Music to ease his grief

Bill Medley isn’t sure what he’ll feel when he steps on stage tonight in Cerritos for his first public performance since the sudden death last month of Bobby Hatfield, his musical partner in the Righteous Brothers for 41 years.

“I probably won’t know until I get out there, and I may get halfway through ‘Lovin’ Feeling’ and discover, ‘No, it really is too soon,’ ” Medley, 63, said Wednesday as he sat in the study of his bayside Newport Beach home. A bust of his hero and vocal role model Ray Charles sits nearby; the walls are decorated with framed copies of Righteous Brothers album covers, the duo’s gold and platinum record sales awards and a smattering of his favorite celebrity photo-op shots, including one of himself with Dick Clark, another a solo shot in bib overalls on the set of “Hee Haw.”

Over the last several weeks, Medley has been slowly coming to terms with the loss of Hatfield, who died Nov. 8 of a heart attack while they were in Kalamazoo, Mich., to start a short concert tour. Medley has even made the decision to keep the Righteous Brothers active in some form, at least long enough to fulfill 12 weeks’ worth of dates in Las Vegas that the pair had committed to before Hatfield’s death.

A phone call earlier this week asking him to fill in for the ill Irene Cara in the annual “Colors of Christmas” holiday revue sped up his timetable considerably.

Medley says that the show’s producer, Stig Edgren, was a little afraid to ask him. “He knew my partner had just passed away, and I was still reeling from that a little bit,” says Medley in his deep, gravelly voice, his usual joviality toned down markedly but not absent entirely. (“Kalamazoo ...,” he says later, with a grim smile and a shake of his head. “Only Bobby would see the humor in that.”)

So with mixed emotions, he accepted Edgren’s offer to hastily join the show, filling in tonight at Cerritos Center and Tuesday in Seattle. “I said yes and thought it probably would be a good thing to get out [on stage] again,” he says, “especially in that circumstance.”

That circumstance is a familiar one for Medley, who did the “Colors of Christmas” show three years ago. He’ll be joining “Colors” stalwart Peabo Bryson and this year’s other rotating cast members, Sheena Easton and Christopher Cross.

“I’ve done a lot of work on my own over the years,” Medley says, “so I won’t exactly be a fish out of water. And this is a good way to do this because I’ve done this show before, I only have to sing three songs and two of those will be duets.”

One will be his 1987 hit “(I’ve Had) the Time of My Life,” in which his 16-year-old daughter McKenna, who’s been doing a show of her own in Vegas this year, will sing the part originally handled by Jennifer Warnes.

The other numbers will be the Righteous Brothers’ two biggest hits: “(You’ve Lost That) Lovin’ Feeling,” the 1964 collaboration with Phil Spector that remains one of pop music’s towering singles, and 1966’s “(You’re My) Soul and Inspiration,” which was as much a vehicle for Medley as “Unchained Melody” was a showcase for Hatfield’s vocal virtuosity.

On “Lovin’ Feeling,” Hatfield’s parts will be sung by either Bryson or the audience. According to Medley, there’s no thought of looking for a new partner. He chuckles and shakes his head at the suggestion. “I could never replace Bobby vocally, I could never replace him emotionally,” he says.

But Medley is assembling a show he envisions as “a celebration of the Righteous Brothers’ music, and Bobby’s life” to fill those Vegas dates next year. His future beyond that, Medley says, “will depend on how these shows go and whether there seems to be a need among fans for me to continue doing it.”

To the best of anyone’s knowledge, Medley says, Hatfield died peacefully in his hotel room the night before their scheduled Kalamazoo performance.

“Absolutely he was doing what he loved, and until the end he lived well and lived life on his own terms,” Medley says. “ A lot of people wanted him to quit smoking, and we would have liked to see that for his health. But he always said, ‘I like to smoke, and I like to have a couple of drinks after a show.’ For some odd reason, I’m one of the people who got that.”

It may not be so odd. As Medley puts it, virtually from the first time they sang together in the late ‘50s, two teenagers with visions of rock stardom fronting separate bands playing Orange County nightclubs. “It was like we were one person with two voices. It was magical.... He was a great lead singer but he was also the greatest harmony singer I’ve ever known.”

The harmony of their working relationship was tested for a while in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. As the duo’s fame began to fade, Medley launched a solo career and charted with the soulful ballad “Brown Eyed Woman” in 1968, while Hatfield tried hiring a new partner to keep the Righteous Brothers act alive.

Neither was a great success, yet Medley says, “That was really good for us. I don’t think we appreciated what the Righteous Brothers meant to people at the time, and that really made it clear we belonged together.”

They reunited in 1974 and recorded “Rock and Roll Heaven,” which became a No. 1 hit, but two years later Medley retired from music for several years after his first wife died, leaving him a single parent with a son, Darrin, now 38.

The time he spent as a full-time dad, he says, gave him a much-needed reality check on his entertainer’s mind-set. But that is something he thinks he and Hatfield never developed in a big way because they remained in Orange County, largely out of the celebrity spotlight during the height of their success.

In 1982, Medley and Hatfield teamed up for a 20th-anniversary Righteous Brothers tour and continued to perform regularly afterward. Earlier this year they were elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 16 years after they became eligible and long after both had given up hope of ever being included.

“That validation really was great for both of us,” Medley says. “We had started thinking maybe we didn’t really do something as significant as we thought we did. But when we got there and people like Sting and Billy Joel and Elton John were telling our kids how much our music meant to them, that was really great.”

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Bill Medley in ‘The Colors of Christmas’

Where: Cerritos Center, 12700 Center Court Drive, Cerritos

When: Tonight, 8

Price: $20-$75

Contact: (800) 300-4345