The Left Banke’s third album

The Left Banke, Strangers on a Train. Omnivore Recordings, 2022.

Strangers on a Train : Heartbreaker : Lorraine : Yesterday’s Love : Hold On Tight : And One Day : You Say : I Can Fly : Only My Opinion : Queen of Paradise

Bonus tracks: Airborne : I Don’t Know : Until the End : My Buddy Steve (Long Lost Friend) : Meet Me in the Moonlight : High Flyer

The Left Banke are best known for two 1966 hits, one major (“Walk Away Renée”), one minor (“Pretty Ballerina”). The group’s brief time in the spotlight was a tragic mess: brilliant songwriting (Michael Brown), unusual instrumentation (“baroque pop”), great lead vocals (from the Lennon-influenced Steve Martin Caro), Beatlesque harmonies (from Caro, George Cameron, and Tom Finn), competing singles by two groups claiming the Left Banke name, legal complications about airplay, and over it all, a toxic cloud of parental interference in the form of Michael Brown’s father, violinist Harry Lookofsky, aka Hash Brown. A musician who played with members of the Left Banke after the group broke up once told me matter-of-factly that Lookofsky had ruined his son’s life. Any resemblance to the relationship between Murry Wilson and Brian Wilson is coincidental and telling.

The Left Banke’s two LPs, Walk Away Renée / Pretty Ballerina (1967) and The Left Banke Too (1968) were followed — if that’s the word — by Strangers on a Train (or Voices Calling in the UK), recorded in 1978 and not released as an LP until 1986. In recent years, there were sporadic reunion efforts (Caro not participating, Brown making occasional brief appearances) and talk of a fourth album. It never happened, and none of the principals are here to see this CD release, which supplements the ten tracks of Strangers on a Train with recordings from 2001 and 2002.

The ten LP tracks are a decidedly mixed bag, the work of a group trying on a variety of styles. Nine of the ten songs are by Cameron, Caro, and Finn, with one ill-conceived contribution from Shade Smith. Brown, who contributed no songs, may be playing keyboards on some. There are Beatlesque harmonies (“Heartbreaker,” “Yesterday’s Love”), lovely ballads (“Lorraine,” marred by synthesized strings, and “And One Day”), and a song that eerily anticipates “Free as a Bird” (“I Can Fly”). Those last two songs are the most Left-ish on the album. An effort at guitar-driven rock (“Hold On Tight”) is hardly distinctive. The spirit of Billy Joel seems to hover over the ballads; “Only My Opinion” and “Strangers on a Train” suggest to me Paul McCartney and Wings. “Queen of Paradise,” a disco effort (Shade Smith), is best forgotten. It’s unfortunate that this song should end the LP, which follows the UK track sequence. The US release ended much more fittingly with “Yesterday’s Love,” mixing memory and desire.

The bonus tracks (also available as a digital EP) are no mixed bag. They’re worth the price of admission. Brown is the writer or co-writer of all six, all demos, more or less duets, Caro singing and Brown playing keyboards (with minimal contributions from additional musicians here and there). It’s clear that even when Brown was far from public view, he was writing brilliant songs. And Caro, long after he gave up performing, was still in great voice. “Airborne,” for voice, piano, and a string quartet, shows an “Eleanor Rigby” influence. “I Don’t Know,” “Meet Me in the Moonlight,” and “Until the End” sound like postmodern parlor pieces. The strangest song here, “Buddy Steve (Long Lost Friend),” is the story of an ocean voyage to look up a friend. It’s a surreal variation on “September of My Years” (Jimmy Van Heusen–Sammy Cahn):

When I was twenty-five
I wondered if he still was alive
So I went off to Milan to find my long-lost friend

Most poignant is “High Flyer,” a song of melancholy longing, a grown-up “Walk Away Renée”:

High flyer, the bells are ringing
High flyer, the sky is singing
High flyer, the clouds are moving low

The clouds are moving; nothing stays. Now that’s a fitting end to a Left Banke album.



Related reading
A handful of Left Banke posts

[Details: Yvonne Vitale, Michael Brown’s wife, co-wrote “Until the End.” Ian Loyd, who with Brown founded the group Stories, co-wrote “Meet Me in the Moonlight.” A factoid: Brown traveled to Florida to record with Caro. I have read (somewhere) that Caro’s non-participation in Left Banke reunions was at least in part a matter of his refusal to fly.]

George Cameron (1947–2018)

George Cameron, singer, drummer, and original member of the Left Banke, died earlier this week at the age of seventy.

When it comes to the Left Banke, I am very late to the show. I started listening to the group just a few months ago, after seeing Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri and hearing the Four Tops version of “Walk Away Renée,” which made me remember the Rickie Lee Jones version, which made me think: I should really look into the Left Banke. I bought the group’s available LPs (two, reissued as CDs), downloaded a compilation (the two LPs and two singles, from iTunes), and discovered an extensive website about the group at archive.org.

Suffice to say that the Left Banke, though shortlived, was fairly brilliant: Beatlesque harmonies, psychedelic touches, and great (“baroque”) pop songs. Like the Beach Boys, the group had a musical mastermind at its center, the songwriter and keyboardist Michael Brown (d. 2015). And like Brian Wilson, Michael Brown had a musical father who brought considerable misery to his son’s life. The Beach Boys, in one form or another, have gone on and on. The Left Banke fell apart in the late 1960s — with brief reunion appearances in recent years, and with plans earlier this year for a reunion with Steve Martin Caro, the group’s long-absent lead singer.

Here’s George Cameron, who usually sang harmony, taking a rare lead: “Goodbye Holly” (Tom Feher), from The Left Banke Too (Smash, 1968).

[In the small-world department: our friend Seymour Barab played cello on the Left Banke’s second hit, “Pretty Ballerina.” I wish I could have asked him about that.]

What I hear in “Walk Away Renée”

[Backstory: The Left Banke’s “Walk Away Renée” was released as a single in July 1966. In February 1967 the song appeared on the group’s first LP, Walk Away Renée / Pretty Ballerina. “Walk Away Renée” is credited to Michael Brown (the group’s keyboardist and principal songwriter), Bob Calilli, and Tony Sansone. According to members of the group, Brown wrote the music, and Sansone gave some help with the lyrics, which were mostly by Brown. Why Calilli is credited is unclear. (See this commentary.) Like “Pretty Ballerina,” (by Brown alone) and “She May Call You Up Tonight” (by Brown and Left Banke lead singer Steve Martin Caro), “Walk Away Renée” was inspired by Brown’s crush on Renée Fladen (now Fladen-Kamm), one-time girlfriend of Left Banke singer and bassist Tom Finn.]

I started listening to The Left Banke after hearing the Four Tops’ recording of “Walk Away Renée” in Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri. I told that story in a 2018 post, and I am still happily listening to The Left Banke. Here’s what I hear in the lyrics of “Walk Away Renée”:

And when I see the sign that points one way
The lot we used to pass by every day
Just walk away Renée
You won't see me follow you back home
The empty sidewalks on my block are not the same
You're not to blame

I can think of just two poems that begin with and: William Blake’s “And did those feet in ancient time” and Ezra Pound’s first canto, which begins “And then went down to the ship.” Pound is translating Andreas Divus’s 1538 Latin translation of Odyssey 11 into an approximation of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse: thus The Cantos begins in medias res, as Homer began his poems. “Walk Away Renée” too begins in the middle of the thing, somewhere within a sorrow that repeats and repeats. There, once again, is a street sign: an unusual beginning for a pop song. A Left Banke song from 1967, “And Suddenly” (Michael Brown-Bert Sommer), also begins with and.

The sign and lot are markers of city life, things seen on the walk to school or the walk back home. The word “block” confirms the city setting. The landscape is bare and barely there, as it was even when Renée was part of the singer’s life. Of course the street is one-way, moving in the direction of further loneliness. A city lot is, by definition, vacant. The sidewalks are empty. Think of a Beckett play staged in an outer borough. Michael Brown grew up in Brooklyn.

The singer’s lack of response to these markers of emptiness is curious: seeing these things (yet again) prompts no outcry (why did you leave me), no reverie (these foolish things remind me of you). All the singer can do (yet again) is encourage Renee, who is blameless, to walk away. Like Catullus abandoned by his lover, the singer can take it, or so he says.

*

From deep inside the tears that I'm forced to cry
From deep inside the pain that I chose to hide
Just walk away Renée
You won't see me follow you back home
Now as the rain beats down upon my weary eyes
For me it cries

We move from outside circumstances to introspection. The hidden pain carries an echo of the Beatles’ “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” whose singer turns his face to the wall. As in the first verse, there’s a strange inaction: no verbs follow tears and pain, though the tears and pain must somehow, at some point, find their way out, whenever the singer was, or is, forced to cry. But it’s really the sky that cries in present time — sympathetic nature at work, supplementing or standing in for the singer’s tears. Compare Elmore James’s “The Sky Is Crying.”

*

And now there’s a lovely interlude for alto flute. “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” closes with flute and bass flute. But Michael Brown said that the Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin’” inspired the use of alto flute here.

*

Your name and mine inside a heart upon a wall
Still finds a way to haunt me, though they're so small
Just walk away Renée
You won't see me follow you back home
The empty sidewalks on my block are not the same
You're not to blame

The song saves its best, most poignant verse for last. In this bare cityscape, there are no trees in which to carve initials. A wall must do. Does the singer’s lost relationship achieve some permanence in this inscription? Or are the names written in chalk, to be washed away by the rain? The names of two little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world, do they?

There’s an odd and almost certainly accidental shift in verb forms here, from singular to plural. The names are small, but your-name-and-mine-inside-a-heart still finds a way to haunt the singer. That fleeting singular verb marks the lone moment of togetherness in the lyric.

*

I love this song. In addition to The Left Banke and Four Tops performances, I recommend performances by Rickie Lee Jones, Cyndi Lauper and Peter Kingsbery (even with flubbed lyrics), and Linda Ronstadt and Ann Savoy.

[Talking Heads’ “And She Was” almost begins with and. The first word though is “Hey!” For Catullus, see Louis Zukofsky’s translation of VIII: “So long, girl. Catullus / can take it.”]

The Left Banke’s final album

Omnivore Records is releasing for the first time on CD The Left Banke’s final album, Strangers on a Train, with additional later tracks. Here are the details.

(I’m a fan.)

Related reading
A handful of Left Banke posts

The Left Banke for Coke

“Lonely hours alone go much faster when you have them with Coke”: The Left Banke did a Left Banke-ish commercial for Coca-Cola.

Sleep study

It was Rembrandt’s biography of Liszt that inspired the three then–surviving members of The Left Banke to conduct a sleep study. They sought volunteers in the tri–state area: New York, New Jersey, and Florida. They found four volunteers in a Wal-Mart parking lot.

Elaine and I were walking toward a Wal-Mart when we saw an older woman from the music society leaving the store — well-dressed, perfect hair. It was obvious that she had not worn a mask while shopping. We swerved to the left to avoid her.

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

[Talk about pre-cognitive dreaming: the bonkers governor of Alabama is more or less the woman I saw in my dream. I saw a photograph of the governor shortly after waking up this morning. And I must have listened to The Left Banke’s final album at least a dozen times in the last few weeks.]

Steve Martin Caro (1948–2020)

Steve Martin Caro, lead singer with The Left Banke, has died at the age of seventy-one. Rolling Stone has a brief obituary.

The Left Banke’s extraordinary musical potential yielded just three LPs and a handful of non-album 45s. Here is the group’s “other” hit: “Pretty Ballerina.” The one everyone knows: “Walk Away Renée.”

Related posts
George Cameron (1947–2018)
What I hear in “Walk Away Renée”

The rules

From The Chicago Manual of Style blog Shop Talk, an explanation of when to capitalize an initial the.

[Should it be the Left Banke or The Left Banke? I go back and forth. Uh-oh, a nitpicker. Just walk away, Renée.]

Tom Finn (1948–2020)

Tom Finn, bassist and singer with the Left Banke, died last month at the age of seventy-one.

Here are two songs from The Left Banke Too (1968). Finn wrote them and sings lead: “Nice to See You” and “There’s Gonna Be a Storm.” Baroque pop, yes.

Related posts
Steve Martin Caro (1948–2020) : George Cameron (1947–2018) : What I hear in “Walk Away Renée”

“Garnacha”

I was standing inside the front room of a narrow two-story house after a meeting of a community group and a taping of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. I called my aunt, who had just moved to Montana, to tell her that a terrible snowstorm was on the way. I reached her secretary, who said that he had too many other things to do to relay the message. “Yes, but” — and we went in circles. I threw the handset into an enormous wastebasket.

Out on the front porch, I met up with our recently retired dentist. He wore a parka and a galero and walked down a long board that had been placed over the five or six steps from the porch to the sidewalk. It occurred to me that this board was a riskier proposition that the steps themselves. Our dentist was highly critical of some of the people at the meeting: they were there, he said, only to be seen.

And then I saw our old friend Margie King Barab. She was parked on the porch in an enormous sedan, the kind of car people once called a boat. I wondered how she had gotten the car up the steps. And how had she turned it around? How could there have been enough room? Margie now had to maneuver the car to drive it back down the steps. I started to push a large table toward the door of the house to free up room on the porch. As I did, a green and white sports car began to back out of the house, right toward the table. “Wait!” I yelled. “She has to get her car out.” “That’s gonna take a lot of time,” said the driver. He looked like Eric Campbell from the silents.

Later, Elaine and I saw the driver standing on the sidewalk. “Look,” I said. “He’s smoking a Gauloise and drinking espresso.” He corrected me: “Garnacha.”

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

[Possible sources: On Sunday I was listening to the Left Banke compilation There’s Gonna Be a Storm. A friend begins a job today doing a little of everything. Alexander King, Margie’s first husband, was a frequent guest on The Tonight Show in its Jack Paar days. The word prow, from a little crossword I made for Elaine, might have something to do with the car. I saw a little BMW convertible yesterday. Elaine thinks the table could be from If Beale Street Could Talk.]