Song of the Day 8/16: Del Shannon, “Runaway”

Guest post by Nathan Arizona

When was a synthesizer first used in recorded pop/rock music? Maybe surprisingly early. Some say 1961, on Del Shannon’s “Runaway.”

The electric keyboard work was one thing that made the zippy “Runaway” so distinctive that many think it’s the best Top 40 song of its era. The one you wanted blaring from the car radio when you were driving down the road looking for some teen-age action. It topped the charts in the U.S. and England.

“Runaway” has relentless momentum with an intense, kind of spooky electric keyboard break in the middle. Nobody called it a synthesizer back then because the Moog analog synthesizer wasn’t a thing yet. Band keyboardist Max Crook called it a Musitron.

Crook had been fooling around in the studio with something called a clavioline, an electric keyboard invented by a Frenchman in 1947. He modified and enhanced the clavioline using TV tubes, appliance parts, amplifiers and other items that came to hand. Shannon liked the result and they applied it to a new song. Soon “Runaway” was ready to go. The producer did speed it up a little to slightly raise the pitch.

When Shannon performed the song on David Letterman in 1987, his falsetto strong as ever, keyboardist and band leader Paul Shaffer bobbed up down excitedly and eventually looked almost like a crazy man at the keys. But a happy one.

“Runaway” has had a flourishing afterlife on television and movie soundtracks, including “American Grafitti,” where it was the perfect background for a parade of now-classic cars down the main drag. It was the opening theme for the ‘80s TV show “Crime Story” with Dennis Farina. It was played on “Dexter” and “Quantum Leap” and is currently used on the soundtrack for the Steve Martin-Martin Short show “Only Murders in the Building.”

Artists as disparate as Genesis, Scandal and Tom Petty have referenced it in their songs.

Here’s Del Shannon’s “Runaway”:

And on David Letterman: