Bass player from Tucson 1960s band Dearly Beloved dies

Walter “Shep” Cooke, the bass player for one of Tucson’s most promising 1960s bands and a member of Linda Ronstadt’s Stone Poneys band that launched her national career, died early Monday, Nov. 7, at his Tucson home.

Cooke died from complications of throat cancer just weeks after he elected to stop treatments and go into home hospice, said his longtime friend and roommate Stephen “Sandy” Laemmel. Cooke was 76.

“He was one in a million really,” said Laemmel, a former drummer who had known Cooke for 50 years and had been his roommate for the last 20. “He was kind of a private guy. I think that his time in the limelight was a big part of his persona, but it wasn’t something he needed.”

Cooke is perhaps best known for playing bass in The Dearly Beloved, the 1960s Tucson band that was on the verge of a national breakthrough when their lead singer was killed in a car accident outside Yuma in 1967.

Cooke was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Tucson, graduating from Catalina High School in 1964. He studied art at the University of Arizona as a way to avoid being drafted, according to the bio he penned on his website (shepcook.com).

He joined The Dearly Beloved in 1965, just as the band was starting to make a name for itself regionally and was on the verge of signing a national recording contract.

“Shep was, in my opinion, easily the best musician in the band,” said Dearly Beloved founder and guitarist Terry Lee. “I think he was one of the best players in one of the best bands. ... He was just the kind of torchbearer of the music of the 1960s.”

After the death of the band’s lead singer, Larry Cox, Cooke went on to record and tour with Ronstadt, who had been trying to get him to join her band for a couple of years.

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“I became probably the only person ever to turn down an offer from Linda Ronstadt TWICE and STILL get hired,” he wrote in his online bio.

Cooke was only with Stone Poneys for several months, touring the country and appearing on a pair of national TV shows, before he left “a little disillusioned about ‘the big time,’” he wrote.

He spent much of the 1970s and ‘80s as a session musician, bouncing between Los Angeles and Tucson, where he lived in the same midtown house where he grew up. He played in a few Tucson bands including with Bobby Kimmel in the short-lived but successful trio the Floating House Band, and had a solid solo career that included playing shows at LA’s famous McCabe’s Guitar Shop.

Cooke’s longtime manager and producer Mark “Jeff” Reed digitized a series of cassette recordings from those McCabe’s performances and released “Live at McCabe’s” in 2014. Two years later, Reed produced Cooke’s final solo release, “Everyday Hero.”

Cooke sold his guitars and stopped performing more than a dozen years ago, when his hearing started to fail him. He supplemented his retirement by working part time as a school crossing guard with Tucson Unified School District, where he worked for more than a decade.

“He had a 1972 Toyota Corolla that he would have parked at the corner. It had flames on the front of it with passengers that were dummies that would ride with him in the car,” Reed recalled. “He would pass out his CDs to the kids and other people he would meet at the cross walk.”

Cooke was an only child and has no survivors. Laemmel said there are no services planned.