Moody Blues, Wings co-founder Denny Laine to bring solo show to Club Cafe

The English rock band the Moody Blues was just getting their act together in the early 1960s in a suburb of Birmingham when a suitcase full of American rhythm and blues records was brought to them by a British disc jockey who had just returned from the United States.

The contents of the suitcase, or at least part of it, ended up changing the course of lead singer Denny Laine’s life.

The DJ suggested they listen to the 45 rpm records in the case because there were a lot of good songs among them and they might just find some they would want to record. Sure enough, there was one song in particular called “Go Now!” performed by an American soul singer named Bessie Banks that caught the band’s attention.

In the song, Banks’ voice is filled with heart-wrenching emotion as she sings about the breakup of a relationship.

“We’ve already said good bye,

Since you’ve got to go, oh you’d better go now

Go now go now

Before you see me cry”

The song featured a driving piano riff that especially appealed to the Moody Blues.

“We were looking for stuff that had piano. We were a piano-based band,” Laine told the Tribune-Review in a video interview. “I think that’s why the Beatles liked us — because we weren’t trying to be a four-piece guitar band.

“We had a harmonica player, a flute player. We were a different lineup. We were looking for material that fitted our lineup, and ‘Go Now!’ stood out because it was a piano intro and (keyboardist) Mike Pinder said, ‘We’ve got to do that one.’ So we recorded it.”

Pinder nailed the piano part and even added a funky solo to their version. The question was whether Laine, on guitar and lead vocals, could match the emotion of Banks’ version. He did and the song went up the pop charts, eventually landing at No. 1 in the UK Singles Chart in late January of 1965. By February, “Go Now!” was No. 10 in the U.S.

Laine is quite likely to celebrate the anniversary of that mid-February occasion by performing the tune as part of his solo acoustic show on Feb. 16 at Club Cafe on the South Side.

Laine said he’s not at all concerned about performing without a band backing him.

“Before the pandemic, I was doing some solo shows, and I enjoyed it,” he said. “I get to do my own songs (from his solo career), so I get to do a lot more than I can do with a band. And you get to talk to the audience more, and I enjoyed it.”

Laine said he especially enjoys coming to Pittsburgh.

“I have friends in Pittsburgh from various other times in my life,” he said. “I know the town quite well, and I love Pittsburgh. It’s a center for lots of culture.”

It’s hard to say whether Laine is better known for being in the Moody Blues or Paul McCartney and Wings. Though he spent 10 years with Wings, Laine recorded his most successful single — the aforementioned “Go Now!” — as a lead vocalist with the Moody Blues. He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with them. During his years with the Moody Blues from 1964 to 1966, they were on somewhat of a competitive level with the Beatles.

“We were mutually inspired by each other,” Laine said. “Let’s put it this way: It’s very hard to be a fan of another group or another artist when you’re an artist yourself.

“But (in this case) you’re actually friendly competitors, and that’s really what it’s all about. They liked our music. We liked their music. And that’s how we got friendly quite a few years before I joined Wings.”

Their friendship already established, Laine said he was anything but star struck when he and McCartney became bandmates in Macca’s first post-Beatles group. And he wasn’t feeling any urgency to measure up to the Fab Four.

“I wasn’t, but Paul must have been, I suppose,” Laine said. “For me, it was just a laugh. It was like, ‘Great, let’s do it!’ — because I knew him and it was just like getting together with a mate and putting a band together.

“And so it wasn’t anything to do with post-Beatles, post-Moody Blues. It was just the fact that we knew we could pull something off. We had that connection and the same musical influences.”

They decided at the outset they were going to write all or mostly original songs together and be on equal footing.

“I’d come in with a few ideas. He’d come in with more ideas. I didn’t treat him like a superstar, let’s put it that way. I think he needed somebody like me to bounce (ideas) off.

“He made me test myself a little bit more, be more prolific, play more instruments, which he knew I could and brought that out in me. It worked but it took a while. It didn’t happen overnight, but we felt confident about it. We knew it would work out in the end.”

To say that it worked out would be a monumental understatement. Wings was incredibly successful for much of the ’70s with a series of platinum-selling albums. There was a lovely song co-written by McCartney and Laine called “Mull of Kintyre.” Written in tribute to the Kintyre peninsula in Scotland and its headland, the Mull of Kintrye where McCartney owns a farm, it was Wings’ biggest hit in Britain and one of the biggest selling singles of all time in the United Kingdom.

So it’s probably safe to say that Laine doesn’t really feel he has anything to prove in Pittsburgh, other than, at 78, he can still put on a good show.