On August 14, 1979, Barbra and Donna Summer began recording the duet “(No More Tears) Enough Is Enough” in Santa Monica. Paul Jabara wrote the song with his partner Bruce Roberts.
“Paul came over to my house and said, ‘We’ve got to write something else. Let’s write something for Barbra and Donna,’” said Bruce Roberts. “It was a natural to see if we could put those two together … I just went to the piano and played chords and we started to sing it. It was written in a very short period of time.”
“It was Paul Jabara who came up with the idea of doing the duet,” Donna Summer wrote in her memoir. “Paul had won the Oscar for ‘Last Dance,’ and Charles Koppelman, Barbra’s producer from Columbia, knew a good song when he heard it.”
Koppelman originally rejected the song, though, because it did not fit the album’s theme. “I was trying to get Barbra to include ‘Enough Is Enough’ on her Wet
album,” Jabara said. “But it didn’t have any water in it.”
“Paul was the kind of writer who couldn’t be deterred,” Streisand laughed, “so he brought back this wonderful intro, a play on the children’s nursery rhyme ‘It’s raining, it’s pouring, the old man is snoring’ which he made into ‘My love life is boring me to tears.’ He kind-of shoehorned the tears and pouring rain to fit the wet concept. And it became the big hit from the album.”
Then, Jabara scheduled some time with Streisand to play the new song for her. “The day before,” Jabara said, “I asked Donna [Summer] if she wanted to come with me to Barbra’s for lunch. She immediately said, ‘I’d love to.’
“When I called Barbra, her 11-year-old son, Jason, answered,” Jabara explained. “I told him to ask his mother about lunch. He screamed, ‘Donna Summer!’ Turns out Jason’s the biggest Donna fan in the world. So I owe it all to him.”
At Barbra’s house, Summer said “she was a complete delight, and it didn’t take long for us to fall into a nice conversation.”
Jabara continued: “The minute Donna and I arrived at Barbra’s, I said, ‘This is the duet I’ve been trying to get you two to do.’ They both got excited. Barbra kept asking, ‘What part do I sing?’ I knew if I could just get them together, they’d do it.”
Bruce Roberts recalled, “It was crazed from the start. We got them together, locked them in a room in Barbra's house in Malibu and played them the song ... and taught it to them.”
“The next day,” Summer wrote, “Paul began to look for a place for us to record the song. We wound up trying four different studios. In one the sound wasn’t right for Paul, in another it wasn’t right for me, in still another Barbra didn’t like it, and the fourth seemed wrong to all three of us. Once we finally found a studio we all agreed on, it was smooth sailing.”
“Barbra was not as comfortable in the genre of disco or dance music,” said Bruce Roberts “so I first went in and sang Barbra’s part as a guide vocal. It was finished overnight.”
“Enough is Enough” was recorded over two weeks in Los Angeles at a reported cost of $100,000.
Jabara was ecstatic. “There was Streisand,” he said, “hands flaring, and Donna, throwing her head back — and they’re both belting, sparking each other. It was a songwriter’s dream. Forget ‘Enough Is Enough,’ I want ‘More and More.’”
Jabara also clarified, “There was a popular rumor going round Hollywood that Donna and Barbra recorded separately. Not true. The master tracks were done face to face.”
Engineer John Arrias confirmed that the singers did some overdubbing separately, though. “They never could quite feed off each other,” he said, “so they decided, ‘Okay, let’s try it individually. Donna singing to Barbra’s scratch part and Barbra singing to Donna’s.”
One amusing story about the recording sessions concerned Donna Summer. During the final recording session, while she was holding a long note, Summer fell off her stool, unconscious from lack of air. When she came to, Barbra was still holding her note! When she finished, Barbra asked, “Donna, are you all right?” Summer confessed that “I was completely exhausted” during that recording session, having completed her last show of an 8-night concert performance at the Universal Amphitheatre.
