1997 short Gene Pitney interview with Bob Greene

[Jim Dixon]

In a previous comment I mentioned a Gene Pitney quote about "Liberty Valance" I'd seen in Serene Dominic's "Song By Song" book. I decided to see if the interview was online, and lo and behold, the Chicago Sun Times still has it up 27 years later. I didn't see it on the forum; hope this isn't a redundant post.

It's not particularly revelatory, but it's a fun read. It's funny that by the 1980s, most of the Kennedy era singers like Pitney and Roy Orbison seemed like lost survivors from a distant epoch, while Jagger, McCartney, and Dylan, who were barely any younger, were just middle aged rock stars (obviously because they created the rock culture came to shape the music world). Pitney was only 56 here; Orbison was only 52 when he was a Travelling Wilbury and passed in 1988.

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https://www.chicagotribune.com/1997/09/ ... ne-pitney/

DOES IT HURT TO BE GENE PITNEY?

By BOB GREENE
PUBLISHED: September 14, 1997

If heartbreak had a voice, it would be Gene Pitney's.

If anguish could be put into sound, it would be the sound of Gene Pitney singing. During the 1960s, when most of the music coming out of car radios was peppy, big-beat harmonies by British rock groups, Gene Pitney–born in Connecticut–was singing anthems of pure pain and despair. Not only did this set him apart, but it found a ready audience–tens of millions of young hearts were breaking every week, and Pitney was the spokesman for their pain.

There was something about that voice–the plaintive whine, the hurt that sounded as if it were on the verge of real tears–that stopped people in their tracks. If your heart had been broken, there were certain Pitney songs–the last 30 seconds of "I'm Gonna Be Strong" is the best example–that were simply too much to take. You had to turn the radio off.

Of all the singers in the world, Pitney is the one I've always wanted to meet. But in all my travels, I never heard of him being around.

And then, while here in Syracuse, I found out that he would be arriving at the airport on the day I was scheduled to leave.

How interested am I in the craft of Gene Pitney? Put it this way: Given the choice between asking Shakespeare how he came up with the language in "Hamlet" and asking Gene Pitney about the chord changes in "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," I'd go with Pitney.

And now here, at last, he was. The great Gene Pitney. Fifty-six years old.

Tongue-tied, I asked him what it was that he thought set his voice apart. He laughed and said one critic had written that "only dogs can hear some of the notes I hit." At the beginning of his career, he said, music producers told him that his voice was "too shrill, too reedy" to sell records. But it worked to his advantage: "As soon as you hear a song of mine, you know immediately who's singing."

Was he really as depressed as his songs? "Nah," Pitney said. "People tell me all the time that I must be so sad. I never was. It's just the way I sing."

He wrote some memorable songs for other singers: "Rubber Ball" for Bobby Vee, "He's a Rebel" for the Crystals, "Hello, Mary Lou" for Rick Nelson–but it was the Gene Pitney hits I was interested in, almost all of which were written by other people. The stories behind each song. So I asked.

"I Wanna Love My Life Away": "My first hit. Done on a shoestring. Very simple, straight-ahead rock song."

"Town Without Pity": "I was frightened of that song. I would never have written a song like that, and I would never have picked it to record. I saw that song and thought, 'How do I sing it? What do I do?' I decided to sing it as slowly as I possibly could."

"The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance": "It's an exciting story constructed as a song. I thought I was recording it for the movie. But in the middle of the recording session I found out that the movie had already come out. Here's a movie with Jimmy Stewart, Lee Marvin and John Wayne–and the song doesn't get into the movie. People tell me all the time that they saw the movie on TV, and that someone cut my song out of it. I say, no, they didn't. The song was never in it."

"Only Love Can Break A Heart": "That one frightened me, too, when I first heard it. I didn't think it was a hit record–I thought it had too few words. I was wrong."

"Half Heaven, Half Heartache": "It's a singer's song. It builds and builds. I really got my teeth into that one."

"Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa": "The 1960s was a very strange time to have a hit with that kind of song. I remember a girl sitting in the front row while I was singing that song, and I could read her lips as she said to the girl sitting next to her: 'Isn't he different?'"

"It Hurts To Be In Love": "I knew it was a hit. You have 'listeners' ears' when you're just starting out, and your 'listeners' ears' tell you what will work. You lose those ears later, when you break songs down into production elements too much."

"I'm Gonna Be Strong": "What a song. That last phrase in the song–'how I'll break down and cry'–how the notes change within that last word. All these years later, and I still get goosebumps every time I sing that song."

And Pitney truly isn't a lonely man?

" 'Solitary' is a better word," he said. "I always feel that it's great when you can be happy when you're by yourself. That's not a bad thing."

———-

[Sara D]

A singer who could play piano, guitar and drums, who wrote hits for others (Rubber Ball, He's A Rebel, Hello Mary Lou) and who was always an interesting and articulate interviewee. He maintained a big following in the UK years after the hits stopped and in fact was in the middle of a tour here when he died in 2006. Ask the average Brit over a certain age to name one Gene Pitney hit and I'm pretty certain the vast majority would mention Twenty-Four Hours From Tulsa. Here's a rare promo film Pitney made for the record.

[blueonblue]

The other "24".....

'blue'

[Jim Dixon]

Here's a rare promo film Pitney made for the record.

So I've got some questions. Did this woman he was singing about steal all of his money and his car, thus forcing him to ride around America in an empty bus lamenting that he can never, never never go home again? Why the suit and tie? Was he a door to door encyclopedia salesman?