A conversation with Denny Laine

Denny Laine has been to the Chicago Fest for Beatles Fans several times, and always is a crowd favorite. A member of Wings from beginning to end, he was the one stalwart who accompanied Paul and Linda McCartney to Nigeria for sessions that turned into the band’s best-loved album, “Band on the Run.”

Before Wings, Denny was the original lead singer in the Moody Blues, when they had a simpler, bluesier sound than the orchestral approach that later backed singer Justin Hayward. It’s Laine’s voice on “Go Now,”  a 1965 No. 1 hit in the U.K., No. 10 in the  U.S., and later a Wings concert staple.

I spoke with Laine via a phone call to his Las Vegas home in August 2010 for a Chicago Sun-Times preview of the Fest for Beatles Fans. The newspaper story had three or four short quotes. Here’s a longer transcript of the interview.

JG: Denny thanks for taking the time for this. It’s going to be great to have you back in Chicago. You know, last time you were here, you and Laurence Juber (lead guitarist in Wings’ final lineup) did a panel that I thought was the best Beatlefest had ever had. It was “Beatles Under the Influence,” tracing music that had influenced the young Beatles, and you and Laurence played some things I’d never heard, some blues, old English folk and music hall stuff.

DL: Did we really? You know, Laurence and I weren’t necessarily going through the same experiences. We come at this from different backgrounds. He’s got a lot of knowledge on the other side of the business as well, a more classical training. He doesn’t  just know the groups and the bands, but he has a completely different background of trained musicians and session work and all that kind of thing.

We [British musicians] got it all from the folk world, and that went to America and came back via folk, blues. It’s an exchange thing. I think.

JG: What have you been up to of late? I understand you’re recording again.

DL: It’s taken me a couple of years, but I’m just on the downhill as far as a new album. It’s just being mixed with the last few songs being mixed. The artwork is going to be based on my new website, dennylaine.com, so you can see the style of artwork that is going to be there. It should be already packaged about a month from now. It’s called “Valley of Dreams,” and I’ve been writing over a two-year period or more because I wound up going to England for a year and working over there. I started to write a book.

The album has taken time because I had that year in England. I had to come back and finish here in Vegas with the producer. I didn’t want to go off the beaten track, I wanted to keep the same people, so I just finished it off in the last couple of months.

The other thing is that I’ve had this musical around for 20 years or so that I’ve been trying to put around, an ecological musical. And it didn’t see the light of day earlier on. We did do it with some college kids once. But now UNLV is starting to look at it with their people. It’s called “Arctic Song.” It’s all about the environment. It’s sort of science fiction meets ecology, the world problems, the green issues. Now of course, it’s become so current people may pick up on it.

JG: That sounds like something I’d like to see.

DL: I hope you do.

JG: Wings fans and Beatles fans will want to know, do you have contact with Paul? There was a difficult separation at the end of Wings.

DL: I bumped into Paul one night when we went to UB40, we’re both big reggae fans. We all hooked up. The newspaper got hold of the picture we had taken together, so that went nationwide the next day. It at least showed me and Paul were back on the same page, so that was good.

JG: Looking back, how do you feel about what you did with Wings?

DL: I’m starting to look at stuff again. Who knew that we would still be popular 30 years later, or the music would? It’s been taken over by the kids, the children of the parents who were fans and what not. And I’m getting children who are 12 years old coming to see me. It’s across the board all that music --- especially the Beatles, of course. The music has just lasted and lasted and lasted. And now it’s going into musicals, so you have the “Love” musical, the ABBA musical, “We Will Rock You.” So all those songs have a complete re-emergence.

I’m looking at it with new eyes, I suppose. There are people around me, working with me, who were big fans in the day, and have all the stuff, things I haven’t looked at. I haven’t played a Wings album for years. But now I’m starting to listen, and thinking that was a good band, it was tight, it worked. Especially the ’76 tour [JG—the tour from which “Wings Over America” is drawn]. That really did work. The band was tight, everything was great. Me and Paul had a great relationship. We knew each other really well before Wings even got started. I mean, the Moodys did the Beatles second British tour, we were good friends before all that. And that really came across to me, that we really just gelled in writing together and working together.

I’m more interested at how the band was onstage, and I was quite impressed looking at some the new stuff.

JG: When you were with the Moody Blues, you were playing blues and blues-based rock and roll, and had some good success. Later, they evolved into something completely different, with the lush productions and orchestral backing, a totally different sound. Do you have an insights into the change?

DL: I was watching the Moodys documentary which I am on of course, and found out why they went in that direction. It’s quite hilarious. It’s an uncanny thing

I think [keyboard player] Mike Pinder said since I left, they started getting into more melodic stuff, they weren’t as much of a blues band any more. The original Moodys before the “Go Now” album were a real blues band. We didn’t play any R&B. And it developed into R&B, and “Go Now” came from that batch of songs. But we had the harmonies, we had all the voices, we had singers, so it became an R&B band with harmonies.

We were part of a whole different scene in the ‘60s. We were friends, the Beatles, the Stones, Rod Stewart, the Animals, Tom Jones. All these people were friends of ours. We’d have parties and we used to play each other’s music to each other. If the Beatles had a new song, they’d drop by and play it to us and vice versa. It was a much different world then. People weren’t stars to the point they were off doing their own thing and not mixing with people. The whole thing was kind of a mish-mash of exchanging ideas.

JG: I’ve always loved the “Go Now” album. It’s one I bought in 1965, and I still like to put it on the turntable. I liked that bluesy feel a lot.

DL: Donovan did our liner notes on the back of that album. He was another friend who was hanging around. Brian Jones was another very close friend. We watched everybody make it and go through all their changes. We had a lot of support and a lot of feedback. And we were playing live all the time. We weren’t going into the studio for months on end. It’d take a few weeks to make an album. And then we would go on the road, and on the road you’d get feedback all the time.

JG: Will you be playing any songs from the new album at the Fest?

DL: I won’t be doing it with the band [Liverpool, in its night-closing concerts]. Maybe in my own session. With the band, I sing “Go Now,” “Band on the Run,” “Mull of Kintyre,” “Live and Let Die” ---  sort of my tribute to the Wings thing. Uusally I just do my songs that I did --- “Time to Hide,” “No Words” and stuff like that. I try not to copy Paul’s version if I can help it.

JG: I know you work hard at the Fests. But besides a job for the weekend, what do you get out of the Fests.

DL: Meeting people. Although I don’t do a lot of them. It’s meeting the fans. I get involved in the nostalgia of the whole trip from all our points of view. Most of the time I have some little story people haven’t heard.

I like the thing of all fans being together in one place, because it generates a certain energy that you can’t find anywhere else. It’s not like a normal gig. It’s an occasion.