I've known for a long time there was a revamped version of "Oh What A Night" created years later that ended up on the radio, but never knew how or why. Here's that story:
At some point, most hits from the '70s get a brand new beat. When "December 1963" got its new groove, something very unusual happened: the song returned to the Hot 100. Released as a single in 1993, this remix took off in the clubs, but also went mainstream. Top 40 radio jumped on it, and in October 1994, the song made #14 - eighteen years after it first charted.
The man responsible for this remix is the Dutch DJ/producer Ben Liebrand, a studio savant who has remixed, mashed up or otherwise altered tracks by Phil Collins, Michael Jackson, Tina Turner, Prince and many others. "The reason to make a remix is to adapt a song to another market," he wrote in our recent email exchange. "That could mean for the dance floor as opposed to pop radio; for a different country with a different musical taste palette. Or another market due to another time period with other rhythmic and instrumentation preferences. Whether or not a song lends itself to a remix is determined in my case by a gut feeling and the necessary experience to be able to pull it of."
Liebrand got the call to remix "December 1963" in 1988, when he was commissioned by Bert van Breda of the Dutch reissue label BR Music (he also remixed the Four Seasons classic "Who Loves You" at this time). Released in Europe, the remix took off in the Netherlands, where it eventually sold 75,000 copies, enough for a gold record. In 1993, Curb Records, who issued the original version of the song, released it in America, where it made its surprising ascent.
