Few people in pop music spanned such a range as Kim Fowley, the record producer, songwriter and Sunset Strip svengali who has died aged 75. In a career lasting almost 60 years, Fowley created B. Bumble and the Stingers and the pioneering all-female hard-rock band the Runaways, produced artists from Gene Vincent to the Seekers and the Soft Machine to Helen Reddy, sang with the Mothers of Invention and made radio programmes with Miami Steve Van Zandt, and could claim to be on familiar terms with just about everyone who counted in the music business.
Back in 1965, Bob Dylan told him to become an artist himself, and to make his own records. It was something he tried many times over the years, with a commercial failure so consistent that he came to accept his role as a backroom boy – albeit an unusually colourful and highly visible one: he was 1.96 metres (6ft 5in) tall, with a compelling gaze from eyes described by the critic Barney Hoskyns as “dead blue marble”. He belonged to a generation of highly intelligent and gifted but temperamentally unorthodox 1960s people who fell in love with pop music and used it as their canvas.
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