Post by the Scribe on Aug 3, 2012 17:35:00 GMT -5
Shep Cooke: a rewarding life, but 'nothing any better than that'
June 28, 2012 12:00 am(0) CommentsWalter "Shep" Cooke bounced between Tucson and Los Angeles throughout the 1970s and '80s, picking up work as a session musician and touring for awhile with Linda Ronstadt's Stone Poneys.
He performed as a solo artist and teamed up with fellow Tucsonan Bobby Kimmel for a short-lived but successful trio called the Floating House Band.
"He's really a wonderful musician in every way," says Kimmel, a guitarist and singer who left Tucson in the early 1960s to form the Stone Poneys. "He was a really good guitar player and had a sweet, sweet voice. He had a really good musical ear, better than mine."
In Tucson, Cooke played in the country band Sunset Limited for a few months in the 1970s. He became a regular at Tucson restaurants and clubs, where he would play guitar and sing.
There's no hint of that life in the midtown home where Cooke was raised and where he has lived most of his 66 years.
No concert posters. No photos of him with Tom Waits, Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne or any of the other artists on whose records he played. Nor are there any album covers from his two recordings as a solo folk-rock musician or the songs he recorded with The Dearly Beloved.
He looks around the room on a blistering hot day earlier this month and says that he is fully retired from music.
He got rid of the bass and his other guitar. He no longer has a piano, which he had played off and on.
It was a rewarding life, he says as air blasts noisily from his swamp cooler and he sips a can of Miller beer, his long gray hair pulled back from his eyes.
But it wasn't a profitable one.
"I never made any money. Pressed 1,000 copies of my first album. Gave half of them away and sold the rest for $4 apiece at my shows," says Cooke, who supplements his Social Security checks by working 10 hours a week as a school crossing guard. He has a website (www.shepcooke.com), where he sells digital downloads of his songs for 99 cents a pop, even though he has no computer.
Cooke shares his home with quirky art projects in various states of completion, along with stacks of collected odds and ends. An imposing 12-foot-tall Styrofoam robot stands guard in the front yard, framed by a child's doll house and a metal garden table topped with Christmas village figurines. A front room is crammed with sculptures, including a vintage beach-comber bike festooned with an animal's spine up the center bar. On one wall are paintings by Cooke's late father, who spent his life working for Pima County's parks department and his retirement painting simple, colorful landscapes until his death 10 years ago.
Cooke taught himself how to play the bass so he could join The Dearly Beloved.
"He can play anything. He is a phenomenal musician. I used to say if you give him enough time he could play a fence," says Dearly Beloved bandmate Terry Lee. "Of the whole band he's probably the best musician. Always was, still is."
The men last spoke a few years ago when their fellow bandmate Tom Walker died.
Cooke says he's uncertain of how far The Dearly Beloved would have gone.
"We were good enough, but just good enough. I don't think that band was ever going to get much better than that, but I don't know," he says.
He says he already had lost interest by the time of the crash.
"I was arrogantly too self-confident and thought I could do better than this," he adds, looking around his home that he has turned into an art gallery. "Here we are 45 years later and I have not done better than that, try as I may. I've been in country bands, folk bands, rock bands. I was in a reggae band for six months. I was in a couple of duos. All of which were respectable musical ventures, but nothing spectacular, nothing any better than that."