The Left Banke’s ‘Walk Away Renée’ Was Set in . . . Brooklyn?

‘200 Greatest 60s Rock Songs’ Book Excerpt

Frank Mastropolo

Smash Records

In 1966, the Left Banke featured flute, harpsichord and string orchestration in their debut hit single, “Walk Away Renée.” The haunting sound of the record was so unusual for its time that its style earned its own names: “Bach-Rock” or “Baroque ’n’ Roll.”

The complexity of the song belied the youth of 16-year-old composer Mike Brown, who grew up in Brooklyn. Brown’s father, violinist Harry Lookofsky, owned a small studio in New York City near the Brill Building. Brown played keyboards and soon began rehearsing there with friends Steve Martin (vocals), Rick Brand (lead guitar), Tom Finn (bass) and drummer George Cameron. Lyricist Tom Fair joined the band soon after the song’s success. The teens called themselves the Left Banke after the Left Bank (Rive Gauche) of the Seine River in Paris.

“Walk Away Renée” was written by Brown with Bob Calilli and Tony Sansone, who were not in the band. Members of the group told Dawn Eden that the inspiration for Brown’s song was Finn’s girlfriend, Renée Fladen.

“Renée was Mike Brown’s big love, and Tommy liked her a lot too,” said Cameron. “Tall, blonde and quiet. Mike was like a little kid around her. He’d bring her up to the studio to hear his latest songs, and then we’d all come out and sing. She’d just sit there and listen and smile a lot.”

“For a kid of 16, or 17, she was free, liberal, open-minded, sexy — everything,” recalled Finn. “She was just very different for that time, so she bowled Mike over.”

Brown added that he wrote “Walk Away Renée” in the winter of 1965, a month after meeting Renée. They never had a romantic relationship. “I was just sort of mythologically in love with her.

“It was only because I was away from it that I could appreciate the beauty of it. Once you’ve become immersed in it, you can’t see the sunlight coming through the window, because you are then in the light.”

The song’s reference to a “sign that points one way” was part of a fantasy of Brown’s. The one-way sign is at the corner of Hampton Avenue and Falmouth Street in Brooklyn; Brown imagined himself meeting Renée there, where he told her to walk away.

World United was a small studio in the mid-1960s at 1595 Broadway in New York owned by Lookofsky, a respected jazz and classical symphony violinist. Reparata & the Delrons and the Magic Plants were among the groups that recorded there.

“The initial sessions took place in World United studio, owned by Mike Brown’s father, Harry Lookofsky, and run by brothers Bill and Steve Jerome, who were co-producers on a number of other studio projects,” Fair recalled in Big Takeover.

“The studio itself was kind of ratty by today’s standards, way up in the back of a dingy old building on Broadway and 48th Street in midtown Manhattan. There was an old upright piano on one wall of the studio and another in a separate office in the same building. That office served as the publishing administration office.

“Mike would sit at the piano and command rehearsals with his superior musical knowledge. The rest of us would stand around the piano and sing, trying to achieve his ideal vision of each song he originated.

“All we did was go upstairs to the studio and play and sing all night long,” added Cameron. “When things needed to change, we would go next door to this arcade called Fascination and play this bingo-style ball game. The workers there loved us, we were so odd. I think that those were the best times. The music was still our driving force and we got along. Well, most of the time.”

Besides providing the studio and producing the song, Brown’s father played all of the strings on “Walk Away Renée.” Martin sang lead and Brown played the signature harpsichord. Brown recalled in Classic Bands that Renee’s presence in the control room unnerved him.

“My hands were shaking when I tried to play, because she was right there in the control room. There was no way I could do it with her around, so I came back and did it later.”

Renée Fladen, bothered by the attention from the band, soon disappeared from their lives but not before serving as Brown’s inspiration for the band’s follow-up hit, “Pretty Ballerina.”

When Lookofsky fired the Jerome brothers, co-producers and engineers of the hits, the band moved to Mercury Sound Studios at 110 West 57th Street. “The trust was gone,” Finn told Please Kill Me. “Now, we were at Mercury Studios recording with some by-the-book staff engineer with a white shirt and tie, who didn’t understand the first thing about what we were trying to do. That was the beginning of the end for us.”

Mike Brown left the group shortly after and the Left Banke never charted again, though “Walk Away Renée” was a Top 10 hit for Motown’s Four Tops in 1967. When Tom Finn died in 2020, he was the last surviving member of the band. At last report, Renée Fladen moved to San Francisco, where she became a singer and vocal coach.

Frank Mastropolo is the author of 200 Greatest 60s Rock Songs, part of the Greatest Performances series. For more on our latest projects, visit Edgar Street Books.