Singer with high energy and huge pompadour
Wayne Cochran, who wrote a classic love-andloss pop song while in his early 20s, then morphed into an energetic rhythmand-blues singer with a devoted following and an outrageous pompadour before finding a new purpose in a Christian ministry near Miami, died Nov. 21 in Miramar, Fla. He was 78.
The cause was cancer, said his son, Christopher Cochran.
Wayne Cochran was a relative unknown trying to make it as a singer in Georgia in 1961 when he wrote and recorded “Last Kiss,” a heart-wrencher about a fatal car wreck.
“Well, where, oh where can my baby be?” it starts. “The Lord took her away from me.”
Mr. Cochran’s initial recording did not make much of an impact, but a 1964 cover by J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers became a national hit. The song — which Christopher Cochran said was inspired by a real traffic fatality, though not one that his father was involved in — has proved durable. A Canadian group named Wednesday had a hit with it in the 1970s, and Pearl Jam did even better with a version recorded in 1998.
Mr. Cochran, though, veered away from teenage pop and into soul and R&B, developing a high-energy stage act with a band he called the C. C. Riders. The initials stood for Cochran Circuit. With his hair in a pompadour of epic dimensions, he put on a propulsive show that earned him the nickname the White Knight of Soul. He drew comparisons to James Brown.
“Cochran, though, made everything faster, louder; everything was bigger,” The Miami New Times wrote in a 1997 feature about him, “from the size of his carefully coifed ‘do to the size of his band. And for white audiences reluctant to venture across the tracks to hear Brown and his black R&B contemporaries, Cochran offered a powerful and impassioned shot of blue-eyed soul.”
Talvin Wayne Cochran was born May 10, 1939, in Thomaston, Ga. His father, Talvin, worked in a cotton mill, and his mother, the former Mini Lee Starley, was a homemaker. He grew up listening to honkytonk on the family radio and, with some local boys, formed his first band, the Blue Cats.
“We’d play around on the weekends on front porches and in people’s living rooms,” he recalled in the 1997 article. He dropped out of school in the ninth grade to pursue music — the story is that his school gave him the choice of either cutting his hair or leaving, and he left.
In any case, by the late 1950s he was in Macon, Ga., where the musical opportunities were more plentiful than in Thomaston. Mr. Cochran formed a band and relocated to Bossier City, La., to take an extended engagement at a club called Sax’s Boom Boom Room. The band grew, with Mr. Cochran adding horns and changing the name to the C. C. Riders.
The group toured extensively, especially in the South and Midwest, playing roadhouses and nightclubs, including a place in Muncie, Ind., where a student at Ball State University heard about Mr. Cochran’s frenetic shows. Almost two decades later, in 1982, that student, David Letterman, had Mr. Cochran as a guest on “Late Night,” and Mr. Cochran told the story of how he had hit upon his distinctive look.
“I had been messing with my hair, trying to get what I wanted,” he said. “I really couldn’t figure it out.” Then, at a neighboring club, he saw a group featuring the young Johnny and Edgar Winter, both albinos.
“There was a great thing about their hair,” Mr. Cochran told Mr. Letterman. “Every time the lights over their heads changed colors, their hair changed colors. And I said, ‘Now there’s the color, if I could figure out how to get it.’”
He hired a stylist with a bottle of bleach, but the initial experiment did not go well. “We must have bleached it for two or three days, and it come up strawberry red and then about fell out,” he said. “But we finally ATZERT got it up platinum, MILDRED M. (ALAND) and he teased it up like the old Trojan warriors.”
Mr. Cochran moved the band to Miami in 1964, and its following grew. He took to leaving the stage and marching onto the dance floor to sing, his horn section following along.