BOBBY VEE, who has died aged 73, enjoyed a successful spell in the limelight in the early 1960s with a string of saccharine pop hits including Take Good Care of My Baby, Run To Him, The Night Has A Thousand Eyes and Rubber Ball.
With his infectious smile, bright eyes and boyish good looks, he swelled the ranks of other clean-cut American pop idols of the day such as Johnny Tillotson, Pat Boone and Bobby Rydell, taking advantage of the fact that Elvis Presley had been drafted into the US Army.
Another crucial factor in Vee’s rise to fame was the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and JP “The Big Bopper” Richardson on their way to play at a dance in Minnesota in February 1959. As 15-year-old Robert Velline he stepped in at three hours’ notice to take Holly’s place on stage at the Moorhead National Guard Armoury on the basis that he knew the words to Holly’s hit songs.
Within months, the young singer and his high school band, the Shadows, which included his older brother Bill on lead guitar, released their first record, Suzie Baby, on a local label in Minneapolis. Soon after it became a regional hit, he signed with Liberty Records.
Renamed Bobby Vee, he went on to chart success on both sides of the Atlantic, topping the American charts in 1961 with the Carole King-Gerry Goffin song Take Care Good of My Baby and reaching No 2 in the US with the follow-up Run to Him. His UK breakthrough came when Run to Him received a unanimous thumbs-down on BBC Televison’s Juke Box Jury in January 1962, only for the record to vault to No 6 in the British Top Ten.
A month later, Take Care Good of My Baby was also released in Britain and reached No 7, boosted by Vee’s television and radio appearances and a hectic provincial tour starting at the Gaumont, Doncaster, with Tony Orlando and The Springfields. More record releases followed, most notably The Night Has A Thousand Eyes from the film Just For Fun which got to No 3 in Britain in March 1963.
A year later Vee was back in the UK for a 29-date tour with Dusty Springfield, The Searchers and Big Dee Irwin, and in June 1964, with the British pop invasion of the United States well under way, he toured America with the Rolling Stones and released an album of Merseybeat arrangements called Bobby Vee Sings The New Sound From England!
In all he recorded 38 Top 100 hits between 1959 and 1970, before changing his style and image and releasing an album of country-inflected rock numbers called Nothing Like A Sunny Day (1972). By the mid-1980s he was a regular on the oldies touring circuit, appearing on a series of UK dates with Del Shannon and Rick Nelson.
The son of a chef and his Finnish wife, Robert Thomas Velline was born in Fargo, North Dakota, on April 30 1943, into a musical family. His American father played the violin and piano. Bobby formed his own band at Central High School in Fargo in 1958, and the following year answered an appeal on local radio for a group to fill in at a “Winter Dance Party” following Buddy Holly’s plane crash.
In the summer of 1959, when his career was beginning to take off, Bobby Vee was introduced to a teenage pianist calling himself Elston Gunnn and appeared with him at a couple of gigs. The musician’s real name was Robert Zimmerman, who switched to the folk guitar, renamed himself Bob Dylan, and who, in his 2004 memoir, Chronicles, enthusiastically recalled Vee performing his own first recorded song Suzie Baby.
Signed to the American label Liberty, Vee was groomed for stardom by the producer Thomas “Snuff” Garrett, who arranged for him to cover What Do You Want?, a big British hit for Adam Faith. Vee’s version flopped badly, struggling to No 93 in 1960, but he fared better with his follow-up Devil or Angel which got to No 6 in the American charts.
His next release, Rubber Ball, co-written with the singer Gene Pitney, became Vee’s first million-selling record. It climbed to No 6 in America in February 1961, but reached No 4 in Britain, even fending off a cover version by the better-known Marty Wilde. Vee’s follow-up single, More Than I Can Say, also charted in Britain at No 4 a few months later.
Perennially popular in Britain, where he toured regularly for years after his hit parade heyday, Vee numbered Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice among his fans and performed at Webber’s 50th birthday party in 1998. It was while touring in England that he first noticed symptoms of what was later diagnosed as Alzheimer’s disease. Vee, who stopped performing in 2011, latterly recorded some of his favourite songs in a jam session with his family at their studio in Minnesota.
In 2013 Bob Dylan introduced Vee to the audience while playing a concert in Minnesota before performing his own version of Suzie Baby.
Bobby Vee married, in 1963, Karen Bergen. She predeceased him in 2015 and he is survived by their three children.
Bobby Vee, born April 30 1943, died October 24 2016
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