The Death of Ritchie Valens

Ritchie Valens: His manager, Bob Keane Remembers

The day the music died. That's how Don McLean saw it in his song "American Pie". On February 3rd, 1959. Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper (J.P. Richardson), and Ritchie Valens were killed in a plane crash. The world of Rock 'n' Roll has never been the same since that day. In 1987 Columbia Pictures released the highly successful film, La Bamba, the Ritchie Valens Story. With the renewed interest in Ritchie Valens, we decided to interview the man who discovered him, who managed him and produced him, Mr. Bob Keane.

Q - What is the likelihood of a 17 year old today achieving the kind of success Ritchie Valens had?

A - Well, I don't know. It's so completely different today because of recording techniques. Rock music is more or less solidified. It's a definite art form. All they really need is the voice. Today I would say a 17 year old would have a much bigger chance. I don't think it would really be comparable because he was a Latin, and there were no Latins in those days. No Latins were singing Rock music, or Pop, or whatever you want to call it. It would be a hard question to answer. As far as becoming a big success today, it can be done at 17 as well as 18 or 19.

Q - We have Debbie Gibson and Tiffany, but they're still not in the same category as Ritchie. He was a singer / songwriter / performer. Why don't we see that combination surfacing these days?

A - Today, everything is kind of automated. You find a singer. You put him through the mill. You get the producer and he goes in and uses the drum machine and comes up with the song and does a video, and they put it out. That's the method of that stuff. We had to go from city to city, and disc jockey to disc jockey, an entirely different situation. Nothing's the same. That's almost like the difference between factory made and made by hand.

Q - What is your background? How did you start Del-Fi Records?

A - I was a band leader before that. I had this guy that followed me around. He wanted to start a record company. So he started Keene Records, which was the first record company I had. I had Sam Cooke on the label. He was my first artist. "You Send Me", which was his big hit. Then we got into contractual problems with this guy and that's when I started Del-Fi. So my background had been strictly musical all the way, which is sometimes good, and sometimes not. In this case, I guess it was okay.

Q - You saw Ritchie Valens for the very first time at a little theatre in Pacoima (California). Did you meet with him after the show?

A - Yeah.

Q - What year was that?

A - That had to be, let's see, '58 I guess.

Q - What brought you to that theatre?

A - I was just starting Del-Fi Records and I was having my business cards printed. The young fellow who was printing them for me asked if I wanted to hear a singer in Pacoima. They said they called him the Little Richard of San Fernando. So, I said, "Yeah I'd like to hear him, sure." So, that's how it came about.

Q - Did he have a manager at that point?

A - No.

Q - Who was handling his business?

A - I was. His mother had to go down for the court approval, but outside of that, there was nobody handling him.

Q - How successful was Ritchie's version of "La Bamba" when it was released?

A - It was very successful right from the beginning, which was kind of a surprise to us because we put it out as a throw-away, on the B-side. "Donna" was the A-side. It was starting to go. It was going up ten points each week at the point he was killed. It went from 44 to 33, to 22, and it would've gone right up I'm sure. "Donna" was up at number 2 at the time he died. He was a new act nationally and in those days when someone died, if it was not a big name that had been around for a long time, they just jumped off of 'em. Disc jockeys won't play a dead artist 'cause they can't get any promotion. And that unfortunately stopped his career.

Q - You've said that only 25% of the La Bamba the movie was true. What was the 75% that was incorrect?

A - There were so many little things. I could hardly enumerate them. Number one, his family were never fruit pickers. The mother worked in a machine gun bullet factory or something like that out there in the valley. She also worked as a waitress. The situation between the brothers I don't think existed. I never had any problems with the brother. I only met him once. He was never at the recording sessions. He had nothing to do with anything. I never did meet Donna. That was just something they embellished for the love interest in the story. He was from the other side of the tracks. Also, all the songs he was singing when I met him, that wasn't true. He didn't know any songs when I met him. All the other songs, "Donna", and so forth, he just had the little hook for them and we had to finish out the songs for him. Even "La Bamba" was something he played for me. He just played the music. I asked him to do the lyrics and he said he didn't know them. He had to get the lyrics from his Aunt. It took me two or three weeks to convince him to record it. He didn't want to record it.

Q - It seems rather odd that a man who knew him so well would not be asked to be a consultant to the movie.

A - Well, I was a consultant. I spent about four or five hours with them, giving them everything that I thought they wanted. But they didn't use much of it. But when you stop to think about it, if they hadn't done it the way they did, you know making kind of a soap opera out of it, I don't think it would've been that good of a picture, frankly. So when you go to make a motion picture, you have to use a lot of ingenuity, a lot of poetic license. After all, the bottom line is, here's a kid who came out of the ghetto and in a very short time became number one in the world. That's the message, and the rest of that stuff isn't that important anyhow.

Q - How did you help Ritchie finish "Donna"?

A - He just gave me the hook over the phone. 'I got a girl and Donna is her name.' That's all. Actually my partner in the publishing business at that time, he and I finished the song, put the bridge to it and finished the rest of the lyrics, and the rest of the melody. I gave him credit for all the songs just about, except a couple of 'em that I started from scratch like "Little Suzie". I gave him co-writer on that too, which he had nothing to do with. But the point is, I was trying to get him enough money to buy a home for his mother and clean up his personal life as much as possible, which I was able to do before he died. I was able to see his mother get a home.

Q - Does a tape exist somewhere of Ritchie's performance on American Bandstand?

A - It might, but if it is, Dick Clark's got it, and he isn't letting go. He doesn't let go of anything really. We tried to get that information from Dick, and he said he had it, but he lost it or something. You never know, he may be saving it for some future thing he's got in mind.

Q - You spoke to Ritchie the night before he died. What did he say to you? What was on his mind?

A - He just said the bus trip was lousy, that he was freezing and he didn't like it, and I said, "To hell with it, come home."

Q - And what did he say to that?

A - "Yeah, okay." I said, "Just leave tomorrow." And I guess he decided to go the other way.

Q - When Dick Clark was asked if Ritchie Valens had lived, would he have been able to sustain his popularity, Dick Clark said that's a difficult question to answer.

A - He was right.

Q - I don't understand why Ritchie's music, his recordings, couldn't have been used in the movie La Bamba?

A - That's an easy question to answer. Warner Brothers gave the producers $250,000 for the rights to the cast album and they couldn't do that if they used Ritchie, because I owned the cast album.

Q - As we approach the 30th anniversary of Ritchie Valens death, what's going to be on your mind on February 3rd, 1989?

A - Well, I don't know, it comes and goes every year. But it might be more meaningful because of the fact of the picture. You know I had another artist that was very big with me, Bobby Fuller, "I Fought The Law". He was murdered at the peak of his career. In fact, his career parallels Ritchie's very closely. One semi-hit, "Let Her Dance", which was comparable to "Come On Lets Go" and then "I Fought The Law" which was right after that, which was just like "Donna". It was on its way to number one. And he got killed. As a matter of fact, we're going to do a motion picture on his life.

Q - Wasn't Bobby Fuller the victim of a Mob hit?

A - Yeah, well, I don't know. There's a lot of rumors around. But, it's gonna be a good picture, because it's going to be kind of a murder mystery, with Rock music too, of course.

© Gary James. All rights reserved.

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