These Twilight Memories pages feature an expanded version of an article that first appeared in Cool & Strange Music Magazine #21 in the summer of 2001.

Article contents ©2004 Michael David Toth and may not be reproduced in whole or in part without express permission of the author.

After settling in at RCA Victor, the label began to beef up their recordings by bringing in arranger Marty Gold, and soon Sid Ramin as well. In simpler, pre-RCA times, the group worked out their own arrangements and performed all the instrumentation themselves. But additional instruments and musicians were added to the mix, with new musicians sometimes covering for the guitar, organ, or accordion parts as well.

Ramin noted, "Al Nevins was a very dear friend. We were inseparable. It was a very special relationship that we had personally, but he wasn't exactly a great guitarist. He was the businessman of the group. He handled all of the details about their contracts and bookings and things like that. But when they recorded (for RCA), they would hire guitarists like George Barnes to play, and it was kind of funny, because George might do something on the recording that people would expect to hear when they heard the group in person. But poor Al…George Barnes was a tough act to follow."

Arranger Marty Gold also played organ on many of the mid-1950s recordings. Casher explains, "Artie Dunn was a great musician, performer, and showman, one of the most talented, best-sounding organists I've ever heard, and I really enjoyed working with him. But Artie could not read music. That meant that they had to have someone cover for Artie on organ parts for the recordings. Artie could play anything once he heard it, but when you're in a recording session, you have to play it immediately."

Ramin commented, "When we'd do the albums with an orchestra, we used the top men in New York, like Phil Kraus on percussion and a lot of other very well-known instrumentalists at that time, as evidenced by the sounds you hear on those albums."

Ramin described how specifically arranging for hi-fi and stereo also contributed to a recording industry climate of projects with off-beat arranging sensibilities. "They wanted what were known as 'ping-pong' arrangements, which would go from one speaker to the other. Out of necessity you had to be quirky and write things you wouldn't normally write, because you had to always keep in mind that what they were looking for was this new fad, for want of a better word, of having sound come from the left and then to the right and then to the left and right. In order to do that, you'd have to break up phrases or do things you ordinarily wouldn't do."

One of the first quirkily percussive orchestral Three Suns hi-fi extravaganzas was the cartoony, Ramin-arranged, misleadingly titled and packaged 1956 monaural LP, Easy Listening. "I think what that quirkiness was was youth. When you're younger, you're eager to try different things and experiment." When RCA was ushering in stereo, Ramin moved on to projects under his own name and Charles Albertine took over as the Suns' primary arranger. Also around this time, a young Don Kirshner was being taken under Al Nevins' wing to form the production team of Nevins-Kirshner Associates and Aldon Music, historically monumental music publishers behind Neil Sedaka and many early 60s girl group hits.

Changes in approach to recording the group over the 1950s and early 1960s propelled the Three Suns into wild, uncharted regions of musical mayhem. From the liner notes to the LP Movin' 'N' Groovin', part of RCA's deluxe, ping-ponging, hyper-stereo "Stereo Action" series:

The musical core of the Three Suns — the familiar guitar, accordion and organ — has been here augmented by an extraordinary assortment of instruments, including jaw bone, wind bells, chains, tapping shoes, harpsichord, ad infinitum — all gliding and sliding in a whirlwind of pattern and a maelstrom of motion, sometimes subtly and variously violent, but always MOVIN' 'N' GROOVIN'.

The liner notes for the song "Danny's Inferno" (a reworking of Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King") from that same album indicated that the Three Suns records were veering into wild territory several planes of reality removed from "Twilight Time:"

In this unusual adaptation by Charles Albertine, the full depth-of-focus effect of Stereo Action is captured. The opening sounds of the "Inferno" — African xylophone, timpani and the jaw bone of an ass — dramatically underscore the rapid-fire ping-pong of the melody, carried by bass accordion on the right and chromatic bongo and bass guitar on the left. The organ answers the melody, with bass guitar punctuation, while the chains of the Damned are dragged back and forth in an almost visual effect. The arrangement returns to the opening Inferno effect, and then the organ breaks into a macabre jazz solo while a frightened-sounding guitar flies back and forth from speaker to speaker. The staging ends with a reprise of the first chorus.

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