann. Born as Mark Luhrmann in Australia and nicknamed for his red hair, Baz became well known internationally in 1992 with his first directed film Strictly Ballroom. Four years later, Luhrmann filmed a reinterpretation of the Shakespeare classic Romeo + Juliet starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes which broke through big in America. Not only was the film a success, but the soundtrack was massive, going to #2 on the Billboard 200 sales chart in the weekly music industry trade bible, and scored a pair of radio hits with "#1 Crush" from Garbage and the top ten smash "Lovefool" from the Cardigans. In 1998, Luhrmann was compiling a music album under his own House of Iona label distributed by RCA Records. That set, Something For Everybody, contained alternate versions of songs from Romeo + Juliet. One of those songs, a remake of Rozalla's "Everybody's Free (To Feel Good)" done with singer/actor Quentin Tarver, The remake was spliced with a spoken word reading of a speech by Mary Schmich, which contained platitudes and advice to the younger generation. However, someone started the lie that it was a graduation speech from Kurt Vonnegut, which wasn't true. Nevertheless, that "fake news" of the pre-internet era helped hype up the newspaper article, which grabbed the attention of Luhrmann. Originally an over seven-minute album cut of the speech and Tarver's chorus, it was pared down to five to send to radio (which mostly eliminated the sung parts). The effect was the "Desiderata" of this generation, as kids rushed to get the song for their own graduation, and radio played the edited track...

 

 Luhrmann's "Sunscreen" missed the American pop top-40 by a handful of notches in April of 1999. The song was a big success at "easy listening" radio, rising to #10 on Billboard's Adult Top-40 radio chart, and #27 on their Adult Contemporary format list. Internationally, the single topped the charts in the UK and Ireland, and reached the top-40 in Norway (#8), Canada (#11), Denmark (#13), Sweden (#15), the Netherlands (#26), Belgium (#31F), and Switzerland (#36). The Something For Everybody album, released in March of 1998 originally, went to #24 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, going on to move over a half million copies.

Although this was Baz's last time on either the singles or albums charts as an "artist", his imprint on the music world was definitely not done. His third movie in his "Red Curtain Trilogy" from 2001, Moulin Rouge, was another massive success, and also produced another entry to this series in the future. That soundtrack was nominated for Best Compilation Soundtrack for Visual Media for the 2002 Grammys, with the award going to the equally big bluegrass of O Brother Where Art Thou. In 2013, Luhrmann redid another piece of classic work, F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, starring DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan. Its accompanying soundtrack was again nominated for a compilation Grammy, losing to the music industry documentary Sound City: Real To Reel helmed by the Foo Fighters' Dave Grohl. The Gatsby set will also make its way to this series.

(6/10)

(Click below to see the rest of the post)

And here's the extended seven minute album version of the track...