Breaking Up Is Hard To Do (Slow)

For the DJ edit, I presume it starts right away with the piano. Is this edit also sped up, or an additional edit? The reason I'm asking, on the Definitive Collection version, if you slice off the intro from the original 1962 version, it runs 2:59, not 2:53 as indicated in the database.

I sped the slow part up, but just doesn't sound right. So, is there another edit to get it to run 2:53?

About 10 years ago, a friend of mine asked me for a copy of this version of the song. I could not locate an mp3 of one online so for $3 on ebay ($1.50 for the record and $1.50 for shipping), i had purchased the promo 45 and had the seller send it directly to my friend, i never saw or held the disc in my hands. All I remember from the copy of each side that my friend sent me was that one contained the intro from the original version before the song came on, and one contained it without the intro to the original version, that both sides were stereo except that the intro to the old version was in mono.

My question is, which side did radio stations play? Having not been born until 1985 I wasn't even around to hear this hit the charts the second time around, but I very much prefered the version without the original intro to the song at the beginning, and personally feel it could've been a bigger hit had they not released it with the original intro tacked to the beginning.

Edited by TomDiehl1

Tom, all of the Top 40 stations in my area played the short version, which skipped the "1962 version intro". I think I may have heard Casey Kasem play the full version on AT40 a time or two in 1976, but I'm fairly certain that most Top 40's across the country also opted for the "piano intro" version.

I do remember WLS in Chicago also using the edit. As Hykker (sorry, don't know your real name) correctly points out, the 1962 intro certainly does stick out like a sore thumb.

I grew up in Seattle listing to KJR, their main top 40 station, and I don't RECALL ever hearing the 1962 intro at the time. I only remember it starting out cold with, "You tell me that you're leaving."

And I seem to remember being surprised sometime in the '80s or 90's when I heard the '62 intro on an oldies station, and wondering if the station had done its own edit.