Pete Fountain And The Kings Of Dixieland
1964 Crown Records CST-537 Stereo / CLP-5537 Mono
Side One
1. Bugle Call Rag
2. Somebody Stole My Gal
3. Careless Love
4. Wait Till The Sun Shines Nellie
5. Thunder & Blazes
Side Two
1. Shine On Harvest Moon
2. Lassa's Trombone
3. Washington Post March
4. My Old Kentucky Home
5. Dixieland Blues Liner Notes:
Through the formative years of his musical training, Pete Fountain performed with several sensational bands. One such band was the Junior Dixieland Band which performed in the famous Parisian Room - often performing for legendary jazz men. It was a heady time of life and Pete was savoring every moment. A few years later Pete joined Phil Zito's International Dixieland Express. They were playing the El Morocco on the street. He also played with Sonny Bonano and the Kings of Dixieland where this material originated. The music on this album is good, the recordings are well done. However the quality of the record vinyl is poor, sounding worn out, even though my copy was new when I listened to it. Surface noise was high, the records had no protective liner jacket. Still I enjoyed listening to material.
About Crown Records
Crown Records was a budget label for the Bahari Brothers, who ran Modern and RPM labels. It started in 1957 and continued for about a dozen years, earning itself the reputation of the king of the junk record labels. Aside from endlessly reissuing the legitimate hits that were on Modern and RPM, and the B.B. King material, what Crown had to offer was musical junk food on plastic plates. The covers and the vinyl were cheaply made, fell apart almost instantly, and the records sounded worn out right out of the package. Crown was much too cheap to issue special promotional copies; in fact, it's doubtful they ever gave away promotional copies, special labels or not.
The one nod to class was that early stereo albums were often issued in red vinyl. The stereo numbering did not correspond to the mono numbering for about the first 250 albums.
The first Crown label was black with silver print. This was replaced in the early 1960s by a black label with the logo in block multi-color letters. By the mid-1960s, the same design was used, but the label had changed to grey with black printing, discarding the colors in the logo. Later in the 1960s, a logo with stylized "CROWN" lettering and a three-pointed crown above was used, again in grey with black print. In the very late 1960s, the label became black with white print, with "CROWN RECORDS" curving around the top of the label and a stylized script logo beneath it.
