Background
Sid Wayne would recall the song's inception: "I was in the habit of going from my home on Long Island every day to Brill Building, on Tin Pan Alley meet with different songwriters there. We'd eat at Jack Dempsey's or The Turf Restaurant and then we'd go up to one of the publishers' offices and work in the piano room. We'd sit around saying to each other, 'What do you want to write today? A hit or a standard?'" At 11 a.m. on a Friday in June 1959 Wayne thus met up with Sherman Edwards: "he said, 'What do you want to write?' 'I'd like to write a song called See You in September,"' I said. We talked it back and forth and I think I may have contributed part of the opening music, but with Sherman it didn't matter, because he could throw me back half the lyric — that's how he worked. I think probably by two in the afternoon we got the song finished. It needed to be written; it was like boiling inside of us."
By 4:30 p.m. that day Wayne and Edwards had reworked their composition, simplifying it so as to appeal to the teen demographic, and proceeded to make the rounds of publishers to pitch the song which, after one rejection, met with an enthusiastic reception from Jack Gold, owner of the local Paris label, who by 8 p.m. had telephoned the Tempos1 in their hometown of Pittsburgh. The group had been flown into New York City by the next day: Saturday. Sid Wayne — "By Monday the record was cut, test pressings were Thursday, and by Friday the song was played on WNEW in New York. The thing took off like wildfire....Five hundred dollars to split between the two of us ...was a damn good week's pay in 1961."
In fact the Tempos' "See You in September" failed to become a hit in the New York City area and despite breaking in San Francisco in June 1959, the single did not reach the national charts until that July. Despite a subsequent swift ascent of the Billboard Hot 100, the single's momentum fell sharply at the end of August 1959 with a resultant #23 peak. Although overshadowed by the Happenings' #3 remake, the Tempos' version of "See You in September" did gain considerable currency in 1973 by virtue of its inclusion on the American Graffiti soundtrack.
- 1Mike Lazo (top tenor), Jim Drake, Tom Monito, Gene Schachter
Read more about this topic: See You In September
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