Bill Medley says he figured the Righteous Brothers were done for good after Bobby Hatfield, his lifelong friend and singing partner in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame duo, died unexpectedly while the group from Orange County was on tour in November 2003.
“First off, you can’t replace Bobby Hatfield,” says Medley, whose bass-baritone anchored such hits as “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” and “(You’re My) Soul and Inspiration” in the ’60s. “I was just blessed to be able to sing with maybe the greatest singer in the world as a first tenor.
“Of course it was an enormous shock and an enormous loss of a friend,” he says. “It was about a year later I kept wondering why I felt a certain way. I kind of didn’t feel whole.
“And it finally dawned on me that I am a Righteous Brother, and when Bobby died the Righteous Brothers died too.”
Now, though, after 13 years in which Medley toured as a solo artist and played regularly near his second home in Branson, Mo., the 75-year-old singer is reviving the Righteous Brothers for a three-month residency in the Showroom at Harrah’s Las Vegas that starts Wednesday.
A CHANGE OF HEART
Medley, who grew up in Santa Ana and lives in Newport Beach, says he resisted the urge to revive the group through years of requests before fate brought him together with a Branson-based singer named Bucky Heard.
“I had fans and the industry and everybody saying, ‘Keep the Righteous Brothers going, keep the music alive,’ and I really didn’t want to do that,” Medley says. “I had sung with a couple of guys who would supposedly be really good Bobby Hatfields, and I thought, ‘Oh geez, it’s really anti-climatic.’”
A year or so ago, Harrah’s asked Medley whether he’d do a residency and would be willing to do it as the Righteous Brothers. Still he said no.
Then one day in Branson he ran into Heard, a longtime friend, who was singing in a Journey tribute band.
“I went in to see him pretty much by accident and he killed it,” Medley says. “I was taking a walk the next day, and it just dawned on me.”
Heard nailed the tenor vocal parts of Journey’s Steve Perry, so surely he could hit the notes Hatfield sang, and Medley already knew him well enough to know he’d be a fun guy to work with.
“Really, the main ingredient for me was somebody I could team up with onstage and offstage,” Medley says. “I want to laugh a lot, I want to love a lot, I want to sing a lot.
“He does sound a little like Bobby, only because he was influenced by Bobby,” Medley says. “So I met with him and said, ‘What do you think?’”
A TRIAL RUN
The Righteous Brothers featuring Bill Medley with Bucky Heard, as the act is now named, did a short run of warm-up shows at the Riverside Resort in Laughlin, Nev., in the last week of February.
“That was it, the very first time Bucky and I stepped onstage together,” Medley says. “And I had two questions in mind: Are (fans) going to care that there’s a Righteous Brothers they can go see? And are they going to accept Bucky?
“Oh, man, we did five shows and we turned away people every night, so that answered that question – because I’ve worked that room a million times and done about half that business. And they just absolutely loved Bucky.”
Stepping onto a stage again as a Righteous Brother was something of an out-of-body experience at first, Medley says.
“I was preoccupied with about five or six different things: How Bucky was looking, how Bucky was singing, and watching the audience, and how are they reacting. And so it took me a couple of shows to finally become the Righteous Brother again instead of a cop onstage.
“And boy, about the third show it just felt great,” Medley says. “It certainly made me miss Bobby a lot. It kicked up a lot of that. I do an ‘Unchained Melody’ tribute to Bobby, and it’s got a video and I can’t even look up to the screen.”
There’s a big band behind the singers, including four horns, a four-piece rhythm section, and a trio of backup singers in addition to his longtime musical director, Tim Lee, and his musician daughter, McKenna Medley.
“We try and stick as close to the original record as much as we can, though when you’re doing a Phil Spector record, it’s pretty hard to do,” Medley says. And while he’s always included Righteous Brothers songs in his solo shows there are more here, including a few that he hadn’t done since Hatfield’s death.
“Probably the most fun for me is that we get to go back to ’62 and ’63 when Bobby and I had all these rock ’n’ roll and rhythm and blues hits like ‘Little Latin Lupe Lu’ and ‘Ko Ko Joe.’
“The Righteous Brothers got so heavy because of the dramatic hit records like ‘Lovin’ Feelin’,” Medley says. “Bobby and I just felt like we were a couple of Orange County guys who were just having a great time singing rock ’n’ roll, and then, boy, it became something else.”
A TRIBUTE TO A FRIEND
“I’m a Santa Ana boy from 1940 to all my life,” Medley says. “And Santa Ana was different only in the fact that Orange County was just small. Hell, I used to ride my motorcycle through the orange groves, and now it’s tracts of homes.”
Hatfield grew up in Anaheim, and he and Medley were both about 20 when a mutual friend brought them together. They played for a brief period in a band called the Paramours that played all around Orange County, but soon decided to split off.
“The minute Bobby and I started singing together it was pretty magical for us, and apparently people enjoyed it,” Medley says.
One of the Righteous Brothers’ last big hits came in 1974 with a song titled “Rock and Roll Heaven.” Asked what he thinks Hatfield would think if he were looking down from such heights today, Medley says he thought about that often as he and Heard set about bringing back the duo.
“I tried to put myself in his spot,” he says. “I think I would have been happy for Bob, and I think he would be happy that I’m keeping our music alive and kind of honoring him onstage.
“This is really about Bobby and our music,” Medley says. “It’s taken this long for me to even screw my head on because I truly feel that I’m not replacing Bobby. You can’t.
“But I am having Bucky fill in for him, and he’s doing a really great job filling some really big shoes.”
Contact the writer: 714-796-7787 or plarsen@ocregister.com
