King Bobby


The term "roots" music has come to mean almost everything that's good and older than the day before yesterday, including rockabilly, swing, soul and ethnic forms like polka, salsa and conjunto. It's gotten easier just to say what roots doesn't cover: music on the charts or MTV, apparently, and anything making significant money. Roots music, then, is largely performed by people who wouldn't know a Buzz Bin clip from a cheap haircut. But a just-released set of recordings by 1960s Texas rock 'n' roller Bobby Fuller should make us reconsider those terms.

The music Bobby Fuller made with his band, the Bobby Fuller Four, is as great in its way--as rootsy, and thoroughly American--as all the soul songs of the same era, and more influential; it was the springboard for the visceral pop sound bands like the Ramones, the Cramps, and Southern Culture on the Skids recycle. If it also represents the first stirring of a patchwork style that would eventually water down all regional differences and give us John Cougar Mellencamp, for a time it was a beautiful mongrel.

In the liner notes to the Fuller collection Shakedown! The Texas Tapes Revisited (Del-Fi), critic Dave Marsh runs through the variety of styles Fuller mastered in Texas between '61 and '64--ballads, rockabilly, surf and a dead-on Buddy Holly imitation--and concludes with what could be an epitaph not just for Fuller, who died young under mysterious circumstances, but for rock 'n' roll. None of the other Texas bands of that time, he writes, "tried to do this many things, much less tried to record it in their parents' house." That's the essence of Bobby Fuller's story: a tinkerer hunched over his twin Ampex tape decks, as mad as Thomas Edison or Les Paul, sparking like a firefly.

If Fuller is remembered at all today, it's for "I Fought the Law," his Mustang Records single that nosed into the Top 10 in 1966; it was covered by the Clash 14 years later, and can still be heard on oldies radio. But Fuller was no one-hit wonder. Over the years, some of the material on the new two-disc Del-Fi set has dribbled out on bootlegs; Norton Records, a small New York reissue label, released El Paso Rock Vol. 1 several months ago, a single disc that covers the same ground as Shakedown!; and the material from Fuller's original Del-Fi albums has remained in print on Rhino and the British imprint Ace. Fuller has been a beacon to incipient rockers, not because he did one thing well, but because, as Marsh suggests, in his unorthodoxy he represents an age when people were unselfconsciously reinventing themselves. It was a time when teenagers from landlocked El Paso played credible surf guitar, and all that really mattered was the big, subversive beat.

Many of the details of Fuller's life are recounted in the Shakedown! booklet by Del-Fi staffer Bryan Thomas. Unfortunately, his comments are disturbingly similar--word for word in some quotes--to an article by Miriam Linna in a 1988 issue of her small magazine Kicks. Neither Linna nor Kicks is credited by Del-Fi, or by Thomas, whose title at Del-Fi is "Director of Creative Services." Linna did an extraordinary amount of research on a subject no one else cared much about at the time, and she deserves recognition for it.

In Linna's Kicks account, Fuller's origins seem thoroughly ordinary. He was born just outside Houston in 1942, and, after a sojourn in Salt Lake City, resettled with his family in El Paso in 1956, where his father worked for a local natural-gas company. Through his high school years, he toyed with drumming, jazz and drag racing. Impressed by fellow Texan Holly, he learned guitar and experimented with rock 'n' roll when he wasn't working in a strip-mall music store.

According to Linna, Fuller and his pals spent a good part of the early '60s hanging out at the Lobby Bar in Juarez, Mexico, just across the Rio Grande from El Paso. Bluesman Long John Hunter was the Lobby's featured attraction, and Fuller sometimes sat in on drums. He also began issuing home-recorded singles on the same New Mexico label Hunter used, Yucca; his second effort, "You're in Love," shot to the top of the playlist at El Paso's KELP, standing on the shoulders of Elvis Presley and Roy Orbison.

Fuller formed a band with his brother Randy on bass, who joined on the condition he could play fast songs like Ritchie Valens' "La Bamba." While Randy liked Valens, the first Chicano rock star, Bobby was obsessed with Holly. He insisted his band use Fender equipment because Holly had, and liked to unwind after shows by playing a guessing game using lyrics from Holly's songs. Holly, who died in '59, was a natural influence. He'd blazed a path out of Lubbock, Texas, by experimenting with home-recording techniques, melding disparate styles--the syncopation of R&B, the longing twang of country--into dreamy, upbeat songs. For Fuller, he represented a future attainable by wishing, puttering and leapfrogging over the dusty El Paso present.

In 1962, Fuller booked time at Norman Petty's studio in Clovis, New Mexico. Petty had presided over Holly's seminal early recordings; along with Lee Hazelwood in Phoenix, he was plying uncharted sonic waters, amplifying, syncopating and redoubling country music. He cut two Fuller sides, but the results were lackluster. Fuller returned to El Paso and immediately began beefing up his own home studio. He was on his way to becoming a public recluse--the boy who stood on the roofs of gas stations playing an electric guitar, telling the other kids to dance.

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