BILLY VERA SEIZES THE ‘MOMENT’

Billy Vera’s days as a fixture on the local club circuit may be numbered. The veteran leader of Billy & the Beaters is fast becoming the most left-field success story of 1986 as his single “At This Moment” rockets up the pop charts. It jumped from No. 38 to No. 32 on the new Billboard chart.

What’s so strange about it? Well, “At This Moment” is a 5-year-old song that was resurrected after Michael Weithorn, then a supervising producer and writer for NBC’s hit television series “Family Ties,” caught one of Vera’s club sets.

It was just a Friday night out for Weithorn, but he was searching for a romantic song that would fit the emotional requirements of a scene where the character played by Michael J. Fox fell in love.

“I had a few thoughts of songs I knew but we checked them out and they were all so horrendously expensive we couldn’t afford them,” Weithorn recalled. “I had heard Billy & the Beaters were great but I didn’t know much about them beyond that.

“At one point during the show, Billy sat at the piano and did ‘At This Moment.’ I thought to myself, ‘That’s the song.’ ”

The song was featured in both segments of the two-part episode during the series’ 1985 season and generated so many letters to the network that it spurred Vera to action.

“Opportunity knocks and losers let it keep knocking,” Vera said. “I said I’m not going to be a loser anymore, so I decided to answer the door.”

Vera approached L.A.-based Rhino Records with a proposal to compile an anthology of highlights from Billy & the Beaters’ two albums on Alfa Records from the early ‘80s. That LP, “By Request,” sold briskly to local fans after its release late last summer, and Rhino issued “At This Moment” as a single--a rare step for the independent label.

“We though the song really fit in with the pop radio climate today and we ought to go after it as a single if it provoked that strong a response on ‘Family Ties,’ ” explained Rhino A&R; ch1768252960it, so we didn’t have any concrete expectations.”

But the record took off after “Family Ties” featured “At This Moment” again early in the 1986 fall season. NBC received more than 9,000 phone calls about the song, the most in the network’s history, and radio stations across the country were swamped with phone requests to program it.

“The radio stations I talk to love the Cinderella/Rocky aspect,” said Vera, who brings the Beaters to the Roxy Monday and the Blue Lagune Saloon Saturday. “It’s an artist nobody wanted, a label that nobody took seriously, a song they actually like and that people were actually calling in for in huge numbers. It’s called grass-roots, and that doesn’t happen in the ‘80s.”

But it did. And Vera, who will soon realize his lifelong dream of appearing on “American Bandstand,” has been working 12-hour days to sustain the record’s momentum. He’s also weighing the merits of the various label and management deals being offered him. With three songs featured in a forthcoming Blake Edwards film and six in an ABC movie of the week scheduled to air in February, Billy & the Beaters seem well positioned to capitalize on the unexpected breakthrough of “At This Moment.”

The future may not be quite that bright for the James Harman Band, the Beaters’ compatriots in the local bar-band battles, but the Orange County group may be supplementing its heavy touring schedule with fresh vinyl early next year. Harman is now concluding negotiations with Rhino for an album of new material, and will soon be shopping his labor-of-love blues album to specialty labels.