Interview by DJ Johnson

At the end of part one of this interview with Del-Fi's head honcho, Bob Keane, we left you with a little cliffhanger involving the Del-Fi Records master tapes, which had vanished from the vault. It was the kind of cliffhanger that is most satisfying to resolve, but I regret to inform you that since that time he's decided against telling us the rest of that story. My guess is there are legal reasons. The only thing I'm able to tell you is that the tapes were eventually discovered, more than a decade later, in a studio in Tennessee. And that is the end of that little plot line. Our apologies.

We pick up the Del-Fi story during a long stretch of time when there was, in fact, no Del-Fi. The death of Bobby Fuller had left the label with no major star, and other factors led to the closing of the doors. Keane had been in the music business all his life. He now found himself outside, but instead of looking in, he got on with his life. Of course, as we now know, the biz was still in his blood.

If you missed the first part of this interview, you can read it by clicking here.

---

Cosmik: When we last spoke, we left off just after the death of Bobby Fuller, which was shortly before you closed the doors at Del-Fi in 1967. You were out of the business. What did you do for a living at that point?

Keane: Well, I got into home security. I was the manager of the new Westinghouse Home Security Unit here in Los Angeles. In those days, they only had those systems in commercial buildings, so it was a whole new thing that Westinghouse was trying to do. I knew so many people, so eventually I put systems into the homes of almost every motion picture company president, and a lot of movie stars and music people.

Cosmik: So you were successful at that, too. Did it make you happy after working in the music biz?

Keane: Naw, I didn't like it that much. It was okay in the beginning, but it got pretty dull.

Cosmik: But you were raising three young boys at the time.

Keane: That's right, I was, and that's why I took that job. I wasn't in the record business anymore, and I didn't have any income. When we split up, my partners and I, everything was disolved. The only thing I had was the tapes.

Cosmik: Which you didn't have.

Keane: Which I didn't have. In '68 or '69 we closed the doors, they took what was theirs, I took what was mine. They had other things going, of course, because they had the big company called Record Service, and I didn't have anything, actually.

Cosmik: Must have felt like a raw deal.

Keane: Well... not so much a raw deal as just very unfortunate. It was like when Keen Records got screwed by the Greek, it turned out to be a lucky thing for me. And, as it turned out, this deal was also a lucky thing for me. My sons were 3, 4 and 10 at that time. My wife was an alcoholic, and that's when we divorced. I had to sell the Ritchie Valens copyrights, which hurt later, but they weren't worth much in those days. He wasn't selling that much and nobody covered his songs. When La Bamba came along, those copyrights were worth three or four million dollars. Now they're worth a lot because every time someone uses La Bamba in a motion picture, heavy money changes hands. But anyway, that's life! You can't call your shots always. But outside of that, I must say this: the experience I got from having to sell something was the greatest gift I ever had in my life. Now that sounds kinda crazy, but before, I was a millionaire, I had everything I wanted, I had three or four cars, I lived in a big joint at the top of the hill next to Frank Sinatra's place, and it was easy livin'. I never had to really work for anybody in my whole life. When I was 17 I worked for my father doing construction, but since then I had not worked for anybody. And here I'd never realized what it was to try to sell something, and to convince somebody that this is what they [want]. I studied it and became very good at it. Next time I got in business, I realized what the tricks were, the tricks used by the people who were successful in business. So it was a blessing, in a way.

Cosmik: Makes you wonder what you could have done with that knowledge before, when Del-Fi was still going strong.

Keane: Oh! (Laughs) I could have bought half of Hollywood, fer Chrissakes. But I wasn't into money. I didn't give a damn about money. I was a musician, and I made records, and I never thought about anything like that. When you're successful, it just comes rolling in. At any rate, if there is a master plan in my life, this is one thing that really had to happen. Today it's tougher than ever to stay in business if you're a small independent, like we are. But we're making it, and we're making money.

Cosmik: What budged you back toward music?

Keane: I'd been grooming my sons, Tom and John, and by the time they were nine and ten years old, Tom had written a lot of songs, and they were killer songs. I took the kids up to 20th Century to a little [studio] up there, and John was playing guitar and Tom was playing drums. I had them playing for a producer. Tommy, who was ten years old, had written a song called "God Loves A Woman." His music was so sophisticated, including the lyrics, but this guy says "no, no, no, that's all wrong, it's God loves little girls!" And ya know what? We walked into his office and verbally put a contract together. They came out with their first album when they were ten and eleven years old. That was David Foster's first production job, and the whole band later became Toto. That record went to number one in Canada. Here, we made the mistake of saying the kids were only around ten, and the disc jockeys said "forget it, commercial radio's not interested in playing teenyboppers."

Cosmik: The Keane Brothers made the rounds, too, didn't they? Talk shows, concerts... They were on Carson's show at least four times, and multiple shows with Dinah Shore, Mike Douglas, Merv Griffin...

Keane: They'd played up at Mammoth [ski resort], and my wife was very close friends of the people that owned the place. One of the people there was the wife of the stunt man for Burt Reynolds. Through that connection, CBS ended up putting together a summer show for the guys. The Keane Brothers Show. Now here's two little kids that are like eleven and twelve at this time. They did the Carson show five times, and they did every other talk show in America. CBS toured them to ten cities. They did New York, they did the Good Morning America show. Then they opened for Charro's first show at the Sahara. Charro made a mistake, because like they say, you never follow a kid act or a dog act. She didn't know that. The guys went out there with a twelve-piece band with charts. One of the instruments they played was vibes, and they go out there, both boys on the same vibe, okay? They get out there and go [Keane scats a fast, complicated jazz solo] at that tempo, and everybody fell down. Then they sang, played piano, played drums... It was an incredible show. These guys were somethin' else.

Cosmik: In the press, and especially in the teen idol magazines, they were treated like bubblegum stars...

Keane: But it wasn't bubblegum, it was jazz, man! It was hot jazz. In fact, the last show, I came in and played clarinet with them. We played an old Gene Krupa thing, and Tommy was on vibes and Johnny was on drums. We had an orchestra with David Foster conducting. So that was their thing, but they didn't want to go forward. They had a chance to do some motion pictures, and Aaron Spelling wanted to hire them for [an episode] of SWAT.

Cosmik: So they just kind of gave it up. They could have been huge.

Keane: They were on the cover of TV Guide, and they had a story in People Magazine, but they didn't want to get into the motion picture business. There were a couple little guys doing pretty good at the time, like Donny Osmond, and they said "forget that shit!" (Laughs.)

Cosmik: Didn't want to be taken as jokes?

Keane: These guys were musicians, and I mean they could play rings around 99% of the pros.

Cosmik: Where are they now?

Keane: They went on and continued to work till they were like 17... 18 years old, and then Tom signed a publishing deal with Universal. They gave him 50% of the publishing, which is pretty good for that age. I can't remember all the people he's written for, but there was Michael Jackson, Chaka Khan, and he co-wrote "Through The Fire" with David and Cynthia Weil, which is probably one of the best copyrights around today. John was an ace drummer. They were recording with Jeff Porcaro, and when Jeff couldn't make it, John would do the session for him. I told him "Johnny, get on the keyboards and do some writing," and he did. Now he's writing and producing music for motion pictures and television. In fact, his first album just came out. He spent five years making it.

Cosmik: But all that time you were still in the world of sales. What made you leave that?

Keane: I got to the point where I just couldn't handle it anymore, so I started my band back up again and worked locally here. This was in the early 80s, and there were no big bands. Lots of rock and roll. Big bands were long gone. But there were a lot of people who wanted to dance and live in the past. Because I fronted the [Artie] Shaw band and I'd played everything [Benny] Goodman had ever played, I had arrangements. I still had a lot of the Shaw book arrangements, but I didn't have any Goodman, so I had somebody take them right off the records. We had almost every song he'd ever recorded from '36, '37 on up. People used to flip out when we'd play because it was a great band. It was just like the old Goodman band. Not as great, of course, but for those days it was really something

Cosmik: Did it feel good to get out there and do it again?

Keane: Ooooh, yeah. They'd come up to the bandstand with tears in their eyes, fer Chrissakes. Boy they loved to dance. We had some great musicians, and these guys weren't working a hell of a lot, either, because there wasn't room for great trumpet players and great trombone players. It was really great for them because it was a lot of fun to play those books, those arrangements, because they really kicked ass. So that was fun for a couple years, but it started to pall on me a little bit. There was no future to it, really. The older people were the only ones that were diggin' it, and they don't have any money, so it was hard to make ends meet.

Cosmik: Which brings us fairly close to the time of the Lou Diamond Phillips flick, La Bamba.

Keane: Of course, that was 1987. I'd started the band back up in 1982 and I kicked around with that for a couple years. Then I was into investing for a while. Then when the picture came out, they called me and wanted to interview me, but all they wanted to do was be able to use me as "the manager." They made me believe that everything I told them they were gonna use, and they didn't use any of it. It was a soap opera, and most of it wasn't factual. After the picture came out, I found they had used my name and the name of my label and all that kind of stuff, and I started getting reaction from people. Write ups and television interviews. In one interview, they asked me how much of the picture was factual, and I said "about 25 percent." They said "how did you like it," and I said "it was a pretty good story, I guess, but I'm the only one who really knew Ritchie Valens except his mother, who didn't have anything to do with [the film], I think they're all guessing, and they picked the worst little wimp they could to play Ritchie." You know, he couldn't have been any more opposite. Well, I got a call from Taylor Hackford, the producer, who said, and I quote, "you got an enemy, motherfucker." (Laughs.) I said "whattaya mean?!" He says "what are you talkin' about?!" I said "if they ask me, I'm tellin' them the truth, because that's my opinion." He had thought it was a throw-away, and then it turns around and does twenty or thirty million dollars.

Cosmik: Without saying much of anything true.

Keane: And sure enough, the picture's all about fruit pickers, right? Which was not the case in any event. They never got that close to an orange except in the market. (Laughs.) As it turned out, it did cost them more than the seven or eight hundred thousand they thought it would to make the picture. But Warner Brothers gave [his partners] a quarter million dollars to put out the soundtrack. I should have sued, because in the brouchure that Columbia put out, they claimed they were using Los Lobos because the Del-Fi tapes were in such disrepair they couldn't use them. And by that time, of course, the Rhino release had been on the market for seven years. But I didn't sue them. I was crazy. I should have sued GAC [General Arts Corporations] for booking Ritchie Valens. He was under age, they put him on that airplane. I didn't sue for that, either. Then I walked into Tower Records about that time, and of course the interest in Ritchie Valens had picked up. This guy in England, a big bootlegger, had put out a whole Ritchie Valens album through Germany, and there it was in Tower Records. So I said "hey, it's time for me to get going." So we hired an attorney and got a cease and desist. But I realized then that everybody was bootlegging Ritchie Valens. Holland is one of the biggest bootleg countries of all, because they have no agreements with anybody regarding property rights. There was some guy there named Charlie, and nobody could find the guy. EVERYBODY was looking. He was THE bootlegger. We've had three or four law suits, and we've won on every one so far, but you can't nail these guys [in Holland]. The government is crapping on the music industry daily. They just passed this thing where the restaurants don't have to pay any royalties at all to use my music or anybody's music. They get it free. That was all through congress because of lobbyists. They only thing they did for us was extend the copyright law a little bit. Anyway, I'm not going to get into my feelings about the government. But that was why I got back in the business. I thought "I have to get my stuff out there to let them know that Del-Fi's back in business.

Cosmik: You restarted the label and at first you kind of dabbled in Latin rock, like Latin Touch, and this was one of those occasions where it didn't really pan out because it never caught on the way you were hoping.

Keane: Well, it didn't because these guys were all rock and rollers, and believe me, they were good. One of them was so good I went down to Mexico City, where one of the big record companies had released a record they were really excited about. We had one record, by Lynx, that was number one for a month in Guatemala. We tried to ship some records down there, and we never got 'em in the country. Couldn't get them through customs. Besides that, we couldn't get any airplay here, so we gave it up.

Cosmik: After all that, the biggest thing that happened was when Pulp Fiction came out.

Keane: That was a big break for us, right.

Cosmik: Del-Fi was huge in the first wave of surf, the second wave happened in 1979 and 80, which Del-Fi, of course, missed. But you were right there in position when the third wave hit in 1994.

Keane: And we didn't have anything to do with that. Actually, Rhino represents me on a lot of motion picture deals, as well as a couple of other companies. Two years before that picture came out, they had made the deal for the song by The Lively Ones, "Surf Rider." And then I forgot all about it. Then I get a call from the music supervisor for Pulp Fiction, and they wanted the record called "Bullwinkle II," by The Centurions. I didn't even remember anything about that song. Didn't even know I had it. Quentin Tarantino, on a little CD he put out for retail, wrote about how he put the pictures together. He said he figured "Bullwinkle II" fit better for that scene than any other music he had on the whole thing. What he does when he starts a new picture is he goes into his record library and listens to music that he thinks would be apropo, and he happened to have a bunch of surf stuff in his collection. And that's how we got in there.

Cosmik: Besides just giving you a boost financially for use of the song, it ushered in the third wave, which is still happening five years later. Since Del-Fi was considered one of the prime surf labels in the 60s, you were in a good position for the 90s. When were you first aware it was happening?

Keane: Number one, sales picked up on the surf stuff. Surf was a fad in the 60s. To the young people, who were the big record buying public for rock, they didn't know what surf music was. So even though we put out our whole catalog, it didn't do very well. But then came Pulp Fiction. And we came out with [a compilation CD called] Pulp Surfin', which I must tell you was a little stroke of genius, because I knew they couldn't follow up with Pulp Fiction 2. We were very fortunate to get Brian Wilson, of the Beach Boys, who had a song for a motion picture that never got on record. So that album did well.

Cosmik: It was interesting, too, in that it had modern surf bands mixed in with the first wave recordings.

Keane: Yeah, that was the whole idea. I wanted to get it across that we were going to put the new with the old. It wasn't all surf, either, because we had some stuff in there like [exotica musician] Eden Ahbez. I wanted to make an entertaining album out of it, because it related to the picture in a way, because of the word "pulp" and because we copied the cover of their album. We had a little static from MCA on that.

Cosmik: But it was different enough that they probably couldn't do a thing.

Keane: Oh yeah! They were gonna stop us. I don't remember exactly how it went, but we told them it was a parody, and that got us off the hook a bit. Then Miramax came in and they wanted a percentage. Then Tarantino heard about it and said "forget about it! Let it go." So they didn't bother.

Cosmik: Then you came out with my favorite thing, Shots In The Dark, the Henry Mancini tribute. It had a wide range of sounds, from surf-punk to exotica. But I understand that you weren't very happy with it when it was first pressed.

Keane: Yeah, because I came from the big band days, right? Mancini, to me, was sophisticated and different, and a LOT different from pop or rock. I heard these guys, and I said "oh, man, I don't want to put this out."

Cosmik: You didn't like the album at all?

Keane: Well I only heard one or two songs. But then when I heard the finished album, I said "geeeez, this is it!" But you know what's funny... I never really can hear something the first time and make a decision. When we cut "I Fought The Law" [Bobby Fuller Four], I engineered it, and we did the three track and all the overdubbing with the eight track. About four weeks later I dragged it out to fit it into an album, and only then did I say "holy mackerel!! This is a great record!" So it's happened before.

Cosmik: You've said that, while you obviously needed to work your catalog and get it all back out there, you were getting bored with that a few years back and wanted to get back to developing new artists.

Keane: That was the whole thing with my company. It was a company that did nothing but develop new artists. So now we're back into that, and I have to tell you that I'm a really lucky guy, because every time I put out something new, it always hits. Now that's a broad statement, isn't it? (Laughs.) First record I put out on Ritchie, first record I put out on Johnny Crawford, first record I put out on Little Caesar and the Romans, Ron Holden, Barry White... You can just go down the list, you know? So now we have this group called Cloud Eleven. They changed their name from Jiffy Pop. They've only been out a couple weeks, and radio's going bananas over these guys. We just got our first big commercial spin up in Boston. We came in on CMJ's chart the first week it was out. So we're back into the new band development thing. We have another one coming out in September, which is Outrageous Cherry, which has already got a reputation out there, and we're looking at a couple more.

Cosmik: Just a little while back you put out one of the most interesting and crazy surf records ever, Reverb Explosion by The El Caminos.

Keane: Yeah, and this guy [Eddie Ugata] literally showed up on my doorstep! With his new bride! They'd come here on their honeymoon. The guy was a Del-Fi nut, and he was totally stoked about the sound that we got on the guitars in the 60s, like the Dick Dale sound. He wanted to copy that, so he came over here to use the same amp, same tubes, same everything. His wife played bass in the band, and they had a record out in Japan that wasn't doing a lot, but they had already gotten pretty close to the sound of those bands from the 60s. He said "I want to give you a master, and would you put it on a 45 with a Del-Fi promo label? I don't want to sell it, I just want it for my collection." He said "I'll pay whatever it costs to do that, but I just want it." He said Del-Fi was really big in Japan, and that they had t-shirts out over there and everything. I'm going over there for the first time in October.

Cosmik: On business?

Keane: One young entrepreneur over there has commissioned us to put two Bruce Johnston [Beach Boys] records together, which we did. He paid some heavy money up front, too. That's amazing. So all is not dead in Japan. Now he's talking about wanting to do something with Cloud Eleven.

Cosmik: We never heard from them again, though. What happened?

Keane: They have another one out, and we were going to put it out, but I didn't think there was enough of a hook to it to warrant putting it out. Surf doesn't sell unless you got a great hook to it. Another thing I've learned in this business is you'll never follow a phenomenon, and that [first El Caminos record] was a phenomenon.

Cosmik: I wonder why you've moved away from instrumental surf music when the scene's still going out there.

Keane: Well, there are a couple guys we're looking at, old timers that are still selling, but the new guys, that's not our kind of surf. That's underground or punk, and some of it's probably pretty good, but I don't feel that it has enough of an audience to warrant getting into it to that degree.

Cosmik: The new direction for Del-Fi seems to be well-crafted pop tunes. At least if Cloud Eleven and the International Pop Overthrow releases are a barometer.

Keane: Yeah. Every genre of music is a specialty today. You make millions of dollars with rap, you make millions of dollars on pop, and on modern rock... whatever they're calling what they used to call alternative... and then you get the Mariah Careys and you'll make millions of dollars on those acts. They're all treated and promoted separately. Today, you can't do what I did in the old days, because I had everything going. Everything was up for grabs. But what I want is to go with the things I like in music, which are good melodies, good songs, and good performances. Like Cloud Eleven. That's more my bag. Have you seen the radiograms that we send out about airplay?

Cosmik: Yeah, Cloud Eleven's getting all sorts of attention.

Keane: Everybody says "ya gotta pay. Payola, payola, payola..." Bullshit. Boston, Cambridge, New London, Rochester, Trenton, Alberta, Vancouver, Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinatti, Waco, Claremont... All of those have added the songs to their playlists in just two weeks since its release. So it must have something.

Cosmik: Are there bands on the new 2-CD International Pop Overthrow that are about to be Del-Fi bands?

Keane: We're talking to Jason Falkner. He's got a great sound and we like him a lot, and there are a few other bands we like a lot. We'll see what happens.

Cosmik: When you look back over everything, all these years and all the records and memories, it's easy to say you've done it all. So what does it take to keep you interested now, fifty some odd years after you started? What makes this the business you still love?

Keane: Well... it's about young talent, is what it's all about. All my big successes have been with young people. I'm bored with my catalog now because there's nothing new there. I'm not developing anything. I'm just marketing. I want to develop talent. That's what I always wanted to do, and that's what I always did. That's why Del-Fi had all those young guys. I saw something in them, I went out there and got 'em going. It's like a horse race, you know? You want to see them win. I've got the same drive right now. We've finally got the company turned around to where we have the right personel and the right contacts, and everything's going our way. We've got a good start with Cloud Eleven. That'll be our main thing from now on. Of course we have a great catalog and we will continue to work it, but we're going to put most of our efforts into developing new talent. These guys can't get a break on a major. Major labels cut these guys loose so fast, like the MCA or Universal, they let something like 200 artists go, and some of them sold like 100,000 albums! There's something very, very wrong with that. 100,000 albums is a hell of a lot of albums. What I'm looking for is a way to get new young people out there to where the public can hear them. And I think we got a big break in that eventually the Internet will be put together in a way that it'll all work out for them. Still, they have to be distributed and promoted. But that's where I am. That's what I'm in business for, and that I really enjoy. Because if it's good music, man, I get that thing inside, you know? It's like when I was in high school and I heard Benny Goodman, and I'd come home and play till dinner time with Benny, over and over and over. Just hearing the guy and the band was so exciting. And good music still makes me feel that way.

---

Cosmik Debris offers up huge thanks to Bryan Thomas, Del-Fi's publicity guy, who is a walking encyclopedia of Del-Fi history. Bryan gave a great deal of his time to help the interviewer research this story, and it's highly appreciated. Thanks, also, to Bob Keane for taking over four hours out of his busy schedule to let us cover the whole history of Del-Fi Records.

Interview (C) 1999 - DJ Johnson