Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps - Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps

I've probably mentioned that my mom and her interest in the teenage Rock N' Roll of the fifties have always had a big influence on me, but if I haven't then let me take this opportunity.  Mom has told me the story of her cutting school and driving to another town along the lake where she grew up, and listening to Chuck Berry's Maybelline all day.  That sounds like a pretty perfect day to me, and it pretty much always has.  Mom loved Buddy Holly and Elvis, too.  I'll bet you she really didn't know this version of Gene Vincent, because I don't think he really hit it big until he mellowed out and dropped The Blue Caps.  I don't think the American kids were as interested in Gene Vincent as the British kids were (and when I say British kids, I mean the ones that were in bands).

So i really didn't know much about Gene Vincent's earlier Rockabilly stuff until I was older.  I know I bought this on cd long before I bought it on a record.  But look at that cover!  You know this record is gonna really kill it just looking at it.  These guys might have been the tightest little group on the circuit back then.  The best thing bout these guys is they knew they were killing it, and they were just having fun.  The off mike whoops and hollering on a song like Pink Thunderbird are the kind of visceral shot that pretty much always piques my interest, and the whole sound of this record in general just shines the tiniest light on the fact that even in 1957 there was Rock N' Roll that was nothing but fun, and still there wasn't quite enough room for it in most people's collections.

Now, I'm not saying that Gene Vincent was some underground darling like say, The Hold Steady or something, but in a time when big chart impact every time meant a lot towards getting another shot at making another single, let alone a whole album.  Gene and the Blue Caps must have done something right though, because Capitol has had his thing in print in one form or another for a lot of years.  I don't think there's a lot of the under 30 crowd ordering these (hell, I'm just over 50 and this is twenty years before my time), but I think the people that hear this record immediately think, "Holy shit!  These guys were great!"  I think that's a really cool thing.  To leave something behind from an era defined by the true original Rock N' Roll heavyweights and have some dude with a barely noticed blog on the internet say something like, "Hey - didya ever hear Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps?  If not, you really should fix that!"  I think that's cool.

Like I said before, I've got this on cd (with bonus tracks), but I usually listen to my Capitol Records reissue.  It's flat and sounds mostly pretty good considering the era.  Capitol is pretty cool about not adding dumb things like bar codes to the cover, too.  I mean, this looks a lot like the ones you would have bought in 1957 (if you had the bread to buy an lp!).  I think it's really cool that Capitol chose to rerelease this.  I'm sure they didn't sell 100,000 of these, so my hat's really off to them.