Monday, December 12, 2005

Love Songs In The Night

These two songs are from a single that Steve Martin released in 1971. Steve Martin was the lead singer in the Left Banke. That’s him on “Pretty Ballerina”, “She May Call You Up Tonight” and “Walk Away Renee”. These two songs are pretty much Left Banke in every way except for the name on the label. The songs were written by the Left Banke’s keyboard player and primary songwriter Michael Brown. Also on the session were Left Banke bassist Tom Finn and drummer George Cameron.

Love Songs In The Night” is a terrific power pop song. This song should’ve been a hit but it’s barely known outside the circle of Left Banke fans. The flip isn’t as memorable but it's still a good song.

Both songs were used in the soundtrack to a movie called Hot Parts. The movie starred an ex-Warhol Superstar named Ultra Violet and 'is mostly about sex.' Anybody seen it? IMDB.com doesn’t list the movie in Ultra Violet’s entry and there’s nothing available on eBay. There was a soundtrack released. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a copy of that either.

The songs have only been reissued on a Left Banke comp that Rhino released in 1985. If anybody ever wises up and reissues the Left Banke’s records, I hope they include both of these songs.

2 Comments:

Blogger Collin said...

'Love Songs In The Magic' is such a wonderful song. I actually first heard it on the fabulous LeftBanke yahoo group where you can also dig into the Banke doing coca cola and hair-spray jingles. i have almost everything brown has ever put his stamp on and i'd say over 90% of it is good.

13/12/05 3:10 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

That Hot Parts soundtrack also has a couple decent Michael Brown songs done by The Montage, a band whose record Michael wrote and played on.....they released that on cd a few years back. Somebody needs to re-release that Beckies album.....it's pretty great. Brown released one more record in 1994 with a singer named Yvonne Vitale called "On This Moment".....awful damn hard to find, though.

17/12/05 3:10 PM  

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