Left to right: DeWayne Quirico, Bobby Fuller, Randy Fuller, Jim Reese
July 18, 1966, 60 years ago: With his 1st big hit still on the charts, and another one coming up, Bobby Fuller is found dead in his car in Los Angeles. He was only 23, just a little older than his fellow West Texan, Buddy Holly, whom he tried hard to copy, was when he died.
Robert Gaston Fuller was born on October 22, 1942 outside Houston in Baytown, Texas. Along with his family, including his brother Randy, he moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, and then, in 1956, to El Paso, Texas. In high school, he began forming bands, with Randy on bass guitar as the only constant. Basically, they copied Holly's style, down to Bobby playing the Fender Stratocaster, which Holly had made famous, and even going to Norman Petty's recording studio in Clovis, New Mexico, where Holly had recorded with The Crickets.
In 1964, the Fuller brothers moved to Los Angeles, and formed The Bobby Fuller Four, with rhythm guitarist Jim Reese and drummer DeWayne Quirico. They signed with Mustang Records, and were produced by Bob Keane, who had produced Ritchie Valens, who had died in the same 1959 plane crash as Holly.
Their first album was released in November 1965: KRLA King of the Wheels, with a title track about a hot rod that became a mascot for a Los Angeles radio station, at 1110 AM. (It was a Top 40 station from 1959 to 1977, and is now a Christian talk station with the call letters KWVE.) KRLA played the single "Let Her Dance" enough to make it a regional hit, but that's as far as they got.
In 1958, Sonny Curtis wrote "I Fought the Law," and he recorded it in 1959 when he joined the Crickets, after Buddy Holly left them. The song was included on their 1960 album In Style with the Crickets, but received very little airplay. The Fuller Four recorded it in 1964, but their original version didn't get very far, either. But a much more professional-sounding version was recorded with Keane, who released it in October 1965, and it reached Number 9 on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 in February 1966.
The group subsequently recorded an album titled I Fought the Law, which included the title track and "Let Her Dance," releasing it in February. Quirico left the group shortly thereafter, and was replaced by Dalton Powell.
They recorded another Crickets song, this one written and sung by Holly, "Love's Made a Fool of You." Like a lot of acts in the 1960s, they copied the formula that made them hits: It had a sound very similar to "I Fought the Law." As The Four Tops had recently put it, "It's the Same Old Song." (That song sounded a lot like their Number 1 hit "I Can't Help Myself.") Sometimes, as with that Tops song, the formula worked; other times, it didn't: "Love's Made a Fool of You" only reached Number 26. They released one more single, "The Magic Touch," but it wasn't a hit at all.
They played both hits on Hollywood a Go Go, a local TV show on independent Los Angeles station KHJ-Channel 9. (That channel became KCAL in 1989, and has been a CBS affiliate since 2002.) They also backed Nancy Sinatra on 2 songs in the film The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini, a comedy that was an attempt to combine several film trends of the era: Beach, horror, and biker movies. It was released on April 6, and, despite starring Tommy Kirk and Deborah Whalley, and also having horror icon Boris Karloff and, in one of his last films, former Sherlock Holmes Basil Rathbone, it flopped.
Things went from bad to worse for the band: In July, Reese received a draft notice. Knowing he wouldn't need it, he decided to sell his sports car, a Jaguar XKE, to Bobby at the band's next meeting, on July 18. And Powell had decided that, at that meeting, he would announce that he was leaving the band, to return home and support his family.
We'll never know how the Fuller brothers would have responded to this: That meeting took place, but Bobby didn't show up for it. His body was found, beaten inside his car, a 1962 Oldsmobile, parked just outside of his Hollywood home. Evidence suggests that he had ingested gasoline. Initially, these details were not released to the public.
The Los Angeles medical examiner could not reach a conclusion, checking the boxes for "accident" and "suicide," but putting question marks next to each. The police officially ruled it a suicide. Randy and Powell went on record as saying they didn't believe that.
Powell, in particular, believed Bobby was incapable of suicide. In a 1996 interview, he said, "I saw the body. Anybody who can write it off as a suicide is either totally incompetent or scared to death... Whoever did this had the connections," meaning to have the case end up ignored.
Speculation arose that he was killed by the Mob, because he'd taken a hitman's girlfriend. One version says that Phil Spector had it done: The biggest producer in L.A. liked to claim organized crime connections, and he was certainly mean enough to have it done. He attended Bobby's funeral, and was seen smiling there. But he wouldn't seem to have had a motive: Bobby never worked with him, and he isn't known to have had a rivalry with Keane, either.
Another version suggests Keane himself had it ordered, since he knew the band was breaking up, and that dead rock stars sell better than live ones. But that's almost certainly not what happened. Another version says that Frank Sinatra had it done, because he thought Bobby had been fooling around with his daughter Nancy. That doesn't seem likely, either: While it's possible that they'd met, Frank knew Nancy, who was 2 years older and already divorced, was her own person, and wouldn't have appreciated it. As her producer, Lee Hazelwood, put it, "You're not a sweet young thing," telling her to sing like she wasn't one on "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'."
We may never know the truth. Those who have tried, well, in a way, they, too, have fought the law, and the law has, thus far, won. The name of the alleged hitman and the girlfriend have been lost to history. ("Melody," with some irony, has been suggested as her name.)
Bobby Fuller's name is remembered. And "I Fought the Law" remains one of the all-time rock and roll classics. The Clash had a hit with it in their native Britain in 1979, although it didn't make the U.S. charts. It's also been recorded by, among others, Hank Williams Jr., the Dead Kennedys, Status Quo and Green Day.
Randy Fuller was convinced by DeWayne Quirico to continue his musical career. He formed a new band, naming it The Randy Fuller Four, but had no hits. He occasionally reunited with other members of the band. In 2015, Randy collaborated with Miriam Linna, drummer for the punk band The Cramps, and later a rock historian, to write I Fought the Law: The Life and Strange Death of Bobby Fuller, the first authorized biography of Bobby and his band. Quirico also remained active as a session drummer, and sometimes toured with Randy.
Jim Reese and Dalton Powell went back to Texas, and formed a band named Murphy's Law -- perhaps appropriate, given what had happened to their previous band: "Murphy's Law" is a cliché that says, "Anything that can go wrong, will." After a few years, that band broke up, and Powell played in a series of bands. Reese stayed out of the spotlight.
On October 26, 1991, after playing a round of golf, Jim Reese suffered a heart attack, and died at the age of 54. Bob Keane died on November 28, 2009, at 87. Randy Fuller died on May 16, 2024. He was 80. As of July 18, 2026, DeWayne Quirico and Dalton Powell, the 2 drummers, are still alive.
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July 18, 1966 was a Monday. Dan O'Brien, winner of the Gold Medal in the decathlon at the 1996 Olympics, was born.
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