Sounds Like Old Times

By JAY COCKS

The Sheppards make fresh pop from the past

It was 1955, the way Bunky Sheppard tells it now, and he was riding in his car past the corner of 58th and South Park in Chicago. He passed a group singing a cappella, letting some high sweet harmonies drift up into the metropolitan air. Bunky drove around the block, came back to that same corner, listened a little harder and made his move.

Nothing happened. Or a great deal happened, but nobody heard much about it. Bunky bestowed his own moniker on the group that evolved from the street corner, and, as the Sheppards, they had one halfway hit, Island of Love, in 1959. Then they played some live shows, turned up on Dick Clark's TV program and in the mid-60s just disintegrated. It was a typical rock trajectory: amateurs, hit makers, has-beens. But with the Sheppards, there is a difference.

An upstart San Francisco record company called Solid Smoke dusted off 18 Sheppards sides and made an album released this summer. While the record has not made the charts, it has delighted Sheppards buffs and ensured the group a rightful niche in rock history. The tunes are mostly sweet, short love songs delivered in two basic styles: what Singer O.C. ("Perk") Perkins calls "that good old gospel harmony"; and a harder, more sinewy sound that took gospel harmonies and made them sweat and work for a living, in the manner of Wilson Pickett. The Sheppards made these disparate approaches into their own distinctive style.

Bunky produced all the Sheppards' songs. They had two top lead singers. Murrie Eskridge took the harder-driving numbers and Millard ("Mill") Edwards handled the more wistful songs, making Island of Love come within cutting distance of some of the Drifters' best material. Unlike the long-lived Drifters, the Sheppards broke up and stayed broken. Who remembered? Who even knew?

Bunky Sheppard works for 20th Century-Fox Records in Los Angeles now. He is a vice president, a successful promo man. Of the six Sheppards, James Allen is dead, and another, Eskridge, has disappeared. Perk Perkins still sings occasionally. He works nights at a Chicago plating company, picks up extra money as a freelance deejay at parties. He likes to reminisce about the days when 5,000 kids in a Michigan City armory charged the stage when they heard Island of Love. Sometimes he plays the Sheppards album. His wife, his children, or his grandchildren will stop and listen to that impossibly sweet music from 20 years ago; someone will turn the television down low while Perk listens, and remembers a little more. --Jay Cocks

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.