Hitting Big with Hummables

The studio was next door to a garage in a New Mexico town called Clovis. For instruments, there was a $50 mail-order guitar and a battered bass with one string missing. The performers were two students from nearby West Texas State College, backed by the sister of one and her girl friend. Yet Party Doll and I'm Stickin' with You, the songs recorded that day by Buddy Knox, Jimmy Bowen and the "Rhythm Orchids," both caught on across the nation and became two of the top rockabilly hits of 1957.

The Orchids soon wilted. They sang their two big numbers at Manhattan's Paramount Theater, but when the audience screamed for more, they could offer nothing better than a reprise of Buddy's big song. Back West on the nightclub circuit, the group sometimes outnumbered the audiences; even in Jimmy Bowen's home town of Dumas, Texas (pop. 8,500), they could not fill the town auditorium. "We didn't have a follow-up act," drawls Jimmy today, "and that ruined our careers."

Household Names. Temporarily ruined them, anyway. Knox is now a country-and-western singer in Macon, Ga. And Bowen? He finally settled in Los Angeles, producing recordings rather than performing on them. He did right well, too. During six years as a producer for the Reprise label, he supervised albums that sold 10 million copies and singles that sold 12 million, boosting his income to $500,000 a year. Today, his own six-month-old Amos Productions Inc. is one of the largest independent record-production companies in the U.S.

On the average, only one out of every eleven records hits the charts--meaning the trade magazines' top 100; Jimmy Bowen has a three-out-of-five hit rating. His specialty is lending up-to-the-minute commercial appeal to long-established "household names." In 1964, while producing an album by Dean Martin, he saw possibilities in a little song written 15 years earlier by Martin's pianist, Ken Lane. He released it as a single, and Everybody Loves Somebody carried Martin to the top of the bestseller charts for the first time in two years. In 1966, at a Frank Sinatra recording session, Bowen came up with a Bert Kaempfert melody from the soundtrack of the movie A Man Could Get Killed. With lyrics added, the song made one of Sinatra's biggest successes of recent years, Strangers in the Night.

Expanding into Shoes. For Bowen, the key to streamlining performers like Martin and Sinatra is to "change the sound around them, not change their sound." Equally crucial is Bowen's knack for spotting catchy material. "I'm not setting any trends, and I'm sure not trying to follow any," he says. "I look for songs that are simple enough to be hummable after you hear them one time."

The first album on Bowen's Amos label, to be released this month, may be his greatest coup yet. After years of trying, he finally managed to team Bing Crosby with a group of lank-haired backup musicians in a collection of rock and folk hits--for examples, the Beatles' Hey Jude and Judy Collins' Both Sides Now. Meantime, Amos Productions continues to expand in other directions: independent producing, recording-studio engineering and shoe repair. Shoe repair? It seems that Bowen's father had a shop in Santa Barbara that was not doing well, so Bowen bought it out. With some of the royalties from Jimmy's first record hit, his father, once Dumas' police chief, bought a dairy farm in Missouri. He knew little about the dairy business, and besides, most of the new calves born on the farm turned out to be male. That was when he opened the shoe-repair shop. Or so Bowen says, in that aw-shucks country manner that seems to thicken when he is working on his shrewdest deals.

God Is Welcome. At 31, Bowen could well afford to subsidize a whole chain of shoe-repair shops. He and his wife, Singer Keely Smith, receive about 100 business and social visitors a week at their twelve-room North Hollywood house, which has a big black-and-orange piano in the poolroom, a private studio and a swimming pool out back, and a brass plaque on the front door that says: "Our house is open to sunshine, friends, guests and God."

Every year, Bowen throws a private golf tournament for 40 or so friends at a local country club. The ground rules require that every player have a drink before playing each hole, and limousines are provided so that nobody has to drive home. Last year, what with the grand prize of a Datsun convertible and all, the tab ran to $10,000. All things considered, old Jimmy has turned out to have a pretty good follow-up act after all.

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