Lee Ritenour sets the record straight on fixing George Benson’s Give Me the Night solo

Session guitar legend Lee Ritenour has recounted how he ended up re-recording part of George Benson's guitar solo on Give Me the Night in an after-hours session with producer Quincy Jones. Now, in a new interview, Ritenour has set the record straight.

“It was like midnight or something, and I had finished up whatever I'd been doing during the day on sessions,” Ritenour told Vertex Effects owners and CEO Mason Marangella.

“I had just turned out the lights and the phone rang, and I said, ‘Who's calling at this hour?’ and Quincy said, ‘Ritenour, this is Q. You gotta get down here right now.’ ‘Down where?’ I said. ‘To Kunden [the studios],’ he said. ‘We gotta fix George's solo.’”

As Ritenour tells it, the second engineer had accidentally recorded over the last few bars of Benson's solo and Benson had already flown to his place in Hawaii. “They said they had to mix the song that night or day. And there's no way they could ask George to come back.” Jones told him that he had to “punch in George's stuff.”

“So I went down there. And they had a cassette of the solo that they had run off for George. And so they played it a few times for me. I was pretty familiar with what we were doing with George's rig because I had basically set it up, you know, for George to have that sound.”

Ritenour revealed they just used a little bit of delay, a “little bit of chorusing and obviously reverbs that they were doing through the board. So you know, it was just adding a few subtle effects. Nothing big in today's world.”

Ritenour punched in someplace that made sense, and ended up recording the last “two or three bars” of the solo. The solo turned out “pretty good.”

However, Jones was clear with Ritenour. He never wanted Benson to know what had happened. “And I said, ‘Okay, well okay, I won't say a thing.’” Ritenour also had to double Benson's scatting part at three in the morning. Fortunately, the engineer hadn't deleted that part.

The single ended up being Benson's first single to hit number one on the US Billboard Soul Singles chart and peaked at number four on the US Billboard Hot 100.

A decade later, the story came full circle. “I was pretty close with George,” Ritenour says. “We were on a lot of tours together. We did jazz festivals, co-billing, or I was opening, he was closing.

“So we're walking in the airport one day together, and I said, ‘George, did I ever tell you the story of Give me the night and what happened to your guitar solo?’ He said ‘No, brother, tell me.’ And so I told him what happened when he was in Hawaii, and that Quincy swore me to secrecy. And then George burst out laughing.

“He said, ‘Oh man, now I gotta pull up that track and see if I can tell if it's you.’ And he said, ‘I never knew it wasn't me. You know, you did a good job. And it made a lot of money. So I'm happy.’”