Wedding Bell Blues - 5th Dimension Hit

5th Dimension Hit

The 5th Dimension had already found hits with Nyro's "Stoned Soul Picnic" and "Sweet Blindness" during 1968. When recording tracks for their upcoming album The Age of Aquarius, producer Bones Howe suggested it would be amusing to record another Nyro song, this one about a woman trying to get someone named Bill to commit to marriage. As it happened, 5th Dimension singer Marilyn McCoo was engaged to another member, Billy Davis, Jr., though they had not set a wedding date. So the group recorded it, and in May 1969 the album was released. The first single ahead of the album, "Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In", was a tremendous hit, while success of the second single, "Workin' On a Groovy Thing", was much more moderate. When a disc jockey in San Diego began playing "Wedding Bell Blues" off the album, Soul City Records saw its potential, and in September 1969 it was put out as a single.

"Wedding Bell Blues" quickly soared to number one on the U.S. pop singles chart, spending three weeks there in November, 1969. It also reached the top spot on the U.S. adult contemporary chart, made one of the group's somewhat rare appearances on the U.S. R&B singles chart, was a Top Five hit in Canada, and placed in the Top 20 on the UK Singles Chart (and their only hit there save for the earlier "Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In").

In 1969 television appearances, McCoo would explicitly sing parts of the song to Davis; Davis would respond with quizzical looks. The rest of The 5th Dimension's early hits featured more unison singing than this, and McCoo's prominent vocal and stage role on "Wedding Bell Blues" may have led to her being more featured in the group's early 1970s productions.