By WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: December 2, 2009
Bob Keane, a record producer who discovered Ritchie Valens and helped start the careers of Sam Cooke, the Bobby Fuller Four and Frank Zappa, died in Hollywood, Calif., on Saturday. He was 87.
Bob Keane, right, with Ritchie Valens in 1959.
(Del-Fi International Books picture)
The cause was renal failure resulting from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, his son Tom said.
Mr. Keane scored a coup for his fledgling Del-Fi label in 1958 after spotting Richard Valenzuela, a young Mexican-American singer and guitar player, performing at a movie theater in the Pacoima neighborhood of Los Angeles. His signature tune, “Come On, Let’s Go,” barely qualified as a song, but the audience, mostly screaming teenage girls, suggested big potential to Mr. Keane.
“He just had little riffs and stuff — he couldn’t put a song together, and he couldn’t write a bridge,” Mr. Keane told Rolling Stone in 2004. Nevertheless, he continued, “I said to myself, ‘If I can put that guy on record, and get these girls like this, I’m gonna have something.’ "
Mr. Keane told the young singer to shorten his name to Valens and helped him develop his ideas into songs. Valens scored a modest hit with “Come On, Let’s Go” and then soared to the top of the charts with “Donna” and “La Bamba.” His eight-month career ended when he died in an airplane crash on Feb. 3, 1959, with Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper.
Robert Verril Kuhn was born in Manhattan Beach, Calif., on Jan. 5, 1922. A Benny Goodman fan, he took up the clarinet at 5 and at 17 was fronting his own big band. The MCA talent agency, entranced by the idea of a teenage Goodman, signed him and promoted him as “The World’s Youngest Bandleader.”
In 1941 he enlisted in the Army Air Corps and trained pilots in North Carolina. After the war he returned to Los Angeles and performed with several groups, including Artie Shaw’s band, for which he was the substitute frontman. In 1950 he was hired as the conductor for “The Hank McCune Show,” a television sitcom, and changed his name to Keene, later changing the spelling to Keane.
In 1957, teaming up with a businessman named John Siamas, Mr. Keane started Keen Records. Acting as the label’s A&R man, he signed Sam Cooke, who was singing with the gospel group the Soul Stirrers, and released his first non-gospel hit, “You Send Me.” It reached No. 1 on the Billboard charts, but Mr. Keane was pushed out of the record company. Undeterred, he started Del-Fi.
Mr. Keane maintained an open-door policy at his record label. Anyone could walk in and get a hearing. Over the years he recorded the soul singer Brenda Holloway (“Every Little Bit Hurts”), the doo-wop group Little Caesar and the Romans (“Those Oldies But Goodies”) and surf-music groups like the Surfaris, the Centurions and the Lively Ones.
In 1963 Zappa, a walk-in, brought Mr. Keane a collection of doo-wop and surf tracks that he had written and recorded in a studio in Cucamonga, Calif. They were later released as the album “Cucamonga.”
In 1965 Mr. Keane started an R&B subsidiary, Bronco, and hired Barry White as producer and A&R man.
Mr. Keane’s biggest success at Del-Fi was the Bobby Fuller Four, which reached the Top 40 with a cover version of Buddy Holly’s “Love’s Made a Fool of You” and broke into the Top 10 with “I Fought the Law.” In 1966, Fuller was found dead in a car near his home in Los Angeles, and Del-Fi records went out of business soon after.
Mr. Keane went on to sell accordion lessons door to door and, with more success, home burglar alarms. In the 1970s he devoted his musical energies to managing the career of his sons, John and Tom, who performed as the Keane Brothers. In the 1980s he resuscitated Del-Fi, whose catalog Quentin Tarantino ransacked for the soundtrack of “Pulp Fiction.”
In addition to his son Tom, of Los Angeles, Mr. Keane is survived by his wife, Dina, also of Los Angeles; a brother, Walker Kuhn of Riverside, Calif.; two other sons, Bob, of London, and John, of Los Angeles; a daughter, Chanelle, of Manhattan; and seven grandchildren.
In 2006 Mr. Keane published a memoir, “The Oracle of Del-Fi: My Life in Music with Ritchie Valens, Sam Cooke, Frank Zappa, Barry White and Other Legends.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/02/arts/ ... .html?_r=1
