Pitney Feels His Rock Hall Election Just Matter of Time

When the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame holds its inductions in May, Gene Pitney will be missing once again.

“I hold the record for number of times nominated, I think,” Pitney says good-naturedly over the phone from his home in Somers, Conn.

Pitney--who unlike many inductees continues to command international audiences--doesn’t fret about being left out. “I know what the criteria is. Eventually they’re going to have to put me in.”

The honors are deserved--if not for his two dozen singles that hit the charts in the ‘60s, then at least for having written such enduring rock ‘n’ roll tunes as “Hello Mary Lou” and “He’s a Rebel.” Such writing was noted recently when Pitney’s typewritten and scratched-out lyrics for “Hello Mary Lou” appeared amid examples of Doc Pomus, John Lennon, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen’s work in a book called “Songs in the Rough” (St. Martin’s), compiled by songwriter Stephen Bishop.

“The phrase was in my head: ‘Hello Mary Lou, goodbye heart,’ ” Pitney says in the book. “Then I had to create the rest of it around that.” Like a lot of songs he wrote at the time, as a Rockville, Conn., High School grad dying to break into the music business, it was scribbled down as he sat in his car alongside the local reservoir.

“I’d take my guitar in my Ford coupe: fire-engine red with a white Orlon top,” Pitney recalls. “There was a parking place across from the water that held one car. I’d sit there with a guitar and write. I can’t tell you how many times the cops stopped me.”

“Hello Mary Lou” became a Top 10 hit for Ricky Nelson in 1961. Pitney scored an even bigger hit a few months later with “He’s a Rebel.”

“I heard ‘Uptown’ by the Crystals and was blown away. I had never heard cellos and low strings added to rock songs. I said, ‘I’m going to write their next song.’ ”

He borrowed the word “rebel” from a song that a friend said he was going to write but never did. “I thought, what a great word to use in a song. And, having morality, I waited until I knew he wasn’t going to write a song.”

He then took a month to craft his own rebel song. “The moment of truth comes when you play your song into a tape recorder,” he notes. Then, double-tracking it with another tape recorder into a rough demo, he realized what he had: “It was awful. I started all over again.” Starting over is better than fixing something bad, so he went through the whole process twice before hitting on the song that eventually was taken by producer Phil Spector for his girl-group.

It not only was a No. 1 smash for the Crystals, but the biggest single Spector ever recorded. It wasn’t until years later, when Pitney shared a bill with the Crystals, that he learned the group had not actually sung on the record.

“They asked if I’d rehearse the song with them on piano,” Pitney recalls. “I thought: That’s strange. This is their big hit and I have to teach them to sing it?” It turned out that Spector had used a Los Angeles group, the Blossoms, with Darlene Love of the Ronettes singing lead.

Once Pitney became a recording star himself--with such hits as “It Hurts to Be in Love,” “Half Heaven--Half Heartache” and “I’m Gonna Be Strong”--he had little time to write. Luckily, he had one of pop’s best teams, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, writing such hits for him as “(The Man Who Shot) Liberty Valance,” “Only Love Can Break a Heart” and “Twenty Four Hours From Tulsa.”

Pitney, who will be 56 this month, never stopped being a star internationally and has continued to tour the past quarter-century. He scored a No. 1 hit in England in 1990, singing a duet with rocker Marc Almond (“Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart”). Lately, Pitney has been performing more often in this country, and this week his “Town Without Pity” will appear on the soundtrack to the film “subUrbia” alongside new work by Beck, Elastica and Sonic Youth.

Should Pitney ever make it into the Hall of Fame, he’ll be among familiar company. In the early ‘60s, he headlined several British tours that featured such future stars as the Rolling Stones (whose manager he shared), the Iveys (who would become Badfinger) and David Jones and the Lower Third (led by the man who would become David Bowie).

Pitney’s recording of a Jagger-Richards song, “That Girl Belongs to Yesterday,” marked the first time a song written by the Stones made it onto the American charts.

Pitney doesn’t dwell on the past and generally refuses to play multi-act oldies shows. He prefers to pay attention to current projects, like an album of new material he is completing with his son Todd.

But a recent cache of his history--including those lyrics to “Hello Mary Lou”--recently was uncovered.

“My mother kept a lot of things,” Pitney says. “We didn’t know until after she passed away. She had a roomful of everything, dating back to the pay receipts when I used to work as an usher at the Palace Theatre in Rockville.”