The Do-It-Yourself Comeback Kid

Back in the 1960s, Johnny Rivers was one of the first pop stars to run his own record company and produce hits for others. Now, the Louisiana-reared rocker is mounting a comeback with his first new album in years, yet he’s happy to keep it on a low-keyed, do-it-yourself scale.

These days, pop savants who achieve major success wearing multiple hats as artists, producers and record moguls are as numerous as playoff-bound baseball teams. Prince started the trend in the 1980s with his Paisley Park label; Babyface, Sean “Puffy” Combs and Master P have carried it into the late ‘90s.

Johnny Rivers had the jump on all of them.

Starting in 1964, the Los Angeles-based rocker enjoyed a long run on the charts that produced nine op 10 singles before his success dried up. “Secret Agent Man” (1966) and “Rockin’ Pneumonia-Boogie Woogie Flu” (1972) are the two Rivers songs that every fan of good-time oldies rock ‘n’ roll knows; with “Poor Side of Town” (1966) and his 1977 chart farewell, “Swayin’ to the Music (Slow Dancin’),” Rivers successfully put his pure, piercing voice to use as an introspective balladeer and a romantic crooner.

In 1966, Rivers--born John Ramistella--parlayed his early streak of hits into a deal that gave him his own company to run. As the head of Soul City Records, he discovered one of the decade’s most significant pop songwriters, Jimmy Webb, and signed and produced one of its most successful vocal groups, the 5th Dimension.

After 20 years out of the recording spotlight, Rivers, at 55, recently revived Soul City to release “Last Train to Memphis,” an album he describes as “the first real Johnny Rivers album in a long time, probably 15 years.”

Rivers will showcase that work--a straightforward shot of blues and R&B--with; two concerts tonight at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano. Although “Secret Agent Man” gained new mass exposure as the theme song in the recent hit film “Austin Powers,” Rivers doesn’t expect to challenge Babyface, Puff Daddy, et al. on the charts. “Last Train to Memphis” includes blues nuggets from Muddy Waters, Jimmy Rogers and Bobby “Blue” Bland, along with several originals he wrote by himself or with Jack Tempchin, the “Slow Dancin’ ” writer best known for his contributions to the Eagles’ songbook. It ends with “Blue Suede Blues,” a quiet farewell to Rivers’ old friend Carl Perkins, who died in January.

“We’re not giving [the new album] the big hype,” Rivers said this week from his home in Studio City. “If it doesn’t get on the Billboard top 100 charts, it doesn’t make any difference to me. It’s available for people who want it. The thing that’s cool about my stuff is that there’s a Johnny Rivers bin in any store you go in. We’re going to make it a little more visible, but I don’t have to sell mega-platinum.”

Rivers was just 24 when he had his own label and a firm hold on the pop charts. But his boy-wonder story was 10 years in the making.

Born in the Bronx, N.Y., he came to Baton Rouge at age 5 when his uncle, the art department chairman at Louisiana State University, set up Rivers’ out-of-work dad with a job at the university as a handyman. It was a musical family, and after picking up his first guitar chords from his dad, Rivers was fronting his own band, the Spades, by the time he was 15.

From his earliest days, Rivers showed extraordinary drive. While visiting an aunt in the Bronx, he took the subway each day to the Brill Building in Manhattan, hub of the 1950s pop industry, hoping to run into somebody who could help him get ahead.

On one chilly day, Rivers said, he took his guitar and camped outside the radio station where Alan Freed, the famous disc jockey and promoter, was doing a show. He intercepted Freed on his way to work and pressed his band’s 45 on him. Soon, he found himself cutting a new single with future jazz great Kenny Burrell on guitar and Otis Blackwell, author of the Elvis Presley hits “Don’t Be Cruel” and “All Shook Up,” as musical arranger--based on Freed’s recommendation.

“Alan played it a little bit, but it didn’t take off,” Rivers said of that first recording. “It didn’t bother me. They played it around my hometown, and just to have a record out in those days was a big deal. You could get bookings, and we became the hot little band around Baton Rouge.”

Similar contact-forging trips to Nashville led to further recording and more chances for the teenager to learn how records were made and how the music business worked. A crucial break came back in Louisiana, where he was introduced to James Burton, the influential guitarist for Ricky Nelson.

Never shy, Rivers told Burton he had a song, “I’ll Make Believe,” that might suit Nelson; the affable guitarist gave him an address to send it to. Nelson recorded the number, and Rivers soon moved to Los Angeles to try to capitalize on his first significant credential. There, he found more mentors, including Reprise Records staff producer Jimmy Bowen (later a main cog in the Garth Brooks success story), who took him on as an assistant.

“I don’t think I was cocky, but I was confident about my ability to sing and play,” Rivers said of his knack, as a teenager, to find well-placed allies. “People heard something, and I was serious and dedicated. I was into the music. I wasn’t just trying to do it. It was my life.”

Late nights in the studio paid off for him in more ways than one. Gazzari’s, an after-hours eatery he frequented, found itself in need of live entertainment when one of its usual jazz combos quit. Owner Bill Gazzari turned to Rivers, willing to use a rock group as a stop-gap while he sought a suitable jazz act.

“I started playing all this funky stuff that I’d played with the Spades in Baton Rouge,” Rivers recalled. “After a week or two, it became the hot spot in town.”

When the Whisky a Go Go opened in 1964, Rivers was recruited as the club’s six-nights-a-week regular attraction (his night off went to a young Oklahoman named Johnny Cale, who changed his billing to J.J. Cale when management insisted it didn’t want any confusion from two headliners named Johnny).

“The Whisky was such an audience participation thing,” Rivers said. “People would stand around the bandstand and clap along. There was such energy, you could see the excitement.” He and his producing partner, Lou Adler, rented a mobile studio and recorded two nights at the Whisky, which landed Rivers a record deal and gave him his angle: raw rock ‘n’ roll with a live, party ambience.

A cover of Chuck Berry’s “Memphis” launched Rivers into the top 10 in 1964; he went to the same well for a successful follow-up single, “Maybelline.”

Most of his hits were covers of songs that had been hits for others. But Rivers wrote his only No. 1 song, “Poor Side of Town.” It marked a transition to mellower moods and lush production, presaging the sound that shortly would vault Glen Campbell to stardom; in fact, Rivers’ original recording of Jimmy Webb’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” served as a template for Campbell’s breakthrough hit version of the same song.

“It was just a natural transition,” Rivers said of his move from party-happy rock ‘n’ roll to soft sounds with strings and cooing backing vocals. “When we finished recording ‘Poor Side of Town’ with [just] the rhythm section, it was just crying for strings and orchestration.”

When his record contract with Imperial Records was up, Rivers said, he insisted on being given his own boutique label as a condition for re-signing.

“I wanted to be able to produce other artists. At the time it was unheard of. But you go back to my background, hanging out at the Brill Building, being in the studio with Jimmy Bowen, I was trained for it. I’d paid my dues and learned the process.”

Rivers’ knack for choosing the right songs for his own singles carried over as a label boss and record producer when he signed the 5th Dimension and had the group record “Up, Up and Away,” a song Webb had written for a never-made Broadway musical.

After a few years, he had to scale back his work as a producer and label chief, because Imperial was unhappy that he was falling behind on his own recording output. In the late ‘70s, after his streak of hits had ended, Rivers revived Soul City for what turned out to be his last chart hurrah. He heard “Slow Dancin’ ” on the radio in its original version by the Funky Kings, a mid-’70s country-rock band that featured singer-songwriters Jack Tempchin, Richard Stekol and Jules Shear.

Rivers assumed it was a hit; when he found out it wasn’t, he put out his own version and sailed back into the top 10 one last time. It ended badly, though, when he had a falling out with the label that took over national distribution of the single; despite huge sales for “Slow Dancin,’ ” the album Rivers built around it, “Outside Help,” went nowhere due to the business infighting.

Now Rivers is back with less outside help than ever. He wrote or co-wrote seven of the 13 songs on “Last Train to Memphis,” an unusually high ratio for somebody who made his career bird-dogging other people’s hits.

“It’s just something I wanted to do,” Rivers said. “I could have been doing [my own writing] all through the years, but I wasn’t on an ego trip of ‘I have to write the songs.’ I didn’t care who wrote it. It was how I felt it.”

Nowadays, Rivers plays about 70 shows a year, fronting a four-piece lineup on vocals and guitar, and working in his more lush pop side in occasional shows with symphony orchestras. It’s a comfortable pace for a twice-divorced father of four who says he devotes most of his time outside music to his family and doesn’t need to wear himself out on the road to make a living.

Rivers was able to hold onto his earnings from that extended hot streak in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

“I had good management, accounting and lawyers; I wasn’t just a naive musician,” he said. “That was the good part of paying my dues all those years, learning the business from the ground up. I learned about publishing, producing, and I learned about all the artists who’d made a lot of money and ended up broke.”

* Johnny Rivers plays tonight at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. 8 and 10:30 p.m. $25-$27. (949) 496-8930.