Word: bowen
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...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...
...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...
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...
...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...