Tales & Tunes

by Jason MacNeil

MUSICIAN DENNY LAINE is trying to forge ahead with a new solo show which mixes signature songs he helped create along with stories from his rather remarkable career. Few can lay claim to opening for The Beatles. Fewer to being in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as part of The Moody Blues’ original lineup. Yet being part of a band for roughly a decade with Paul McCartney in Wings is something only Laine and McCartney’s late wife Linda can state as fact.

So how does Laine, 78, manage to find a balance between tunes and anecdotes during his current Songs & Stories tour?

“After you’ve done them for a while you do narrow it down to certain songs you know you got to be doing,” Laine says. “The first Songs & Stories show I did was two-and-a-half hours, it was ridiculous! I felt afterwards, ‘Oh Christ I’m surprised anybody wanted to sit through that!’ There were a lot of songs and some were original songs that people don’t know that well.

“Now it’s down to less. I have about an hour-anda-half to two-hour set. It’s much more of an improvisation as well as a worked out show. I’m having to relearn a lot of my older songs and revisit some of the older stories.”

The older stories started when Laine, who plays the Alliance for the Arts on July 8, tried his hand at ukulele and guitar before turning professional in his teenage years.

“You got to remember after the war everything was up for grabs,” he says. “You were encouraged to go out and make money whatever way you could. And there were a lot of people in Birmingham at the time doing music. A lot of people thought, ‘You’re not going to make it.’ But the thing is if you stick at it you always do (succeed). So I stuck at it.”

Although inspired by Django Reinhardt and moving through the skiffle craze of the ‘50s led by Lonnie Donegan, Laine always felt a deep connection to other genres. In 1964 Laine became one of the founding members of The Moody Blues and definitely steered the group towards a blues-based sound.

“I was into it (the blues) more than I was into the charts and the music of the day,” Laine says. “So I was having to sort of educate the rest of the guys in the band into playing that kind of music. Mike (Pinder) and Ray (Thomas) came to me and asked me to join. I said, ‘I didn’t really want to do that, but I’ll join if we can do blues because that’s all I want to do.’”

After the band’s first number one hit with ‘Go Now,’ Laine parted ways with The Moody Blues in 1966 as the band went towards a more orchestral, lush form of rock. After forming The Electric String Band, Balls and having a stint in Ginger Baker’s Air Force, Laine hit pay dirt when Paul McCartney contacted him about a new group: Wings. The McCartney-led group had mammoth hits such as ‘Live and Let Die,’ ‘Jet’ and ‘Band On The Run’, among others.

Despite the albums, touring and success that came with Wings, Lainesays he doesn’t think Wings could be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

“Well I know that’s not going to happen because Wings was never in our world considered to be a band,” Laine says. “It was more of a Paul project. I was not in command sort of musically. I knew Paul from the early days in the ‘60s and I joined up with him to do that. But I didn’t go into that to be part of a band really.

“I knew you couldn’t be part of a band with Paul McCartney because he was too famous. It couldn’t be regarded as a group. And it was always changing members. So I don’t see it as being worthy of the Hall of Fame. It was more of a Paul project and it was treated like that.”

As for their success, Laine is quick to point out the obvious.

“Well, first of all because of Paul and his fame,” he says. “Everybody wanted to see what he was doing. I worked well with Paul. His background musically, and he was a little older than me. We bounced off each other in very positive ways and we enjoyed it. Of course we got musicians in. It came through friends that we knew. It was a really good little combination for a while, but they (drummer Denny Seiwell and guitarist Henry McCullough) didn’t come to Lagos (to record 1973’s Band On The Run album). So we started again with it being just me, Paul and Linda. We went out and got another band together, but that didn’t last long, a couple of tours.”

Few can lay claim to opening for The Beatles. Fewer to being in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as part as The Moody Blues. Being part of Paul McCartney’s Wings is something only Laine and McCartney’s late wife Linda can state as fact.

Despite breaking up in 1981, Laine’s importance to Wings is recognized in one of the group’s biggest yet rarely performed hits in ‘Mull of Kintyre.’ The song became a surprisingly successful single in 1977 featuring bagpipes and has seen McCartney perform it sparingly in Canada, Scotland and Australia, accompanied by a local pipe band.

“Paul came up with the chorus and the chorus is obviously the selling point of the song,” Laine says. “But I came up with a lot of the lyrics in the rest of the song. We were in Scotland. He played me that chorus and I thought we should definitely get together and finish this off. There was a little bit of wondering whether he should do a Scottish song because they might lynch you (laughs) if you try and do an authentic sounding traditional song.

“So I just said, ‘C’mon, let’s just do it.’ The next day we put it together. We had a mobile recording unit come up and do it. We had the pipes outside and the natural echoes of the mountains and it was a huge hit. We enjoyed it.”

Laine also performed the song at Carnegie Hall alongside Heart’s Nancy Wilson and singer-songwriter Christopher Cross as part of a charity tribute concert last March entitled The Music of Paul McCartney.

“I had originally wanted to do that song but they said, ‘Somebody else is doing it,’” Laine says. “But since I was definitely doing the show they said you got to do it. It was a great night. I got a nice letter from Paul. A nice note he sent to everybody and said he wished he could’ve been there.”

Wings disbanded in the early ‘80s, but Laine has been busy with an impressive solo career. He says the one constant is the songwriting process, which hasn’t really changed since he first started putting lyrics on paper.

“The thing is it’s always different subjects because you’re moving on with your life,” he says. “Every time you sit down to write a series of songs it’s about what’s going on in your life now.

“I was always pretty good with words and language in school. I would write a lot of essays. That’s what encouraged me to go and write rather than just be a musician. I wanted to be a writer. I just followed it through so that’s what I’ve always done.”

That writing as well as the pandemic has led Laine to end up with roughly 30 songs he has for possible future release. One album is already ‘in the can’ and there’s enough material for another album possibly. Meanwhile, the Bangles lead singer, Susanna Hoffs recently covered one of his songs, ‘Say You Don’t Mind’. Laine says Hoffs’ rendition was “great.”

But for now Laine will be performing his Songs & Stories shows for fans in Florida and beyond.

“I just came full circle and thought I would rather just go out and sing the songs as I wrote them on my own,” he says. “And it goes down really well, these shows have gone down really well, I’ve got to tell you!” •

Denny Laine performs Songs & Stories on July 8 at the Alliance for the Arts, located at 10019 McGregor Blvd. in Fort Myers. For information, call 939-2787.