You may love it, you may hate it, but you've definitely heard it: The Piña Colada Song is one of the most recognizable and enduring hits of the last fifty years – the only song ever to hit No. 1 in America in two different decades.

But it almost sank without trace.

The artist behind it is Rupert Holmes, who is primarily known to many for penning this one tune, but he has led an interesting and varied life. While he currently lives in New York, Holmes was born in Cheshire in 1947 as David Goldstein – a US Army brat, with an American father and an English mother, the wonderfully named Gwendolen.

His was a very musical upbringing, and when the family were uprooted and moved to Nanuet, New York in the 1950s, he ended up attending the prestigious Manhattan School of Music and majored in the clarinet, although he didn't follow his brother into the world of opera and "serious" music.

Instead, he became a session musician and did side-gigs like writing jingles for shampoo commercials. Holmes was delighted to be working in the music business at any level, but it also enabled him to support himself while working on his own music. In the early 1970s, he had a couple of minor hits under his own name, while also wrote songs for big stars like Dolly Parton, the Drifters, Gene Pitney, and the Partridge Family.

He broke out himself in 1974 with the album Widescreen which really nailed down his soon-to-be-signature style of witty but romantic story songs. And when Barbara Streisand asked to cover some of the songs from that album for her movie A Star Is Born, he'd hit the big time.

It was the release of his fifth solo album – and particularly the single Escape (The Piña Colada Song) – which made him truly famous. At least among those who didn't mistake the singer for Barry Manilow, a surprisingly persistent error over time.

While that case of mistaken identity didn't dampen the song's initial reception, another form did. It was originally released as Escape – with no mention of those famous piña coladas in the song title.

People would call up radio stations and ask for the song about piña coladas, only to be met with bafflement. And when they went to their local record store to order The Piña Colada Song, they were told the store didn't have it. They did, of course, but it was titled something else: Escape.

Word-of-mouth was hitting an impenetrable wall and sales remained tepid throughout October 1979. The record label begged Rupert Holmes to change the title to The Piña Colada Song, but he resisted the pressure. The theme of escape is central to the whole meaning of the song, he clearly felt, which is all about the protagonist wanted to escape his boring life, and the prospective love interest taking out a personal ad to escape hers.

Rupert Holmes dug his heels in and refused to change the title… right up until December of that year when he finally agreed to a compromise and renamed the song Escape (The Piña Colada Song).

It went straight to No. 1.

Marketing Lesson #1: a title is part of the commercial packaging – ignore your Inner Artist when it comes to business decisions.

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