Alive and Well in Encino

In the summer of 1969, hundreds of thousands nationwide marched against the Vietnam War, in which hundreds were dying every week; 300,000 slogged their way up to muddy Woodstock; actors in New York cavorted nude on stage in “Oh! Calcutta!”; drug-powered flower children worldwide rushed to see “Easy Rider” and dropped out of Western civilization.

And teen singing sensation Bobby Sherman dropped in.

Hundreds of thousands of teeny-boppers nationwide went absolutely wild for him. Bobby Sherman was a bastion of sanity in a tumultuous world, one of the last of the true teen idols, someone at whom preteen fanatics could throw love letters, candy, flowers, and ultimately, their hearts.

While Jimi Hendrix and the Experience nearly set the audience’s hair on fire at Woodstock with “Purple Haze,” Bobby and his horde of publicists, managers and agents were packaging the next big step after the overwhelming popularity of his two very sudden mega-hits of the summer of ‘69, “Hey, Little Woman” and “La La La.” Overnight, he was the crowned king of Bubblegum Rock, that saccharine, gooey vocalized junk that the pre-pubescent kids were eating up like, uh, bubble gum.

It all lasted the proverbial 15 minutes.

Even today, Sherman is not particularly proud of the music. “But I could have sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and they would have bought it. My audience was so young and impressionable, they would buy everything associated with Bobby Sherman.”

Bubblegum Bobby, they called him back then, and he was bigger than Herman’s Hermits, bigger maybe even than the Monkees, whose TV show had been canceled late in 1968. The Monkees were having big problems with their producers: Singer Mike Nesmith got into a fight with an executive at Screen Gems. The Monkees were no longer nice kids, and publicly they refuted the packaging, their management and their music. Nesmith said, at the time, that the group was “being passed off as something we aren’t.” Meaning they actually were musicians.

Bobby was a real nice kid from Van Nuys. Unlike those bratty Monkees, he played ball with the producers. He also played guitar, piano, trumpet, French horn, drums, sitar and trombone. In his spare time, he played Jeremy, the stuttering, teddy-bearish younger brother on ABC’s “Here Comes the Brides.”

Bubblegum Bobby was on T-shirts, lunch boxes, Post cereal boxes, watches, leather collars, and he had his very own “love beads” for sale, thousands of them. He was the product of a shrewd marketing blitz that quickly determined exactly what the teeny-boppers wanted, and almost instantaneously gave it back to them on stage, on television and in teen magazines. The fans ate him up; the critics chewed him up.

“The whole thing was manufactured,” Sherman, now 45, recalls. “If it started to shift, we started to shift. It was supply and demand. The market realized there was money in very young kids. A lot of money.”

By the time Bubblegum Bobby had accumulated his 12th gold record (4 albums and 8 singles) and more than $15 million in retail sales, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison were all dead of drug overdoses, and Bobby Sherman’s career as a teen idol was all but over. Sales on his 1972 bubble gum boogie “Together Again” were dismal.

Bobby was not. He is not dismal today, either. Neither is he a figure for derision or pity. Bobby Sherman is happy and successful, though not in the seven-figure terms he used to be. He sits comfortably in the Lalo and Brothers restaurant, alive and well on Ventura Boulevard in Encino, a few blocks from his home of almost 20 years, looking just like the average divorced Valley dad he has become.

The hair is touched with gray, he’s properly suited and pinky-ringed, and the face, well, he must have borrowed some of Dick Clark’s genes. The face has hardly changed.

“I wasn’t glad that it was over,” Sherman said of the demise of Bubblegum Bobby. “It was inevitable, there’d been so much over-saturation. Anyway, there were other things I wanted to do.”

Meaning acting and television production, in which he has been involved almost steadily since the death of Bubblegum Rock in the early 1970s. In his state-of-the-arts recording studio in his Encino home, Sherman composes, arranges and performs the scores for television programs, including “People Magazine on TV.” He’s producing “Crime Watch Tonight,” a nationally syndicated TV show beginning this fall.

Sherman remarks that he is lucky. “I’ve been surrounded by good, influential friends through thick and thin,” he said. Nonetheless, he exhibits, and apparently always has, an almost Zen patience with the fickle turn of events of his life. Except for a painful divorce from his wife, Pamela, in 1979, and the onerous separation from his sons, Christopher, 16, and Tyler, 15, Sherman glides calmly over his road, bumping along optimistically from project to project.

Sherman doesn’t complain that Bubblegum Bobby was only good for “15 minutes,” the cynical Andy Warhol summation of the brevity and pomposity of stardom in America. Sherman enjoyed the ride from the start.

“I went to this party for the premiere of ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told,’ ” Sherman said, recalling his first minute of stardom in 1965, when he was a sophomore at Pierce College studying child psychology. “There was this band playing. Three of the guys in it I knew from high school; I used to play with them. They didn’t have a singer and everyone--everyone in Hollywood was there--started yelling they wanted to hear vocals. . . . The guys asked me to sing.” Sherman laughed. “And so it happened Sal Mineo, Natalie Wood and Jane Fonda came up and asked who was handling me.” When the party was over, he rushed back to the Valley, thinking that was that.

It wasn’t.

He got an audition for ABC’s “Shindig” and became the house singer on the show for nearly 2 1/2 years, then went on tour for about eight months after which he auditioned for and got the part of Jeremy on “Here Comes the Brides.” Then he became Bubblegum Bobby in the summer of ‘69, working constantly between television and music for the next three years. And then--bam!--his 15 minutes were up. And, surprisingly, that was OK with him.

He still misses the fans, though. “They were my friends,” he says insistently. From practically every account of the period, the ferocious passion of his hundreds of thousands of fans was overwhelming, yet somehow he seemed to reach out to them from the stage--or at least they felt he did. “I couldn’t leave certain places,” Sherman said. “Once they put me in a hearse, using a limo as a decoy to escape.” For a moment, Sherman seems sad. “I still get fan letters,” he sighs. “I miss that one-on-one.”

One-on-one with 15,000 fan letters a week?

“Yup, one-on-one. That’s the way I felt about them. And that’s the way they felt about me,” Sherman said adamantly.

Well, if the fans are waiting, so is Sherman. He’s been kicking around the idea of singing again. “I’ve been asked to re-record this song or that. But considering the new formula--MTV and everything that goes along with it--I’d have to do a sitcom or a dramatic series also, only because I do have an audience that knows me as an actor and a singer. I think they could accept me again in those roles.”

But the questions linger in the soft pink ambience of the restaurant: Do you get a second 15 minutes in America?

‘Bubblegum’ Bobby Sherman, a Teen Idol Back in ‘69, Just May Be Ready for Another Shot at the Limelight