left banke - walk away renee

More than the Left Banke, I love Montage, especially the stripped down, pannicky version of Desiree!

Has anyone heard the Left Bake reunion record from the 80's/early 90's?

(honestly)

There is an interview with a couple of the original members of the Left Banke in one of the last issues of The Big Takeover.

to my ears, the structure of this song is: pre-chorus/chorus/pre-chorus/chorus/etc.

it's kind of brilliant.

i love the fact that "what do you know" is a country song sung in faux british accents.

Not a big fan of Stories, though...just seems mannered and lacking in energy, without the saving grace of callowness found on the LB recordings. Michael Brown's dad, Harry Lookofsky, did the string arrangements on the early stuff--he was a big-time NYC arranger/session man...

"And you have to take the crunchy with the smooth I s'pose"
and
"And then one day it happened - She cut 'er hair and I stopped lovin' 'er"

You should download the masterpiece Black Cab from Jens Lekman/Rocky Dennis homepage (he released stuff on Secetly Canadian etc) It was the best single last year.

It samples I´ve got something on my mind.

http://www.srvice.com/rockydennis.html

You sure about that link? Didn't work for me.

http://www.srvice.com/mp3/rockydennis_blackcab.mp3

his page on secretly

-- amateurist (amateuris...), August 7th, 2003 6:06 PM. (amateurist)

i guess you're not actively listening to it!

-- fact checking cuz (factcheckingcu...), August 8th, 2003.

I love songs like that. The Raspberries' "Go All the Way" and "I Wanna Be With You" are like that too.

Michael Brown's dad, Harry Lookofsky, did the string arrangements on the early stuff
Looks like the dad's album is getting rereleased tomorrow.

Yes! I thought of "I Wanna Be With You" right away.

And the acronym is "WAR."

i'm a big fan of the banke. "she may call you up tonight" is their best song, i always thought, though i quite love "left banke too" LP which has "goodbye holly" and "my friend today." just dark, dripping pop that sounds like nothing else. "men are building sand" is some kind of genius song, too--i mean, the decemberists will spend their whole career trying to do something as good. but, it's such callow music. it's kind of amateur night in a way, but that's what makes it so affecting, in that classic power-pop manner. funny to compare the l.b. and the beau brummels from the same period. there's something very very uptight about those left banke hits whereas "laugh laugh" is a bit less inhibited.

what a strange history, too. michael brown was gone by the time they did "left banke too," right?

haven't checked this, but you mean the "there's gonna be a storm" comp is OP? out-of-print seems a perfectly good term. and pinefox, i think the comp is worth having. a few things that are just too fucking fey, strained, mannered, but overall it's great stuff.

i have the orig. smash LP of "walk away renee" in good shape, and i remember my buddy's *dad* had a copy of "left banke too," this was years ago, that we taped and were way into back then...

It's not worth $60. Either look for it cheap (it used to be a budget price comp for under $10 so I'm sure you'll find it eventually) or wait until it or something to replace it cycles back into print.

That said I've been listening to the Raspberries a lot too. The David also has these kinda baroque pop elements as well. Good stuff.

Ben

So many awesome versions of this tune

yup

I remember coming across this thread a long long time ago, way back when youtube.com was a brand new thing, in the olden times of 2007 before I'd ever heard this song. I looked it up because I was very interested in hearing what someone called the most beautiful song they'd ever heard. (I also did the same thing when someone here said the same thing about "Wichita Lineman." I'd never heard that before either, somehow.)

Anyway I remember hearing "Walk Away Renee" for the first time and liking it a lot not just because it's great but because it's a great thing brand new to me and therefore probably many others and therefore probably severely underrated. Upon reading the news in this thread today I listened to it again for the first time in a long time and still liked it a lot, and because I have free time to kill while I wait for my start date for my new job, I had a lot of the day today to sit around and listen to music. I listened to the whole Walk Away Renee/Pretty Ballerina album twice. It's great! And I've never heard it before. And being able to hear something great I've never heard before is exactly the sort of thing I've been using this board for for nearly the last twenty years.

"I've Got Something On My Mind" is my favorite

^^ that's a super good one
"Desiree" is my favorite I think

I just looked up the backstory of The Left Banke, and I'm amazed by how young they were. I would never in a million years have guessed that Walk Away Renee was written by an actual teenager, even though the lyrics are all about teenage love.

Also there were two, possibly, three incarnations of the band, in as many years, and all of them were good.

The Stories’ “Love Is In Motion” is a great track. They don’t have their own thread so posting that here.

Now have been listening to There’s Gonna Be a Storm and really digging the melancholy garagey orch-pop of all of it, particularly “Let Go of You Girl.”

“Pretty Ballerina” has a drony violin I never noticed before, played by Lookofsky père, I believe, vaguely reminiscent of “Venus in Furs.”

Other thing I am reminded of a bit is the Dutch group The Outsiders.

Here’s a factoid I never knew from the second album’s Wikipedia page:

A pre-Aerosmith Steven Tyler, then known as Steve Tallarico, contributed backing vocals to several songs on the album including ‘My Friend Today’ and ‘Dark is the Bark’.[3]

It's really obvious it's him too. He was quoted somewhere about he'd been hanging out with the band and was shocked at how unprepared to record they were (songs written immediately before stepping into the studio and/or written in the studio).

Those are pretty good songs, unprepared or not!

Just happened upon this Michael Brown chestnut from the 70s: https://youtu.be/wLeQXGcw5gM

The four tops version is the worst.

Jesus christ!

Bass player Tom Finn has died, meaning the entire original line-up of the band is now dead.

RIP :(

Is it just me, or does "Pedestal" have serious early 70s Bowie thing goin' on? The ache in the vocals, wounded romanticism in the lyrics, Ronson-esque axe heroics...

I was checking out the credits for this song, and noticed it was co-written (and produced) by Thomas Jefferson Kaye, and that he seems to have revived it the next year for an album he did with Jay and the Americans, interesting in that both groups were said to have ties to organized crime at the time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jND2dj8fU9A

(Association w glam Bowie reminds me that xgau in the 70s heard some of Big Star's music as a blend of the Velvet Underground and Left Banke.)
Michael Brown's mid-70s group the Beckies made one (s/t) LP, with LB appeal in the melodies and arrangements. though a bit limited in words and singing, but (available again as legit download and) well worth checking out here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCJXric_9UF

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPYtsXNQGj4

That second link has all 11 tracks in a playlist on the right.

No this should be better:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCJXric_9UF

Damn!

Havn't listened for a while: finding first couple tracks hard to take, esp. vocally. but then "Midnight and You" is where they start getting more Left Banke-ish, also("Song Called Love" starting to fit (getting faster) with the contemporaneous power-pop approach. "Cant Be Alone" and "River Song" could be more catnip for Tom Scholz and his fans, though "River"'s bridge takes turns that I like better.

Jeez--hadn't listened in many years, should have re-checked before posting, but, to my taste, ones w most LB-ish appeal are "Midnight and You," "Fran," maybe "Other Side of Town," "On The Morning That She Came," and "One of These Days," despite its pre-Boston tendencies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tzhaoGJiQI

Old school Minnesota rockers led by Curtis A do a version of Walk Away Renee for Renee Good and others killed by ICE

Showed up in Marcus's "Real Life" today:

3. Curtiss A & Friends, "'Walk Away Renee' to honor Renee Goode & Alex Pretti" (YouTube). Has anyone ever not liked "Walk Away Renee"? A New York group called the Left Banke put it out in 1966 and it has never gone away, but it may never have hit as hard or gone as deeply as it does here. At 75, Curtiss A has been around Minneapolis for decades--and now, in a snowy white suit and even whiter flowing hair, in a studio with two horn players, a guitarist, a bassist, a woman and a man singing backup, and more, he conjures up a sense of community, as if the whole town is there to play the song, where now Renee is someone the Left Banke never imagined and you may never hear the song again without her in it.

aw that is a sweet cover

it is true, however, that this song will always sound good