The Cheater – a song that foretold the story of the man who sang it

Bob Kuban formed a band with university students and they scored an unlikely hit – and it spoke of scenes yet to be played out.

One-hit wonders Bob Kuban and the In-Men. Kuban is on drums; Walter Scott in kneeling in the foreground. Picture: supplied

Bob Kuban and the In-Men’s blue-eyed soul classic The Cheater was one of the most distinctive hits of 1966. The band was made up of drummer Kuban, a music teacher, and some of his former high school students. When their hit went national the boys, mostly at university, were unable to tour outside Missouri as they risked losing their exemption from national service.

They did appear on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand and ever so briefly felt like rock stars. But a proposed nine-date tour of Australia, where The Cheater was particularly popular, had to be scrapped.

Singer Walter Scott’s powerful vocal and a punchy brass section made the song unforgettable. Almost everyone of a certain age remembers the line: “Look out for the Cheater! He’s gonna build you up just to let you down!”

When some 1960s acts were reforming in the early ’80s, Kuban contacted Scott and suggested they get back together for the tour denied them 17 years earlier. They rehearsed the band and planned some dates locally, then things fell apart – pretty much following the script of The Cheater.

Scott was handsome and his constant touring as a solo act gave him plenty of opportunity for philandering. It cost him his first marriage, and his second was in trouble.

About the same time, a St Louis woman, Sharon Williams, was seriously hurt in an odd, low-speed car accident. She was put on life support but her husband instructed the doctors to turn it off.

Two days after Christmas in 1983, Scott’s car was found at St Louis International Airport, but there was no evidence he had taken a flight. His wife, Joanne, reported him missing, mentioning to police that her husband was involved with drugs and criminal types.

Not long after, she married Jim Williams, an electrician Walter Scott had employed to do some work on his house. Williams had recently been widowed. His wife had been in that car crash.

When a new medical examiner, Mary Case, was appointed in St Louis, she decided to reopen files on deaths she thought unusual. She had Sharon Williams’s body exhumed and determined that the woman had been bashed to death.

Case then looked into Scott’s disappearance. Police interviewed the Williamses’ son, James, who was in jail on drugs charges. He recalled his father working on a concrete flower box. Police removed it and opened the cistern below. Walter Scott was there. He had been bound and shot in the chest.

The Cheater had been cheated on and cheated out of life, and a double murder was solved.

Kuban’s band released a few singles that were popular in the St Louis area and three times grazed the Billboard chart, the last time with a remake of the Beatles’ Drive My Car. When the In-Men gave it away Kuban formed another popular band and played in and around St Louis for the rest of his life.

Kuban was born on August 19, 1940, to Dorothy (Shaffer) Kuban, a secretary, and Marion Kuban, a milkman. It was rock pioneer Chuck Berry, St Louis’s favourite son, who turned Kuban on to drums. Before Berry became world famous he sometimes played at local schools. He visited Kuban’s and asked if there were any drummers among them. The other boys dobbed in Kuban and he sat nervously behind the kit and played along with the star for 10 minutes. Berry said he thought Kuban had done well and asked how long he had been playing drums: “Ten minutes,” young Kuban said.

Kuban was inspired after seeing the Ike and Tina Turner Revue, which included Ike Turner’s original band, the Kings of Rhythm. He told a reporter decades later that he had planned “to get a band like Ike’s with the horns and be a recording artist some day”.

Across the years Kuban shared stages with the Drifters, the Beach Boys, the Turtles, the Temptations, the Four Tops and the Righteous Brothers. His band often played before St Louis Cardinals baseball games and performed in the city’s parks over summer playing golden oldies and his original music.

Kuban was happy to be known as a one-hit wonder and often would say that many bands were no-hit wonders. The Cheater was finally inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

When Jim Williams died in jail in 2012, Kuban called his old friend’s mother, then aged 88, to tell her the news.

Robert “Bob” Kuban. Musician. Born St Louis, Missouri, August 19, 1940. Died January 20, aged 84.