Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In (The Flesh Failures)

Label

Soul City Records

Genre

Stage & Screen

Composer(s)

Galt MacDermot;James Rado;Gerome Ragni

Entered Chart

Mar 8, 1969

Peak Date

Apr 12, 1969

Released

March 1969

Recorded

1968

Catalog #

Soul City 772

B-Side

Don'tcha Hear Me Callin' To Ya

This was written for the rock opera Hair, where it became an anthem for young people who grew their hair out and protested the US government. In the book By the Time We Got to Woodstock: The Great Rock 'n' Roll Revolution of 1969, Bruce Pollock writes: Among the many people calling the publisher in 1968 for a lock of Hair's mystique was the L.A. producer Bones Howe, who'd been working with the 5th Dimension since engineering "Up-Up and Away" for their first album in 1967. He'd produced hits for the Turtles ("It Ain't Me Babe") and the Association ("Windy"); he'd been a personal guest of Lou Adler at the Monterey Pop Festival where he was perhaps the only West Coast guy in attendance to appreciate Laura Nyro's gruesome performance. Later he delivered Laura's "Stoned Soul Picnic" to the 5th Dimension, for which it was their biggest R&B hit. He was shuttling back and forth between his home in L.A. and the studio in New York working on the vocals for the Stoned Soul Picnic album when the group told him they wanted to do "Aquarius." "The thing that bothered me about it was that there'd been other releases of 'Aquarius,'" said Bones, "and none had done anything, so I was concerned about what we would do that would be any different. I went to see the show and there's a place where they do "The Flesh Failures" and at the end of the song is just a three bar repeated thing of 'Let the sunshine in' where Ragni was swinging across the stage on a chandelier and there was all kinds of craziness going on. That really stayed with me and I came out of the theater saying, I wonder if I could stick that on the end of 'Aquarius' and make that the ending. So I went back to the hotel and I called the publisher. I mean you don't mess with the music from a Broadway show. I started my professional career in 1956 and I knew a lot about what you can and what you can't do with songs. I said, look the 5th Dimension would like to record 'Aquarius,' but I'd like to make it a medley and I'd like to use the last three bars of 'The Flesh Failures' and I don't want to do it without permission. So he said okay, you can go ahead and do it." The next problem was to go ahead and do it. "The record was plotted in the fall of '68 and more or less finished in January of '69," Bones said. "I had to do a lot of work with my vocal arranger, Bob Alsivar. Because they couldn't sing both songs in the same key, we had to do a modulation; we figured out how I was going to do the instrumental arrangement so we could change keys. The record itself is the result of a conglomeration of things. I began as a jazz musician and I know the standard repertoire pretty well. I kept thinking about a song called 'Lost in the Stars' and trying to find something to give you that kind of impression. I described it to Bill Holman and he wrote that beautiful woodwinds and strings part that's in the intro. We did the track in L.A. and the vocals in Las Vegas where the 5th Dimension were opening for Frank Sinatra. We were working in that studio in Las Vegas where you used to have to stop when the train went by. Once when we were doing practice runs while the train passed Billy started that riff at the end 'oh let the sunshine…' so I said, wait, let me put that on a separate track at the end. There were a lot of happy accidents making the record." That the Age of Aquarius (harmony, understanding, sympathy, trust, mystic crystals, revelations) announced to mainstream America by the song had already irrevocably given way to Richard Nixon's vision of law and order troubled Bones Howe not in the least. "I was in my thirties then; I was never part of that culture," he said. "But I made records they liked. I spent my life in the studio. Sometimes I went to the Trip and the Crescendo and all of those places on Sunset Strip because I worked with so many of those people. I was the engineer on 'Eve of Destruction' when the Mamas and Papas came to sing backup vocals. I was there the first night they were there and did their first three albums." The 5th Dimension was a highly popular ensemble group during the late '60s and early '70s. It originally consisted of Billy Davis, Jr., Marilyn McCoo, Lamonte McLemore, and Ron Townson, who were quickly joined by Florence LaRue. They at first called themselves the Versatiles, and owed their rise to Motown Records and Johnny Rivers, who had just started his own record company. This song turned out to be their biggest hit, staying at #1 for six weeks. The 5th Dimension performed several more hits over the years until 1975, when Davis and McCoo got married and left the group. The original group reunited in 1990 for a tour, capitalizing on the growing nostalgia for the music of its era. >> A lost wallet led to the 5th Dimension recording "Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In." After lead singer Billy Davis Jr. left his wallet in a New York City cab, a member of Hair's production team found it. He invited the singers to the Broadway show, inspiring them to record "Aquarius"; producer Bones Howe then merged the tune with the repeated words "let the sunshine in" from another Hair song "The Flesh Failures." The Age of Aquarius is when the sun is in the constellation Aquarius during the springtime. The next time that this will happen is 2448. We are currently in the age of Pisces. >> This song won the Grammy Award for Record of the Year in 1970. It was the second time the group won the Record of the Year, two years previously they won the award for "Up-Up and Away." Report this ad Fittingly, this song made it to Woodstock, but not by The 5th Dimension, which didn't play the festival. Sweetwater, which was the second act to take the stage, performed it during their set. Many who heard this song assumed The 5th Dimension were a white group, and they took some heat for that in the Black community. That's why it was so uplifting when they performed "Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In" at the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival to a predominantly Black crowd of about 50,000. This performance can be seen in the 2021 documentary Summer Of Soul with commentary from Billy Davis and Marilyn McCoo. "That's one of the reasons why performing in Harlem was so important to us," said McCoo. "We wanted our people to know what we were about, and we were hoping they would receive us. We were so happy to be there." This appeared in the movie Forrest Gump, and has a big part in the movie The 40 Year Old Virgin, where at the end of the movie the cast performs the song in Hippie costumes to celebrate the de-flowering of the virgin. >> In the movie Apollo 13, there are some scenes where the astronauts are filming live feeds from space from inside the spaceship for viewing on television (the live feeds were commonly featured on network TV in the early days of space flight). In the movie, the astronauts play Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit In The Sky" as the background music and theme song for the TV appearances. Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell has since stated that the real song used as the "Theme Song" was "Aquarius," as Aquarius was the name of the Lunar Landing Module that ultimately served as the crew's lifeboat when the mission went awry. >> Ex-Soul Coughing frontman Mike Doughty used the "Let the sunshine in" refrain as the chorus for "Fort Hood," a song from his 2008 album Golden Delicious. >> This was used on both Sesame Street and The Muppet Show. Sesame Street turned it into "Telly's Aquarium" in 1998, where it's sung by captive fish. The Muppets used it to open season 3 Episode 316 in 1978 with a group of Muppets whose hair grows as they sing it.

When the moon is in the Seventh House
And Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars

This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius
Age of Aquarius
Aquarius
Aquarius

Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revelation
And the mind's true liberation, Aquarius
Aquarius

When the moon (when the moon) is in the Seventh House
And Jupiter (Jupiter) aligns with Mars
Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars

This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius
Age of Aquarius
Aquarius
Aquarius
Aquarius
Aquarius

Let the sunshine, let the sun shine in
The sun shine in
Let the sunshine, let the sun shine in
The sun shine in
Let the sunshine, let the sun shine in (oh, let it shine)
(Come on) the sun shine in (now everybody just sing along)
Let the sunshine (and let the sun shine on in), let the sun shine in
(Open up your heart) the sun shine in (and let it shine on you)
(And when you lonely) let the sunshine (hey, let it shine), let the sun shine in
(You gotta open up your heart) the sun shine in (and let it shine on in)
(And when you feel like you been mistreated)
Let the sunshine, let the sun shine in (and your friends turn their backs upon ya)
(Just open up your heart) the sun shine in (let it shine on in)
(You got to feel it) let the sunshine (you got to feel it), let the sun shine in
(Oh, open up your heart) the sun shine in (and let it shine on in)
(Now, let me tell you one thing)
Let the sunshine, let the sun shine in (I want you to sing along with the 5th dimension)
(Hey, and open up your heart) the sun shine in (oh c'mon)
Let the sunshine (and let it shine), let the sun shine in
(Glory day) the sun shine in
(Hey, you got to feel it) let the sunshine (you got to feel it), let the sun shine in
(When you open up your heart) the sun shine in (you got to let the sun come on in)
(Now I say, in the morning) let the sunshine, (late in the evening), let the sun shine in
(Open up your heart) the sun shine in
(Hey, when you're feeling low) let the sunshine