Living Guitars Shindig (1964): Al Caiola rocks the digs for citybillies

Living Guitars Shindig.  Dig the lack of punctuation--no colon, no dash.  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.

Actually, maybe the Rock Roll Hall of Hyp... er, Fame got its cue from this cover--the whole guitars-on-the-walls routine.  Of course, these are likely pretend walls (see the gap between the facade and the floor just right of the center model).  The more I study those red walls, the more hilarious they look--especially in the unnatural angle on the left.  What did RCA Camden use?  Classroom poster board?

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 (working at RCA Camden label rates) 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 an expert player.

"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.)

Sorry about that.  Now, the thing is, how to designate this sort of LP?  Is is a fake-hits LP?  In my view, not really.  It's just part of the long-standing pop music industry tradition of covering hit material, and covers made up a huge portion of recorded pop music into the rock era.  Elvis, after all, borrowed much of his material and style from day one, and R&B vocal groups frequently recorded old standards (Blue Moon, Blueberry Hill, The White Cliffs of Dover), and some 1960s groups functioned primarily as cover bands (Kingsmen, Ventures), while the Beatles and Beach Boys did plenty of vintage r&r material (Roll Over Beethoven, Money, Barbara Ann, Why Do Fools Fall in Love)... and so on.  The pop cover tradition didn't become something to mock until about the time rock and roll dropped its "and," and folks like Tony Bennett, Kate Smith, Perry Como, Frankie Carle, Benny Goodman, and Billy Vaughan were covering the Woodstock-era Top 40.  They were simply carrying on a tradition, but suddenly it was hilarious.

Similarly, sound-alikes became a "What the heck are these?" sort of thing once the pop-cover era was just a memory.  Gone was the context that made the tradition make sense, so nowadays our natural first response to a sound-alike collection is, "Somebody bought these things?  Why?"  I imagine these budget cover-the-hits collections seem nearly as odd to many folks.  As in, why buy the Living Guitars, when you can go to YouTube and hear the originals?  Well, what about that, RCA Camden?  Anyway, some very fun stuff here, and in glorious mono.  The light green cover came out dark green, and that's mainly because my scanner produced weird color fluctuations in the green that made the jacket border look like... curtains, basically.  So I had to do a crazy degree of cloning.  The cover is actually pretty shiny, but shiny doesn't always register in scans.  Any cover or label meant to reflect light at an angle--well, forget that when you're laying something flat on a piece of glass.  Anyway, shindig on!!

Can't you just hear Frankie saying that to Annette, right before taking off to catch a rear-screen projected wave?




DOWNLOAD: Living Guitars Shindig (1964)

Lee