Guitar Great, Al Casey, Is Gone!

Phoenix-bred guitarist Al Casey, who died this week at age 69, helped put the city on the pop-music map.

Casey left his mark on recordings by fellow Arizonan
Duane Eddy, the Beach Boys, Monkees, Frank and Nancy Sinatra,
Glen Campbell, Ella Fitzgerald and scores of other stars.

He teamed with Eddy to create the twangy, echoing guitar sound
that would evolve into surf music in the late '50s.

But the ultimate compliment might come from Casey's best friend
and longtime collaborator, Sanford Clark of Mayer, who simply says,
"Al was just a good picker.

He could go into the studio and figure out a lot of good sounds."

Casey concocted the funky riff on Nancy Sinatra's These Boots Are
Made For Walkin', played on Campbell's 'By the Time I Get to Phoenix'
and the Beach Boys' 'Good Vibrations'.

Casey, who was inducted into the Arizona Music and Entertainment Hall
of Fame in 2005, was placed in a Phoenix nursing home a few weeks ago
with kidney and lung problems. He died Sunday.

Dionne Hauke, owner of Ziggy's Music shop in Phoenix, is organizing
a wake for Casey on Saturday from noon to 5 p.m. at the Musicians Local
586 hall, 1202 E. Oak St., Phoenix.

"It's open to the public, all his friends and students. We'll have a
video camera set up for people to tell their 'Al stories,' " Hauke
says.

He was a member of the studio group that recorded the songs that the
Monkees pretended to play on TV in the '60s, backed up Elvis Presley
on his televised 1968 comeback and picked on 'Everybody's Talkin',
from the film Midnight Cowboy.

John P. Dixon, longtime Valley music historian, said Casey was the
"go-to guitar guy" on dozens of records that came out of Phoenix,
starting in the late '50s and, later, Los Angeles.

"He was there at the beginning, even in 1955 with the Sunset Riders,
a band . . . that played on a TV show called The Arizona Hayride that
was broadcast all over Phoenix," Dixon said.

It was Casey's association with writer-producer Lee Hazlewood that
launched his recording career.

Hazlewood had penned a song with country radio in mind called 'The
Fool'.

Casey came up with a bluesy guitar riff and introduced the producer
to singer Clark.

"It was intended to be country but it went rock," Clark recalls,
hitting No. 9 on the national charts and selling 750,000 copies.

That song, plus the guitar sound that Casey and Coolidge's Eddy
created - "I call it the twang heard round the world," Dixon says -
helped put Phoenix on the pop-music map.

Guitar instrumental hits like Eddy's 'Rebel Rouser', 'Forty Miles
of Bad Road' and 'Ramrod', all featuring Casey playing, had a
unique sound that later would be capitalized on by surf groups
like Seattle's Ventures.

"We were in the desert, and we gave birth to that surf sound," says
Keri "Miss Holley King" Plezia, who often plays Casey's work on her
rockabilly-music shows on KBSZ (1250 AM) and Internet station
www.radiofreephoenix.com.

"From lounge to rockabilly to surf, this guy did it all, from 1955
up to this year."

From: The Arizona Republic
By: Larry Rogers