He filled in for Buddy Holly on the 1959 tour after Buddy was killed, Bob Dylan played in his band and The Beatles covered his songs in Hamburg and on their failed Decca audition.
Above all Bobby Vee made some great pre-Fabs pop records.
Around 1960 Dylan lied his way into Bobby Vee’s band under the name Elston Gunnn (with three n’s) claiming he was a piano player and had toured with Conway Twitty. Vee was impressed, but later learned that Dylan could only play in the key of C. They hired him for $15 a night, but the job didn’t last long as Bob wasn’t much of piano player.
It was lightweight pop perhaps, but Take Good Care Of My Baby was a great Goffin & King song.
http://i.imgur.com/66GVzRm.jpg
In the early 60s, Bobby Vee recorded some great stuff with the Crickets
http://i.imgur.com/PHJRLQA.jpg
This was, I’m pretty sure, the first album I ever listened to as it was part of my Dad’s collection.
He assures me he still has it
Actually quite sad about this – another chunk of my pre-Fabs childhood gone.
I remember my first wife telling me that her mother wouldn’t let her buy Take Good Care of My Baby because she thought it was about illegitimate children.
Here’s a typically bonkers Scopitone.
Great clip! Talk about clean-cut. Right after the cameras stopped rolling they were all snorting coke and shagging like crazy.
That period between the end of rock & roll and arrival of the Beatles (1959 – 1963?) produced some great pop music, much of it written by the great Brill Building songwriting teams.
Ironically when the Fabs arrived, they almost single-handedly killed it off.
Always a bit of a shock when you see a contemporary picture of someone when your mental image of them has been frozen for half a century or more…
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g401/mikethep/_92073628_bobbyvee_2013_ap_zpskjx0v0rg.jpg
Yes, quite. He’ll always be the boyish be-quiffed clean cut kid to me.
As noted in Tiggs recent thread Bobby Vee’s album was the one that opened my ears up to pop music. It actually belonged to my older brother’s girlfriend but given that back in those days owning an actual LP was both rare and cool her generosity in loaning it to me was pretty amazing.
Just read that for the first time. What you say about owning LPs back then is exactly right.
As someone mentioned in passing in a thread last week, it’s remarkable how many of the first wave of rock & rollers are still with us – Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Don Everly, Fats Domino, Chubby Checker, Jerry Lee Lewis, Wanda Jackson, Dion, Duane Eddy are some that come to mind – so seeing another one go is obviously sad, however inevitable in the fullness of time…
Those clips above & Rubber Ball are all great reminders of that bygone age – I wonder how long it’ll be before Rock & Roll is looked back on as distantly as we (perhaps) look back on big band music or the Charleston or whatever…
There is, of course, a Dylan connection here……the Bobster actually played piano in Vee’s band for a short time in 1959 – I am not sure if it was before Holly’s death. Apparently Dylan held Vee in quite high regard even in recent years.
My first pop song memories on the radio (around 1962/3) include The Night Has a Thousand Eyes which, along with Take Good Care of My Baby, remains a great song. On the other hand maybe we should all try to forget Rubber Ball?!? (Bouncy Bouncy indeed😬)
I think I may have mentioned the Dylan connection in the OP. Bob even performed Vee’s first hit live when he played a concert Bobby’s home town recently. I forget the title and I’m on my phone and can’t look it up, but it was pre-the pop hits.
Update. Suzie Baby was Bobby Vee’s first single in 1959 and the song Dylan recently performed live in Vee’s hometown. You can hear the Buddy Holly influence
AND I’d forgotten this, but back when the world was a smaller place Vee and his band were billed as Bobby Vee and The Shadows. How about that?
Nice thread. I can’t understand why anyone would want to scoff, nothing wrong with lightweight pop that makes you feel good. The night has a thousand eyes is a great pop song, beats dark and edgy hands down.
😊👍
My elder sister was a fan and saw him on a package tour in Bradford on a bill which included: Clarence “Frogman” Henry, the Springfields, Tony Orlando and four other acts which fall into the “Who?” category.
Then the Beatles came along and spoiled everything.
She had two of his albums which, after we had all left home, became the hub of a long standing family practical joke, in which the present custodian attempts to smuggle them into another’s record collection. It’s been going on since 1976.
Notwithstanding, “Run to Him” is an outstanding song, very well sung.
I punched my buddy in the nose after lunch
Now I’m in trouble ’cause the dean saw the punch
He was tellin’ things that were not true about her
So I let him have it in the cafeteria
Two perfect minutes of teenage angst…Stayin’ In.
“More than I can say / Stayin’ In” – what a great single. (2nd record I owned, aged 9; “Rubber Ball / Everyday” was the 1st. Still have them both.)
Written by John D Loudermilk, as were so many other great songs. I always thought he never looked like his songs sounded!
I had no idea John D Loudermilk had died, or indeed that @johnny-concheroo had posted to that effect. His post from 25/9 is quietly gathering tumbleweed, so I’m off to give it a bit of a shot in the arm.
The problem with John D is finding a good comprehensive list of songs he wrote (and who recorded them); when he shuffled off, much time was spent looking online, but could only find the hits mentioned.
This site seems to contain as much as anybody would reasonably want to know about the great man and his songs, and who recorded them.
http://www.ihesm.com
Here’s Sylvie Vartan and some lounge lizard doing Out of Gas, or Panne d’Essence if you prefer. No, don’t thank me.
In an overnight email exchange about Bobby Vee a friend reminded me of how the early 60s pre-Beatles, preppy, pin-up pop merchants were derided. People like Fabian, Bobby Rydell and, yes, Bobby Vee.
It could have been George Harrison who made that wonderfully acidic comment about “all the Bobbys infesting the US charts”. Jerry Lee echoed the same comment recently, noting with approval that The Fabs had cut down ‘all the Bobby this, Bobby that like wheat before the sickle’,
Even so, I think Bobby Vee was a cut above the others.