The 1960s

Cher first met Sonny Bono in a Los Angeles coffee shop in November 1962, when she was sixteen. Sonny was already twenty-seven and working for record producer Phil Spector at Gold Star Studios in Hollywood. The two became fast friends, eventual lovers, and later, husband and wife. Through Sonny, Cher (as she was called early on for short) eventually got to sing back-up on several of Spector’s classic recordings, including the monumental Be My Baby by the Ronettes.

With Sonny continuing to write, arrange and produce the songs, Sonny and Cher’s first incarnation was as the duo Caesar and Cleo. They received little attention. They later re-emerged as Sonny and Cher, and released their first album Look at Us in the summer of 1965. This album contained the overnight smash and eventual number-one single I Got You Babe (1965). Cher was nineteen years old. Several more top forty hits would follow, most famously Baby, Don’t Go and The Beat Goes On.

The two became a quick sensation, travelling and performing around the world. Periodic solo releases continued during the Sonny & Cher days, including a major success with Bang Bang for Cher in 1966. They did become briefly controversial in Los Angeles for siding with the young people being harassed on the Sunset Strip; as a result, they were removed from their promised position of honor in the Tournament of Roses Parade in January of 1967.

In an attempt to capitalize on the duo’s success, Sonny penned their first feature film (themed similarly to The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine) Good Times in 1967, in which the duo starred. The film was a flop.

Sonny and Cher's career had stalled by 1968, as album sales quickly dried up. Their gentle, easy-listening pop sound and drug-free life had become unpopular in an era becoming increasingly consumed with the psychedelic rock that came with the overall evolutionary change in the landscape of American pop culture during the late 1960s.

Sonny and Cher also welcomed their first child, Chastity Bono, born on March 4, 1969. The duo made another unsuccessful foray into film later in 1969 with Bono writing and producing the film Chastity, intended as a dramatic debut for Cher as an actress. That film (directed by first and only-time director Alessio De Paulo) was also a commercial failure.