Average Rating: (4 out of 5 stars)
This Album conjures up visions of mini-skirts and go-go boot
This is a two-album collection of vinyl recordings from Capitol in 1966. I originally purchased one of them in 1966 because they were by David McCallum and I was curious. I purchased the second one because the first one was so good. For those of you not around or too young in 1966, suffice it to say that there were volumes of music produced that did not originate from the “Fab Four.” With the exception of “Michelle and Yesterday,” these albums are a good cross section of the “other” sixties music but with a different slant. Actor David McCallum of “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” TV fame in the early sixties was schooled as a musician and came from a musical household. The songs on this album are his arrangements of pop-rock tunes of the era, but are not the schmaltzy elevator music, at least not the garden variety of elevator music. McCallum’s arrangements are not truly orchestral, in that there are no “legitimate” strings in the orchestral sense; rather, an electric guitar and bass represent the strings, while the woodwinds are represented by a sax section anchored by a rocking baritone that lays down a great bass in many of the numbers. Additionally, the English Horn (an oboe on steroids) is used as a frequent solo instrument, although it isn’t clear whether McCallum is the soloist. At any rate the English Horn takes on several persona from melodic soloist to almost a polyphonic clone of the bagpipes. McCallum covers the gamut from Len Barry’s 1-2-3, to the Stone’s “Satisfaction” and Ramsey Lewis’ “The ‘In Crowd”’ with a wall of symphonic sound that is more of a Concert Band sound than an Orchestral one omitting the string section but retaining the orchestral brass. As with the tunes of the era, where 45-rpm records dictated song length, most of the 24 tunes on this CD are short… but that isn’t a fault. This is a fun album which makes old men remember when Pet Clark was a youngish mid-30’s sex-pot to the teen-aged men of the era… strange? You had to be there. Four stars
Submitted by John (Manteca, CA)
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