Gary James' Interview With Guitarist Jim Reese Of
The Bobby Fuller Four



The Mysterious Death of Bobby Fuller

It's 1966 and a group out of El Paso, Texas calling themselves The Bobby Fuller Four are enjoying considerable success with their recording of "I Fought The Law". The song went all the way to number 9 on the national charts. A follow up record, "Love's Made A Fool Of You" (a Buddy Holly cover) reached number 26 on the charts. Then on July 18th, 1966, Bobby Fuller was found dead in his car, parked in front of his Hollywood apartment. His body was beaten and a can of gasoline was found in the front seat. The Los Angeles Police Dept. called it a suicide! Those who knew the 23 year old singer knew better.

As a guitarist for The Bobby Fuller Four, Jim Reese was one of those people. We talked with Jim about his days in the group and the unsolved mystery of Bobby Fuller's death.

Q - Jim, are you still involved in the music business?

A - Well, semi. I play on the weekends in east Texas. That's doing pretty good if you can play every weekend in east Texas. That's great.

Q - Are you in a Rock 'n' Roll band?

A - It's a Country band and we try to play Rock 'n' Roll as often as we can. We have to play Country. I don't like it, but it's money.

Q - What was it like to be in a Rock 'n' Roll band in 1966?

A - It was great. It was a lot of work, but it was a lot of fun. Playing for big crowds and people accepted you as opposed to say playing in a bar or nightclub where the last thing in world people came to do was hear a band.

Q - How did life change for you when "I Fought The Law" became a hit?

A - We just started getting extremely busy. Just doing something all day long and all night. We'd go around to autograph parties, playing, recording, being in all kinds of publicity things.

Q - Did you ever do the Dick Clark Tours?

A - No. We did a lot of touring. There were shows with us and The T-Bones and Sir Douglas Quintet. I know we did one tour with Charlie Rich. Just kind of package shows.

Q - You and Bobby both played guitar in the band. How did that work?

A - Well, that's been a source of my problems. I played 75 to 80 percent of the lead on stage and somewhat more than that on the records. Bobby and I doubled on, where we played the same part at the same time on guitar, and sometimes playing harmony. Everything just kept getting finagled around where Bobby got all the credit for it. Thereby hangs a problem. If you've been doing all this work and haven't been getting credit for it, the people out in Los Angeles look at who is getting the credit for it and figure that's who did it. If it sounds like I've got some sour grapes, you bet ya.

Q - It also sounds like maybe you haven't seen any royalties in a long time.

A - I got a check probably the last week Bobby was alive. It was for the last bit of work we did, for a show or whatever. And that's the last penny I've ever gotten off that. And see, I sit here and see all these yo-yos all over the world putting out these "Oldie Goldie" albums with our record on it, sometimes pictures of the whole band, showing me, and I'm not getting a dime for it. It seems to me like it's feathering everybody's nest but mine. And it was my work.

Q - Whose idea was it to call the group The Bobby Fuller Four?

A - The thing about The Bobby Fuller Four is the name in itself is inappropriate. That was a name that was thought of between Bobby Fuller, Bob Keane (the group's manager) and somebody else. I don't know who. In other words, the band, the rest of us, were never consulted about that. They set up a corporation, Bobby Fuller Four Inc., of which we were not members. Almost from the word go, from a corporate standpoint, a business standpoint, the band was changed from four people to one man with three people playing with him. But, that's not actually what the band was. It was actually four guys that left El Paso to go to Los Angeles, with all for one and one for all in mind. We're all equal. We're all partners in this deal. We go out there and it got taken away from us. Since Bobby was the singer, that's who they concentrated on. I don't lay all the blame on Bobby. Bobby wanted to be a star so bad, to a point, he didn't care what he had to do to make it. If I live to be a hundred years old, I'll always believe that if we had just connected with visionary type people in the business, as opposed to bottom line, money people, we could conceivably have been as big as The Beatles.

Q - You knew Bobby for a long time, right?

A - Yeah. I knew him for several years before The Bobby Fuller Four came into being. In other words, the band ultimately came into being that band. He played drums for me in fact at one time.

Q - What was Bobby Fuller's mood in those last few days of his life? Was he depressed?

A - No. That was what was so strange. The Saturday previous to July 18th is the last time I remember seeing him. He was happy and joking around. He was in a pretty good mood. If you're leading up to did Bobby kill himself? No.

Q - Bobby was found in his car, with a gas can and a plastic hose at his side. Bob Keane said "It would be ridiculous to assume he drank gasoline."

A - Well, it's physical impossibility. You can't drink gasoline. A conscious body can't do it.

Q - When did someone suspect foul play?

A - I suspected it immediately. Where I was standing, you could see them (the police) take his body out of the car, I was 20 to 30 feet away. You could see what looked like scrapes, abrasions on his arm, like he'd been in a fight. At the time they're pulling his body out, I said he didn't commit suicide, somebody's beat him up. And then a cop gets a gas can out of the car with his bare hands and pours gas on the ground. I'm yelling at him, "Hey man, don't do that. They might want to look for fingerprints on that can, or analyze where the gas came from." They were trying to say that the car had been parked there all day. You know how a car, when it's been shut off for a while, condensation comes out of the exhaust pipe. There was a big puddle of condensation under the exhaust pipe of that car. This was a July day in L.A. they're trying to tell me that the car had been there for four or five hours? That car hadn't been there 30 minutes. In fact, I know for an absolute fact that it wasn't there when I went to the store, which had been about 30 to 40 minutes before that. I had to drive right by. The police said his body had been in that car at least 12 hours. Where was the car?

Q - But his death was ruled suicide.

A - Well, as I understand it, they finally ruled it accidental death, saying he was in the car, sniffing gasoline.

Q - That still does not answer a lot of questions.

A - No, because I recall looking through the back window of the car, at the back seat and seeing an open book of matches on the back seat and a burned spot on the seat, close to the matches, like somebody tried to set fire to the car. I tried to point it out to the police and their attitude was "Don't worry about it kid, we'll handle it."

Q - Will this case ever be re-opened?

A - No.

Q - Wasn't there a rumor going around that Bobby was having an affair with the girlfriend of a Mobster?

A - The girl referred to was Melanie. A good looking gal, young, probably in her early twenties. Her and Bobby saw an awful lot of each other. We just assumed they had a thing going. She worked for this fellow who was one of three people that formed the money behind Bob Keane. This fellow was married. She may or may not have been his mistress. We know that at times she functioned as a high priced call girl. Whether there's any Mob connections there, I don't know for a fact. I suspect it. Every time we turned around, there would be be a Mob man somewhere around, either trying to get us under contract or get us on their record label. At least, that was the rumor coming to us. And I'm going to say a little bit stronger than rumor, what people would actually tell us that ought to know. The story that always came back to us was that the Mob would like to get a hold of us, The Bobby Fuller Four, and we're not going to let them do it. The problem is, they probably told Bobby pretty much everything that was going on, but they kept the rest of us in the dark.

Q - Do you think we'll ever see this mystery solved?

A - Short of a death bed confession, no. I think there was a cover-up. It bothers me a lot. I dream about it sometimes. I'd like to know, as far as who did it. I have theories, but I'm going to keep 'em that way. You're dealing with people that you don't even want to have a theory around. I've racked my brain a lot of times over the last twenty-some-odd years, saying do I know anything? Is there anything I know that I don't realize I know? And I just don't think there is.

© Gary James. All rights reserved.

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