Creativity, Work Continue to Flow for Denny Laine

By Regis Behe

Denny Laine’s first brush with fame came more than 40 years ago when he sang “Go Now,” a hit single with Moody Blues. He would eventually become Paul McCartney’s right-hand man in Wings in the 1970s.

Since then, he’s performed in a variety of projects, including a stint with Todd Rundgren, Lou Gramm and Bo Bice in “It Was 40 Years Ago Today,” a all-star tour and tribute to the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” album.

“I’m very stoked up, I’m very busy,” he says from his home in Las Vegas. “I’m doing quite a few things at the same time. Things seem to be coming together for me.”

Laine’s schedule includes an appearance Saturday as a guest of “Pete Bennett’s British Invasion” at the Lincoln Park Performing Arts Center in Midland.

The past few years, Laine has been laying low in Vegas, preferring to help his wife raise a miniature breed of horse. Aside from a few corporate gigs, he’s mostly put music on the back burner.

But the “Sgt. Pepper” tour and some interest from some local casinos about putting on a rock ‘n’ roll review has spurred his creative energy, which also has been applied to a memoir he’s writing. He’s working constantly, and when it’s mentioned to him that the musicians of his era, especially from England, have been nothing if not inventive about extending their careers, he agrees.

“There was always a friendly competition involved,” he says, noting friendships with Rod Stewart, Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton. “But the thing about all those guys, they were in working bands. They were working gigs every night until they started to get noticed.”

And it wasn’t only music. Laine says London was a nexus of not only music, but photography, fashion and the arts in general. Only in retrospect did Laine, or anyone else, realize how creative and fertile London was during that era.

“I don’t think any of us really thought about anything like that, or about the future, that much,” he says. “I think we lived for the day. We were just lucky to be working, that’s how we saw it then.”

Because London was brimming with talented artists, there was no room for laggards. If a band missed a gig, there was always another one waiting to take its place. Thus, an ethic that stands Laine well today, even if he compares being a musician in the 1960s to being “in the bloody army.”

“You learn to discipline yourself, of the value of being disciplined by others, and to be good at what you do,” Laine says. “You come through it all, you learn about business and management and different sides of the job. … And later on in life, that experience comes to fruition more and more.”

(c) 2008 Tribune-Review/Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.