Penned by a couple of guys with unremarkable names, their hit song in 1961 signaled a change in both their names and recognition by the listening public.
Ask a million pop music lovers if they’ve ever heard of a guitar player named Charles Westover and you’ll get a million blank stares.
And no one would have ever known Westover had it not been for 1961, when he and a friend named Max Crooks collaborated on a song written in a bar in Battle Creek, Michigan. Playing in a band at the time named Charlie Johnson and The Big Little Show Band, Westover and Crooks were struggling to find work until someone suggested they rewrite a song they had written a year before…that no one noticed.
Westover was a lead singer with a gravelly, distinctive sound, and Crooks was a keyboard player who had experimented with a unique sound that he called the ‘musitron’. The song began to get attention, they renamed it Runaway, and Westover changed his stage name to Del Shannon. By now, if you’re a fan of 60s pop music you know the rest of the story.
Shannon’s voice was what it was. But Crook’s unusual instrumental solo in the middle of ‘Runaway’ prompted the song being recorded on BigTop Records in January of 1961 and it was released a month later. By April Shannon and Runaway were invited to appear with Dick Clark on American Bandstand, and within two weeks it was the #1 song on the Billboard Charts. Within two months it was the #1 song in Europe.
So popular was Runaway, that at its height of popularity it was selling 80,000 copies of the 45 rpm per day, an unheard-of figure for record sales at the time. Nothing else had ever come close to that kind of meteoric rise.
And anyone alive in 1961 and within earshot of a radio, record player, or jukebox could not possibly have failed to hear the song at least once.
The keyboard bridge of the song, performed by Crooks, became such a significant sound that when the movie American Graffiti was made by George Lucas and Francis Ford-Coppola in 1973, Runaway was the only unanimous selection by the producers among the 41 period songs featured on the sound track.
“It was a simple thing,” Shannon would claim later over the process of finding the tune. “Max Crooks played an A minor and a G chord and said, ‘Follow me’. I finished writing it in a carpet store.”
It’s sound was so infectious as to become a kind of rebellious standard for other push-the-envelope hits over the remainder of the decade. And Shannon, addicted to anti-depressants and who died of suicide in 1990 at age 55, never again reach the notoriety and recognition that he did with his one hit song.
“It still sounds good,” he told David Letterman in 1987, twenty six years after writing it.
35 years later, it sounds even better…one of unanimous favorites of the 60s. No list would really be complete without it.
The Dave Arbogast family of dealerships is the official transportation source for Press Pros Magazine.com.