GENE PITNEY, AN EARLY FAVORITE

 

Gene Pitney's final curtain call came not with a cough or a stagger, but with a performance—rounded, complete, and received with a standing ovation in a Cardiff auditorium. The word used was “natural causes,” as if God Himself were a concert promoter with a fondness for showmanship, allowing the tenor to finish his set before drawing the velvet drapes. There’s a polite symmetry to it—no collapse on stage, no tortured final note bent grotesque by mortality. Just applause, quiet egress, then absence. His voice was pure architecture: each syllable a stair climbed with theatrical intent, each chorus an attic gable framed in steel and longing. Pitney sang of love in the way-stained glass renders saints—ornate, overwrought, and wondrous. The songs were simple. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. World ends. And yet beneath the corn syrup of the lyrics, there surged a man excavating feeling as if sorrow were a quarry and he the last willing laborer. In the Sixties, when music began its slow morph into rebellion and fuzz pedal aphorisms, Pitney was romanticism’s holdout—unashamed of strings, crescendos, and hearts bleeding into vinyl. “Town Without Pity,” “It Hurts To Be In Love,” “I’m Gonna Be Strong”—these weren’t mere tracks. They were sonatas of collapse, teenage Gothic, snapshots of pain that, through their excess, found strange dignity.I bought his records back then, amid my youthful pantheon of pop: The Four Seasons, tidy in their falsetto flights; Peter, Paul and Mary, solemn with their folk harmonies. These now feel like embroidered samplers on a Midwestern kitchen wall—nice, nostalgic, and devoid of heat. But Pitney? Pitney remained. A soft spot formed around his melodrama like a pearl around grit. In later years, when his name was spoken with smirking condescension, I found myself defending him—not out of loyalty, but recognition. The man had made banality soar. The Prince of Perfect Pitch, they called him, and rightly so. He turned pubescent emotionalism into operetta, and made the adolescent experience seem operatic, and perhaps holy.