Cathy young and the innocents

When she was fifteen years old, she and her mother happened to be attending The Wink Martindale Show , a daily dance program in Los Angeles. As luck would have it, a local trio called The Innocents was performing their current hit, "Honest I Do," on the show. Afterward, when Kathy approached the group to congratulate them, she mentioned that she was a singer.

Jim Lee, the Innocents' manager, as well as the owner of their record label, took one look at the photogenic teenager and invited her to come to his studio the following week for an audition. When Kathy showed up with her mother at Lee's Indigo Records office at Barham Boulevard in Hollywood near Burbank , she sang one of her favorite songs, "A Thousand Stars," which had originally been written and recorded six years earlier by The Rivileers, a black vocal group from Queens, New York.

Kathy gave a rousing performance, but Jim Lee thought something was missing. She needed a background group to fill out her sound. And he had one: The Innocents.

Cathy young singer

The Innocents, who would eventually sing under their own name or behind someone else on almost a third of the 50 Indigo singles that Jim Lee released from to late , were Al Candelaria, guitarist Darron Stankey and Jim West, three young guys from the San Fernando Valley. They had an unusual blend of three voices harmonizing slightly off-key, backed by a reverb-heavy guitar.

They had begun as a quartet, The Echoes, for the Andex label, but after the company folded in , one of the members quit and the remaining trio renamed themselves after their car club, The Innocents. But the demands of heavy record sales had a way of sinking tiny, undercapitalized labels, and by Indigo folded.