“I’M STILL IN LOVE WITH EDDIE COCHRAN!” Songwriter Sharon Sheeley Almost Died in the Crash That Killed the Classic Rocker. That Night Still Haunts Her!
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In the Ritchie Valens biopic, La Bamba, she was just a minor character, but when Hollywood gets around to making a rock 'n' roll movie about Sharon Sheeley, there won't be much need for embellishment. She hung out with dozens of early rock 'n' roll stars, from Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens to Dion and Bobby Darin. But she wasn't what you'd call a groupie. In 1958 she convinced Ricky Nelson that he should record a song she'd written called "Poor Little Fool," which became his first #1 hit. When Sharon was 18, rock star Eddie Cochran asked her to marry him, and before her 21st birthday she almost died in the car wreck that killed him and badly injured Gene Vincent. Later she wrote several hits with singer Jackie DeShannon.
Born and raised in Newport Beach, California, just south of Los Angeles, Sharon was the daughter of "a fisherman who never seemed to catch any fish" and a mother who had to go "out there doing double jobs to support us." As a little girl she made up songs to entertain her little sister on their walks to school, and that, she says today, is how she got her start in the world of music.
In the '70s, Sharon put her songwriting career aside to raise her son Shannon, but now she's working on some new material with Stray Cats leader Brian Setzer, who grew up idolizing Eddie Cochran and portrayed him in the film La Bamba. Now almost 50, Sharon Sheeley's still an attractive and vivacious woman who leaves very little doubt why many of the rock 'n' roll idols of her generation fell in love with her.
SH-BOOM: How did you get Rick Nelson to record "Poor Little Fool"?
SHARON: I read in the Laguna Beach paper that the Nelson family had just bought a house in Laguna Beach. I said to my sister, "Piece of cake." The Nelsons had bought a secluded beach house behind private gates, with guards, and we didn't even know where it was. I figured out that there was only one main street going through Laguna Beach, so we staked it out on Saturday mornings, and on the second week they passed us. We followed them to the guard gate and found out where it was. So the next day we went to the gate. I said flippantly to the security guard, "Rick Nelson, Sharon Sheeley." He waved me right through. I drove by his house, turned around in a cul-de-sac and stalled the car right in front of his house. It must have been a miracle, because just then Ricky walked out the front door carrying a football. He asked me shyly, "Got trouble with the car? I'll see what I can do." We started talking, and I mentioned that I had met Elvis, who he idolized but hadn't met yet. The next thing, we're invited in to have a Coke, and we met Ozzie and Harriet. Ricky played us his new 45s.
A couple of years earlier, I'd written "Poor Little Fool" as a poem in English class, and I got an F. I set it to music and took it to Rick. I told him that my father's best friend wrote it for Elvis, and that [Elvis] was going to record it. Ricky said, "Why? I don't think it's very good." I knew better than to tell him that I had written it, because back then a song from a girl just wasn't acceptable. I had one up on Ricky, though, because we were both 17, and girls are just smarter and more mature at that age than boys are. He may've been a TV star and rock 'n' roll idol, but he was still a boy.
So I played on that and said, "Sorry you don't like it, because Elvis loves it. I shouldn't have played it for you anyway, because my father's gonna be angry." He asked me if he could keep it for a few days, and I said, "Only one day, or my father'11 be furious." He asked me to come over the next day, and [his guitarist] Jimmy Burton was there. [Burton] suggested that if we slowed it down, it would be great. I'll always thank him for that. I kept up this charade with this song. I figured, if playing hard to get works on a date, why not in business? Finally Ricky said, "I've dumped a song off my album. I'll put this song on, if your father agrees." I told him that my father had already said it was okay, but only because Ricky was my friend, and Elvis was over in Germany.
So Ricky cuts it, and I get a call from Ozzie saying that my father's friend has to come in and sign a songwriting contract. You should have seen their faces when this little teenage girl shows up with braces on her teeth! [Laughs] "Surprise! I wrote the song." Ozzie was flabbergasted. Ricky was furious.
"Poor Little Fool" was the first song on an LP to be forced off onto a single by popular demand. The LP sold a million, which nobody [in rock 'n' roll] had done since Elvis, then they put it on a single, which sold three million. It was the biggest-selling song of 1958.
SH-BOOM: In those days, there weren't any female songwriters in rock 'n' roll. That must have been difficult.
SHARON: We had to fight harder, didn't we? It was no piece of cake, being a girl trying to break into songwriting in the '50s. Everybody'd say, "Why don't you model, or try acting? Get out of this man's business!" Eddie used to say, "Boy, you should've seen the looks on our faces when we found out 'Poor Little Fool' was written by a girl." Most of them thought, if you're pretty, you can't be smart too.
SH-BOOM: You hung out with just about everybody, didn't you?
SHARON: There wasn't one rock 'n' roller I didn't know, and all the young actors at the time: Troy Donahue, Sal Mineo, Will Hutchins from Sugar-foot—I went out with him for about a year. I'd come home, and he'd be standing on his head with a flower in his mouth, waiting for me. We were all basically a bunch of teenagers.
SH-BOOM: What's this I hear about a date you had with Bobby Darin?
SHARON: I was fighting with Eddie, so I went out to dinner with Bobby Darin. We went to Dino's on the [Sunset] Strip, and in the course of the evening he made a cutting remark about Eddie. It was something about how [Darin] was older and more sophisticated, more of a man of the world. It made me really angry, and I excused myself to go to the ladies room. I'd seen this in movies so many times, so I slipped out the side entrance and had the doorman call me a cab. I went home and left him sitting there. When it dawned on him that I wasn't coming back, to say that he was annoyed would be putting it mildly. He showed up at the apartment where I lived with my mom, and he was beating on the security door downstairs. My little Italian mother finally got fed up and dumped a glass of water out the window on his head. I think his ego was a little hurt, but we patched it up.
SH-BOOM: You spent a lot of time in those days making Eddie jealous.
SHARON: [Laughing] When I was 17, I was staying at this hotel in Cleveland, and every rock 'n' roller in the hotel was calling me because I had made dates with all of them to make Eddie jealous. I didn't want to go out with any of them, so I kept saying I had a headache. I heard this knock on my door and a voice: "Open up— security!" He showed me his badge, so I let him in. We had this whole conversation, but I was talking about rock 'n' roll, and he was talking about prostitution: "How long have you been in the business?" I said, "A year." He said, "How old are you?" I said, "Seventeen." He said, "My God, you were 16 when you started?" "Yes." He said, "That's incredible." I said, "Thank you." He said, "Who got you into this business?" And I said, "Ozzie Nelson." He said, "How much did you make last year?" I said, "Oh, a hundred-thousand dollars." He said, "You must be incredible" and clapped handcuffs on me and chased me around the room. All I could find to hit him with was a big wooden hairbrush, which I kept trying to whack him with. At that point, poor Freddy Cannon knocked on the door to see how my headache was. The guy grabbed him and slammed him against the wall and told him, "Tell the other guys she's off limits!" With that, Freddy ran down the hall and got Eddie and Jack Scott, who's built like Mr. Universe. Jack broke down the door, and Eddie broke the guy's jaw.
SH-BOOM: How'd you meet Eddie?
SHARON: When I was almost 16, I saw a poster of the movie The Girl Can't Help It, and I immediately fell in love with the guy in the poster-Eddie Cochran. I told my younger sister, "I'm gonna grow up and marry that guy." She said, "Sure, you and everybody else."
A couple of years later, Phil Everly introduced me to him. Lightning struck on my side, but not on his. I could have been a lampshade. I was so annoyed that he didn't pay any attention to me at all. I called Phil. He said, "Sharon, you're beautiful, you're talented, you could have any man you want. Don't pick on Kid Cochran. He'll break your heart." You never saw Eddie Cochran with the same girl twice. But he met his Waterloo when he met me.
SH-BOOM: You later wrote five or six songs for Eddie, including a hit record. How did that come about?
SHARON: Dion saw Eddie and me walking down a hallway one time, and he yells to Eddie, "Hey, Cochran, man, she's something else!" I turned around and said, "Thank you," and then I thought, "That's a great song." I wrote "Something Else" in five minutes, but I worked on it a little before I showed it to Eddie. Brian Setzer tells me it's his favorite song. He said, "This is the song that made me quit high school."
SH-BOOM: You and Eddie were good friends with Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens, and you wrote "Hurry Up" for Ritchie. How did you find out about the plane crash that killed them?
SHARON: I was driving to Gold Star recording studios [in Hollywood] to do a demo session. I had pulled out of the apartment and had only gone a couple of blocks when I heard the news on the radio. I swerved over and almost fainted. Eddie and I had just talked to Buddy on the phone a few days before. Eddie was at home in Buena Park when he found out. Eddie went to Buddy's funeral in Texas, and I went to Ritchie's in Pacoima. I wore the little diamond earrings that Ritchie had given me for Christmas.
SH-BOOM: Eddie later recorded "The Three Stars," and his voice broke during the performance.
SHARON: Eddie had a premonition that he was going to die, too.
SH-BOOM: It happened only a year later, April 17, 1960, while you, Eddie and Gene Vincent were on tour in England, and your taxi crashed near Heathrow Airport. You were badly hurt, weren't you?
SHARON: I broke my neck in three places, my back in four, crushed my pelvis, split my head open. They had to sew my leg back on. I had a 10% chance of living. Gene had 50-50.
This is very hard to talk about. I came to, lying in a cow pasture, bleeding and dazed. I went to move, and I couldn't because my neck was broken. Gene crawled over to me, and I asked, "How's Eddie?" Gene said he was okay, just shaken up a bit. I knew then—Eddie would have crawled over to me himself if he wasn't badly injured. At one point I woke up in the ambulance, and I was holding his hand, and I thought he'd regain consciousness, but he never did. The ambulance attendant later told me he knew we were in love, and so he'd locked our hands in case we came to.
SH-BOOM: Gene Vincent never completely recovered. He remained in pain until he died in 1971. What kind of person was he?
SHARON: Gene Vincent was a very sad, pathetic person. He was suicidal, even before the accident. Eddie was such an up guy with so much to live for, and Gene wanted to die. I wondered, why didn't God just pick Gene then? He had such a sad life.
SH-BOOM: How did you meet Jackie DeShannon?
SHARON: After I got out of the hospital, I was a total recluse. I locked myself up in my bedroom and shut the drapes, and nobody could visit me, not even my friends. Then a deejay I'd once dated named Jimmy O'Neill came over with this girl who had just signed with Liberty Records.
She moved in to stay for a week or two and wound up staying for a year. We started writing together. "Dum Dum" just came up like bingo. [It became a #4 hit for Brenda Lee in 1961.] And we wrote "The Great Imposter" [#30 for the Fleetwoods], "Heart in Hand" [#15 for Brenda Lee], "He's So Heavenly —we had 352 songs recorded. We were one of the most versatile teams in rock 'n' roll. We could look at each other and know exactly what we were thinking. We had a great rapport, but then we broke up over something that's kind of silly when we look back on it.
SH-BOOM: You were involved with Shindig, which in 1964 became TV's first real rock 'n' roll program. How did that come about?
SHARON: Jack Good, who produced Shindig, was also the guy who'd brought Eddie to England. That's how I met Jack. After Eddie was killed, Jack used to come visit me in the hospital. Later Jack would call me, and I told him to bring what he was doing in England over here. He was doing all these great shows there. I helped him put the pilot together. Jimmy O'Neill, who was my husband by that time, was the host. Jack tried to sell the show to every station in town, to no avail. Nobody was ready for primetime rock 'n' roll, live.
Finally ABC bought it as a summer replacement and sold it out for nearly nothing to Stridex [facial pads for acne]. To their great surprise, it went straight to number one. Then comes fall. and they have all these rinky-dink shows to put on, and Shindig is number one, so they can't bump it. But they've sold it off for nothing, so they're not making a profit. So ABC sabotaged Shindig. How do you get it off the air when everybody's watching the show? I mean, we had people like Ike & Tina Turner, the first TV appearance of Sonny & Cher and Aretha Franklin, and it was live with a band, which included Billy Preston on organ, Glen Campbell on guitar and Leon Russell on piano. It was incredible. NBC, who had originally turned us down, imitated us with Hullabaloo.
Now ABC's in a huge panic because the show's losing millions of dollars even though it's number one. So they expanded it to an hour a week, then twice a week for an hour [in order to sell new advertising slots]. There's no way for an hour, twice a week, that you can continue to get the talent-you have to pad it out. At that point, Jack Good got out. He told Jimmy, "They're going to destroy it." Jimmy hung in there, and they did get it off the air. [Shindig folded in January 1966.]
SH-BOOM: Eddie was your one true love, wasn't he?
SHARON: Yes. I married Jimmy O'Neill [in 1962] because he always loved me so much. He knew that I was still in love with Eddie Cochran, but he hoped we could make it work. We couldn't. Jimmy and I split up in 1965. After that, I was engaged to Gordon Waller [of Peter & Gordon]. I knew it wouldn't work-there was always that ghost between us-but we're still very close. I've had some terrific guys in my life, but none of them have been like Eddie.
SH-BOOM: Most are gone now.
SHARON: We've lost so many people. All I have left out of a living room full of close friends is a handful. There were Johnny and Dorsey [Burnette], Eddie, Buddy Holly, Little Ritchie [Valens] the few months we had with him, Billy Fury, Gene Vincent, Elvis, Ricky Nelson. It's like the only ones I have left are the Everly Brothers. It's amazing when you think back on it, that Ricky lived to be the oldest. Ricky lived to be older than Elvis, but you always thought of him as a little kid. My God, my whole cast of characters is in Forest Lawn. My close crowd wasn't Fabian and Frankie Avalon. It was always the real, pure rockers.
