left banke - walk away renee

-- 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

then, a few years ago, I sold it on eBay for $55. The fucker who bought it emailed me back and said that it had a scratch and he wanted his money back. Natch, I said he could have his money back as soon as he returned the disc. He ripped the disk to his hard drive, and then sends me back the disc and it is still in perfect condition (it was in perfect condition because I played it exactly one time when I ripped it to my hard drive, and he played it one time when he ripped it to his hard drive.)

I then sold it again on eBay for about the same amount.

Record companies are so stupid to let shit go out of print.

it's kind of brilliant.

This comment made me want to listen and count. The verses are 8 bars long, which seems relatively normal (and is the same as e.g. "About a Girl" by Nirvana). But there is a sense of everything being there to set up the chorus. So maybe it's something in the way the melody and changes lead to the chorus that gives this impression?

And I'll also add, since this has become a more generalized Left Banke thread, that Susanna Hoffs and Matthew Sweet did a GREAT job with their cover of "She May Call You Up Tonight." If anything, even more convincing than the original, and I love that it works with either gender.

No, no, no.

that comp isn't worth $60. as joseph mccombs says, it does kinda trail off a bit toward the end. but shit, I quite like it all except maybe "myrah" and a couple-three others. "give the man a hand" is good.

as for the foreshortened "walk away." well, how long is the track itself? 2:42.

xp

The verses may not be wildly short but they're not long either. The chorus is a little long, with a defined ending. Perhaps most importantly, there's never a double verse.

i go back and forth on preferring the left banke and montage renditions of desiree - right now i'd pick montage, for the focus and propulsion. it's an incredible song. the instrumental version that montage did is also wonderful - it's piano, bass, drums, and sitar, leaving only the verse melody intact. the chorus is just piano emphasizing the original bass line, which makes the entire song.

the montage album is really great - the song grand pianist rivals the best of the left banke, for me, and tinsel and ivy, i shall call her mary, and the piano-and-wah-wah heavy instrumental thor and or are all solid.

you can get Pretty Ballerina on a 45 for 3 bucks.

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