Legends

By Scott Martelle / photograph by Geoff Ragatz

The O.C. original who taught George Harrison to bend a guitar note

It’s nearing 9 on a Sunday night and Laguna Beach’s Sandpiper Lounge—the “Dirty Bird” to locals—is about as lively as a crossword puzzle. The light is low, and the noise from busy South Coast Highway seeps through the open front door. A couple of regulars at the bar nurse beers and crack jokes at “Antiques Roadshow” blaring from a wall-mounted TV.

In the side room, separated from the bar by a glass wall, a slightly built man in jeans and a light polo shirt plucks a string on a Gibson ES-335 semi-hollow electric guitar, then uses a small screwdriver to tweak an electronic pickup. He plucks again, and tweaks again, until he’s satisfied. Then, as a final test, he picks out a fast run, fingers flying and notes tumbling, as the guys at the bar stay glued to the TV, oblivious to the band setting up for its regular Sunday night gig.

The guitarist is 68-year-old Barry Rillera, a Filipino-American who grew up in Santa Ana in the 1950s, gigging with brothers Rick, on bass, and Butch, on drums, and eventually backing up a couple of other local guys, Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield, better known as The Righteous Brothers. One thing led to another and Rillera spent most of his professional life as the group’s lead guitarist and, for a time, music director. Whenever the band went on hiatus—which happened often—Rillera signed on elsewhere, touring with Ray Charles for a year and backing Engelbert Humperdinck during another break.

Not a bad claim to fame, but not the stuff of which legends are made. That distinction came during a 1964 charter plane flight, while chatting with an impressed Paul McCartney who was looking for new guitar tricks for fellow Beatle George Harrison.

Rillera’s tuned guitar is nestled into its stand on the Sandpiper’s small stage. He slides into a chair at a corner table to wait for 10 p.m. and the start of his weekly gig with The Heat Band. It’s more fun than work, an ever-shifting lineup of musicians driven to play R&B. No pressure, no playlists, just veteran musicians jamming together.

Rillera has brought a couple of photos with him, old black-and-whites in solid frames. One shows Medley and Hatfield with Harrison and John Lennon, taken when The Righteous Brothers toured with The Beatles in the summer of 1964. The other, taken about four years later, shows Rillera with Ray Charles and his bass player, Edgar Willis. Rillera has more photos at home but he’s proudest of these mementos, especially the shot with Charles, a personal idol from the early ’50s.

As much as he loved Charles, Rillera’s favorite was bluesman B.B. King, and the sharp, raucous music he was creating. “I was fascinated by the guitar sound, the electric guitar—at that time it was not that widely known.” Rillera just had to play, so his father, a music buff who played piano by ear, took Rillera down to the House of Music in Santa Ana.

“I was too small when I first took lessons to play an actual guitar,” Rillera says. “They started me off on the ukulele.” He grew into the guitar fast, though, with King—via recordings—as his personal instructor. “I would put on 78s and learn B.B. King’s solos note for note.”

As a junior high student, Rillera joined his older brother’s band, The Rhythm Rockers. Younger brother Butch eventually joined them on drums. Medley went to school with Rillera, and they let him and another guy, Richard Berry, sing at gigs. One night in 1956, at the Harmony Park Ballroom in Anaheim, Berry heard the Rilleras play a cover of Rene Touzet’s arrangement of “El Loco Cha-Cha,” and a few days later reworked it into the legendary “Louie Louie.” Hatfield swung into the Rilleras’ orbit around then, too, and began singing with Medley. The Righteous Brothers were born.
The focus was on the sweet harmonies of Medley and Hatfield, but the sound was yet another bridge between the soul music and R&B of black culture and the white mainstream. And Rillera brought the arcing note bends of the blues along with it.

“Barry Rillera had a profound effect on the O.C. guitar scene in the early 1960s,” says Richard Smith, curator at the Fullerton Museum and author of “Fender: Sound Heard ’Round the World.” “He played regularly at Disneyland, which gave him terrific exposure. And of course, he played with The Righteous Brothers, who gave him an even wider audience [at a time when] music was still highly regional. Until later, very few guitarists broke through that barrier to have national impact.”

In 1964, as Beatlemania was sweeping the pop world, The Righteous Brothers signed on as an opening act for The Fab Four’s U.S. tour. There were five acts on the tour: The Beatles, Jackie DeShannon, The Exciters, The Bill Black Combo, and The Righteous Brothers. It was a good tour for The Beatles, but not so good for The Righteous Brothers, who quit in frustration just before it ended. All that screaming, all those girls fainting. Nobody could hear Medley and Hatfield’s intricate harmonies. “They just couldn’t take it any more,” Rillera says.

Before they quit, though, Rillera was called upon to play his bit in rock ’n’ roll history.
The bands were aboard a charter plane between cities, and McCartney came looking for Rillera. From backstage at the shows, McCartney and Harrison had heard a striking guitar sound—an unusually broad bend in the notes—from one of the opening acts, and asked around until someone told them they were hearingRillera. McCartney wanted to know the secret. “ ‘We were wondering: Do you think you could show George about that?’ ”

Rillera says McCartney asked him.

Sure, Rillera said, but there wasn’t much to show. The secret was using thin strings instead of the thick ones that were standard at the time. In fact, Rillera advised, if Harrison couldn’t dig up some thin guitar strings, banjo strings would be perfect, a trick Rillera stole from Glen Campbell, then a session guitarist in Los Angeles.

And that was it. A small moment, a brief conversation, a spark of history.

The Heat Band takes the stage just after 10 p.m. A few more people have filtered into the Sandpiper, their loud conversations at the bar carrying over to the empty dance floor. One of the musicians calls out, “Anyone got one?” and Rillera dives into the blues classic “Sick and Tired.” Other songs follow until a friend—the bearish Chris Whynaught—makes his way to the stage and launches into a cover of Son Seals’ “Goin’ Home (Where Women Got Meat on Their Bones).”

Drawn by the beat, a slender woman with long, dark hair skips alone from the bar onto the dance floor and begins a slow, seductive shimmy, her delicate frame a punch line to the outsized Whynaught’s singing lament that “there ain’t a woman in this town big enough to keep me warm.”

Rillera joins that timeless musical conversation, meshing his guitar with the drum and bass to propel Whynaught’s voice and the woman’s hips. The regulars at the bar laugh and carry on, oblivious to the legend in the room next door.

Scott Martelle, a former Los Angeles Times reporter, is an Orange Coast contributing writer.