Walk Away Renee - The Left Banke

The video is from October 19 and 66, less than a month after Walk Away Renee was released. I was in a boarding school in Arizona when the song hit the airwaves, and can still remember it playing incessantly on the A.M. radios that nearly every student carried.

The Left Banke was a New York-based quintet. Michael Brown, the leader of the group, was only sixteen when he wrote Walk Away Renee. The song was inspired by a Renee Fladen, a young woman who had befriended the band.

According to Brown, the song - which took about eight weeks to write and record - was rejected by ten major labels before being picked up by Smash Records. Walk Away Renee would eventually chart to #5 and would place at #82 in Rolling Stones Top 100 Singles.