by  Craig Moore

Bobby Vee’s true place in the annals of rock ’n’ roll is only just now being thoroughly researched and acknowledged.

In the first four parts of our career-spanning interview, Bobby discussed his influences and his early days with brother Bill as mentor. Now we find the young man from Fargo bursting onto the national scene following the tragedy of Clear Lake, rubbing elbows with the greatest songwriters and producers of the ’60s and ’70s and creating some of the most important pop hits of the entire rock ’n’ roll genre. He evolved not only into a singer/songwriter to be reckoned with, but also as a rock icon who has never left the road nor his fans behind.

With Elvis, people would fine-tune their demos, to try and make them accessible to him, like the ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ demo written by Hoyt Axton’s mother. And in the early ’60s, they had P.J. Proby doing the demos for “Follow That Dream” and “King Of The Whole Wide World” and all that kind of stuff …

Bobby Vee: I’ll tell you a funny story. I was watching televison, one of the late-night shows — this was quite a few years ago — and I heard Elvis singing. I was in the other room, and when I went in to look, here it was Otis Blackwell, and he was singing the songs he had written for Elvis, sounding like Elvis.

Well, you  want to get his attention, you know!

BV: Got my attention! But there were a lot of songs that were tailor-made for artists, and it was sort of that Catch-22 thing, if you don’t have a hit you can’t have any songs. So it was after “Devil Or Angel” that people started sending me songs. And then the Carole King/Gerry Goffin relationship, which really became something.

Did you ever sit down with them?

BV: One time. That was when I was recording “How Many Tears.” They flew out and came to the session, on the break — we were cutting an album (Bobby Vee With Strings And Things) and “How Many Tears” was part of that and eventually became a single. And on the break they sang two songs that they had just written, and that was the reason that they came out. And one of them was “In My Baby’s Eyes,” which is a great song, and the other was “Take Good Care Of My Baby,” and they did them in that order, and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. A couple of weeks later we went in and cut “Take Good Care Of My Baby.”

Why wasn’t “It Might As Well Rain Until September” a Bobby Vee single? Did you do it before or after Carole King?

BV: As I understand it, her demo was her single. We got three of her songs at the same time. She sent “It Might As Well Rain Until September,” “Go Away Little Girl,” and “Sharing You.” I didn’t capture “Go Away Little Girl.” I really liked “It Might As Well Rain Until September,” and I LOVED “Sharing You.”

I thought that was great, the strings that Ernie put in there. I liked them all, but we had to make a decision, and the way Donny Kirshner at Aldon/Screen Gems Music operated was, “You know you’ve got a window of opportunity; if you’re not going to put this out as a single, we’ll get a single on it ’cause they’re all good songs, and somebody else will put it out,” and that’s what happened. We put out “Sharing You,” and of course, Steve Lawrence put out “Go Away Little Girl,” and then Carole came out with “Might As Well Rain Until September.” She was as good as gold. I like everything about it, and in retrospect, I wish we had put it out, because it had the ad-libbed introduction like “Take Good Care Of My Baby.” Unusual song.

It would have been a great follow-up. But “Sharing You” is a killer record though, an absolutely great record and it doesn’t get any airplay.

BV: I think of it as a fringe hit, although it was a Top 20 record. It’s kind of the “color” in my chart life.

You did all your own harmonies on those records, right? The Bobby Vee Brothers — “Please Don’t Ask About Barbara” is really tricky!

BV: Yes I did, just off the top of my head, we just did it. I had the ability to sing harmony parts, but that was a tough song. But there’s one place if you listen to it, where I drop into unison with myself. (sings the harmony part) “…tears tears go away, come again some other day,” somewhere within all of that I just couldn’t find the harmony, just for one note …

That’s OK!

BV: Right…and it’s fine!

Have you ever gotten tired of performing those hits?

BV: Rarely. It happens at times, with the exception of “Take Good Care Of My Baby” and “The Night Has A Thousand Eyes,” which I’ve never gotten tired of. There’ve been others that I just give ’em a rest, and then songs that I haven’t done in years [that] I’ll all of a sudden start doing those again — “How Many Tears,” “One Last Kiss” — and it’s a great piece of material, and I rediscover the joy of it.

When you were doing the sessions at Liberty, did you ever present any of your own stuff? How much input did they allow you as the artist into which records were made, [and] how they sounded?

BV: I was comfortable with the level of attention that my own songs got, and after the first couple of albums came out, I started … I had always been writing. It’s an interesting thing. People talk about The Beatles, John and Paul and George Harrison often gets left out, and here’s a guy who had several major records, and they were amazing songs, and it’s almost the association, he was working with a couple of guys who were genius writers, and he became a sensational writer. I think when you’re working with people, they raise the bar, if we’re paying attention we can be better.  So I learned a lot about songwriting. I’m not a prolific songwriter but I enjoy writing.  And I think I became a better writer by being around songwriters and listening to them talk and being part of that process.

Some of the records that don’t get a lot of notice, “Charms,” “Never Love A Robin,” “Be True To Yourself,” do those titles generate any memories?

BV: You actually picked out a couple of them there. I still do “Charms” from time to time, I just think it’s a great record, early pop record, early ’60s, it’s a sweet song. I love the drums on it, the brushes, and it’s a good record, mixed nicely. “Never Love A Robin” I love. And “Armen’s Theme,” I like that, too. I was told that “Never Love A Robin” got played in Detroit on one of the powerhouse stations, I was excited about that ’cause I really did pay attention to who was playing the songs and I would call disc jockeys and introduce myself to ‘em, try to spur those records along. But “Never Love A Robin” is a wonderful song, a great lyric, like a movie, you could put it in a movie, I see images with it when I hear the song. It was another of those a capella or part a capella entrances, like “Take Good Care Of My Baby.” I also did a version of the Fleetwoods’ “Mr. Blue” where I did the a capella piece in front of that. I never really thought that much about it until quite a few years later I started adding up all the songs I did a capella opening, and I thought jeesh I should splice them all together. (Another great one, “Punish Her”) “Armen’s Theme” was such a wonderful thing. Ross Bagdasarian who was David Seville, that was his song, I think he had invested some money in Liberty, he was good friends with Si Warnoker, Lenny Warnoker’s dad who really had put the money up for the label. And it was just a great song. I think maybe great songs are just like that. You can visualize them. You can see the guy sitting in the café, drinking  a beer, or a whiskey….whatever it is.

I could see somebody like a Michael Buble or a Harry Connick Jr doing that, with the big band — well, you could re-do it yourself of course! But even back then what came to my mind, wow this is Bobby Vee but it seemed to me like Sinatra or something.

BV: Oh, wouldn’t that be great?  And it’s a great piece of material, that’s everything, it gives you a lifespan.

That was a big 2-sided record in my mind, I always thought.

BV: (Laughs) … that did absolutely nothing! That’s not always … well I love hearing that. People earmark songs …

You had a lot of what I think were 2-sided masterpieces: ‘Run To Him” / “Walkin’ With My Angel,” “Stayin In” / “More Than I Can Say,” “Rubber Ball” / “Everyday,” “Punish Her” / “Someday” — lots of them. Most of them.

BV: Snuffy liked to record and so did I. There was a time when the B-side might save you. You put all that effort into making records and then not to give people an A-side and a B-side, I loved that. I used to go into someplace in Fargo and put the nickel in the jukebox, listen to Elvis Presley on the jukebox for 4 days and then flip the record over. A lot of my stuff was B-sides and I was glad to have them, they paid the same as the A-side.

Exactly, there’s nothing like having the B-side of a record that sells a million copies!

BV: Yeah, “Take Good Care Of My Baby.” Dick Glasser wrote “Bashful Bob” and bought a house with the royalties.

From listening to your new album (I Wouldn’t Change A Thing) it’s clear  you also learned a great deal about production and how to make a record. It’s all over it. We were talking about “Whatever Happened To Peggy Sue.” You’ve got the plucked strings, you’ve got the bass part but then you have a tremeloed bass part over the top of that. You’ve got layers of things going on that are very simple little things that you can do in the studio.

BV: Yep, thanks. You know Ernie Freeman did that so naturally, here’s a guy that came out of the whole blues background and all of a sudden was making pop records. But he had a way of separating things, whether it be a guitar part that wove in and out, or just a rhythm part, or the piano licks in “Take Good Care Of My Baby” that are so important to that song. Or “Walkin’ With My Angel,” they’re just little things, but they re-occur and string lines that re-occur, and they became hooks.

I’ve learned over the years as a songwriter that trying to write something like a “Run To Him” with a naturally flowing hook, is really a trick. Something like that either comes to you or it doesn’t.

BV: I’m trying not to sound bitter, but you know, sandwiched in between the free-flowing years of rockabilly and rock ‘n’ roll, and then the unbelievable great songs and exciting era of The Beatles, and that little late 50’s & especially early 60’s time period, it isn’t either of those things, but what it is is so simple that it gets overlooked, I think.

This has been my opinion all along, even as far as Elvis goes. To me Elvis Presley’s best records came after he got out of the Army. I mean, just his delivery. “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” and “Surrender” and “Little Sister,” “His Latest Flame,” “She’s Not You,” even some of the early movie songs like “Follow That  Dream” and “King Of The Whole Wide World” that I list among my all-time favorites. But, rock ‘n’ roll purists think that after 1957 there isn’t anything any good. I think this is so far off base it’s laughable.

BV: Unbelievable. He was fired up again. You’re right, just try to write one of those songs.

Listening to a lot of the material on Wouldn’t Change A Thing, it is about having a broken heart, losing your girlfriend, your wife, whatever. There’s a lot of sadness expressed in the lyrics, even in the songs that you wrote, and I’m wondering whatever happened to that cheerful Bobby Vee? But then I thought, go back and listen to the lyrics to “Run To Him,” “Stayin’ In,” “Take Good Care Of My Baby,” and “Please Don’t Ask About Barbara.”

BV: Never got the girl!

You never got the girl, but you always managed to put a happy face on all of these break-up songs!

BV: Yeah, “Breakin’ Up Is Hard To Do” … Neil Sedaka, boy I’ll tell ya. You know, Del Shannon was different. You could hear the anger in his voice — “Runaway,” “Hats Off To Larry.” But yeah, it was interesting. “Take Good Care Of My Baby” with it’s little pizzicato strings …

When did you first run into Del Shannon?

BV: The very first time I met him I was doing a “Murray The K Show” out in New York at the Brooklyn Paramount, and I was sharing a room with Dion. Those shows, we did five shows a day, and they would run a rock ’n’ roll movie in between the shows, clear out the theater, whatever. People could come and stay all day if they wanted to, and you know, 12 acts on the show. Dion and I were sharing a dressing room, and we were playing Chinese checkers. There was a cot in the room and some chairs. We had the Chinese checkers on the bed. Dion was sitting in a rocking chair. I remember this vividly. He had a cup of tea in his hand, and Del came into the room, like he always did. I’d never met him before. “Hey boys, Del Shannon, they put me in the room with you,” and he went over and sat down on the bed and the marbles went everywhere. Dion rocked the chair back and tea went flying, and that was Del Shannon, that’s the way he was. He was just a bull in a China shop, but just a great heart and boy, I’ll tell ya, it just killed me when he died. We were such good friends and had such great history together.

You did a lot of shows with Del Shannon in the ’60s, and many more over time.  For this album you ended up picking out two of the most obscure Del Shannon songs. “That’s The Way Love Is” was the follow-up to “Sue’s Gotta Be Mine” on Berlee from ’64. It fits so well into your album, just because of the way you do it. And “Cry Myself To Sleep,” it’s got that doo-woppy swing that surely was intentional.

BV: I’ve got the single. It’s on my jukebox. He had a lot of great pop sensibilities, too, but the thing that was different about him was the fact that he made … and I would call his songs pop songs cause a lot of them were, but he always had the rock ’n’ roll edge to it ’cause that’s how he made the records.

He made them with a rhythm section, with Max Crook doing the keyboard thing, and he was a lot of both. He had a lot of pop sensibilities, and he was a rocker. Del was such a good writer. He was really a solid writer. “Cry Myself To Sleep” is almost a Dion song. I could hear Dion doing that in the “Runaround Sue” shuffle kinda thing. Brian Hyland did the harmony vocals with me on it as he did on both of them. I always liked both of those songs. There was going to be a tribute CD coming out, and I spoke to Dan Bourgoise who was Del’s manager and best friend. I speak with him from time to time, and he said he was going to do a tribute CD and would I like to contribute a song. I said, “I’d love to,” and we just went in and recorded the songs. That CD never came to fruition. It may at some point, so that’s why we did it, did it my style.

“Keep Searchin’” is one of the great rock ’n’ roll records of all time.

BV: Four-on-the-floor, four-on-the-floor, and then he’d do a nice song like “Kelly,” a flip-side. He felt a lot of pressure about writing, and he wanted to write … he said one time (laughs), “God it must be nice just to get all these Carole King songs. I gotta take a month off and go sit and drink beer in my garage and try to crank out some tunes (laughs).”

Or get in a fight with my girlfriend.

BV: Right!

How about a real live album from the ’60s? Was there ever an entire show recorded? I have Live On Tour.

BV: No, not actually.

Jumping to The New Sound From England … Did you ever do, in ’64, “I’ll Make You Mine” or “She’s Sorry” live?

BV: I did “She’s Sorry” for a while, because that was the A-side. Never really did much from that album. That was an odd deal. It was just a theme album. I went to England and came home thinking, “Let’s do this.” Because of the impact of The Beatles, I got horrible reviews on it in England. I’m a singer, and we did The 30 Hits Of The ’60s and Meet The Ventures and … Crickets, it was a theme and I enjoyed doing it cause I’m a fan of The Beatles too, but it was, you know, really would have been better off left alone.

But there are a couple of other great songs on the album that you wrote. “Don’t You Believe Them” … I thought that album was a really great EP …

BV: (Laughs) I wish you would’ve screened it for me back then. I had so much product out, and like the … Live! On Tour a thing I wish had never come out. If I had to remove another one out of my collection it would be The New Sound From England. “Don’t You Believe Them” had a good feel to it. It was less … kinda had that sound but wasn’t imitating the background vocals.

They did that to The Yardbirds, too. They took a really cool, complete live show and added bullfight cheers and stuff to it because there wasn’t enough live audience sound. They did that to you and a lot of people in the ’60s, fake live albums, and they never work.

BV: Bad idea!

I Remember Buddy Holly —I’ve always thought that “Raining In My Heart” and some of those tracks were recorded and sounded better than the originals.

BV: They were certainly well-done. I was in England on tour around 1996, ’97, and I don’t think I’ve done an interview in which the Buddy Holly subject didn’t come up. And I was thinking about the 40th Anniversary and what I would like to do about that. I had gone to the musical “Buddy,” and the song I walked out of there with was “Blue Days, Black Nights.”
I hadn’t heard the song for a long time and was surprised they had put it in since it’s so obscure. Couldn’t get it out of my head and usually when that happens, I start singing it myself. I thought, “I’m gonna go back to refresh my memory,” and when I went back and started  listening to his catalog, all sorts of things popped out.

That’s where “Tell Me How” came out. I listened to “Tell Me How,” and I thought, well this is a sad song sung with a happy face, as you said, and turned that around and enjoyed doing that. And then I took some liberties. If you listen to “Words Of Love” and “Listen To Me,” we were talking about groupings of songs. Songwriters tend to write songs in groups. Those songs were written about at the same time, and they’re really the same song. So I turned them into the same song. I go from “Words Of Love” into “Listen To Me” back to “Words Of Love” back to “Listen To Me,” and it’s just another way of presenting this wonderful, really sensitive side of Buddy Holly.

In the ’60s were you living in California or were you still in the Midwest?

BV: I was living in California. I moved out there. I had an apartment out there when I was 16 years old, but I spent so much time on the road, and I was out there really because when I came back to nest somewhere, it made sense to be out there because when I wasn’t on the road I was recording. So that was the purpose there, but I still considered myself a resident of Fargo. My parents lived in Fargo. I bought them a house, opened a little restaurant for my dad, and that’s when I really felt like I was at home, when I was back in Fargo. But I moved out there permanently in 1963, got married in ’63 and always came back to the Midwest in the summertime — never missed a summer. [We] came back to Detroit Lakes (Minn.). We had a lake cabin there, and we did that for 35 years until we moved back to the Midwest permanently. We live on a lake here.

When you were living in California, did you have much contact with the counter-culture as the years went by and the music scene changed?

BV: Only by association. My producer … after Snuffy left Liberty and went out  on his own, I worked with a couple of different guys, most  successfully  with Dallas Smith. Dallas produced  “Come Back When You Grow Up” and “Maybe Just Today,” “Sweet Sweetheart” and he had recorded the Hour Glass, the Allman Brothers original stuff, the original band in L.A. And the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, he was involved with them initially. I could see the picture changing. Being in L.A., being in Hollywood, you’ve been out there, you get a pretty close-up look at what’s going on … Frank Zappa, I’d finish my session and Frank Zappa and his guys would be waiting in the lobby and they’d go in to do their stuff. always late at night.

Were they still holding to these schedules, you’ve got a three-hour session and at 4 o’clock you’ve gotta get out?

BV: It was changing at that time. We worked at several different studios: Gold Star, which was a great studio; Sound Recorders … Liberty Studios was a studio they owned on Robertson, that’s where I cut “Come Back When You Grow Up.” So we went to several places, and then  it got to be Sunset Sound, and you’d say we want to come in and do some stuff and they  would say  the last two weeks we have [are] totally booked up, and we’d say, “Really, who’s there?” And they’d say something like “Paul McCartney is in. He’s rented the studio for a week to write,” so that was changing.

From the outside looking in it looked like people were going in and using relentless amounts of studio time. Everybody was so indulgent  throughout  that  whole  period of time. It’s probably even worse now.

BV: Except the whole studio scene has changed so much.  We’ve got a terriffic studio here in St. Joe, Minn., where our office is. We do live recording in there, and it’s a fun place.  You know, the equipment, you’d go out and spend quarter of a million dollars on recording equipment. Today you can buy it for $15,000.

You can have an entire studio and carry it in a suitcase, practically. Since you’re recording digitally you can make a lot of a little.

BV: Exactly, so then the only requirement is that you know what you’re doing. And I think that separates a lot of stuff.

After “Come Back When You Grow Up” you were all over radio again with “Beautiful People.”

BV: There were two versions of it. The guy who wrote the song, Kenny Odell … I think mine was 37 in the Top 40, and Kenny’s was 38, something like that. They basically went up the charts together and fell out together. It was really disappointing for me, ‘cause I didn’t need to put that song out, ‘cause I was just coming off of “Come Back When You Grow Up,” which turned out to be a major hit for me.  Dallas Smith produced the song, and basically he said, just listen to this, and I said I don’t want to cover the song. I started listening to it and really just kind of fell in love with it; [I] thought well let’s just do it, and if it works it works and if it doesn’t, no harm done.

Having forgotten about the Kenny Odell version, yours is the one I remember. My impression was that it was an affirmation that even in the flower-power counter culture era that Bobby Vee optimism could translate into a hit record.

BV: It’s true. “Come Back When You Grow Up,” another example. I mean it was so far out of its era, and again I loved the song. It was just a nice piece of material. It was a hit out in Green  Bay, Wis., and Billings, Montana. I remember all of this stuff, Charlotte, and Spartanburg, S.C. A distributor sold  5,000 copies of it, and on the strength of that we took out an ad in Billboard magazine and thank God for disc jockeys that read Billboard, ‘cause they wanna play hits. That’s what they’re looking for, and so then we reissued the record a second time, and by the end of the year, it had spent all it’s energy, but it was the biggest record I ever had sales-wise.

So “Come Back…” was actually issued twice. It was a hit in small markets and then went national?

BV: There are different B-sides. That’s the only way you’d figure that out. The first was my song, nice little record, “I May Be Gone.” The second was a theme song for a Chuck Conners television show. .

I didn’t know this. Record collectors love this stuff, Bobby!

BV: I really kind of shot myself in the foot. It was nice to have a theme song especially for television, ’cause it goes on and on, and it was a nice little record, but the series failed. They had like three shows, and it was all over with.

If you can indulge my attempted analysis for a moment, going back and listening to all of the Snuff Garrett era stuff and all the big hits, I think you can chart a sonic progression. Ozzie Nelson was a big part of the Rick Nelson records, how they sounded. The drums are there, but mostly what you’re hearing are high hat and snare drum. You don’t even really hear cymbal crashes or anything. The bass drum is almost non-existent. Ozzie used to say that he did that on purpose because AM radios and TV speakers would just be flustered by a bass drum plugging along. He didn’t care about that. He wanted the vocals out front. Analyzing the hits on Liberty, sure enough the bass drum sort of isn’t there, yet there’s all kinds of swing, all kinds of rhythm, and it’s coming out of the bass guitar, the guitar, the vocals and then the percussive sort of orchestration, but usually there isn’t really a rock drummer going on there. Even [with] the Elvis Sun records, the rhythm is driven by the percussion on the instruments, not a drummer. Then Snuffy comes along doing the same thing only taking it bigger with kettle drums and strings pushing things. Then  Phil Spector with three of everything as loud as possible. Then Bob Crewe producing the Four Seasons, and there at the beginning of “Walk Like A Man” and stuff like that is the biggest drum kit I’d ever heard up until then. By that time here comes Motown and then it’s Katy  bar the door. It’s big drums, big bass guitar, and The Beatles come along and eveything is as loud as possible. But if you listen to all of those records, not a single one of them suffers from the variations on that theme. You don’t miss anything that’s not present on the earlier records because the rhythm is so strong on all of them, and it’s right down to the artist and the producer I think.

BV: That’s right! Eddie Cochran, too. You’ve got a good progression there! If you take the walking bass out of “Devil Or Angel,” it’s a different song; that’s how important that was. On the early records that I did with Liberty we also used a click-bass. That was something that was popular for a period of time, so the six-string Danelectro [is] playing along with and mixed in with the stand-up bass just to give it some edge, because you can’t get edge out of a stand-up bass unless you’re slapping it. It’s not obvious on “Devil Or Angel,” but if you listen to the album, or Brenda Lee, when she recorded “I’m Sorry,” that’s a pretty predominant part in there. You’re right. That’s one of the observations I made, when I do that “Party Doll” thing on the box, it comes from that same way that you just described, because it’s not a drum, it’s a box! It’s a sound. When Elvis is doing “Don’t Be Cruel,” it feels huge, but it’s a guy tapping on a guitar! You know? When Eddie Cochran goes “dun-dun-du-du-du” (imitates “Summertime Blues” rhythm), it’s just balls to the wall, and you think, “Wow.” But when you listen to it, it’s a bass guitar, and it’s a high hat and that’s it! And that was the charm of that time period. That’s the reason that I do that “Party Doll” thing, because when I was a kid I became aware of sounds. And it was fun. It was fun to listen to records and hear sounds. It was part of my training, part of your training, too!

That’s it! “That’s All Right” — there’s not a drum in the building, but it just chugs right along! The Beatles did that, too. They would go out of their way to find things that they could put on their records that were just sounds. It goes right back to them being fans and fanatics about their records, listening and analyzing — hand claps and such. I always found it to be thrilling to listen to a record and figure out what’s going on.

BV: And why’d  they do that. Why would you have a guy tap on a guitar and call that a drum? They’re maybe rehearsing the song and the drummer or whoever is just tapping the guitar …

…and the engineer says, ‘Let’s do it just like that!” One big exception I found recently was listening to “The Night Has A Thousand Eyes” in stereo. The drums are just  cookin’. He’s just rockin’! Was that Earl Palmer?

BV: Yeah, that was Earl Palmer. You’re right about the mixes. They were kind of impressions, rather than trying to catch everything. It was sort of impressions. The lead vocal was always on top. You try to capture it all, but sometimes even now the videos that are being played, you can see the drummer playing like crazy, but you’re not getting all of that sound, because the mix is an impression. It’s like a painting. There’s always a focal point and balance. Your eye comes to a place that it’s meant to go, and music is basically the same.

That’s a really great term, “impression”, because the impression is that everything was big, but in reality it’s not.

BV: I went down to Nashville and stayed at Jerry’s house (Jerry Allison, The Crickets). We were sittin’ around. I was going to do “Love’s Made A Fool Of You,” and we went through that a couple of times. Somebody went for a cup of coffee, and by the time they came back we were doing “Blue Days Black Nights,” not planning on recording it. But the producer came in, and he said, “Why don’t you just do that? It sounds great.” We were in the living room and the studio there, [and] he said, “Let’s just go outside. It’s a great day and let’s set it up on the porch,” and we recorded it outside. It was Joe B. with his stand-up bass. Jerry Allison was playing brushes on a box, my son Robbie was doing a double part with Sonny Curtis on the guitar, and it was all done acoustic, and it was all done live. I never thought about the live part of it until it was over with. It was funny. We did several takes on it, and we stopped because there was an airplane, or the cow was mooing, or something. I wouldn’t trade that part of my life for anything. Being able to go in and record … even the Soma stuff, it was done live, [and] it was a great experience. I didn’t think about it as anything special, but as time marched on that in a way has become lost.

It’s completely lost. You have to find somebody who is old enough to forget what they have learned since, ignore the technology and forget about it.

BV: You’ve got to be able to “hear” it, when engineers are doing stuff like that, but the baggage we carry along these days would say, “You can’t do that. There’s gonna be dissonance and stuff coming back at you that you don’t want …’

You were with Liberty for a very long time. Apparently it was a good economic relationship. Whereas a lot of ’50s and ’60s artists tell horror stories about lost royalties and not getting credit where credit is due, apparently you avoided that sort of pitfall with Liberty …

BV: I mean who really knows if they’re getting all their royalties, but I was fortunate enough that I had enough records that got played, and I really had nothing to complain about. In fact, I never did an audit on them. I could’ve. I did get royalties, and when the CD world opened and the records started selling all over again, that’s been wonderful for me. I mean most of my stuff has originated in England, and the reason they did that was I got paid a half a royalty in England. That was pretty common in those days, whatever your deal was… even today things for the last 10 to 12 years have originated in England.

Do you control the rights to your masters?

BV: I don’t. I don’t. Talk about a journey! I’ve been treated so fairly by EMI and even today, I talk to people at EMI as if I’m a current entity but I’m not. All of the albums have been reissued except for the 30 Hits Of The ’60s. I mean my catalog is so deep, it’s been nice to see all that stuff come out. There aren’t any hits on there … well there are hits. They’ve just fired all their ammo.

What we need is a Bear Family Bobby Vee vinyl box set with 100-page book!

BV: We did so much recording, doing four albums a year, which was kind of unheard of, too. A lot of the stuff we never went back to. We’ve got all the stuff. We’re in the process of mixing it; they sent us all of the tracks. We certainly won’t use everything, but we’ll use a good portion of it ‘cause a lot of them are good!

I’ve listened to your music my entire life it seems, even though we’re only three years apart in age. As a kid, Bobby Vee, Del Shannon, Ricky Nelson … these were my heroes. You were one of them. After being such a huge star in the early ’60s, with some of the biggest records ever, did you or ever wake up and wonder, “Good heavens what’s happening? Is it all over?”

BV: I’ll tell ya, I’ve never really had those thoughts. What happened for me, as I went through the ’60s and music was changing, I was down in Australia playing a club down there. I was there for three weeks, and I was playing with charts and a 14-piece band — horns and everything. I had gone through the circuit in Canada and done the same thing, and what I realized while I was down there was how much I hated it. I just wasn’t having any fun. I’m a pretty simple guy, and fun enters a lot into the picture, good times. Music has been such a joy ride for me, when I started out, with “Susie Baby,” playing with my brother and the Shadows. And I just wasn’t having a good time, and I didn’t quite know what to do about it, but I knew I didn’t want to go out on the road and work like that.

I had a contract with United Artists at that time, and I had an income coming in, and I had had a nice career and had saved some money. And I was thinking about what would it take for me to find the joy and the energy I had when I was 15 or 16 years old, which is really impossible. I thought about the fun I had in those days, writing songs and playing, and it was so much fun, you know. You can relate to that. I started writing songs, and I wrote an album called Nothing Like A Sunny Day, and it’s all my influences. Those are country, rock ‘n’ roll and pop, and the country part of it has some folk overtones. The album wasn’t successful, but [it] got some great reviews. 1971 it came out I think, ‘71, ‘72. In fact, just a few years ago I picked up a Rolling Stone book from one of the book stores in town, and it was listed in the Top 100 overlooked album, and there was a nice write-up about it, and I thought, “Well, that’s great.” But what it (the album) did for me was it reconnected me to where I came from, and that place in me that was just doing it for the joy of it. It was a real important time in my life, and from there I hired a band from Memphis and went out on the road, and what I’ve always enjoyed the most was working with a rhythm section.

Did you ever think about doing something else? Like, well I’m going to be a producer, I’m gonna sell shoes, or I’m going to do something other than this?

BV: I did some producing. Nothing of any consequence, just a few bands I took into the studio and recorded, all the way back to the early ’60s, because I love being in the studio. [I'm] much more comfortable being in the studio than actually performing.

by  Craig Moore

When you were doing those sessions — with Snuff Garret, Earl Palmer, all of those people — did they allow you input into what went down? How did that function, because all of your records, while they all sound great and like Bobby Vee records, I hear similarities in the production maybe say, on Johnny Burnette’s records at the time. Gene McDaniels … I mean there was a Liberty/Dolton stable of artists who all had these great sounding records.

BV: Yeah they did. I’m glad to hear you say that ’cause I think that’s true also. When I go back and listen to the Liberty catalog, it’s pretty impressive. And I think, again, Motown had their players, and Memphis had their players. Nashville,and in L.A., it really wasn’t any different. There was a core of players that played on most of the Liberty records, the Johnny Mann Singers.

Whether they got credit for it or not, they sang on just about everything that came out of Liberty for about four or five years. Ernie Freeman was a primary guy in the success of those things, ’cause he always came in prepared, and we always recorded four songs in three hours. And the real unsung hero was Eddie Brackett. On the first 10 albums I did, he engineered them, and he came out of that school in the ’50s, where it was done live. So he knew how to listen to 25 players and ride the piano solo when it came up or the guitar solo when it came up — the ooh’s and the ahh’s and that kind of thing …

I mentioned Johnny Burnette, Gene McDaniels — Timi Yuro, The Rivingtons, Troy Shondell, The Fleetwoods, The Crickets, The Ventures. And over on Imperial, which became or was connected to Liberty, was Rick Nelson, Fats Domino. This stable of artists was awesome — even Willie Nelson, at the time.

BV: It really was, and Eddie Cochran …

Did you feel like you were a part of something really happening, or was it just whirling past you?

BV: No, I did. I felt like I was in a … again, talking about a core of people, it was an exciting time. The record business was changing. Little garage labels had evolved into actual record companies.

When I started out, there were like 40 or 50 employess at Liberty, and it was exciting. The marketing department, the promotion department, sales department … they would get excited about a record and hit the road with it, and it was a sight to behold (laughs). I went out on the road, too. We would go ’round to radio stations and do promotion stuff and record hops at that time — go to Detroit and play 12 record hops in one night. It was amazing.

I’d go in and sing “Rubber Ball” or whatever the record was, especially for those, ’cause the record hops were really left over from the ’50s, but the DJs were still doin’ them. And so you’d go out and you’d stand up and sing a song or two, or actually lip-sync it in most cases, or if they had a band, you’d slug your way through it … or sing along with it, sign some autographs, jump in the car and go to the next one.

Amazing. But you were young and flexible! Indestructible!

BV: Yeah right. Absolutely. And [I] toured a lot with the original band, with The Shadows, and then my brother decided … well, he got married. [He] always hated the road. He was always a good player and really my mentor. And then it started changing, started adding guys to the band.

So The Shadows was originally the band that you went out on the road with. So it was still a family affair, more or less.

BV: Right, they stayed with me ’til 1963. I always carried bands with me up until the mid-’60s and then started going out doing the charted versions, the big-band versions of the songs (with a band provided by the promoter). I had a conductor, Ted Gerow, who played with the Five Man Electrical Band. When they weren’t working he’d come out on the road with me. That worked out great, and he’s a great player, and we were still able to do some rockin’ stuff, but it was always a guessing game.

The acoustic versions you’ve done of “Take Good Care Of My Baby” and “The Night Has A Thousand Eyes” (from I Wouldn’t Change A Thing) are so much different than the originals or the demos. The original demos were probably just piano, right?

BV: Carole’s  version of ‘Take Good Care Of My Baby’ had all of the indications of what the record eventually sounded like — even the pizzacato strings, she had that. She used to muffle the piano strings to have that plucking sound. She made great demos; basically, she had a complete road map.

How about “The Night Has A Thousand Eyes”?

BV: That was done … there wasn’t a demo. Ben Wiseman, the guy that wrote the song, kept coming to Liberty, and he’d say, “OK, I got the second verse.” And he sat down and basically wrote the song over a period of a few weeks, and then he’d keep coming in until he had it the way he wanted it. So I learned the song as I was hearing him play it.

So this song sort of grew in front of you? As opposed to coming in as a completed piece.

BV: Right. Ben was at the session. The sub-plot is that the way records were made in those days, all those records up to and beyond “The Night Has A Thousand Eyes” in that time period were recorded live, and we always tried to get four songs in a three-hour session.

It turned out to be the last song on the session. Not for any particular reason, we [just] thought we had four good songs. We were running a little bit late, and we had 12 minutes left to record “The Night Has A Thousand  Eyes.” I was comfortable with that; we had knocked ’em out sometimes with a couple of run-throughs, maybe change something, and seven minutes later you’ve got the song.

I could see Ben. He was pacing and pacing, and after the third song, he came into the studio. People were casual, no big deal. He came over to me and said, ‘You’re not gonna do my song, are ya?” And I said, “Yeah we are,” and he says, “But you’ve only got 12 minutes left!” So we did a couple of starts and stops and then did what we thought and what turned out to be the master. And he came in afterwards, which  would’ve been into “golden time” (overtime).

Liberty didn’t want to pay for golden time because money is money, and we already felt like we had the take. He said, “You gotta do another take.” I thought sheesh, we had a good take. “Nah, you put a wrong word in there.” It was (sings) “one of these days you’re gonna be sorry ’cause your game I’m gonna play.” It was the rhyme that tripped him; [it was] supposed to be “one of these days you’re gonna be cryin’ cause your game I’m gonna play, cause you’ll find out without even tryin’…”

I thought, “Ah, well,” but he never forgot that; it was his song, and I talked to him for years. God bless him. He just died a couple of years ago — wonderful guy. [He] wrote ’em right up to the end. He said, “Ya know, you got a gold record out of it, sold a million copies. But just think if you had sung the right words. It would’ve been a better song’!

He still got his check though. He shouldn’t have been too unhappy! I never even noticed that it didn’t rhyme — never occurred to me. I went back and listened to the new version again, and you still haven’t changed the word back.

BV: Nope, never have!

(Craig Moore)

(From Clovis) “Susie-Q” is good and “Butterfly” is really good. “Party Doll” came off well, but I know what he’s talking about. They tend to be a little flat-sounding, comparatively. Nonetheless, just the fact that they still exist is great. Who’s singing “Leave Me Alone” and “What’ll I Do”?

BV: That’s Bill. That’s my brother. He was a big Johnny Cash fan.

It sounds like Johnny Cash meets Jack Scott!

BV: (Laughs) Exactly! Oh my god that’s funny!

When I listen to this stuff, I was never really all that aware of just how good Bill was, but it seems to me that he’s one of the unsung heroes of rock ’n’ roll guitar players, like a Luther Perkins or a Scotty Moore. He’s in that league, but I never hear people talking about Bill Velline.

BV: He was an interesting guy. He was my mentor and my hero when I was growing up. He was five years older than me, and I went to all the shows with him, all the country stuff, and went to all the shows that came through the area, and he taught me how to play guitar. You know, the three chords, and I was on my own, but he hated the business thing of rock ’n’ roll, the traveling and agents and buyers, and all that stuff. He just wanted to play.

Maybe the same sort of outlook as a Cliff Gallup. He loved to play but was anti-everything else.

BV: “Card Shark And Mind Reader” we cut in California. “Loco” and “Toy Soldier” — it says Madison on the record but it’s not; Stereo Sound was in Wisconsin somewhere. I have a whole album that I recorded with The Shadows, and it’s never come out. It’s one of those things. I brought the master tape back to L.A. They weren’t really interested. There were vocals on there, Bill was singing some stuff and I was doing background vocals. It was really the band. It was The Shadows, and that’s when the real Ventures conflict came up. They didn’t know what to do with them, “we’ve got an instrumental band …”

You’ve got enough material to put out an instrumental album?

BV: Yeah, I do. “Loco” and “Toy Soldier” were part of that, and then there are 10 other tracks that have never come out. And it’s pretty good stuff. You can listen to “Toy Soldier” and say, “That was nicely recorded, pretty good sound …” We’re doing a new CD on The Shadows. I own the product. It’s in the EMI vaults. For collectors and people who like that ’50s thing it would be a lot of fun.

What I’d really like to do is to complete  this Bobby Vee and The Shadows package [and] put this same lineup of stuff that we have, and add to it the album that I did with The Shadows that didn’t come out and also [add] the couple of cuts that we didn’t include in the original package, and then we’d have everything.

It would certainly be fun for me. I’m excited about it because my brother is in it, and he sang a couple of rockabilly tunes on there. [The] stuff is a little bit raw, a little bit loose, but it’s good stuff. It may turn up in that EMI package, and if it doesn’t, then we’ll do something with it on its own. It’ll be fun, 25 songs or something like that. The Ventures always loved Bill’s playing, too.

You should have EMI put it out on vinyl!

BV: I hadn’t thought about that, but it would be appropriate!

“Mind Reader” is very much of the period, with the horns and stuff.

BV: Yeah, it is. They heard that, and they thought, “Hmmm … it’s got Ventures all over it.”

So what?

BV: That’s what I thought, too. And the irony is, I remember going out and touring with The Ventures, and Bill came along, and he played with the Ventures. I mean they loved his playing. Bob Bogle and Don Wilson, whenever we get together, they always talk about what a great player Bill was, and, of course, Bill loved it because he was a big fan of the Ventures.

He’d get up and play lead guitar on some of the songs. Nokie wasn’t with them at that time. He never played with  a pick. He was like Mark Knopfler in that he plucked at the strings. He was perfect for me because I would be singing a melody and he would  be doing a little counter thing beneath it — never got in the way of the vocal. He could have been playing a saxophone or a violin or anything, that’s the way he approached it.

That was the art of that period of time, and that’s why all those rockabilly guitar players like the Scotty Moore sort of bits are so hard to reproduce, because it’s the art of finesse. It’s not Eddie Van Halen doing hammer-ons up and down the neck. You’re actually playing single notes and inside the melody. That sort of went out the window with Cream and Hendrix, although Hendrix actually did some of that. People that are learning how to play guitar now aren’t really learning how to play guitar. They’re learning how to tune down to D and playing a big fat chord and let ‘er rip.

BV: There’s a rockabilly movie that’s coming out, and they were looking for songs from the time period. You know if you go into the movies, you hear all the old songs in them — “In The Still Of The Night,” “Only Have Eyes For You.” “Runaway” by Del Shannon has been in several movies. It’s such a big business that they could [afford] $50,000 or $100,000 to get the rights to use them in a movie.

It wasn’t that type of a movie. They didn’t have a budget for that, and the music director for the movie is a friend of my son’s, and he called Tommy and asked him, “Do you have any?” Does your dad have anything that he owns that we could use?”

So I sent him the CD, and he pulled off “Laurie,” which is going to be the re-occurring song in the movie — “Love Must Have Passed Me By,” maybe “Lonely Love” ’cause they wanted that real garage-y sounding thing. And I think he also used “It’s Too Late,” so that was a fun thing, and [the fact] that 40 to 45 years later somebody gets excited about this!

The film is called “The Idol.” It’s interesting. I got one clean copy from Lou Irwin. When the Bob Dylan movie “No Direction Home” came out, they put a little piece of “Suzie Baby” in there. My piece was about 45 seconds, and we made a deal with them in lieu of payment if we could dump it down into the current platform, state-of-the-art copy from film into the digital world. It might be in the package we’re going to be putting out if it doesn’t fit into that plan we’ll do something else with it.

People still haven’t really heard this even though it’s on CD it seems to me. “Lonely Love” and “Love Must have Passed Me By” … if those two songs had been the A- and B-side of a single at the time, it would be worth $1,000 today. It would be just nuts. Those two songs have every conceivable element that make a record desirable and fun and collectible in this day and age. Especially if they had come out on Soma where they would have disappeared, know what I mean? You’re almost Elvis on “Lonely Love,” and it’s incredible because you’re 15! It’s absolutely amazing to me.

BV: My wife and I had dinner with our daughter and her husband in Minneapolis a while back, and her husband came in with the Bob Dylan book “Chronicles,” and there’s about a page and a half about his early days in Fargo when he played in my band for a while. He was Bob Zimmerman at the time. He talks about that time period, and it blew my mind that he would remember that. He played in Fargo in 1991, and I sent him a letter welcoming him back to Fargo, ’cause he spent time there when he was 17 or something and played in our band a short time. And I brought it up and gave it to one of the technicians that I knew working that show, and said, “If you see Dylan, give him this note.”

So my wife and I and daughter Jennifer, and our oldest son, Jeff, we were all at the show, and on the break after the opening act. We got a page to come backstage. We went backstage, and he and the guitar player on that tour, G.E. Smith, were the only people backstage up in this little dressing room. I had also sent along a cassette of  The Vees, and when we walked in, he was  playing The Vees cassette, and we chatted and I was amazed at how much he remembered from that  time period. [He] talked about my brother Bill, asked how he was doin’ [and] Bill had obviously made an impression on him. And the Red Apple Café where he had worked as a bus boy, and Del Shannon … that was the last show Del played, at the Fargo Civic.

Just about 10 minutes, and that was it — gave him a hug and left the room. Anyway, in the new book, he talks about his experience in Fargo. It’s fascinating.

So Bob Dylan was in The Shadows? What’d he do?

BV: He was in The Shadows. Yeah, he played piano, but he didn’t play very well, and we didn’t have a piano. He talks about playing in a church basement, and that’s true.

The piano was horribly out of tune. He could play “Whole Lot Of Shakin’ Going On.’ He played really well in the key of C, but that was about it. He had this amazing energy even at that time, and when he wasn’t playing he’d come up, and we did Gene Vincent songs and Ronnie Hawkins and all kinds of stuff — I remember doing “Lotta Lovin’” and all of a sudden hearing handclaps next to my ear, and he was singing harmony on “Lotta Lovin’” and I thought, “Wow, this guy, he’s a wild card.”

He was great-spirited, had an amazing sense of humor and just wonderful energy. This was summer of ’59. He also mentioned that we had that time period in common. He grew up in Hibbing, and I grew up in Fargo, but we were listening to the same music. But then he moved to New York and started connecting to a lot of things that I was not connected to, because I wasn’t aware of them.

That’s before he had ever written a song even. You were the songwriter in that band and Dylan was the piano player!

BV: Think about that! But he was very kind and very generous about his memories around that whole thing. I left there thinking, “My god, what a memory this guy has,” and then I thought to myself, “That’s what writers do. They remember things and then write about them later.

So when you got linked with Liberty and Snuff Garrett, you didn’t feel like they were transforming you into anything that you were unhappy with? You were perfectly comfortable?

BV: I was absolutely comfortable. Snuff and I were good friends. He would go out and find the songs, and he’d come back with a stack of demos, and we’d weed our way through them and say, “Well let’s do this one, let’s do that one.” And Ernie would come in and sit down at the piano, and we’d find a key for them and sing them through a few times and generally did them in similar fashion of the demo.

No matter how sparse the demo was, Ernie would come up with these great string lines and added to it.

You rubbed elbows with a lot of good people when you were young and coming up. That must have left a great impression.

BV: That’s right, it did. I mean the discipline of the people that showed up. I mean Earl Palmer and Tommy Allsup. who played with Holly at the end of his career … Barney Kessler, Howard Roberts who played the solo on “Devil Or Angel.” There was kind of a core of people we used, and I recorded a lot, like four albums a year, so that was a lot of material.

Graham Nash, The Crickets and Bobby Vee (third from the left) rock the night away in Clear Lake, Iowa, Feb. 2, 2009, at the "50 Winters Later" event honoring the 50th anniversary of the final Winter Dance Party show for Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper, before the Feb. 3, 1959 plane crash that took their lives. (Craig Moore)

The Day the music died

Buddy Holly was in his prime. He was really on a roll at that point. I’ve always thought — just my own feeling on the thing — is that with “Raining In My Heart” and “It Doesn’t Matter Any More,” those records to me are Buddy Holly sort of becoming what Liberty ended up finding with you, with the strings and the nice pop production with a rock ’n’ roll basis. You were obviously a fan of Buddy Holly and the whole scene as a young guy. I know from many years of listening to you and listening to you now that nothing about your style is affected whatsoever. This is Bobby Vee, this is how you sing [and] this is how you sound. And I’m sure when you were 15 you already sounded like that.

BV: I think I did, yeah.

Did your band do any Buddy Holly songs?

BV: I did. We did, and we did Buddy  Knox songs. I still do. To me, he was one of the great rockabilly guys; you never hear his stuff any more, but he made some great records in Clovis, N.M., and we did Gene Vincent. We did a lot of rock ’n’ roll stuff ’cause that’s what everybody wanted to hear, and people wanted to dance, too. So I would do my hits … I’ve always done  Buddy Holly music.

So the 1959 Winter Dance Party covered the Midwest, too, headed to Fargo …

BV: They were en route to Fargo from Clear Lake; beyond that, on to Sioux City. The show was actually to be in the Moorhead, Minn., Moorhead Armory, [the] Fargo-Moorhead area where I grew up. I heard the announcement about the plane crash at a noon-hour lunch. I had gone home for lunch, and then that was the topic of conversation when I went back.

I was a sophomore in high school. That’s what everybody was talking about, of course, ’cause it was the first major package show to come through the area. So it was exciting. I think it was a Tuesday night, and the radio station had met with The Crickets and The Belmonts. The rest of the guys that came in, the new Crickets, and decided to go on with the show, and they asked — I think once on the radio,we just happened to hear it — for any local talent that would help fill in the evening, and we called them up, and they said come on down and that was it.

Did people come up and say, “You sound just like Buddy Holly?”

BV: No, no one ever said that, and ironically … I’d like to say that it was to honor Buddy Holly I didn’t sing any that night. We just didn’t sing any. I knew them all, but we didn’t sing any of them. I’m a real student of Buddy Holly’s life and his short career; talk about “True Love Ways” … one of the greatest love songs ever written. He co-wrote that song with Norman [Petty], and if you go back and listen to all the Buddy Holly songs that have ever been issued, you can hear him becoming a great writer. It just all happened over a period of about three or four years.

… And a great producer. That was where he was headed. That was my impression.

BV: And producer. Right. The pop stuff — when I signed with Liberty, Snuffy wanted to hear some of my songs, and everything I sang him was a rock ’n’ roll song. He really had the vision; I didn’t have the vision. His vision was Buddy Holly’s vision.

He was a friend of Buddy Holly’s. Snuff had been a disc jockey in Lubbock, Texas. He was friends with The Crickets and Norman, and that’s why we went to Clovis to record. It was more because that was part of his comfort zone. He was just a young producer, and he had spent time in the studio in Clovis, and he thought, well, that’s where you go to make records. You go to Clovis, even though Liberty was in L.A. So that’s where we went.

Snuffy and Buddy Holly’s vision I think were similar. I mean Holly really had a vision of pop music that’s really evident in songs like “Words Of Love” and “Listen To Me” and some of those ballads that he did. He really set the tone for my direction, Johnny Burnette’s direction … I mean Johnny Burnette, my goodness, one of the great rockabilly bands of all time, and here he was reinventing himself as a pop singer.

Did you ever talk to him about that? Or did you ever have any discussions with him about your similar roots and similar direction?

BV: Not really. Actually, we recorded some of the same songs. Snuffy would find a song, and there were several of them … actually I shared my first session with Johnny Burnette. We went in and split the session. He did two songs, and I did two songs. I did “What Do You Want” and “My Love Loves Me,” the Sonny Curtis song, and he did “Dreamin’” and “Cincinnati Fireball.”

Well, that was a moment in time that sort of changed things! Having those two records come out of the same three hours. My goodness.

BV: No kidding.

I really like “What Do You Want.” I told you the other day that I hadn’t heard it for years and had completely forgotten what it was like. That’s a really good record. It absolutely had the hallmark of everything that was to follow.

BV: Oh thanks. It’s a good record, yeah. It certainly did. That set the table.

What all did you do at Clovis?

BV: Actually, the first session that I did for Liberty, they flew me out to L.A. to record “What Do You Want.” The next session we did was in Clovis.

The deal that I had was for an album. Snuffy had this idea that he wanted to make a rock ’n’ roll album, and he wanted to make a pop album at the same time. I thought it was a great idea. He said we’ll put all the rock ’n’ roll tunes on one side, and we’ll cut ’em in Clovis, and we’ll go to L.A. and do some ballads, and that’ll be the string side, and love songs and all that — sounded alright to me.

So we went down to Clovis, and we recorded I think it was actually seven songs. We did a version of “That’ll Be The Day,” and we did “Susie-Q.” We did “Bye Bye Love.” We did a version of “White Silver Sands,” “Wishing” — Norman said, “Here’s one of Buddy’s songs that we haven’t done anything with,” and that just knocked me out. So we recorded “Wishing.”

There’s something I’m leaving out, but that was it, and then we went out to Los Angeles and started recording what became my very first album, Bobby Vee Sings Your Favorites. And Norman had written these wonderful liner notes for this project, and we got done with the six songs out in L.A., and the sessions had gone so well and everyone was so excited, Snuff said, “Let’s do some more.” Snuffy wasn’t very happy with the sound of the records that we did in Clovis, so we did six more songs, and we never used the Clovis stuff. It never came out.

It was a better experience for me, you  know, being a huge Buddy Holly fan, than it was for him, apparently — at odds with Norman somehow. So we had these liner notes that Norman Petty had written, but everything was changing, so we had his liner notes on the back of the album and ended up with an album of ballads from the ’50s, and “Devil Or Angel” came off of that.

So where did  those Clovis sessions go?

BV: Well, nowhere. They sat around. I had a 7 1/2 IPS reel, and there was a master copy I think just stayed in Clovis. I just got it a few years ago, just picked it up. I ended up leasing that material and other stuff to K-Tel, and they put out a package Bobby Vee & The Shadows, The Early Rockin’ Years. My brother died in 1997, and it came out before that, probably 1996.

That was really fun for me ’cause Bill played on that. It’s 24 tracks, all just rockin’ ’50s stuff. It’s very garage-band-y, a beautiful package, great liner notes. Steve Wilson was with K-Tel at the time overseeing the project. It was a lot of fun to put together, and as far as I was concerned, it was a showcase for my brother. The last session we did as a band was at a studio in Wisconsin. It was an album that I produced with the band, and there’s some really nice instrumentals that Bill and I wrote together. (This incredible CD is available from Rockhouse Productions, www.rockhouseproductions.com)

In listening to The Early Rockin’ Years, I’m wondering, did Liberty not hear this material?

BV: The only thing we used during that time period was “Laurie,” which was the B-side of “One Last Kiss.” They got caught up with the whole enmeshment with The Ventures. They didn’t know what to do with The Shadows, basically, and we had signed two different contracts.

This was probably before you even knew about the British Shadows in ’59?

BV: They were The Drifters at that time. Then they changed their name. I saw them play in Minneapolis. They opened the show. It was Frankie Avalon and a bunch of rock ’n’ rollers that came through Minneapolis. Cliff Richard & The Shadows opened the show, and Cliff Richard came out in a white suit, and he stood at the wing, and he did about five spins. He was on the other side of the stage, and it was one of the most rockin’ shows, and we walked out of there saying, “Well, better think of another name for the band.”

Did Liberty end up with the masters to all of these things or did they just disappear?

BV: The masters got burned up. There was a fire. And I had, for example, “Lonely Love,” “Love Must Pass Me By,” “It’s Too Late,” “Remember The Day.” I had acetates on those things and back in the early ’80s, I went into the studio and dumped them down just so that I had them. Then later, when this project came along, we went in and cleaned them up a little bit, but you can still hear clicks and pops in there. But that’s just the way that we retrieved them.

“Laurie” and “It’s Too Late,” especially “Laurie,” sound like [they have] a different bass player, different producer. There are strings on it; it’s completely different than anything else on it.

BV: The only songs the original bass player played on were “Susie Baby” and “Flying High,” the first three actually. There was another instrumental that we didn’t put on here; then Dick Dunkirk came in on bass, and he played on “Love Must Pass Me By,” “It’s Too Late,” and “Laurie.” We took “Laurie” and overdubbed strings on it.

You did that or Liberty did that?

BV: Liberty did it.

So the “Laurie” that’s on here is after Liberty played with it. You say that there is yet another instrumental from the ’59 sessions?

BV: There’s two actually. There’s another version of “Flying High” that we cut at a little studio in Moorhead that I wish I had put on there, ’cause it was the ultimate garage-band sound. Just a real tanky … we had just written the song, and it was like a minute and 20 seconds or something. I didn’t put it on, but I wish I had now because those are the colors. They become the colors — not fun to listen to but good enough to say, “Well, there’s a garage band.”

Yeah but people eat that up. I’m just looking at it from the standpoint of a fan at the time. It almost looks like they thought, well, they’ve got the next generation’s Buddy Holly here, and they’ll go back to Clovis and try and get that magic back out of that studio. But I think the stuff that you guys did in Minneapolis is cooler sounding, and it’s your stuff. You wrote it.

BV: Well thanks, I thought that, too. They’re better sounding records, and they have some spirit to them because they are original.

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