John “Bowzer” Bauman, formerly of Sha Na Na, signs autographs for representatives Charlene Lima, left, Anastasia Williams, right, and Joanne Giannini, back right, at the State House in February.

The Providence Journal / Connie Grosch

The Truth in Music Advertising Act, a bill that seeks to ensure that musical groups using a famous name are connected to the people who contributed to that legend, passed the General Assembly last week as part of the last-minute crush of bills that typifies the end of the legislative year.

The bill requires that the people who are going to perform a particular show — “the performing group” — include at least one person who appears on a record made by the group, or that the performing group hold a federal service mark to the name. The bill empowers the attorney general’s office to stop a show by a fraudulent group, and assess penalties of $5,000 to $15,000 to presenters and promoters who violate the act.

Proponents say that they don’t expect the attorney general’s office to investigate potential violations on their own; practically speaking, they say, the bill gives listeners an avenue to complain to the attorney general’s office, who would then be on the lookout for fraudulent performances by the same group or promoter in the future.

“We think this is a good bill,” says Michael Healey, of Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch’s office. “We don’t see any downside to it.”

The enforcement responsibilities under the bill aren’t a burden, Healey says — if they were, “we would have piped up in the legislative process and said, ‘Hey, don’t give us an unfunded mandate.’ ”

When the bill was introduced in the General Assembly in February, the sponsors, Rep. Peter John Petrarca, D-Lincoln, and Sen. John J. Tassoni Jr., D-Smithfield, were joined by Jon “Bowzer” Bauman, formerly of the doo-wop revival group Sha Na Na, to introduce the act in the House and Senate.

“That’s wonderful news,” Bauman said yesterday at hearing of the bill’s passage.

Bauman, chair of the Truth in Music Committee of the Vocal Group Hall of Fame, predicts the bill will have passed in 27 states by the end of the legislative year. Now that Rhode Island has passed the bill, the entire Northeast is covered “from Maine through Virginia.”

Doo-wop music has been most plagued with the problem of phony groups, mainly because the music was recorded long ago, the recording and management contracts were not always fair and because the groups, many of whom were black, didn’t get their faces on posters and album covers.

Bauman regularly brings up groups such as The Coasters, The Drifters and The Platters, who have been besieged over the years by problems with performers and promoters putting on shows billed as those groups without legal rights to the name. Often, Bauman says, “a 14th cousin” of a group member will give permission to use a name he never really owned.

The music is particularly popular in the region and in Rhode Island, Bauman says, calling Rhode Island “an important cog in the Northeast,” and saying that phony groups have been a historic problem in our state but one that has recently been alleviated as the bill has passed in an increasing number of states.

Bauman claims that “the impostor business” has dropped about 90 percent since last year, which he calls a pivotal one for getting the bill passed.

“There seem to be a lot of problems going on in Impostorland, which was the object of the bill. [And] the real guys are working more.”

The movement for the bill began with Dale Abbott, of Lincoln, an oldies DJ on Woonsocket’s WOON-1240 AM.

Abbott says he had gone to a show in North Kingstown in the early ’90s by an oldies group and recognized none of the members. He spoke to the lead singer, who said that none of the members had appeared on any of the group’s records, but that they had bought the rights to the name.

Abbott wouldn’t identify the group or the promoter. Asked how much of a problem this was in Rhode Island, Abbott said, “There are local promoters who have brought groups in who aren’t real. … On more than one occasion.”

Recently, Abbott had Bauman as a guest on his show, and they discussed the issue. Bauman suggested introducing a Truth in Music Act in Rhode Island, and Abbott did.

“You take your wife out, and you spend 50, 60 bucks, even 100 bucks, to see a show,” Abbott says, “and you’re seeing people who didn’t really sing the song. You could go see (local groups) Reminisce or King’s Row for 15, 20 dollars, and listen to them sing the song. And they can do it just as well as the impostors.”

Harvey Robbins, a promoter who puts on a doo-wop show roughly annually at the Providence Performing Arts Center, calls the Truth in Music Advertising Act “a waste-of-time piece of legislation motivated by hypocrisy and self-promotion.”

Robbins, who is based in Boston and runs the Doo-Wopp Hall of Fame, says that that the bill won’t affect him — that groups he promotes with the original names are the original groups, and that his tribute acts are clearly labeled as such. But the “original” tag, he says, confers an imprimatur on a group that may not be better than a tribute, or a stigma on a good tribute.

“Everybody talks about who’s original, who’s not original, and it’s created a suspicion about the whole art form,” he says. He mentions the examples of Artie Shaw’s band or Guy Lombardo’s Royal Canadians. “None of them are original and nobody says anything. . . .

“The people in the audience — this may sound unpopular, but they don’t care. They do not care. Because they’re there to see the performance of these songs. . . . The audience wants to see and experience this music. They didn’t know who the originals were when they made the records, they didn’t know who the members were by name; they didn’t recognize them by face. It’s not like Bobby Rydell and people like that, who they knew as an individual.”

Sometimes, Robbins adds, the original members aren’t as much a part of the show as people would like to think. He warns that some original groups’ performances contain only cameo appearances by the original members.

To Bauman, however, that’s not the issue. “Are we saying here that people don’t matter? Any name that you can glom yourself onto is fine?”

He calls Robbins’ arguments “legally absurd, ethically absurd, morally absurd, and just plain with-a-capital-A absurd.” He says that the muddled playing field makes it more, not less, important that the real groups be entitled to use their names.

“Either they’re authentic or they’re not. If they’re a very good group doing the songs of another group, there’s certainly nothing wrong with that, but they need to tell the public that they’re really not that group. . . . If you have a very good show that performs the music of that era, then call it what it is, which is a tribute to those groups, advertise it properly, and no one’s saying you can’t perform.”

Of course, it’s possible for someone to hold a legal right to a group name that they don’t artistically deserve, Bauman says, and there’s nothing to be done about that. “In some cases, the holder of a valid trademark is completely the wrong people.”

In any case, even if Gov. Carcieri signs the Truth in Music Act (spokesman Jeff Neal wouldn’t comment until it reached the governor’s desk; Tassoni is “optimistic” that the Assembly will pass it on soon), audiences need to do a little research about the provenance of the group they are considering paying to see — much like an antiques buyer needs to do some homework before shelling out for something “priceless.”

Bauman agrees, and uses himself as an example. He left Sha Na Na in 1983, and performs as part of his own show, Bowzer’s Rock ’n’ Roll Party. “If they go see Sha Na Na, I won’t be there. People need to educate themselves to the point where they know that that’s the case. But that doesn’t make the three guys who are still there not the owners of the name Sha Na Na. . . .

“It’s not a perfect world, and we can’t stop people from dying, or retiring, or losing their voices sometimes. [But] this practice has been unconscionable the entire time.”

Carl Gardner, the original lead singer of The Coasters, said yesterday from Florida that the passage of the bill was “great. I’m in favor of it, sure,” and that he and the group (his son now sings lead) had seen an increase of work in recent years. “Most definitely. They made me very angry.”

“[Phony groups] were taking a lot of phony business in places I wanted to go. . . . We worked very hard all of our lives, and I didn’t get paid like I should have gotten paid in the era, and it’s still not happening like I’d like it to happen.”

“That’s great!,” exclaimed Herb Reed, the original bass singer of The Platters, when told about the bill. Reed, of Arlington, Mass., says that it’s hard for older artists “who are still out here trying to make a living” to compete against their own legends — a group billed as The Platters who are made up of “four people, calls them The Platters, gives ’em each about a hundred dollars, puts the rest in his pocket and he sells the group for nothing. You can’t survive with a first-class group with that kind of money.”

He says he hasn’t seen a lot of results from the laws yet, though. The act was passed in Nevada, for example, but “They’re still working in Vegas, those phony [groups] are.”

Reed agrees that the public is the front line of enforcement, and that listeners need to know what they’re going to see. “The public are the ones who can stop it, because they can stop supporting them.”

rmassimo@projo.com