Gene Pitney toured Australia in October 2003. It was his last time in Australia as he died while on tour in the UK in 2006. I caught up with him at the beginning of that 2003 tour in Sydney. He told me the stories behind some of his iconic songs, from 1961’s Town Without Pity to his collaboration with Marc Almond in 1989, Something’s Got A Hold Of My Heart. 1963 Gene Pitney album World Wide Winners Maynard: Gene Pitney, welcome once again to Australia.Gene: Thank you very much, Maynard.Maynard: How many times all up now?Gene: A hundred.Maynard: A hundred times. It feels like that, hey?Gene: I don’t really know, but I think at least a dozen times since the early sixties.Maynard: Do you remember the first tour? Was it very strange to be so far away?Gene: The very first tour was with a bunch of Brits, I think it was when the, uh, so-called British Invasion happened, and it was Dusty Springfield, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Brian Poole and the Tremolos and me.Maynard: Who was your major competition when you were first starting out? Who was the person you really had to worry about?Gene: I never, ever thought of it in that direction at all. I just loved what I was doing, loved having the opportunity of being out there, and there wasn’t an awful lot of that around at that time. I think there was a great camaraderie in the sixties. People would join in and if somebody was doing a session, they would say, if you’re a town or something and you run into ’em, they’d say, come on, stop by and see what’s going on. There was no really great competition. The competition was the audience going out and seeing how good a show you could do.Maynard: One of the strangest connections I’ve found with you is you’ve got a Rolling Stones connection.Gene: Well, it was political to begin with. My publicist in the UK, Andrew Loog Oldham, was the Rolling Stonesí first manager. As a result, we got to know each other. I had never ever seen a guy with long hair like that before. Nothing like they are now. When they first started out, they had really, really long past the shoulders type hair, you know? And I remember I had a guy traveling with me from home in Connecticut, and he took a picture. That was when Brian Jones was still alive and in the group. When he got home, he showed it to his wife and she said, who are those four ugly broads? They were not pretty with the long hair, I’ll tell you, at the time.Maynard: You ended up doing a bit of work with them and, and swapping songs?Gene: Yeah. Well, we, we didn’t do any tours together, but we, did a lot of television together and a lot of promotion when they were out with their first recordings. They had a song that they had actually recorded with a guy named George Bean. They didn’t like the way it came out and they played it for me and I loved the track. I loved the orchestration on it. So I said to them, look, if you let me rewrite the melody to it so it fits what I’m doing, and having the success with, I’d love to take a crack at doing a vocal on it. So we went back in the same recording studio, Olympia Studios in London. I did the vocal with the harmonies on it, and it came out excellent. So I sent it back to New York first and they put it out to go on the US charts. At the time I was new to the business, the Rolling Stones were brand new to the business and hadn’t had that much success. It was just another thing that we were doing.Maynard: How do you find the business part of the music business?Gene: Unfortunately, it’s gotten way over that side of it now. When I first started, it was the music side. There were a lot of companies that were run by eccentrics that made it really interesting. People like George Goldner, I remember in New York, and Hy Weiss, people that ran a lot of the small independent labels. They were really characters. George Goldner was always with his big giant cigar. I’ll give you an instance: the guy that brought me to New York the first time brought me into George Goldner’s office to see if he would record me. I was in an outer office that had a piano and he came crashing through the door and said ìSing!î And I was just a green kid from this little town in Connecticut, you know? And I said ìJesus, you know, who is this?î So I sat down and I played a couple of the songs I had been writing and he said ìStop!î He said ìWhen is your birthday?î And I said ìFebruary 17th.î And he said ìSign him, he said he’s an Aquarius.î But I didn’t know anything about the star signs at the time, and I thought the guy said I was an aquarium. So when he went back in his office and stormed off again, I told the guy I was traveling with, I said ìThis guy’s nutsî and I said ìI’m outta here!î So we left and vanished, and years later he heard the story back and he came to me somewhere we were, and he was roaring laughing. He says ìI can’t believe I lost you as an artist ’cause you thought I called you an aquarium!î, but those were the guys that ran the industry and they were bigger than life. Unfortunately, now it’s more like all accountants, it’s all money and it’s all bottom line and it doesn’t have the same ring to it that it had then, the same excitement value.Maynard: You’re touring Australia again, you’ve said that there’s no way you could do two thirds of a show. You’ve always given and gotten a full show out. A lot of your songs are gut-retching, emotional songs. How do you go through this every night?Gene: Uh, it’s not difficult. They’re great songs and I love that part of it. I love performing. When I say that I can’t do a shortened version or anything like that. Let’s say I had food poisoning, which I’ve gotten two or three times, you know, and really felt awful, and somebody would say to me, ìJust do an easy show, just go out and do a light showî, I can’t, I cannot do that kind of a show. I have to still put 150% into it. It’s funny. It’s so healing to do that. I’ve actually gone out feeling miserable. I had a wicked cold, I remember, one night, everything was possibly wrong, that could go wrong, except – and I got it ñ the nosebleed. Came on while the orchestra was playing the overture, and I got that cleared up just in time to walk out on stage. When I walked off and did the whole show, I felt terrific.Maynard: Did it cheer you up? Did it put you up spiritually?Gene: I don’t know whether the adrenaline or whatever it is, is self-healing or what, but if you can get through it, you put everything you got into it and walk off, have a good night’s sleep, a lot of times everything goes away. You’re okay.Maynard: A lot of people ask you, is our Australian audience very different?Gene: People always ask me that ’cause they expect different countries to be different. But I’m not sure whether it’s because of the songs that I have or the type of performer that I am, but I find it pretty much the same, the world over wherever I go. I don’t really find that much of a difference in an audience.Maynard: You play Las Vegas, you do a lot of the casinos there. What is the audience like there? They’re a bit older, are they? Sometimes their attention wanders from time to time?Gene: They’re all the same. I just played the Stardust for a week in Las Vegas, just a couple weeks back. I was trying to explain to somebody that people go there and get nervous. It’s almost like going to a big venue like the London Palladium or Carnegie Hall. The thing you have to remember is that those are virtually the same people that come to any other show in any other place. Just because they’re in here doesn’t change anything, you know? When they’re in a casino, they’re people that have come from all walks of life, all over the, all the country, all over the world. I had people there that are really aficionados that fly into all my shows. I had people in the front row from Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Chicago to those that flew all the way from Yorkshire in England. A hell of a long trip. If I was to go there. You know, I’m not knocking it. I think it’s wonderful that they do that.Maynard: I hope you signed a CD for them, after all that.Gene: It’s not a different type of an audience. It’s the same audience.Maynard: ìThe Man Who Shot Liberty Valanceî.Gene: It was never in the film at all. It’s the weirdest thing. I still don’t know to this day why. It would’ve been terrific in the film, whether I sang it or not. But because of the success of the motion picture theme that I had prior to that, Town Without Pity, a whole pile of different film scores came in and offers saying, ìWould you like to record this?î One came in and it was directed by John Ford. It had Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, Lee Marvin, music by Bacharach and David. I mean, how do you turn that down? Paramount Pictures paid me to record the session. With all the kinds of perks that went along with it to do it. Then the film came out without the song in it. I’m sure it had something to do with business. It was something to do with politics, business. I have a feeling the publisher told the writers, Bacharach and David, that I’ve got the deal with Paramount for this picture. The writers did talking to Paramount, and something about it was back and forth and something went wrong with it. I’ll tell you the weirdest part about it – I found this out about five years ago – the music that was in the film was the score from a 1938 Henry Fonda film called Young Mr. Lincoln. The only connection being that John Ford directed both films. I don’t know whether they recycled it at the last minute for some reason because of this problem with the song, I don’t really know, but it’s one of those mysteries.Maynard: Town Without Pity is one of your gut-wrenching emotional ballads.Gene: Again, it was a political situation. I recorded for a small label called Musicor, and Musicor was distributed by United
