It’s not as extravagant as it was, but we still play to 500 or 600 people on weekends. “Of course, a lot of the guys have kicked the bucket,” Spencer says. “Jesse’s gone, Richard Berry too, but there are still a few of the Hispanics, and they really like our music. Marvin also had this really beautiful baritone voice, and everybody was into Billy Eckstine then.”
The patented Marvin and Johnny sound was, it seems, partly the result of a lazy, drawling, version of Mr B’s romantic ballads Doo-wop in LA continues to exist, 50 years on. Maybe the sound was because of the accent, or the smog we were breathing.

There weren’t too many DJs, but Hunter Hancock was playing black R&B on the radio and we got into his sound. “They were singing like that at Jefferson High School, Los Angeles High, and Marvin went to Belmont High. We had all of these clubs, like the California Club and the Nightlife Club, and we kind of influenced ourselves. “Jesse Belvin and Richard Berry and those guys were a big influence,” he says. He quit because he was sick of being stabbed in the back and ripped off, not getting his royalties paid and having his songs stolen, so he didn’t want to do anything.

I finally convinced him to come back into the business in 1990.”
As to where the sound came from, Spencer takes a long breath. “Marvin’s old-school,” the impeccably courteous Spencer says “He doesn’t like to do interviews. I can tell you all you want to know.
“I bought the name Marvin and Johnny from him when he quit the business in 1962, and we’ve had quite a few Johnnies since then, including me. When, shortly after the recording, Jesse Belvin was drafted into the army, Marvin Phillips changed the group’s name to Marvin and Johnny, recruited Emory Perry in Belvin’s place, and went on to produce a number of killer singles in the same gooey vein.
This weekend, as if in homage to the notional 50th anniversary of doo-wop, Marvin and Johnny will be in Britain, where they are to headline the Saturday night of a three-day bill at “Rhythm Riot”, a 1950s R&B and rock’n'roll weekend sponsored by Ace Records at the Camber Sands Holiday Centre, Sussex.
Inspired to contact Marvin and find out why West Coast doo-wop sounds as it does, I managed to speak to his nephew and musical director, Rip Spencer, who used to sing with the Valiants and the Alley Cats.

Sung by Marvin Phillips and Jesse Belvin (a hugely important early R&B star who, like Richard Berry – the writer of “Louie Louie” – is unforgivably absent from most rock’n'roll histories), “Dream Girl” is the ne plus ultra of R&B vocals. It’s just two voices, but the slurred syllables and unbelievably slow tempo represent the pinnacle of the West Coast-slacker style. You can hear an affectionate parody of the style in “Cruising With Reuben and the Jets” by the Mothers of Invention, whose Frank Zappa wrote for the Penguins when he was a teenager of East LA’s El Monte (the same nowhere Latino suburb where novelist James Ellroy grew up), participating in the decadence-stage of doo-wop’s late Fifties demise.
Perhaps the greatest of all the LA doo-wop performances, however, is the track “Dream Girl” by the duo of Jesse and Marvin, recorded for Specialty in 1952. Religious and celestial metaphors abound, “A Sunday Kind of Love” by the Harptones; “Heaven and Paradise” by the Meadowlarks; “Earth Angel” by the Penguins.
The latter two belong to what for me is the best of all regional doo-wop styles, that of Los Angeles, where recordings for the Specialty, Modern and Doo-Tone labels gradually evolved into a ridiculously wobbly, often badly out of key, genre of lugubrious teen laments. The purity and youthfulness of the gorgeously congruent voices created its own aesthetic, and some of the best doo-wop songs are the most unworldly.

Although most vocal groups mixed their gooey ballads with generic jump blues modelled after Louis Jordan or Wynonie Harris, doo-wop was not a good medium for the low down and dirty. Unlike the more openly bluesy and rebellious R&B of the time, preoccupied with the more adult subjects epitomised by songs like “One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer,” doo-wop showed a more optimistic and accepting face to the world. It could be 1950, when the Ravens created a new variation of their signature sound on Count Every Star. What’s certain is that by the very early Fifties, vocal groups named after birds (the Crows, the Penguins, the Flamingos, the Robins, the Meadowlarks), or cars (the Cadillacs, the Coupe de Villes, the Lincolns), or music (the Chords, the Dubs, the Cleftones, the Harptones), were everywhere.