Levi Walks Away With Renee

“Walk Away Renne” by The Left Banke was a Top Ten national hit in the summer of 1966. Although it obviously tugged on the heartstrings of those throughout this fair nation, I tend to associate the song with New York. Maybe it’s the word “block” that does it — does anyone else call a street a block other than in New York? There’s also something loveably pretentious about the band’s moniker that just reeks of artsy Big Apple high schools.

It’s difficult not to have a soft spot for the performance although there’s plenty about it that also actively resists your affection. The lead vocal by Steve Martin Caro is the very definition of wan. Nasal as the first day of a bad cold, Caro’s warbling is blessedly buried in the mix, allowing the harpsichord and the strings (and let’s not forget the flute solo) to dominate. Label it all “Baroque pop” if you must. It’s as gloriously wimpy as it’s just plain white.

Now I have no problem with Baroque pop. Give me Judy Collins version of “Both Sides Now” or Linda Ronstadt and the Stone Poney’s “Different Drum,” both laden with insistent harpsichord and strings, and I’m a happy man. It’s just that the Left Banke practically dare you to unearth any semblance of soulful grit from the airy pop bauble that is Renee.

Enter Levi Stubbs and The Four Tops.

I haven’t the slightest notion of what actually went on in the higher echelon offices of Motown Records, but I’d love to imagine that sometime in 1967 head honcho Berry Gordy and producers Lamont Dozier and Brian Holland were throwing ideas around for an upcoming Four Tops single. Maybe a cover? Why not that hit from last year, you know the one with the killer melody and the mealy-mouthed vocal? It’s as if they set themselves the challenge of transforming a dangerously anemic performance into a strictly dangerous one. The man for the job was Levi Stubbs.

Time has not been kind to one of the mightiest of Motown singers. He may have been semi-immortalized through the wonder of Billy Bragg’s 1986 song “Levi Stubbs Tears,” but this magnificent vocalist is just not given the props that his male peers Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, and David Ruffin of the Temptations are. (And it might be wishful thinking on my part to imagine that Ruffin is a household name to any other than pop music fanatics). Stubbs may have had the most dramatic voice of any of the Motown roster. His utterly impassioned singing posed existential quandaries to a listener. You heard this man attacking the words of “Baby I Need Your Loving,” “Reach Out I’ll Be There,” “Bernadette,” or any of the still earth shaking hits of The Four Tops, and you realized that for Stubbs the stakes were always at their highest. Emotional survival was his only goal.

Somehow — I guess it doesn’t hurt when you’re a brilliant singer — Stubbs is able to invest “Walk Away Renee” with the same chilling urgency he brings to his most gripping performances. The Banke’s Steve Martin Caro sounds bummed out that Renee was walking away, Stubbs sounds as if may be mortally wounded. Caro comes off like the kid he was — Stubbs is a man singing.

[The Wikipedia entry on the Left Banke is worth reading in detail. Work in transsexuality, Michael McKeane, Steve Tyler, and “Brother Louie,” just to mention a few choice subjects, and you’ve got a very substantial pop saga.]