Denny Laine Live at The Iridium - New York City Article
Photos Courtesy of Arnie Goodman
Mr. Laine, who turned 75 in October, is possibly more famous for being Paul McCartney’s major musical partner in the highly successful band Wings during the 1970s, but Mr. Laine was there at The Iridium on Saturday to celebrate his first legendary rock band, the Moody Blues. The “Moodys” first came together at around the beginning of the British Invasion in 1964 - although they were from Birmingham, rather than London (like the Rolling Stones) or Liverpool (like the Beatles). Like a lot of major British bands, their original intention was to play American style blues and R&B, but eventually they became world-famous by creating their own original music and following their own path into what eventually became known as progressive rock.
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Mr. Laine was a key member of that very first incarnation of the group, when they were not only playing the basic blues but touring with American stars like the Mississippi Delta legend Sonny Boy Williamson. This was the period and the idea that Mr. Laine focused on on Saturday, being less concerned with The Moodies’s later pop hits than this moment when they were interacting with the pioneers, such as Williamson, and gradually beginning to open the doors of perception into a new music all their own. Thus Mr. Laine began with the bouncy shuffle beat of James Brown’s “I’ll Go Crazy” and included several of Williamson’s blues classics (including “I Don’t Know”) along the way.
Photos Courtesy of Arnie Goodman
Some of the most interesting music comes from this trajectory, for instance, “Go Now” (like “Crazy”) from their first album, The Magnificent Moodies (1965) - how many many bands in 1965, blues or rock, British or American, were playing in ¾ time? Yet a third tune from that premiere album, “Stop,” was also rhythmically quite fascinating, with a unique stop and start beat, that must have made it especially fun to dance to. Along the way, Mr. Laine also performed “Say You Don’t Mind,” a tune long associated with him though written, as he acknowledged, by his friend Colin Blunstone.
“Boulevard de la Madeleine” was even more interesting: Mr. Laine described how, in Paris, the band tried to pick up a couple of French girls who ultimately didn’t show up for the rendezvous the Moodies were looking forward to. Somehow, they managed to spin this in a Francais-style love song, a tragic tale of a young man missing his mademoiselle (“I'm the one in love, she isn't / There's no girl standing there / And there's no one who cares”). They made it sound even more French with Mr. Laine’s continental-style guitar picking, a melodica to emulate an accordion, and a rhythm that suggests they’d been listening to Django Reinhardt - this was almost a rock n’ roll tango.
Photos Courtesy of Arnie Goodman
Throughout, Mr. Laine was not only full of music and melody, but also considerable warmth, and connected directly with the crowd despite wearing dark black shades. For an encore, Mr. Laine briefly left the Moody Blues bandbook to thrill the elated crowd with “Mull of Kintyre,” the folk song that he and Paul McCartney wrote in 1977, and which became a blockbuster hit single during that year’s Holiday season, a song of home and family that has gone on, over the last 40 years, to become a defacto Christmas classic - winningly old-fashioned air with a built in nostalgia factor, thanks not least to being set in waltz time. Ever full of humor, invited all of us to sing along with him - like we wouldn’t have done that even without being asked. And when we failed to produce either the volume or the intonation that he was looking for, he stopped playing briefly and chuckled, “you’re all fired!”
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