"Quarter to Three" is a popular song, adapted and expanded from "A Night with Daddy 'G' - Part 1" (Legrand LEG 1004), an instrumental by the Church Street Five, which was written by Gene Barge, Frank Guida and Joseph Royster, and sung by Gary U.S. Bonds. The song became a number-one hit on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States on June 26, 1961, and remained there for two weeks.
The 45rpm single of "A Night with Daddy 'G'" identifies the composers by their last names only – Barge, Guida, Royster – and identifies the music publisher as Pepe Music (BMI). The Legrand Records 45 release of the vocal "Quarter to Three" version adds "Anderson" to the author credits, since that was Bonds' birthname and he supplied the vocal arrangement.
The single was recorded with very rough sound quality (compared to other records at the time). Producer Frank Guida has been quoted on subsequent CD reissues that his production sound was exactly what he wanted it to sound like. Noted British producer and columnist Jack Good felt compelled to devote his entire Disc magazine column to praising the "fuzzy, muzzy, and distorted" sound of the U.S. Bonds hit release. The article was subtitled "This record could never have been made in Britain".
The UK release on Top Rank International JAR 575 reached number 11 in the UK chart on September 2, 1961. The record's B-side is "Time Ole Story" (Beckner).
The song was sung regularly by Bruce Springsteen as an encore before he was famous and remained in his repertoire afterward, appearing on the Hammersmith Odeon London '75 concert document and, as performed in 1979, the No Nukes film.
"Quarter to Three" appears on The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll list.
Famous quotes containing the word quarter:
“I also heard the whooping of the ice in the pond, my great bed-fellow in that part of Concord, as if it were restless in its bed and would fain turn over, were troubled with flatulency and bad dreams; or I was waked by the cracking of the ground by the frost, as if some one had driven a team against my door, and in the morning would find a crack in the earth a quarter of a mile long and a third of an inch wide.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)