Just a dude, his drum, and a rainbow.
It’s the call you never, ever want to get at 3 AM: “I just had an awesome idea for a ukulele cover of an immortal classic song.”
And yet, that’s exactly what happened on a dark, warm Hawaiian morning in the year of our Lord 1988.
Israel Kamakawiwoʻole got a burst of inspiration in the heat of the night, called up the studio, and was told he had a quarter hour to show up or the recording engineer was going home for some shut-eye.
Israel showed up, ukulele in hand. He was a big guy, and there weren’t any decent seats for him in the studio. The recording engineer had the security guy drag in a large metal chair for him. The engineer turned on the recording equipment and Israel sang his whole acoustic cover of “Somewhere over the Rainbow”, accompanying himself on his little ukulele. He came back a year later and recorded the same cover as a mashup with “What a Wonderful World” just because he could. Israel released that version on his album Facing Future five years later in 1993 and it…did okay. In the next few years it became the best-selling Hawaiian album ever, but it didn’t make too much of a stir outside Hawaii.
Then Israel gave up and nobody ever heard his song
Just kidding. Israel kept singing and recording. And the world kept turning.
About a decade later, the song started appearing in TV shows and movies as background music, then Israel (posthumously) released a special cut version that only featured the “Over the Rainbow” cover. And that song exploded on the charts and in the public consciousness.
The song started to chart internationally, and the original Facing Future album reached platinum status the next year, more than a decade after its release. Israel’s wild idea for a double ukulele cover/mashup turned out to be genius. You know you want to listen to the thing right this moment, so go ahead:
5 minutes are too short sometimes
What can Mr. Kamakawiwoʻole teach you today?
There are two lessons to learn here. It’s really hard to know what is ultimately going to work. Multiple companies tried some version of the PDA (personal digital assistant) in the 90s, and none of them really took off till a decade later. Ideas that seemed terrible (compact cars…in America?) at the time worked great. Some ideas that seemed like obvious winners turned out not to be so great. The Segway (remember that?) was supposed to revolutionize pedestrian travel. It ended up revolutionizing how theme park, airport, and shopping mall security got from A to B for about 20 years, and now they’re back to using golf carts and scooters like they used to.
Swing and a miss. Sometimes the early bird gets the burn.
Did your last brilliant business idea not turn out so hot? It’s possible you had the right idea at the wrong time. It’s also possible the problem was your message or medium. If you had packaged your big idea differently, it might have worked.
Israel’s hit song may never have gotten play on the radio by itself, regardless of year. But drop it in a half dozen movies and TV shows and somehow it perfectly defines the mood. It becomes “that song from that thing we like.”
Your big idea could still have wings. But you don’t have to wake up some poor recording engineer at 3 am to get it flying. Drop us a line instead. We’d love to help you figure out what makes your business remarkable and how to tell it to the world.