Definitely put together some great comps. R.I.P.

—

Radio Free Bakersfield--60 Minutes of TWANG, CRUNCH, OOMPH.
http://radiofreebakersfield.com
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Radio-Free-Bakersfield/172410279636
http://www.sandiegojoe.com/rfb.htm

R.I.P. Bob

—

-Kyle

Beyond The Surf YouTube channel
Beyond The Surf Instagram
The Verbtones @ Instagram
The Verbtones @ Facebook
The Verbtones @ bandcamp

Wow, Dan Valentie was close to him for a while...

RIP.

—

Jeff Utterback

is the link not working for others? i could try and cut n' paste the whole thing here...

when I go to the link it asks me to log into Facebook.
some of us are not hip, and don't have a Facebook account.

please copy and paste Dave.

RIP Bob.

—

Jeff(bigtikidude)

R.I.P. Bob Keane - The "Oracle Of Del-Fi": He Was Quite A Character
by Bryan Thomas
Yesterday at 12:54pm

I received the news from my friend Mark Rome this morning that our former boss, Bob Keane, died of acute renal failure on Saturday night. He was 87 years old.

As many of you already know, I worked for, and with, Bob Keane at his Del-Fi record label for five and a half years of my life, right after I'd moved to Los Angeles, from August 1995 to January 2001, right before I first started working at Rhino Entertainment. Del-Fi wasn't the first record label I worked at -- I actually worked at a crappy label called Delta/Laserlight for a few months before that -- but my years at Del-Fi provided me with probably the most significant job I've had so far in the music business, though, truthfully, I never realized that fact until much later, after I'd already been working for Keane for a few years.

I iniitially got the job with Bob because a former co-worker, Gary Tanenbaum -- who I'd worked with at a record store in Hollywood -- had begun working with Keane earlier that year. Keane had jump-started his old 60's label in the mid-90s in order to start putting out CDs and licensing tracks to movies like "Pulp Fiction," and Keane, never one to miss the opportunity to either self-promote his own accomplishments or jump on the backs on other similar labels' successess, put together a new CD compilation called Pulp Surfin'.

This CD was something of a minor success and provided Keane with his re-entry into world of reissues. It mixed classic and not-so-classic Del-Fi surf tracks from the early sixties and a handful of newer surf songs, including a previously unreleased Brian Wilson track, and it was doing pretty well, sales-wise. Gary said Keane needed to staff up the label and he asked me if I'd be interested in joining the staff of one. I was unemployed at the time and so I said "sure, what the hell..." and that started off my stint at the Del-Fi label.

At first, I pretty much did everything that Gary -- or Bob -- didn't do, including publicity, radio promotions, marketing, A&R, and anything related to editorial or publicizing what we were doing as a label. Gary, meanwhile, concentrated on sales and distribution and trying to build the company up with Bob. I don't recall that Bob actually did very much of the work, but he sure had a hand in promoting himself and making sure we focused on praising him every way that we could.

Very soon, Gary and I realized we couldn't do everything ourselves, and so we found a few other employees for Del-Fi, or they came to us, whatever the case may be. Some of these guys ended up becoming some of my best friends in life, and they still are, including Bryan Lasley, Steve Stanley, Elliott Kendall, and Mark Rome, whom I've already mentioned.

They're all exceptionally talented too, and they've gone on to much success in the music business. Grammy-nominated Bryan Lasley, for instance, now runs his own label and he's designed many, many CD packages for record companies like Rhino, Shout Factory and others. Steve Stanley runs his own label, Now Sounds, and he does nearly everything: package design, liner notes, licensing, etc. Elliott works for Universal; Mark works for Killer Tracks, a division of BMG Music. They all got their start -- as I did -- working at Del-Fi. A lot of people got their start at Del-Fi, in fact.

I have to tell you that hearing of Keane's death this morning, I realize how lucky I was to have worked at Del-Fi in the mid-90s, and how that experience shaped much of my own life. The man had a great laugh, and a constant twinkle of mischief in his eyes, like a surfin' Santa Claus, wearing oversized baggy shorts and Hawaiian shirts.

I think one writer named Kevin Griffin nailed it when he said this about Keane's appearance: ""The handsome, silver-haired, former Big Band clarinetist dresses in chinos and Hawaiian shirts and looks like he could be Mike Love's big brother-or Gidget's kindly uncle."

When I knew him, he was already in his senior years and so much of his life was already behind him, but he was still pretty active, right up until a few years ago, eating sushi nearly every day at Hirozen on Beverly, where he'd become friends with the entire staff, all the chefs and some of their regular customers, like actor Jeff Goldblum. I have eaten there with him many times. Keane also played golf pretty frequently too, right up to just a few years ago, and I think he was still trying to make a few music deals on the various courses around Los Angeles.

I won't lie to you, working for Keane was like working at an insane asylum much of the time -- that man had many, many crazy ideas, some of which are now frequently repeated by me for laughs at parties and get-togethers where people have a passing interest in Keane or the Del-Fi label. I still can't believe some of these ideas he had -- those of us who worked for him called them "Keane’s Follies." Keane eventually realized that he did have some really bad, bad ideas and he too began calling them his "Follies." He used to laugh about them later and say, "Is that another one of my follies?"

The best example I can give of one of Keane's classic follies was the time he had us all meet in his office -- Del-Fi had two offices in the 90s, and 00s, the first one near the Pacific Design Center, and the last office he had, on Melrose, near Crescent Heights -- and he'd just come up with an idea that one of us should call the Los Angeles Zoo and see if they'd loan us a chimpanzee of theirs. He thought they might actually let us spray-paint it purple, and hiis idea was that we'd begin calling the chimp Delbert, naturally, since that was the name of the little purple ape character we'd put on some of our mid-90s compilations (designed by the very cool artist Shag) including one called Lost Treasures!, of which I'm particuarly proud because it was just a lot of fun to compile.

This is one of my favorite stories, and it's completely true. Bob then said we could then take this purple-painted chimp around to various personal appearances where Keane could then sit at a booth or a table, with the chimp beside him, and he'd sign autographs while he introduced the monkey to his fans, and we'd all sell tons of CDs because of this. I remember this was one of those meetings where I'd just stand up and walk out of his office, saying "I have work to do, Bob! Stop coming up with the stupid ideas of yours -- I don't have time for this shit!!"

Other examples? Well, there was an Armenian surgeon who came into our offices one time -- he went by the professional name "Dr. Rap" -- and Keane had met him somewhere and invited him to come to the label to chat. Keane was always meeting musicians and artists at unlikely places like the check-out line at Vons or the car wash. Anyway, Dr. Rap was an intern in residence at the Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, and he had a pretty good story in rap, I suppose, but his music was horrible. His schtik was to give advice to the teenagers that they shouldn't "take dope" in any form.

As an intern in the emergency ward, he would tell of all the beautiful young guys and girls that were wheeled in unconscious or dead because they overdosed or did something stupid from shooting up. He had a message, you see, but unfortunately, he didn’t know that, as a rapper, he was expounding the exact opposite of all successful rappers, and no one wanted to hear his goody-goody message. Keane loved him, but we had to tell him, "Sorry, Bob, that's just another one of your follies."

Then there was Shadow, a beautiful Chinese woman who lived in Garden Grove. She came to the U.S. from Shanghai originally because she wanted to be a singer. While living in China, she had seen Del-Fi's website and saw that Ritchie Valens had been on the Del-FI label, back in the late fifties, and she had always wanted to be on the same label. Keane ultimately decided we couldn’t consider her music because it had too many Chinese bells in it, and -- as Keane pointed out to us when it finally hit him about this particular folly -- she was singing in Chinese, for Christ's sake. I remember him saying this -- and laughing. We also pointed out to him that his idea to sell her CDs back to China wasn't going to be that easy either. That was his idea -- record the Chinese gal and then try to sell her CDs back to China.

There were so many more follies, so many. There was Bobby Seals, an older country artist who had recorded a medley of Del-Fi hits, country style (he ended up putting this one out, actually, thru a distribution deal with Rhino -- those of you with access to Soundscan can see how well it did).

There was a rock band from Ireland called Stand, who sounded like the band U2 used to sound, back around 1984 or so. There was Crystal, who had a nasty rap single. There was Champagne, a young trio comprised of three young black girls whose mothers were all so afraid that "whitey" was going to cheat them that Keane wasn't able to convince them to sign a deal and so we never got started. Keane went so far as to re-name them Champagne, thinking to cash in on the similarities to Brandy, who was selling a lot of records (she had her own TV show at the time, "Moesha").

There was also Guitar Jack, a blues guitarist who was married to one of Keane's employees, Dorothy Wargo. In fact, Dorothy’s daughter was one of the young girls in Champagne. Keane seemed to just attract all types of artists who thought they were going to be superstars. He wasted a lot of money on a few of these artists too -- Banig, and Jenny Morris, to name just two -- and I don't think he ever had any regrets, he was just foolish in that respect. He spent a lot of money on artists that none of us ever thought would sell, but he wasn't dissuaded by our complaints, or hardly ever. He did what he wanted to do -- he was "mavericky," I guess you'd say.

Keane also knew how to poke fun at himself, and he could be severally self-deprecating sometimes, but he often tried to hide this by overcompensating and having me, in particular, build up his biographical content to the point where it seemed like he might have been bi-polar, so full of himself that he wasn't human anymore, he was superhuman. He would swing back and forth between thinking he was significantly important in the history of modern recorded music and responsible for nearly everything that had come along in music in the last fifty years -- "I'm a genius, I invented rock 'n' roll and discovered surf music" -- blah, blah, blah, etcetera -- but then he'd swing back to the other side of the pendulum, saying things like "I'm a loser, I've never really accomplished anything, it's all a sham," etc.

We had to prepare ourselves for those days when he really just didn't want to do anything, and he'd occasionally threaten to shut down the company and just quit everything. Those were the rough days. But they were only occasional and we grew used to these pendulum swings and would try to build up his confidence and make him feel like we really had something going on, whether we did or not.

The Lively Ones, circa 1963

Just about the time you'd think he'd be at his lowest point, he'd turn around and say "let's get something goin'!" and we'd all meet in his office and learn that his new idea was really only just another way he'd thought of to promote himself -- it was always about promoting Bob Keane, the wunderkind, the master. He liked repeating the saying "When the student is ready, the Master appears." I think he really thought that he'd come up with the saying himself, he said it so often. He also said things to us, his staff, like "Stick with me, boys, and I'll have you fartin' through silk!"

The Oracle Of Del-Fi - the book's available from Amazon, I think.

If you're really interested in what Keane accomplished during his life, I think Keane's own autobiography, The Oracle of Del-Fi: My Life in Music With Ritchie Valens, Frank Zappa, Barry White, Sam Cooke and Other Legends, is a good place to start.

This book is Keane's own story, though I probably, honestly, wrote or co-wrote about fifty-to-sixty percent myself (I didn't receive cover credit, just a nice comment in the "special thanks") -- but quite a lot of it is written in his (ahem) own words. It's not the best autobiography I've ever read (it's the only one I've worked on, however), but mixed in with the spurious details -- which are pretty questionable, to say the least -- there are some wonderful moments that are really fun to read. You really get to know the man by reading the book, I think. Or maybe the man he wants you to think he is, or was, but you might have read between the lines for the true story.

The Oracle of Del-Fi begins with the story of teenage rock n' roller Ritchie Valens, providing a lot of information that people don’t know about Valens, from his birth up to his death on February 3, 1959. I think the story of Valens -- particularly after the popular bio-pic "La Bamba" was released in theaters -- has been told before, many, many times, but Keane's particular take on it is probably the most honest account, though it's difficult to know how much of what Keane remembered later in life is actually true (he started the book when he was around 79-80 years old).

Over the course of a few years, I was pretty involved -- with Phil Spector's help, and others too, of course -- in trying to get Ritchie Valens inducted in the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame, which he was, ultimately, and I suppose this can be seen as an achievement for Keane, for the label and for Ritchie Valens, of course. But these days I don't have too many nice things to say about the R&R Hall of Fame.

Back to the book: after telling the story of his relationship with Ritchie Valens, particularly his death and what it meant to Keane, the story then switches over to Keane's own life, back to the very beginning, from the age of three. He was born Robert Kuhn on January 5, 1922, and was always known as either Bob, or, as a child, Bobby, but he wouldn't change his surname-- first to "Keene" and then later to "Keane", more about this later -- until much later in his life.

Keane wrote most of these passages about his own life himself -- I wrote most of the other parts about the artists he worked with, with his contributions here and there, because, truthfully, he didn't remember too many details about their lives. Every now and then he'd remember something and we'd add it to the book.

I think Mike Stax, of Ugly Things magazine, also worked on the book for awhile, but not sure how much of what Mike did with Keane ended up in the final book, which he published himself on "Del-Fi International Books" even though I'd lined up a few deals before that -- which Keane passed on -- with "real" book publishers, like BackBeat books.

Keane lived with his family in the El Segundo area of Calfornia for the first years of his life, and in the book Keane then tells how the Kuhn family then moved to Mexico, where he then spent three years of his childhood. His father, who owns his own construction company, is helping to construct the Pan American Highway in the 1930s, and the family are treated like kings and queens, and hobnobs with Mexico’s upper and lower crusts. They were ultimately forced to leave Mexico City in the midst of a revolution, however, and the Kuhns returned to Southern California where the young Keane's prodigious musical talent found public acceptance and his boyish good looks won him easy entry into star-studded Hollywood society, but it didn't happen overnight.

Keane tells how he went to auditions and did screen tests with a yet-unknown Lana Turner (they ultimately went on a few dates) until he went to see Benny Goodman perform, and that galvanized the young Bob Keane, who decided to pursue music as a career. He focused on playing jazz clarinet, and was eventually tapped by a major Hollywood talent agency, MCA, who touted him as the "young Benny Goodman."

Keane had dreamed of becoming famous as a great clarinetist all his life, but apparently this was not to be his destiny, though it was a dream he struggled to abandon for the rest of his life. He continued studying music, by day, as the only student of the legendary clarinet virtuoso Lucian Callait (ever heard of him? me neither), and spent his nights jamming and performing at chic, sex-drugs-and-booze soaked Hollywood soirees. He was restless, reckless and a little crazy, if we're to believe what he's written in his autobiography.

Keane eventually bolted from the University of Southern California -- where he'd begun to take college courses that were, for him, a distraction from the musical stardom he really knew wanted to pursue -- and decided to enlist in the aviation cadets. He ended up stationed in Florida, still performing at every opportunity, and ended up getting courtmartialed for jamming with musicians in a black Tampa nightclub. He rejects a comfortable position in a military band in order to win his wings, but he was ultimately grounded by an outbreak of Valley fever, and never actually flew

Keane's story continues to his adventures training as a pilot, right after the World War II, and then back to Southern California, where he continued to play clarinet -- he tells how he ended up fronting Artie Shaw’s band for a while, then signed with MCA Talent Agency as the “World's Youngest Band Leader."

Returning to the states, Keane returned to the big band circuit fronting the Artie Shaw Orchestra, performing and rubbing shoulders with the biggest names in big band jazz and swing music like Artie Shaw, Woody Herman, Chet Baker, Stan Getz and Frank Sinatra. Tagged for major stardom, Keane enlisted the aid of some of the biggest names on the west coast jazz scene such as Red Nichols, Shelly Manne, Red Norvo, Nelson Riddle, Billy May and others as he recorded the first of his four LPs for jazz impresario Gene Norman and he also returned to the glittering Hollywood nightlife.

Changing his name from Kuhn to Keene, initially, after an ignorant disc jockey mispronounced his name on-air as an offensive racial epithet, Keane dodged arson-happy racists to explore L.A.’s jazz and R&B underground along the legendary Central Avenue chitlin' circuit, jamming with jazz greats Duke Ellington. Lionel Hampton and a young piano player named Nat "King" Cole.

Incidentally, the story Keane liked to tell about the name change from Keene to Keane was that he'd met a " lesbian psychologist" of some sort at a dinner party in the early 60s, I think, and she fancied herself a "numerologist." Keane also says she was "possibly a hooker." She advised Keane that the spelling of his name had too many e's, and it was "bad mojo" or something. Keane says he thought this might be a reason for all the bad luck in his life, which I was desperate to change, so on a whim, he changed it to Keane.

Keane's story continued as he became involved with the motion picture business in Hollywood, at Paramount, before hosting his own CBS Television show during the mid-50s, and he also took his live act on the road, to the adult playground of Las Vegas, where he met the woman who was to be his new wife, singer Elsa Nillson. As the big bands made their exodus into the Las Vegas lounges and television studios in the 50s, Keane then found himself as another jazz artist trying to embrace the new sounds of rhythm & blues and rock 'n' roll. But for Keane, he saw the music as invigorating, full of life.

The Bob Keene Show on CBS - 1950s

When a friend approached Keane with a proposal to form a record company to issue updated Greek music, Keane founded Keen Records. Keane began building a recording studio and scouting talent, only to find himself battling for creative control with his non-musical partners. Keane befriended R&B producer "Bumps" Blackwell and gambled on the record that got Blackwell fired from neighboring Specialty Records. All of this leads right up to the forming of his first record label, Keen Records, which was a short-lived but important part of his story.

In the book, Keane chronicles his first attempts to achieve success in the music business, but, truthfully, he was only involved with one artist at Keen -- Sam Cooke -- who had recorded a song for Specialty Records, called "You Send Me." The only problem is that Cooke was still seen as a black gospel singer, and Art Rupe, who ran Specialty Records, didn't think his audience would accept a secular single from the man who would later go on to be referred to a "sepia-toned Sinatra." Cooke's producer, Bumps Blackwell, thought otherwise, and bought himself out of his own contract along with the master recording tapes for "You Send Me," and he takes them over to the newly-founded Keen Records, and to Bob Keane, who loved the song and thought it would be a great way to kick off the Keen imprint.

Keane dove headlong into promoting "You Send Me" and as the single rocketed up the charts, he endured the hostility of the chiefly-white pop and jazz music establishment for embracing rock 'n' roll and introducing "soul music" to America. It was during this first year -- 1957 -- that his partners' greed and intrigues cost him his first record company and artists, however; embroiled in a court battle so bitter the judge suffered a stroke and fistfights erupted in courthouse washrooms, Keane lost everything he'd had or made up to that point when he and his financial backers ended up in court, for over a year, dissolving their partnership.

"You Send Me" had been such a smash hit, however, that the money Keane was able to make, before the personal squabbles squashed Keane's involvement in Keen, and the recording equipment that Keane ended up getting in the settlement -- chiefly an 601-2 Ampex portable recorder -- was just enough for him to start over.

Battered, nearly bankrupt but unbroken, Keane built his own studio in the basement of his Los Angeles home and created a new label he dubbed Del-Fi Records, a misspelling of the "Oracle of Delphi" -- he tells everyone that this Joycean wordplay signals to the corporate music industry and his former Greek partners his unwillingness to accept defeat. Keane has also said, many times in his life, that his wife came up with the name "Del-Fi" because she said "you got screwed by Greeks, why don't you name it something Greek to get back at them?," or something to that affect. It's hard to know if that's a true story, or something he's changed in telling it over the years. Keane liked to tell the same story over and over, but I often noticed that he'd change little details whenever he did, so you were often left wondering which part was true, and which part was fiction.

As Del-Fi began its ascent as one of the many, many independent record labels on the so-called Hollywood "Record Row," near Selma and Vine streets, Keane found in the day-to-day running of a record company a new palette of creative challenges, but he was lucky. He's always been really lucky. Great musicians come to him, and friends and music fans were constantly turning him on to talented artists who weren't getting noticed by the bigger labels.

One example of this comes early in 1958, when Keane is told about an exciting young Latino singer being touted as "The Little Richard of San Fernando." Slouching in the back of a theater crowded with dancing teenagers, Keane assesses the shy young teenager, strumming a cheap guitar, and after the show he introduces himself to the performer, who is named Richard Valenzuela -- he later suggests that Richie add a "t" to his first name and shorten his surmame to Valens, in case they run into any problems promoting him as a Latino singer. Later, as Ritchie’s bandmates wait outside, Keane auditions Ritchie Valens in his home studio and, liking what he hears, he then books time in a small Hollywood studio called Gold Star.

Finding Valens and his bandmates too raw and inexperienced to produce a recordable performance, Keane surrounds the neophyte Valens with the cream of L.A.’s jazz and club scene, a group of session musicians who would later become famous as “The Wrecking Crew." He also wrapped the three-hour session with scraps of incomplete performances of an unfinished song and repaired to nearby Capitol studios where he cobbled together Valens’ first hit single: “Come On, Let’s Go!”

As “Come On Let’s Go!” sailed up the charts, Keane and Valens returned to his home studio for more experimentation. A father/son relationship begandeveloping between the shy, burly teenager and the more sophisticated Keane, who revealed to Valens the secrets of songwriting and music theory. Or that's what Keane tells me happened, who knows if it's true. Keane certainly did know about music, and performance, and I'm sure he helped to mold Valens into the image of a teen idol, but whether Valens was already close to being fully developed or not, who's to say?

Ritchie eventually crooned shards of a new song he'd written for his girlfriend at school, a girl named Donna. Keane loved the song, and subsequently helped Valens construct the shards into something workeable -- thereby taking a co-writing credit in the process -- and he then rushed Valens over to Gold Star where they embellished Valens' plaintive ballad with additional instruments and backing vocals.

Keane suggested for the flipside an upbeat version of an old courting ballad from Vera Cruz he'd heard Ritchie singing in the back of his convertible car on one of their many road trips. Valens wavered, apparently -- he spoke no Spanish whatsoever, you see, despite the language being spoken by some of his relatives, and he is unsure of how these relatives and his Spanish-speaking fans might react to his English accent or changing the song into a rock 'n' roller. Nonetheless, Keane says he coached Ritchie on the proper pronunciation and Valens relented. The song, of course, is “La Bamba."

As the newest double-side smash record blazed up the charts, Keane whisked Valens from concert to television performance to an appearance in the rock 'n' roll movie classic "Go Johnny Go” and, finally, he was able to get Ritchie a coveted slot opening for superstars Buddy Holly and Dion & The Belmonts on a winter tour across the heartland of America. While on tour in the midst of a blistering cold snowstorm, Valens checked in regularly with Keane as the tour progressed and he complained one evening of the cold, the tour disorganization and the rattletrap buses that they've been traveling on from gig to gig. "Come on home," Keane says he told the seventeen year old Valens, who was savoring his first taste of fame and not ready to quit, not just yet. Valens relented to finishing some final dates, and Keane began arranging to bring Ritchie home for some rest and more recording sessions.

Then, as Keane's car -- probably a Cadillac... Keane always drove flashy expensive cars -- whizzed past the Hollywood Palladium the next morning, he heard Ritchie's latest recording being introduced by a disc jockey who referred to the singer as "the late, great Ritchie Valens." Shrugging it off as a slip of the lip, Keane says he rounded the corner to his Selma Avenue offices when his stomach suddenly convulsed. Gasping for breath, Keane ascended the stairs to his office. He remembers vividly how the ashen faces of his staff revealedl the truth, which was to change the rest of his life: Ritchie Valens had been killed in a plane crash, along with Buddy Holly, J.P. Richardson, and the pilot, Roger Peterson.

The funny thing, or not funny -- it depends on the context and how you feel about such things -- Keane often said very negative things about Valens to me, and to others in my presence, sometimes during recorded interviews, and he often said that he was the one with all the talent and without him -- and without the help of the "Wrecking Crew," I suppose -- that Ritchie Valens wouldn't have amounted to much. I think he was always jealous of Ritchie Valens' success, and that the 17-year old who died too soon (after an 8 month career) had become the legend, the icon, and not him. Bob always saw himself as the one who should have been praised and promoted, and you can see that he never missed the opportunity, for the rest of his life, to promote himself right along with Ritchie as much as he could.

And remember, he was a character in the movie "La Bamba" right alongside Lou Diamond Phillips, who played Ritchie, and you'd think you'd be happy with Joe Pantioliano's performance, but no!! What did Keane usually have to say about it?: he wondered why the Hollywood casting people would get "Joey Pants," who is bald or was balding at the time, to portray him, when it should be clear to the world that he had a "full head of hair." Keane was upset that it seemed the casting people hadn't found someone who looked like him.

To pick up the story as we continue, new artists -- blues, rock, R&B, jazz and Latino -- have meanwhile been rushing to the doors of Del-Fi’s "Record Row" offices. A musician to the core and valuing musical adventurousness over cash, Keane violated the conventions of corporate record culture by offering each aspiring artist a personal assessment of their work -- and so, Del-Fi’s innovative "open door" policy is born.

Enduring the first of the triad of tragedies that nearly topple Keane’s recording empire -- the death of Sam Cooke -- Keane plunged forward , signing new artists, redefining the role of the record producer, confronting and circumventing the corrupt payola practices of the early rock years and finally, immersing himself in the studio with a new band to heal the shock of Valens' loss.

Keane throws himself into the business, with Del-Fi rapidly becoming the core of an emerging Hollywood pop music scene in what was previously a one-industry town. Turning his ears and opening his doors to the sounds of L.A.'s ghettos, barrios, suburbs and sun-drenched coastline, Keane's Del-Fi records begins to encapsulate the sounds of California: "Mexangeleno" R&B, Latino jazz, surf music, west coast blues, and a unique Mexican/African-American doo-wop hybrid so zealously embraced by California's car culture that, years later, it becomes known as "low rider" music.

Keane's and Del-Fi's open door policy become a musical crucible for the burgeoning camp of artists and styles that soon define Southern California to the world, and offers the first professional show business exposure to a host of young producers, executives and artists who come to define Los Angeles: Arthur Lee, Bruce Johnston, Joe Smith, Bob Krasnow, Jim Messina and dozens of others.

As the 50s evolve into the 1960s, Keane opens up a spate of new labels to accommodate his new artists and sounds, virtually cornering the market on the styles of music favored in Southern California neighborhoods. Building Del Fi’s state-of-the-art recording studio featuring the first transistorized circuits, Keane evolves the production techniques and approaches that will be adopted by -- and later define -- Hollywood producers like Phil Spector, Jan Berry and The Beach Boys (whom Keane protege Bruce Johnston will later join).

Del-Fi would not only release a lot of music that is now called "oldies but goodies," but also released the Little Caeser & The Romans hit that defined the idiom itself, "Those Oldies But Goodies (Reminds Me Of You)." In rapid succession. Keane released a string of hit songs during the late 50s and early sixties, including minor chart hits by Chan Romero (“Hippy Hippy Shake”), Canada's Bobby Curtola (“Fortune Teller”) and Ron Holden's “Love You So." Mostly, however, his 45 releases sink like the proverbial stone, with barely no trace on the national charts whatsoever. Keane blames the poor distribution of his independent label, and the artists themselves, for their insufficient talents and promotion skills -- never himself.

Keane, meanwhile, cashes in on the tragedy of his one true hit-making superstar and memorializes Ritchie Valens by inaugurating the Donna label, followed later by the Selma and Edsel subsidiaries. A host of aspiring young songwriter/producers are attracted to the Del-Fi staff during the early sixties: P.F. Sloan, Steve Barri, Kim Fowley, Gary Paxton, the Addrisi Brothers (writers of "Never My Love" by the Association) and David Gates, who would later have huge hits with his band Bread.... they all worked with Bob Keane at one of his labels at one time or another.

Plastering the pop charts with hit after hit, Keane then worked with teen idol and TV star Johnny Crawford (from TV's "The Rifleman") and, after some success in this new realm, he mined the new medium of television, modern jazz and Los Angeles’ native Latin music for talent, releasing records by Tony "Pepino" Martinez and releases what some historians consider the first "new age" exotica album by Nat "King" Cole's favorite hippie lyricist: Eden "Nature Boy" Abhez.

By this time, still in the early 60s, Keane has become aware of "surf music," brewing along California’s coastline -- it's an electronic revolution that later gives birth to psychedelia, heavy metal and fusion. Keane began working with an innovative young guitarist from nearby Balboa, named Dick Dale, and eventually he signed Dale and battled the young guitarist's father to bring Dale’s loud, aggressive guitar-based music to a wider audience.

But, after Dale departs from Del-Fi (taking with him the name Del-Tones, by the way), and Dale begins really defining what surf music is or will become, there are a host of young guitar players arriving on Del-Fi's doorstep to take his place, guys with guitars galore, and Keane released a lot of singles and albums by some of the best, and some of the worst, including The Lively Ones, The Sentinals and the Centurions (your mileage may vary, naturally). He recognized surf music's limited appeal, however, and came up with innovative new merchandising techniques, including storming teen fairs and record stores in his famous "surfin’ hearse."

And just as the Beach Boys realized, he also began broadening the music’s appeal to landlocked teenagers, and, like them, follows up with ‘Hot Rod" instrumentals -- one of his bands, the Darts, featuring the solo lead guitar debut of a new session guitarist named Glen Campbell.

Bob sitting in Del-Fi's "surfin' hearse" in the 1990s

Keane also gave Frank Zappa a chance to record for the label after he had appeared on the "Steve Allen Show," on TV, where he could be seen playing a concerto on a bicycle. Keane worked with Zappa, who made his own recordings mostly in his studio in Cucamonga.

Another hit-maker arrives on the scene -- this one a young singer/songwriter from El Paso, Texas -- and Keane recognized yet another bigger-than-life talent in Bobby Fuller. Just as he did in his partnership with Ritchie Valens, Keane worked closely with Fuller to develop the young guitarist's songwriting and stage persona. He buys the band snappy red suits. When a licensing snafu nearly derailed Keane's finest Bobby Fuller Four production to date, “Let Her Dance," the band bounced back with another monster hit on Keane’s new Mustang label, a cover of a song by the Crickets, called "I Fought the Law." Keane formed a new partnership with some shady financial backers, a company he now calls "Stereo-Fi," and more singles and recordings are made.

But as Bobby Fuller’s success grows, dissatisfaction infects the band -- and Fuller wants out, he wants to sign with Atlantic's Ahmet Ertegun, and go solo. Keane tries to hang on to Bobby Fuller and paired him with his newest discovery, a soulful producer/writer and singer named Barry White, in order to allow Fuller to explore new styles. White, meanwhile, records a host of R&B and soul acts for the newly-created "Bronco" label -- these recordings later are collected on a compilation called Boss Soul: The Genius of Barry White.

The conflicts within the Bobby Fuller Four are too much, however, resulting in canceled tours and truncated recording sessions. Keane and Fuller battle one another in the studio as Keane urges Fuller to develop his own genius while Fuller is content to ape his hero Buddy Holly. Keane finds himself locked in an ongoing struggle between his partners while he battles major record companies and record producers like Phil Spector seeking to lure away the artists Keane developed.

Driving to the Del Fi offices from his Hollywood home, Keane passes a cluster of police cars and recognizes Fuller’s mother and bandmates. Springing from his car, Keane rushes to a crime scene to find Bobby Fuller’s bloody, battered and gasoline-soaked corpse sprawled across the front seat of a car. Keane angrily confronts detectives on the scene as they casually discard or disregard evidence and characterize the killing as a "suicide."

Further antagonizing the Los Angeles political establishment, Keane says he used inside connections in a campaign -- a neighbor who worked for the coroner's office -- to overrule the suicide verdict, but no on ever collects on the insurance policy that Keane and his partners have taken out on him. Meanwhile, rumors of Mafia complicity and police corruption rage through Hollywood as mysterious strangers taunt the surviving bandmembers and Keane says he scrambled to salvage his record company as his partners demanded the return of their investments. It got really ugly, I'm told.

The third of the Del-Fi triad of tragedies devastates Keane, bleeds Keane’s record company dry. Keane returns to the studio to develop new acts and works with his protégé Barry White to develop a new sound: a smoother, more romantic style of Rhythm & Blues that will set the stage for the disco revolution. But it's too much for Keane, and he sells off part of his company's assets and declares bankruptcy.

(As a side note, and even though Keane worked with him on promoting exactly one 45 single release for the Keen label, Bob would often refer to Sam Cooke's untimely death as the "second" of his famous Del-Fi triple tragedies, after Ritchie Valens, but before Bobby Fuller's, in July 1966...but I digress).

Keane spent his his post-De-Fi years -- many years before I even met the man -- selling home alarm systems for Honeywell, among other odd jobs, but eventually he came back to music, attending to the careers of his two sons Tom and John who, as the Keane Brothers, got their own taste of stardom, enjoying their own teen idol success in the 70s, seeing a few charting hits (minor hits, if that), but appearing on the first Bill Cosby show and ultimately on their own short-lived summer replacement series.

The funny thing was, Keane once again managed to get himself promoted as their manager, appearing on their TV show, playing clarinet. He just never gave up the idea that he would achieve stardom with what he called his "licorice stick."

Jammin' with his sons "The Keane Brothers" on their 1977 CBS TV Show.

By the end of the '70s, the depersonalized business practices of the major labels had returned to haunt the music business, plunging the industry into its first ugly recession, and Keane struggled to keep himself employed while his sons went on to pursue other interests -- John, by the way, now composes the music for TV's "CSI" shows, and Tom went on to become a Grammy-award nominated producer and songwriter, working with artists like Taylor Dayne and Chaka Khan, even co-writing the Grammy nominee song "Through The Fire" with Cynthia Weill and David Foster -- in other words, Tom has worked with a lot of yucky artists, actually (your mileage may vary), and it was Tom who brought actress and former MTV hostess Kari Wuhrer to Del-Fi in the last year or so of the label for her solo album release (it failed to do anything).

Keane returned to the business, as I said, in the early 90s, but his glory days were mostly behind him. One of the biggest successes for the label came when when Quentin Tarantino went searching for the right music for his movie Pulp Fiction. The story I've heard is that he listened to hundreds of surf tunes, and among his final choices were two surf tracks, "Surf Rider" by the Lively Ones, and "Bullwinkle Pt.2," by the Centurions.

Kevin Griffin, who I mentioned up above in the "Gidget's kindly uncle" article, had this to say about this particular bunch of recordings that Tarantino licensed for Pulp Fiction: "The mood of this music, which Tarantino equates more with spaghetti westerns than surfing, captures the sort of sunshiny violence, macabre and absurd, which is Tarantino's genre, but it also captures a lot of what Keane's "open-door policy" brought to the label in the early 60s too."

Griffin continued, saying: "The original Del-Fi Records was such a seat-of-the-pants operation, that there were times when Keane would record a song in the afternoon, press it in the evening, and have it on the radio by midnight. This sort of instant music made for a disposability that encouraged wild experimentation and absurd humor. Songs like "Moongoon Twist," by the Moongooners, and "She Was a Mau-Mau," by Bob Ridgley, were not produced with an eye on posterity. Listening to a compilation like Lost Treasures, -- another in the series which featured our grape ape Delbert on the cover, incidentally -- you feel as if you've been thrown into the middle of a low-budget Beatnik movie."

The Lively Ones - Surfin' South Of The Border

We did a lot of interesting reissues during this mid-to-late '90s period, and I was able to work on quite a few tribute albums and compilations, of which I'm very proud, writing the liner notes and getting bands to agree to record tracks for practically no money up front, helping to design the cover art & design. It was all very much a learn-as-you-go experience -- there was simply no one to teach us how to do anything and Keane, bless his heart, had even less of a clue than those of us who had never done the job before.

One of the very first releases I worked on -- released in early '96 -- was something that Gary and I did pretty much on our own, in fact, a tribute to Henry Mancini called Shots In The Dark, and it was pretty successful too, I guess. The artists who contributed tracks -- Poison Ivy of the Cramps, Davie Allan and the Arrows, the Insect Surfers, Man or Astroman?, and many more -- did great versions of these Mancini songs. I only wish Keane had let me follow up with my idea to also do tributes -- Del-Fi style -- to Burt Bacharach, and Ennio Morricone, but alas, Keane didn't really feel like it was something he wanted to keep doing. Meanwhile, I didn't like the fact that Keane felt it was necessary to put "A Bob Keane Production" on the cover photo (which featured actress Rose McGowan before she became incredibly popular, I might add), because he'd done absolutely nothing for it other than pay for it's release. But that's the way Bob did things, and that's what he put on the cover of many of the label's releases, where he'd produced them or not: A Bob Keane Production. As I've said, for Keane, it was always about promoting himself.

The last compilation/tribute we did was in order to praise Keane's own sixties label, and, of course, to praise the man himself, called Delphonic Sounds Today, and this release was intended to reach a new audience that might become interested in the back catalog -- it didn't work out that, unfortunately. As I remember, we wanted to do something special to celebrate our being around for 40 years (uh, give or take -- not counting that whole period between '67 and '94, I guess), and so to accomplish this feat, myself and a few of the other guys working at the label invited twenty (mostly) new bands to record their own interpretations of classic and not-so-classic Del-Fi tracks, from hits to rarities. The thinking here – in addition to celebrating the fact that Del-Fi was back in biz again, doing well, etc. – was that we’d also draw exposure and attention to the depth of our catalog.

There were a few "hits" in the mix, songs that had charted for the Bobby Fuller Four and Ritchie Valens, but mostly, it was a mix of new versions of songs by various musical misfits & "shoulda-been-biggies" like the aformentioned Eden Ahbez, Yo Yo Hashi, Larry Bright, Beauregard Ajax, The Beauchemins, The Romancers, The American Four (featuring Arthur Lee of Love), and others.

Some of those bands included The Brian Jonestown Massacre, The Liquor Giants, Man or Astroman?, Los Straitjackets, Davie Allan & The Arrows (who did an amazing cover of Bobby Fuller's "Our Favorite Martian"), Wondermints, The Negro Problem, and many others -- each represented and reflected the ragged, maverick spirit of the original Del-Fi era.

The liner notes also laid out the Del-Fi story for those unfamiliar with what we had done in the past. L.A. music scribe Matthew Greenwald even wrote that our label "was similar to a malfunctioning pinball machine that occasionally set a game-high record, but just as often screamed ‘TILT’!! Yet, that crazy Del-Fi pinball machine still kept racking up with some impressive scores..." The cover art, incidentally, featured that portable 601-2 Ampex recorder that Keane had used to record Ritchie Valens' home recordings and demos, including the song "Donna."

Keane also -- I have to add -- let us try our hand at signing a few bands and starting up a new music label, since we were starting to run out of masters to reissue. We started up a label in 1999, called Del-Fi 2000, which I often called DF2K for short, and we were able to put out only two CDs before Keane decided to pull the plug on the label. The first was an album by a guy named Rick Gallego, who recorded under the name Cloud Eleven, and he went to make ripples in the pop music scene in the late 90s and early '00s, in addition to becoming another great friend in my life.

The other CD was an album by a Detroit based band called Outrageous Cherry, led by my friend Matthew Smith. That album, Out There In The Dark, has been reissued subsequently by a number of cool labels, including Revola UK and Rainbow Quartz, but I"m happy DF2K was the first to put it out. Greg Shaw of Bomp once told me it was something he'd loved and wish that he'd released -- and he'd have done that if he'd gotten a copy of it before I did.

It's too bad we never were able to sign some of the artists and bands we met with in discussion -- including Jason Falkner, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Wondermints, Baby Lemonade and many more, -- and it's one of my great disapointments that Keane never let us continue to work on DF2K and build it into something. I'm sure it would have been a successful indie label, in keeping with the Del-Fi independent spirit. Bob was always very proud of his own independence -- to a fault -- and we used the phrase a lot to promote the label. Unfortunately, those bands didn't appeal to Keane, and he missed out on quite a few bands that would have been successful, I think, at least in the beginning of their careers before leaving for bigger labels.

Bob Keane was a wonderful man, overall, and yes, he drove me absolutely crazy -- but then again, if I could go back again, I wouldn't change a thing about Keane. It was great getting to know one of the last of the old-school music moguls, truthfully. He was a P.T. Barnum type of character who always tried to build up his successes to a point where they were beyond belief, and I think he knew that his fans even understood that he was a baloney-thrower and a confabulist and they loved him even more for it. He was quite a character.

He drove a lot of his artists and musicians and accoutants crazy too, but many of them -- when I'd meet them in the mid-90s for the first time -- had really nice things to say about the man. Some people said some not-so-nice things. My friend Skip once said that Del-Fi made many of its artists what they are today: destitute. I don't think that's entirely correct, but it's a tough business, that's for sure.

And Keane was tough, too, boy was he tough: he survived non-Hodgkins lymphoma that was diagnosed when he was 80, and lived another 7 years, and even after his bout with lymphoma, he continued to come into Rhino to meet with executives at the label who were charged with helping him distirbute new titles thru their distribution deal, and, as always, he wanted to know how these Rhino guys were going to promote hiim. He called me several times after I'd left the Del-Fi label to ask my opinion on how to get his name "out there."

Anyway, now that he's dead, I'd also like to remember Bob Keane for being a great guy who gave me an opportunity to find myself, and for that, I would like to thank him, and I do mean that sincerely.

R.I.P. Bob Keane.

Thanks Dave and Chris.

—

Jeff(bigtikidude)

TuneFan
Del-Fi brought some actual studio production values to erstwhile garage surf bands. I still regularly listen to The Lively Ones, the Impacts, the Sentinels, and Dave Myers & the Surftones, and will do so forever -- as they were that great.

TF, Del-Fi really did do a lot for surf, I agree wholeheartedly, but not the studio production values in most of the cases above. Not directly. I can't say for the Lively Ones off hand, but my understanding from sources like John Blair and Bob Dalley and liner notes, etc., is that the Impacts, Sentinals, and Dave Myers & the Surftones specifically as well as others were purchased by Keane as musical packages from Tony Hillder or Norman Knowles and had been recorded and post processed for them by postman bassist and recordist Ted Brinson in his garage studio in (from memory - Jefferson?). Keane's operation did supply the covers, sometimes rather strange ones. Sometimes the artwork came from Hilder, e..g, those shots of the the New Dimensions summer vacation in Hawaii used on the Sentinals album. (Can't remember for sure if that one was a Del-Fi album.)

Some other Del-Fi surf that you didn't mention per se may have been recorded in other places. For example, I think some of the Rhythm Kings/Soul Kings stuff was done in studios around Bakersfield, though I'm not sure. (Here I am relying on the liner notes to their 90s CD, which is not very specific on the subject.)

Brinson was an independent oprating in a tiny (very hot) un-sound-proofed garage, but his recordings were of good quality and used (in these cases indirectly) by both Specialty and Del-Fi as well as many others. Surf was only a tiny part of his business, but maybe a lot of it in 1962-1964. He operated from about 1951 into at least the 1970s I think. Before that he had a long career as a jazz guitarist and bassist which transitioned into studio work with Specialty. The end of that period of his career overlapped his operation of a home studio operation and some of his recording was done with Specialty artists like Little Richard. He provides the bass in some of his recording, but maybe not in any of the surf records. (The early Original Surfaris might be a possibility, though.)

Hilder also used the Morgans' studio, e.g., for one of the New Dimensions lps, and did (or arranged to have done) some live recording, e.g., for the New Dimensions and others. He put out a few things directly, but sold most of his material to other labels, mostly budget local operations. He was part of that middle level I mentioned earlier. Sometimes he may have been an extra tier in it. It sounds like he was involved somehow with the Centurions and Sentinals in between others like Knowles and Del-Fi, but I'm not sure exactly how and the sources differ. Maybe like hercules he sometimes wanders into myths he wasn't originally part of.

Another example - he essentially bought the Customs/Original Surfaris from Victor Regina who worked with them first. The band knew he had "acquired" them and they were now recording for him, but at least one song that lists Regina as a (formal) co-author (Kalani Wipeout) came out under Hilder, so I think he must also have bought their "catalog" from Regina, too. Regina also used Brinson's studio in his activities, including his work with the Original Surfaris.

I think I am reporting everything correctly, and I will try to provide a reference if called on anything, but there's a lot of room for error on my part and on the part of the sources', original and intermediate. I'd love to hear any corrections, different versions, etc.