Dear subscribers and readers, I’m going to have to take a brief hiatus for two reasons. I’m on a strict work deadline and, to compound that, my car was all of a sudden written off for animal damage yesterday and I have to urgently shop for a replacement.
A community of mice has commandeered my car. Life happens and mice rule the world, don’t they? (At least in this animal kingdom where I live.)
I’ll still send out the Untouchable chapters, but other posts may be sparse for the next week or two. Thanks in advance for your understanding.
Luckily, I already had today’s post ready to go. It’s a really fun one, I think.
What if Sonny hadn’t looked so hip when he met Cher?
The big question I pose in this post is, was Cher destined to become a superstar?
Before there was Cher, there was Cheryl Sarkesian of Tarzana, California, who met a guy eleven years her senior in a coffee shop and couldn’t take her eyes off him in his mohair suit and mustard-colored shirt with a white collar. Cher likens it to the moment in West Side Story when Tony met Maria and everyone else disappeared and it was just the two of them standing there staring at one another.
That guy in the hip mohair suit and mustard shirt was Salvatore “Sonny” Bono, a songwriter who’d already had success with “Koko Joe” recorded by Don and Dewey, “Things You Do to Me” recorded by Sam Cooke, and “Needles and Pins” (with Jack Nitzsche) recorded by Jackie DeShannon.
For Cher’s memory of this ‘meet cute,’ watch the video above. She also reveals how and why their marriage fell apart — and why they decided to let bygones be bygones and revive their professional partnership in 1976. It wasn’t just the money.
At the time Cher met him, Sonny was working for ‘Wall of Sound’ uber-producer Phil Spector doing record promotion on the west coast as well as some production, percussion, and whatever else Phil needed.
Would Cher have made it without Sonny, or Sonny without Cher? What if this meet cute hadn’t happened?
It’s a question worth asking, but maybe not so easy to answer.
It gets to the heart of the bigger question of what kind of help people need to ‘make it’ in the music business.
Is talent enough? How about talent combined with persistence? Or is there an element of luck or even destiny involved?
Let’s take a closer look at these two talented and ambitious people who stumbled upon one another in a coffee shop and within a few short years became one of the most famous couples in America and made it to the pinnacle of the mid-sixties music business.1
The Sonny & Cher Origin Story
In the video below from The Sonny & Cher Show broadcast on January 14, 1977, Sonny relates the story behind their very first song, “Baby Don’t Go,” with some help from Cher and music producer and arranger Harold Battiste. The three of them then perform the song for the national TV audience.
This performance is interesting in a number of ways. First, what we get to hear is what could be called their origin story as a musical duo from Sonny’s point of view.
Although the three of them appear to be chatting in a relaxed and spontaneous manner, the reality was the opposite. Sonny was known for scripting everything.
Perhaps this is why Cher was awarded a Golden Globe Award for The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour in 1974, for Best Performance By an Actress in a Television Series – Musical or Comedy. She was a natural in doing scripted comedy and making it appear to be spur-of-the-moment banter, a talent that came to glorious fruition in the film Moonstruck, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress.2
This video is also a superb opportunity to see Sonny and Cher’s chemistry even after their divorce and get a sense of why they were so popular with the American public.
It’s great fun to watch, but in case you don’t have time, here’s the gist of the origin story.
Sonny and Cher were “infamous backup singers” for artists being produced by Phil Spector, including the Crystals, the Ronettes, and the Righteous Brothers. The duo’s last backup gig before hitting it big was the Righteous Brothers’ international #1 hit “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling.’”
Not too shabby as far as experience goes, especially for Sonny. So far you’ve got songwriting, singing, percussion, producing, and record promotion on a number of hit records.
The couple mastered the entire soup-to-nuts hit-making process together by releasing a number of singles under their first moniker as a duo, “Caesar and Cleo.” What’s so smart about this is that they could take a risk and fail because no one associated Caesar and Cleo with their subsequent incarnation as Sonny & Cher.
On top of all this, it’s important to stress that they were learning from some of the top songwriters, producers, and performers in the business at that time. There’s nothing like being able to observe and absorb from the best.
Following their lackluster Caesar and Cleo experience, Sonny and Cher knew that they were ready to take things to the next level and wanted to record a song Sonny had written called “Baby Don’t Go.”
The problem facing them was that they had no money to make this dream a reality. Harold Battiste had agreed to produce for free, but there were no funds left in the kitty to pay for the studio and the engineer.
So they turned to their managers, Charlie and Brian, for help, and what did those “weird” guys do but hock the office typewriter, adding machine, and dictaphone to raise the required $185.
Charlie and Brian must’ve smelled future success coming off these two, and they were proved right. (Let’s hope they got points or a cut.)
The magical musical duo called Sonny & Cher were about to be born with their first single.
Sonny’s original plan was for Cher to sing the song alone, but she was frightened and he offered to sing it with her. It proved to be perhaps the wisest decision they ever made.
A pattern of relating onstage developed with this first song and carried forward into the rest of their career, what I would describe as a back-and-forth in their singing and their onstage patter, accompanied by regular touching, that made it seem like a relaxed and yet exceedingly intimate conversation even with a massive studio audience watching.
I don’t think I’m the only one who felt like a voyeur as these two sang together. It was kind of like a kid watching parents in love who only have eyes for one another. Indeed, at that time, Sonny and Cher were best friends and lovers and soon to be husband and wife.
The song came out in September 1964 on the Reprise label founded by Frank Sinatra.
Cher was only 18 at the time, the perfect age to sing about the challenges of trying to leave the nest and move to the big city when the hometown boyfriend is pleading for her to stay. The perfect voice for the striving new Baby Boomer generation.
The Big Breakthrough
“Baby Don’t Go” was a big hit in Los Angeles and on the West Coast, but not a national and international hit until a year later when it was re-released.
What happened in the meantime to change things?
As Ed Sullivan says in introducing Sonny and Cher on his national TV show on September 26, 1965 (below), Sonny and Cher had “amazed everyone” by releasing two albums and having five songs achieve the Top 50 all at the same time.
One of these songs also succeeded in going all the way to #1 on both sides of the Atlantic — “I Got You Babe.”
Sonny rushed out an album to take advantage of the single’s success, called Look At Us, which likewise surged to the top of the Billboard 200 chart, reaching #2, staying there for eight weeks, and taking the album gold.
What also played a key role in catapulting Sonny & Cher to the top of the charts was a promotional tour that included all of the top-rated TV shows in the U.S. and UK featuring music. Beyond The Ed Sullivan Show, which alone was viewed by an astounding 20 to 30 million people, they appeared on “American Bandstand, Where The Action Is, Hollywood A Go-Go, Hollywood Palace, Hullabaloo, Beat Club, Shindig!, Ready Steady Go!, and Top of the Pops.”3
If you were into popular music at that time, no doubt you saw them and probably more than once. Their songs were ubiquitous on Top 40 radio as well.
Sonny & Cher made only one appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, but in three songs managed to convey their rather unique positioning in the musical firmament — singing about, and embodying in their very own relationship, the tension we all experience between personal aspiration and ambition and the desire for love and intimacy.
As a psychologist, I have to say, ambition and intimacy are the two primary and competing goals of human beings, and this positioning was absolute genius.
The beat goes on, but it don’t come easy
That tension between love and ambition would soon split the couple itself asunder in the early seventies. But not before Sonny & Cher had hits with “The Beat Goes On” in America and “Little Man” in Europe, reaching #6 and #21 respectively on the Billboard Hot 100.
I’d never heard “Little Man” until researching this, and methinks it would’ve been a brilliant submission for Eurovision given it’s more pop-oriented flavor and given that it went Top 10 in Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
And talk about onstage intimacy in this Beat-Club appearance!
Sonny & Cher’s musical partnership would begin to fail in the late sixties with the rise of psychedelic rock, but the couple would continue to be popular and go on to host their own variety shows in the 1970s. Together, they did four seasons of The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour (1971-1974) and two seasons of The Sonny and Cher Show (1976-1977), and during the period following the divorce and before they reconciled, they independently hosted The Sonny Comedy Revue (1974) and Cher (1975-1976).
Thank heavens they reconciled. There was an indisputable magic when they performed together, captured in this medley of “The Beat Goes On” and Ringo Starr’s “It Don’t Come Easy” (1971) on The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour in March 1972.
Maybe it was that they weren’t focused on delivering perfection (like many of today’s over-managed pop stars), but rather on enjoying each individual performance in that particular moment. They made it look fun. And as Cher confirms in the video at the top, it was in fact that fun that ultimately brought them back together as a musical couple.
Finally, to answer the question, would Cher have made it big without Sonny, or Sonny without Cher?
I don’t know that Cher would have made it without the incredible experience Sonny brought in birthing songs and launching them successfully into the world. He was also a promotional genius who jumped on opportunities before they disappeared and then leveraged them for all they were worth. He put Cher on the map in a huge way.
But then I don’t think Sonny would have made it without Cher. She brought not only talent but beauty and that ‘It’ factor. Someone like Cher does not come along that often. He knew it, and he grabbed that golden ring.
Aren’t we glad they both did?
In Sonny’s case he would also make it to the top tiers in politics, becoming the Mayor of Palm Springs and then a member of the U.S. House of Representatives.
You can also see her facility with banter in appearances on various talk shows, such as Late Night with David Letterman (available on YouTube).
Sonny & Cher Wikipedia entry. Accessed September 18, 2025.
No question luck is often as important as talent in 'making it.'
I think Sonny Bono was talented, but I consider Cher an absolute force of nature and I think she would have found a way to the top whether he was involved or not. She has excelled in virtually every entertainment discipline - singer, actor, dancer, all around entertainer. . . And by most accounts I'm aware of, a pretty great human being as well.
'Moonstruck' is one of my favorite movies ever.
When you talk Cher you're talking my language! You do raise an interesting question. I think Sonny was definitely instrumental in getting Cher's name out there. It's hard to say if she would have been able to do it on her own. That said, her mother was a bit of a star having gotten work as a model and even appeared in an episode of I Love Lucy. So, it's certainly possible she would have found a way into show business. She has said her original goal was to act rather than sing but who knows, maybe she would have found her voice as a solo artist.