Kim Vincent Fowley (July 21, 1939 – January 15, 2015) was an American record producer, songwriter and musician who was behind a string of novelty and cult pop rock singles in the 1960s, and managed the Runaways in the 1970s. He has been described as "one of the most colorful characters in the annals of rock & roll", as well as "a shadowy cult figure well outside the margins of the mainstream".
Born in Los Angeles, he was the son of the actor Douglas Fowley. After his mother left them, at the age of two Fowley was dispatched to a foster home, where he would spend the next five years “with 27 children in a large room fighting for the cinnamon toast”. Having survived a bout of polio, he went to University High School in Los Angeles, where he developed an interest in music, singing with a group called the Sleepwalkers that included his classmates Bruce Johnston (later of the Beach Boys) and the drummer Sandy Nelson, along with a young Phil Spector.
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After a short spell in the US military, Fowley floated on to the Hollywood music scene, working as a promotions man and record producer. In 1960 he co-produced and sang on the single Alley Oop, a pastiche of the doo-wop style . It went to No 1 in the American charts, selling one million copies. The following year he conceived Nutrocker, a frenetic pastiche of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite performed by a group of session musicians under the name B Bumble and the Stingers which reached No 1 in Britain.
He enjoyed a second American success in 1964, with a gloopy girl-group confection, Popsicles and Icicles, by the Murmaids, which was knocked off the top of the American charts by the Beatles’ first US No 1, I Want To Hold Your Hand. Fowley came to London, where he worked as a publicity man for his friend PJ Proby, wrote songs for Cat Stevens and the Seekers, and produced early incarnations of Traffic and Slade.
Noddy Holder, Slade’s lead singer, would later remember how Fowley had “discovered” them at a London club in 1966: “There was this strange character in the audience, about 7ft tall, a beanpole, wearing a cowboy hat and doing all this hippie dancing with his arms flailing about. And after the show he came up and told us we could be as big as the Beatles. ” Fowley produced one single with the group, which sank without trace, then returned to America. “Van Morrison and Them had had a big hit with Gloria in the States but then split up,” Holder remembered. “Kim wanted us to go back with him and go on tour pretending to be Them. He was a rogue, but a very lovable rogue.”
Hardly a bandwagon passed by without Fowley jumping on it. In the late 1960s it was psychedelia; in the 1970s he moved to Finland, where he produced a group called Wigwam (“the Finnish Beatles”, according to Fowley); and then to Sweden, where he produced Scorpion (“the Swedish Beatles”). He went on to produce Helen Reddy and Vicky Leandros, and – “just for the sheer joy of it” – Christian family music in Detroit. A friend once visited Fowley at his home in Hollywood at a time when environmentalism was coming to the fore, and found him writing songs for a putative band he planned to call Ecology.
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| Kim with The Runnaways |
In 2009 an assortment of offcuts and oddities which Fowley had recorded and produced under a variety of pseudonyms were gathered together on two albums, One Man’s Garbage and Another Man’s Gold . Fowley had enjoyed great success as the composer and publisher of songs for such bestselling heavy metal groups as Poison, Guns N’ Roses and Kiss, which he claimed had funded profitable investments in a range of businesses from minerals in Australia to hotels in Spain. In 2012, Fowley won the Special Jury Prize at the 13th Melbourne Underground Film Festival for his two feature projects – Golden Road to Nowhere and Black Room Doom.
Tall, cadaverous and poker-faced, Fowley cut an unsettling figure on the Los Angeles music scene. In his later years he retreated to the unlovely desert town of Redlands, better known for its drive-by shootings than for its music scene. There he lived in a small woodframe house fronted by an almost sinisterly manicured lawn and surrounded by an industrial chain-link fence posted with “Keep Out” signs. Gold and platinum records were propped against the sitting-room wall, “to remind media people and investors who I am”.
In his last years, Fowley worked on writing and publishing his autobiography, which he divided between three distinct books. The last volume was intended to be finished on his deathbed and to be released posthumously because, as the 2010s began, Fowley was terminally ill. On September 24, 2014, Fowley married longtime girlfriend and music executive Kara Wright-Fowley, in a private ceremony in Los Angeles. He died of bladder cancer in Hollywood, California on January 15, 2015, at the age of 75. He is interred at Hollywood Forever Cemetery.
(Edited from The Telegraph & Wikipedia)