08/08/2025
Good obit for an interesting guy who worked briefly at KLRB in the very early years.
Thanks David Bean for sending.
ART FEIN
June 17, 1946 – July 30, 2025
by Randy Lewis
Most people have a friend or acquaintance they like to introduce as a musical know-it-all. When John Lennon says you are someone who "knows everything about music," it means something. Those were the words Lennon used to introduce his new friend Art Fein to fabled record producer Phil Spector when the three met in Los Angeles in the early-1970s. Lennon and Fein quickly bonded over a shared love for early rock 'n' roll, R&B and blues music when they had met at Capitol Records in Hollywood, where Fein was employed doing college promotion for the label's artists.
It was one of hundreds of examples in which his unflagging passion for music won him the affection of those he encountered through decades as a music journalist, record company publicist, talent manager, public-access television show host and other hats he wore until his death on July 30 at age 79. Fein died of heart failure while recuperating from surgery for a broken hip, according to longtime friend Cliff Burnstein, co-founder of Q Prime Management.
"Back in the early days of The Blasters, when few outside of Rollin' Rock Records knew or cared who we were, Art cared deeply," Blasters co-founder, chief songwriter and lead guitarist Dave Alvin wrote shortly after news of Fein's death circulated through the music community last week. In late 1979/early 1980, I was a wannabe poet working as a fry cook in Long Beach," Alvin recalled. "I was also a clumsy guitar basher in a R&B combo from Downey who was beginning to write songs for my brother [Phil] to sing. One of those songs was called 'Marie Marie.' Long story short: Art Fein played 'Marie' to a Welsh rock 'n' roll singer named Shakin' Stevens, who quickly recorded my song and made it into a huge international hit (everywhere except the US of A). Thanks to Art Fein (and the ensuing BMI royalty checks), I was soon able to quit my job as a cook and pursue music. songwriting and rockin' n' rollin' full time. I can never, ever thank you enough for all you did for me, Art," Alvin wrote. "Especially for ending my career as a fry cook."
Others whose lives and careers were touched by Fein's abiding passion for spirited music of all stripes promptly conjured examples of the special place he holds in their hearts. "Back in '94 when I was touring with Butch Hancock in Europe, I took a bad fall, at the end of our month-long tour," singer-songwriter-guitarist Rosie Flores said a day after his death. "I slipped in the rain on a cobblestone street in London and severely broke my wrist. Three months later I was invited to sing at the Elvis [annual birthday] bash at The House of Blues. With metal bars and screws on my arm holding a [mike], I was able to sing my three Elvis songs. No guitar for several months. It was normal protocol to donate all the money from the proceeds of the show and give it to an organization or a charity,' Flores said. "This year, Art surprised me and handed me a stack of money to the tune of $1,500 for my medical bills. I didn't expect that at all [and] it brought tears to my eyes. I felt the love."
She referenced a tribute to Elvis Presley held in Los Angeles each year on or around his Jan. 8 birthday. The event had been started by roots-rocker James Intveld in the mid-'80s and was hosted for at least a couple of decades by Fein, who also frequently helped corral talent for the show, whose proceeds, as Flores noted, typically went to charity. Presley was the Big Bang for Fein's lifelong love of rock 'n' roll, as he noted in his 2022 memoir, Rock's in My Head.
"[O]n Jan. 6, 1957, when I was 10, I accidentally caught what I'd later learn was Elvis Presley's third and final appearance on 'The Ed Sullivan Show'," he wrote. "My life changed in a lightning bolt. Who was this side-burned Pied Piper from outer space with slick black hair like Superman, and just as handsome? ...What was this music? This was rock & Roll!...Suddenly I craved records, and as usual, my parents indulged my enthusiasm to the degree that they were able. This was in Logan Square, a working-class Jewish neighborhood northwest of Chicago, where Arthur David Fein was born June 17, 1946 and adopted at birth by Sam and Lillian Fein. Art said he never knew, or sought, information about his birth mother or father "because it seemed ungrateful—and one set of parents was enough."
Much of his young life revolved about trying to acquire the latest hits he discovered on the radio, or by reading about them in any of a number of publications that catered to the new generation of young music fans. "I compiled 20 Elvis scrapbooks," he wrote in Rock's in My Head. "When I left for college, I tossed them out in a fit of maturity. Who knew the maturity wouldn't last?" Describing himself as a good student, Fein persuaded his mother to accompany him to a rock 'n' roll concert in Chicago headlined by Chuck Berry. He was 10. The bill also included Little Brenda Lee, Eddie Cochran, the Collins Kids and the Everly Brothers.
Fein mentioned that show a decade later to Phil Everly, who asked him "First or second set?" Fein replied "First. I was only 10 years old." Everly told him, "Far out. That was our first show by ourselves, as the Everly Brothers. Two nights before we were still with our family on the Grand Ole Opry."
He missed a live appearance in Chicago by Presley a few months later but was back in the house the following December for another rock 'n' roll r***e, this one featuring Sam Cooke, Lloyd Price and the incendiary Jerry Lee Lewis. "I'd already caught him on TV," Fein noted, "but seeing him in person was something else again. If Elvis was God, Jerry Lee Lewis was the Prince of Darkness. This blond guy came out, eased into 'Whole Lotta Shakin',' and pretty soon he was pounding the piano maniacally. He tore off his white shirt to reveal a purple satin one underneath, a senseless action that I considered one of the greatest things I'd ever seen."
After graduating high school in 1963, he entered the University of Illinois, Chicago. "I studied not, flunked out, and went to work in an office, sorting and filing I didn't know what. My attitude toward college," he said, "was 'What for?' I had an alternative plan—listening to music for the rest of my life." Yet, he returned to higher education—first a brief stint at a junior college, but then the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he graduated at the end of the '60s with a degree in journalism. It was in Colorado he met and befriended Chuck Weiss, immortalized more than a decade later by singer-songwriter Rickie Lee Jones in her breakthrough 1979 hit "Chuck E's in Love."
He had come to appreciate '60s rock icons such as Bob Dylan and The Beatles, but not in the way he had idolized Presley, Berry, Lewis and the original class of rock 'n' rollers. At one point during his years in Boulder, he and his girlfriend lived in the Victorian apartment that would become famous as the Mork and Mindy house during that sitcom's hit run from 1978-82.
Writing freelance music reviews and other articles when he could, he moved to California in 1971, lived for a couple of years south of Santa Cruz before heading further south to Los Angeles. There he settled in and landed his first job in the record industry thanks to Ken Sasano, a classmate from the University of Colorado who had gone to work for Capitol Records. "The city had captured me when I was 15, on a cross-country road trip with my parents," he remembered. "Great weather, spacious homes with swimming pools, hot rods on the streets, things for teens to do. 'Why do we live in Chicago!?' I'd cried."
It was during the brief stint at Capitol in the label's newly created college promotion department when he forged an unlikely friendship with Lennon and Yoko Ono. He was tasked with coordinating interviews with college radio stations for Ono's latest album, Approximately Infinite Universe. Inconceivable as it was for one of the titans of rock music to meet with a recently-hired low-on-the-totem-pole college promotion guy, Fein brought Lennon and Ono to his cubby-hole office decorated with photos of Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Eddie Cochran and several of Capitol's early rockabilly stars including Wanda Jackson and Gene Vincent. "This is my kind of music," Lennon said with a smile. Fein spent a week coordinating interviews promoting Ono's record – and talking obsessively with Lennon about early rock records. At one point, Lennon quipped that if he'd known and had access to all the music Fein had introduced him to earlier in life, he might have been content to become a grocer and just listen to rock 'n' roll day in and day out.
But less than a year after being Fein was hired, Capitol eliminated the college promotion department and Fein with it. He then freelanced music articles to the Los Angeles Times, Herald-Examiner, Billboard, Record World and Los Angeles Free Press for a time before being hired as music editor at Variety. "By the time I got this job, I was sick of the new, aggravating profession of rock criticism," he recalled. "It was about writers, not the music. I wasn't interested in being terribly critical. I was an advocate. I wanted to help the music along; rock critics wanted to help their sense of superiority."
Fein's allegiance was to music, not personalities, even as much as he worshipped Presley. That could lead to some surprises. "I liked the Carpenters a little," he confessed in his memoir, "but the 1972 song 'Goodbye to Love' was something else altogether. I considered it Richard Carpenter's Phil Spector song—not similar in style, but powerful, with a nice melody, a stirring mid-tempo pace, and a sign-off with an unexpected guitar exercise that finished the song in a long, exhilarating solo that held little connection to the ballad. This was a thrilling oddity." His catholic tastes extended to the roots music of Louisiana, and he became a cheerleader for "The King of Zydeco" Clifton Chenier, urging anyone and everyone who came into his orbit to join him for treks to Verbum Dei High School in South Central L.A., Chenier's preferred venue when he performed in Southern California.
He lasted a little more than a year at Variety, was fired and returned to freelance writing and hanging out in clubs soaking up more music. All along he'd been a frequent habitue of the Palomino, the North Hollywood club that was the most important country music venue on the West Coast. As it turned out, Fein also was an earnest fan of country music outlaws such as Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Gary Stewart and rock's original bad-boy-turned country-music hitmaker, Jerry Lee Lewis.
For a time after being dismissed at Variety, he found work at an unemployment office, which lasted less than a year. In 1977 he was hired as a publicist for Elektra/Asylum Records, then one of the most respected labels for its roster of esteemed artists that included Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, Tom Waits, the Eagles and others. Or, as Fein thought of them, "not my rockin' cup of tea, but good." He was charged chiefly with writing artist biographies, but also worked as liaison with writers at the trade publications Billboard, Cash Box and Record World. As in most jobs he held for whatever duration, he continued to be a regular presence at those, and other musicians' shows most nights of the week. That was pivotal year for Fein, not only on the career front, but because it also was the year Presley died. He lasted barely a year at Elektra/Asylum, let go after a label executive informed him, "You're just not fitting in with the team." Fein noted in retrospect, "That would be my last full-time job. Ever." Nevertheless, he shortly landed another gig doing publicity at Casablanca Records, then red-hot for its disco hits, but further yet from Fein's musical cup of tea.
"A cold atmosphere, with no fun and plenty of flash, and nobody needed me for nuthin'," he wrote. "I sat wondering what I should do. My small office had no windows, and I didn't need to be there to write, so I took four-hour lunches, my field of expertise." In another unlikely turn of events, Fein became friends with one of Casablanca's acts, Randy Jones, aka the Cowboy from Village People. But fairly soon he was let go from Casablanca too. The day after being sacked, he tagged along on a UK tour with a minor rockabilly figure from the '50s, Ray Campi, who was in the early stages of a career renaissance in the late-1970s with his fiery band of young acolytes, the Rockabilly Rebels, who definitely were Fein's speed. "I hopped on the bus with them and had the time of my life," Fein remembered.
Campi was among several acts with whom Fein next tried his hand as talent manager. That group would go on to include the earliest iteration of the Blasters, the roots rock group started by Downey-based siblings Dave and Phil Alvin, psychobilly group the Cramps, and a punk pop band that had begun causing a stir in and around Hollywood with its vibrant live shows, the Heaters. Fein embraced his passion for niche roots music forms as the '80s arrived and unfolded and a roots-rock renaissance blossomed in Los Angeles side-by-side with the punk rock explosion erupting in various metropolitan regions around the world.
In L.A. this community soon included transplants such as Kentucky native Dwight Yoakam, Louisiana-born singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams as well as homegrown acts such as punk rock band X and its rootsy spinoff, the Knitters, along with the Blasters, Los Lobos, Rosie Flores, the Plimsouls, James Intveld, the Rockin' Rebels, the Red Devils, the Wild Cards and dozens more. Many of those acts were featured on an album's worth of the best area neo-rockabilly music that Fein assembled and released in 1983 under the title (Art Fein Presents) The Best of L.A. Rockabilly. The LP became something of a musical bible for younger roots-music converts who now were often sharing bills with hardcore punk groups such as Fear, Circle Jerks and Orange County's Social Distortion. Although Fein had nominally shifted into talent management, "Nobody paid me," he pointed out. "I was happy to sit in my hot, stuffy living room getting into people's problems and dispensing advice."
That scenario was a rough blueprint of what would become one of the defining – and longest-lasting – facets of his life: a public access cable TV show called Lil Art's Poker Party, which featured conversation and performances with most of his favorite musicians, aspiring and seasoned, as well as his circle of quirky friends in and adjacent to the music business. The show continued for 24 years.
Rhino Records co-founder Richard Foos recalled that "For years we had a weekly poker game either at his house or mine. I was there the night [music critic] Lester Bangs was playing. We started the first hand, started talking music, and never played another hand, which led to the creation of Lil Art's Poker Party." According to his longtime friend and fellow music writer Todd Everett, "The way I heard it, the name came from a Chicago TV show called Little Wally's Polka Party [aka Polka Party with Li'l Wally]. Then the places he was taping it – various cable facilities, depending on what was available -- started getting touchy about the ci**rs people were smoking, and that whole concept became Art Fein's Poker Party, sans props and decor."
"One of my fondest memories of Art was playing on that show," said Chip Kinman, veteran roots rocker and founding member with his brother Tony of influential bands including the Dils, Rank And File, Cowboy Nation and Blackbird among others. "When we played on the Poker Party, it just great," he said. "We sat on this couch, and Tony had it all figured out and it was just so much fun. Art really got what we were trying to do with Cowboy Nation, and I had profound respect for him for that."
Flores also was among the roots music stalwarts Fein brought onto his show. "He made sure that the people that were going to be on his show that they could talk about were smart people that knew about the music, and he just did such a great job," Flores said. "We could get on television, you know, and we weren't famous people – a lot of us weren't famous – but we were cool, and he would give us airtime and who else was doing that?" she said. "Nobody." He extended performance platforms to musicians he admired at the annual Elvis Birthday Bash, held at numerous clubs and theaters around Los Angeles for more than four decades.
Even more ambitiously, perhaps, he and a group of entertainment-biz pals including singer-songwriter Jerry "Swamp Dogg" Williams, Bob Merlis, Gene Sculatti, Bill Liebowitz and Dick Blackburn banded together in 1978 to stage the first of what turned into a handful of stellar New Year's Eve gatherings over the next half dozen years. They booked many of their favorite vintage rock 'n' roll, R&B and soul performers including Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Darlene Love, Roy Brown, Swamp Dogg, Ray Campi & His Rockabilly Rebels, and Cannibal & the Headhunters, along with latter-day favorites such as the Blasters, Joe "King" Carrasco & the Crowns, the Beat Farmers and Ronnie Mack & the Black Slacks, all of whom helped usher in a new year for a select group of invited guests. Notably, Tom Waits met his second wife Kathleen Brennan at the second of these events, dubbed Mambo Beat '80. When Love headlined the Panic at PJ's '82 edition, it was her first performance after a years-long hiatus from playing live and the first live performance ever of "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)," which subsequently became an annual highlight of Late Night with David Letterman.
Along the way, Fein fashioned his Hollywood apartment into something of a time capsule from the '50s, so meticulously and authentically appointed that it needed little tweaking for its use as a set in Paul Bartel's 1982 cult classic film Eating Raoul, as well as for cover photos of two Rhino Records' "Rockin' Christmas" compilations of holiday music from the '50s and '60s, respectively.
The license plate to his long-running VW Beetle read "SOFEIN," and he made up business cards to inform recipients with whom they were dealing: "Art Fein—Still Photographer....Still a Writer. "True to his word, in 1990, Fein published his book The L.A. Musical History Tour: A Guide to the Rock and Roll Landmarks of Los Angeles. A 136-page compendium of nearly 250 locations, the book guides readers not only to gravesites of seminal rock, blues and R&B stars such as Roy Orbison, the Burnette Brothers, Eddie Cochran, Ritchie Valens, Gene Vincent and T-Bone Walker, but sites where Sam Cooke, Janis Joplin, Marvin Gaye, Tim Hardin, Dennis Wilson and Darby Crash died. In addition, there are cheerier entries on places the Beatles stayed while performing in Los Angeles, the favorite music community hangout of Canter's Deli, the "Rock and Roll Denny's" and the Hollywood Mercedes Benz dealership where Elvis reportedly bought six Mercedes for friends during a single visit in 1970.
In 2022, he published his memoir Rock's in My Head, choosing a title that toyed with a grammar police bugaboo against the misplaced use of possessive apostrophes—in Fein's case, of course, it was employed correctly. On social media in recent years, he would rail about and routinely correct any misuse of the word "cover" to refer to a performance or recording of a song other than the original version. A "cover," he insisted, invoking the original usage, was a competing recording meant to "cover" or overshadow the original and thus steal sales. Subsequent recordings were more accurately, and simply, called "versions."
Beginning in the mid-1970s, with the Lennon-Ono friendship as a springboard, Fein also developed and maintained what he called a complicated relationship with producer Phil Spector, another of his biggest heroes from the early days of rock 'n' roll. It was, after all, Spector to whom Lennon had introduced Fein all those years ago as the man who "knows all about music." Later, Fein became part of Spector's inner circle, even into his dark, deeply troubled years when he was charged with, and later convicted of, murdering House of Blues hostess Lana Clarkson. Fein maintained contact with the fallen recording legend after he was sentenced to life in prison. "I wrote to him 15 times when he was in prison and never got an answer," Fein pointed out in his memoir. "By the time he died, on January 16, 2021, at the age of 81, I had completed my mourning." A good chunk of Rock's in My Head explores their relationship in greater depth.
Almost to a person, musicians who engaged with Fein through the years praised the purity of his passion for music, his kindness and generosity, and his dedication to helping musicians further their careers in whatever ways he could. "It felt like he was a connection between all the bands," Rosie Flores said shortly after his death. "If there was somebody that you could think of that would be like a wire that would run through all the roots bands that were somewhere between country, R&B and rockabilly, he was the guy."
In the final word of his memoir, Fein saved others from needing to invent an epitaph. He noted that "I can't say anything terribly pithy or canny about the state of record sales, or streaming, or new delivery systems. Or how YouTube or TikTok are shaping contemporary music. Frankly, I stopped following the details of commerce quite a while back.
"It turns out I didn't want to be in the music business; I wanted to be in the music," he wrote. "There I remain."
Fein is survived by his beloved daughter Jessie, his wife Jennifer, and a host of family and friends who loved and will miss him dearly.
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Randy Lewis covered pop music for the Los Angeles Times from 1981-2020 and for Cash Box Magazine from 1976-1979.
