"Shindig" returns--in stereo! 1964 budget classic!

From 1964, as printed on the labels: Living Guitars Shindig.  Dig the lack of punctuation--no colon, no dash.  Among the budgets, even RCA Camden preferred to save a penny on its keystrokes.  In case we were new to the concept, the back jacket tells us the definition of "shindig": "An 'uproar,' 'row,' or 'rumpus.'"  Really?  And here I thought a shindig was a quiet, somber affair.  Learn something new every day.

I find the foremost couple oddly posed.  It's as if the young man is asking, "Did you have your temperature taken?"  He wants to make sure before he touches her.  Meanwhile, she's looking a bit puzzled.  Otherwise, good budget label pic.  Of course, this is is a major label budget, so we can expect more professional jacket shots than we'd get with SPC or Broadway, though the guitars on the wall are an odd touch.

I first offered this LP--in mono--back in 2020, and unfortunately the original zip is a victim of the great Workupload purge.  And it was one of the many files which failed to transfer to my present PC.

I strongly suspect that the Living Guitars (I wonder if it ever did a Halloween LP and called itself the Dying Guitars?) was purely Al Caiola, multi-tracked à la Les Paul, with top studio pros providing the extra sounds.  But a Google search led me to nothing that either supports or busts my theory, so we'll just have to take my word for it that I'm correct.  And though Caiola was fifteen years older than Elvis (and thus one of the old guard), he rocks more than adequately on these tracks.  He never did anything fancy on these Living Guitar LPs (to generalize from the four or so that I've heard), but you can tell he was a master technician.

"Your favorites are here, set up rhythmically just like the original hits," the notes say.  Songs which "burned up the best-seller charts in the original versions."  That being said, each one of these numbers existed in current (1964) versions.  For instance, in that year Chuck Berry's School Days was covered by The Knights (a Gary Usher group), and Chuck's Maybellene was covered (with some chart success) by Johnny Rivers.  Meanwhile, Hank Thompson did a version of Detour, Lee Curtis and the All-Stars recorded Jezebel, and the 1963 Beatles version of Roll Over Beethoven did big business.  On this LP's shindig version of Roll Over, Caiola perfectly mimics George Harrison's imitation of Berry, which is no surprise, since Al's chops were infinitely above Berry's or the young Harrison's.  (Please send all complaint emails to address provided in my profile.)





DOWNLOAD: Shindig.zip flac