Chan Romero 1941-2024
There was a time when Chan Romero’s “The Hippy Hippy Shake” was a song you had know. It was to the Beat Boom as “I Got My Mojo Workin'” was to the R&B scene. When Paul McCartney got hold of a copy and started singing it with his then-unknown group at the Star Club in Hamburg and the Cellar Club in Liverpool, it caught on fast. And when the Swinging Blue Jeans, another Liverpool group, recorded it in 1963, they took it to the top of the UK charts.
Like “I Got My Mojo Workin'”, it was basically a 12-bar blues — as was “Hound Dog”, the song that, when the 15-year-old Romero saw Elvis Presley singing it on the Ed Sullivan Show on his family’s black and white TV at home in Billings, Montana in 1956, introduced him to his destiny. “It just took me over,” he remembered. “I said, this is what I want to do.”
Romero, who has died aged 82, was born in Billings to a father of Spanish and Apache heritage and a mother of mixed Mexican, Cherokee and Irish descent. His mother sang and his brothers played guitars. He followed their example, and began writing songs. During his summer holiday from Billings Senior High School, he hitchhiked to East Los Angeles to stay with some relatives. A cousin drove him to Specialty Records in Hollywood, where the A&R man, Sonny Bono, liked his song “My Little Ruby” and told him to come back when he’d polished it up.
Back in Billings, Romero auditioned for a local DJ, Don “The Weird Beard” Redfield, who became his manager and sent a demo to Bob Keane at Del-Fi Records in Hollywood. Keane had recorded the Chicano singer Richie Valens, enjoying hits with “Donna” and “La Bamba”. It seemed a good match and Keane promptly signed Romero.
When Valens was killed at 19 years of age, along with Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper, in the February 1959 air crash in Iowa, Romero must have seemed his logical heir. Indeed, Keane introduced him to Valens’s grieving parents, with whom he later often stayed at their home in Pacoima, East LA.
“The Hippy Hippy Shake” was his first release on Keane’s label. It didn’t make much impact in the US, but it went down well in Canada and Australia. In the UK it was released on EMI’s Columbia label. “My Little Ruby” was the B-side of the the follow-up, “I Don’t Care Now”, and that was pretty much that, although Romero toured with his backing band, the Bell Tones, and found himself turning away girls. “I haven’t got a girlfriend,” he told the Billings Gazette, “because I can’t tell if a girl likes me for myself or because I’m a singer.”
The original version of “The Hippy Hippy Shake” has everything you’d want from a rock and roll record in 1959: the urgent teenage voice, the twangy guitar, the rackety drums, all wrapped up inside a minute and 45 seconds. Thank you, Chan Romero, for your moment in history.
thebluemoment.com 
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What a stonking track!
From the late, great Bob Wooler as told to Spencer Leigh in 1998:
” When I started, I didn’t have obscure rock’n’roll records – I was buying Ella Fitzgerald, quality songs with well-considered lyrics. In 1959, Mike Millward, who was with Bob Evans & the Five Shillings at the time, asked me if I had heard Chan Romero’s “Hippy Hippy Shake”, which was mainly falsetto singing. We didn’t even know if it was by a guy or a girl. The record had come out on Columbia and I bought it…
I played it at a lunchtime session at the Cavern, and Paul McCartney asked me about it. He always fancied himself as a high-voiced singer. I lent him the record and the Beatles started doing it. In the summer of ’63, following a lunchtime session at the Cavern. I got a call from Brian Linford, the manager of the Mardi Gras club, who asked if he could borrow “Hippy Hippy Shake” and return it within the hour, which he did. I thought he wanted it for the Escorts, who were under the Mardi’s management. It never occurred to me that he wanted it for the Swinging Blue Jeans, because they had an upright bass and banjo. The Blue Jeans were jumping on the band-wagon – a classic case of ‘If you can’t beat them, join them’.”
(Romero’s fantastically exciting Hippy Hippy Shake later found fame in the Latino/Lowrider Brown Eyed Soul scene of the 70s and 80s. Can be found in context on an early Rhino LP: ‘The History of Latino Rock, Vol. 1 – 1956-1965, The Eastside Sound’)