Wayne Cochran

NY Times Obituary

Wayne Cochran, who wrote a classic love-and-loss pop song while still in his early 20s, then morphed into an energetic rhythm-and-blues singer with a devoted following and an outrageous pompadour before finding a new purpose in a Christian ministry near Miami, died on Nov. 21 in Miramar, Fla. He was 78.

His son, Christopher Cochran, said the cause was cancer.

Mr. Cochran was a relative unknown trying to make it as a singer in Georgia in 1961 when he wrote and recorded “Last Kiss,” a heart-wrencher about a fatal car wreck.

“Well, where, oh where can my baby be?” it starts. “The Lord took her away from me.”

Mr. Cochran’s initial recording did not make much of an impact, but a 1964 cover by J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers became a national hit. The song — which Christopher Cochran said was inspired by a real traffic fatality, though not one that his father was involved in — has proved durable. A Canadian group named Wednesday had a modest hit with it in the 1970s, and Pearl Jam did even better with a version recorded in 1998.

Mr. Cochran, though, veered away from teenage pop and into soul and R&B, developing a high-energy stage act with a band he called the C. C. Riders (the initials stood for Cochran Circuit). With his hair in a pompadour of epic dimensions, he put on a propulsive show that earned him the nickname the White Knight of Soul. He drew comparisons to James Brown.

“Cochran, though, made everything faster, louder; everything was bigger,” The Miami New Times wrote in a 1997 feature about him, “from the size of his carefully coifed ’do to the size of his band. And for white audiences reluctant to venture across the tracks to hear Brown and his black R&B contemporaries, Cochran offered a powerful and impassioned shot of blue-eyed soul.”

Talvin Wayne Cochran was born on May 10, 1939, in Thomaston, Ga. His father, Talvin, worked in a cotton mill, and his mother, the former Mini Lee Starley, was a homemaker. He grew up listening to honky-tonk on the family radio and, with some other local boys, formed his first band, the Blue Cats.

“We’d play around on the weekends on front porches and in people’s living rooms,” he recalled in the 1997 article. He dropped out of school in the ninth grade to pursue music — the story is that his school gave him the choice of either cutting his hair or leaving, and he left.

In any case, by the late 1950s he was in Macon, Ga., where the musical opportunities were more plentiful than in Thomaston. Mr. Cochran formed a band and then relocated to Bossier City, La., to take an extended engagement at a club called Sak’s Boom Boom Room. The band grew, with Mr. Cochran adding horns and changing the name to the C. C. Riders, and the shows grew wilder.

The group toured extensively, especially in the South and Midwest, playing roadhouses and nightclubs, including a place in Muncie, Ind., where a student at Ball State University heard about Mr. Cochran’s frenetic shows. Almost two decades later, in 1982, that student, David Letterman, had Mr. Cochran as a guest on “Late Night,” and Mr. Cochran told the story of how he had hit upon his distinctive look.

“I had been messing with my hair, trying to get what I wanted,” he said. “I really couldn’t figure it out.” Then, at a neighboring club, he saw a group featuring the young Johnny and Edgar Winter, both albinos.

“There was a great thing about their hair,” Mr. Cochran told Mr. Letterman. “Every time the lights over their heads changed colors, their hair changed colors. And I said, ‘Now there’s the color, if I could figure out how to get it.’”

He hired a stylist with a bottle of bleach, but the initial experiment did not go well. “We must have bleached it for two or three days, and it come up strawberry red and then about fell out,” he said. “But we finally got it up platinum, and he teased it up like the old Trojan warriors.”

Mr. Cochran relocated the band to Miami in 1964, and its following grew. He took to leaving the stage and marching right onto the dance floor to sing, his horn section following along.

“We’d be out there in the audience, standing on tables,” he said. “We’d make the whole room part of the show.” Sometimes he would throw bottles and chairs.

Among those who experienced the excitement was Jackie Gleason, who saw Mr. Cochran and the band at the Barn in Miami and had them on “The Jackie Gleason Show” in 1966. Mr. Gleason also wrote the liner notes for the 1967 album “Wayne Cochran!”

“He doesn’t just sing — he explodes,” Mr. Gleason wrote. “He doesn’t perform — he happens. And when he happens, everything in the immediate vicinity vibrates and responds.”

Mr. Cochran’s records were never chart toppers, but they made an impression. His signature song from the mid-’60s, “Goin’ Back to Miami,” was covered by the Blues Brothers, the band led by John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, in 1980.

But he followed the path of many other performers, one that included too many pills, too much alcohol, a dwindling money supply and, ultimately, a reckoning.

“I remember dreading the thought of living another 30 or 40 years,” he said in the 1997 article, speaking of what he was going through in the mid-1970s and early ’80s. “I had this absolute fear of tomorrow. I had had everything. I had gone from nothing to everything and was heading back to nothing.”

He turned to religion, receiving a call to the ministry in 1981 and founding the Voice for Jesus ministries northwest of Miami. His son said that at its peak, the church had about 600 members, though the figure is now down to about 130.

Mr. Cochran may have left performing behind, but his church services were full of music, with him sometimes singing a few lines. In 2009 he even brought former bandmates into the church for a reunion performance.

Mr. Cochran’s first marriage, to Inez Newton in the 1950s, ended in divorce. His second wife, the former Monica Powell, whom he married in the mid-1960s, died in February. In addition to his son, he is survived by a daughter, Cynthia Warford, and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Mr. Cochran said that one reason he was driven away from show business and toward religion was that his destructive habits had fractured his family. The change, he said, repaired the damage.

“Standing up here, praise and worship, every Sunday morning, is my granddaughter and my great-granddaughter,” he told his congregation in an address on the theme of “Believe” last year. “In the sound booth is my son-in-law. My son is here. Isn’t that wonderful?”