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.

Accordionist Tony Lovello notes, "Times were changing and the music changed. I recall when we were about to record an album called Let's Dance With The Three Suns, and they were sitting in New York, and I happened to turn on the television, and saw this guy playing. So I called up Artie, and he said, 'I know, I'm watching the Ed Sullivan Show myself.' I said, 'Artie, let's go in and change the style of what we're doing.' He said, 'No, the Three Suns are salt and pepper, they're a household name. This will be going out in a month or two.' This guy's name was Elvis Presley."

As the studio recording arm was evolving, so was Artie's live group, despite a resistance to change indicated in the above story. Lovello explains, "We put a combination of dance music and a floor show together. The Three Suns before were more or less playing the lazy 'businessman's bounce' style, standing on the stage more or less duplicating what they recorded.

"The style drastically changed when I joined them. They had no show and there was no flash. We would jump in the air and hit the last chords, stuff of that nature. And the lineup of the show was different. They would come out and play something like 'Hindustan,' which went nowhere and didn't do anything, and I came out and I was playing things like 'Cumana' with a lot of flash and bellows-shake, and 'Caravan' and 'Tiger Rag,' and in the middle played some of the Three Suns recordings, which you had to. Accordionists were mainly playing things that were in the accordion style brought over from the old country, being 'Nola,' 'Dizzy Fingers,' and mostly polkas. This was all they knew, and hit a wall after that. I wasn't going to play any of that, because I was embarrassed when I'd go to school and everybody would call me a polka king."

Casher similarly brought a serious level of experimentation to the live guitar performances. "Artie was instrumental in getting me to create more sounds off the guitar, which included the Ecco-Fonic, a tape-delay (reverb) device which I was helping to design. When performing live, most groups could not get the slap-back echo, because we didn't have echo chambers and couldn't do live what we could do on the record. But I had the Ecco-Fonic, so that when I'd go out and perform the guitar solos that were on the record, When we went to Japan, I'd stick this little box behind my guitar amplifier. When I would come out and do a solo, I'd start out with no echo, and then hit a foot switch and this 'echo chamber' would come on, and the audience would just gasp. A hush would come over the audience like, 'My God, where is this all coming from?' That was the fun part about working with the Three Suns: Artie gave me a lot of opportunity to experiment with sounds live on-stage. We had no drums with the Three Suns live, but on the records, we had bongos and sounds done by percussionists. So when we did 'Jungle Drums,' I made my guitar sound like jungle drums and bongos."

Casher joined the Three Suns after seeing them perform in 1958 at the Coconut Grove in southern California. He recalls, "They were breaking in a guitar player to join the Three Suns and they were trying to get through a show, but it was going rough for the guitar player because he didn't know the Three Suns material. My brother was an accordion player, so I'd known about every accordion record that had ever been put out, so the Three Suns were second knowledge to me since I was about five years old." After approaching Artie Dunn during the band's set break and lining up an audition, Del was quickly hired. He began a tour that included a stay in Las Vegas and a 1959 trip to Japan to support a chart-topping album on which Del performed called The Three Suns In Japan recorded in New York by RCA exclusively for the Japanese market.
 

      >>> ON TO PART 5 — THE MANHATTAN PROJECTS; CONCLUSION

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