Music

Del Shannon

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Jan 19, 2011
Category: Rock

Talk about underrated.

Charles Westover — he called himself Del Shannon because he liked a would-be wrestler named Mark Shannon and he admired his boss’s car, a Cadillac Coupe de Ville — was a Michigan kid who was playing guitars in bar bands before he was old enough to drink.

But as the leader of Charlie Johnson and the Big Little Show Band, he had a career going nowhere fast.

Then Max Crook, his keyboard player, started fooling around on his Musitron, a kind of prehistoric synthesizer.

But let Del tell it from here…

Yes, “Runaway,” a song that makes my heart beat faster every time I hear it — and I’ve heard it a zillion times since it was released in 1961. It’s a great show-biz story. Westover finished writing the lyrics sitting on a roll of carpets at the Carpet Outlet, where he was a salesman. It became an instant favorite on the Michigan bar circuit. And then he was summoned to New York to record it.

Max Crook: “A special feature that the studio had integrated into their phone system was a direct hook-up from their mixer board, so that record executives could play the just-recorded tunes via telephone with reasonable fidelity to distributors around the country. Before ‘Runaway’ was fully mixed, there were pre-orders for over 90,000 copies!"

For all that, Shannon and Crook and their wives couldn’t afford another night in a New York hotel — in freezing weather, they drove a rusted-out car home to Michigan.

Fame came fast — “Runaway” was a double winner. The music was compelling and original. And the message — “I think of the things we’ve done/ Together, while our hearts were young" — was the ultimate teen anthem.

More hits followed. At this level, commentary is superfluous. [To buy the CD of Del Shannon’s greatest hits, click here. To download a 4song MP3, click here.] Listen to “Hats Off to Larry.”

And the hits just keep on coming: “I Go to Pieces.”

And wait — what about “Do You Wanna Dance?”

And Handy Man. A killer version of Black Is Black. And a version of Crying that doesn’t dishonor Roy Orbison.

He was a great musician — Mark Knopfler: “Del Shannon was the reason I picked up my first guitar” — but the songs were too popular to be considered as art. Shannon was relegated to the oldies circuit. Drinking followed.

I cannot imagine that playing for an audience which remembers how you — and they — were way back then compensates for being stuck in small clubs two hundred nights a year. And maybe each stab at a comeback grated on a guy who believed he’d never really gone away.

Still, when Tom Petty showed up, you’d think that would pull any musician out of the doldrums. And, from all reports, it did. Shannon sobered up, ran, lost weight — and completed, under Petty’s direction, most of a new album. Then Roy Orbison died, and, rumor had it, Shannon might be the one chosen to replace him on a Traveling Wilburys tour.

That good news makes the end incomprehensible. In 1990, when he was 55, Del Shannon put a rifle to his head and blasted himself beyond all worldly concerns. He was not, the police noted, wearing his toupe.

What to say? “But his music is immortal.” Lord, I hate that bullshit — Shannon’s music was immortal the first time he played “Runaway.” And the rest of his hits make for a collection that a lot of music lovers would call “necessary.”

And more: Shannon didn’t make bubblegum music. His songs were about loss and heartbreak, and they were light years from cliché:

Once I had a pretty girl,
Her name it doesn’t matter;
She went away with another guy–
Now he won’t even look at her…

Hats off to Larry,
He broke your heart,
Just like you broke mine when you
Said we must part.
He told you lies, now it’s
Your turn to CRY CRY CRY-Y
Now that Larry said goodbye to you.

The other night, I went to see a singer-songwriter perform most of his new CD. I love his stuff — and his new songs are state of the art. But he began the evening with a bunch of oldies: the Everly Brothers, Johnny Cash, Eddie Cochran. And he did “Runaway.”

There’s something about that song, even when there’s no one playing the genius keyboard solo. And what it is, I think, is this — it gets to the essence of what popular music could be sometimes (and now almost never is). That is, it’s urgent, crisp, heartfelt. And musically rich.

After Shannon died, Tom Petty recorded a song that begins:

It was a beautiful day, the sun beat down
I had the radio on, I was driving
Trees flew by, me and Del were singing

Little Runaway.

I was flying.

Exactly.