The T-Bones - The Midnight Hour / Summertime

Monday’s Cover Version serves up a mystery so obscure even the internet — that all‑knowing oracle of cat videos and half‑remembered facts — shrugs and walks away.

To appreciate the weirdness, you need the T‑Bones origin story. What you have here is an acetate from The T‑Bones — a group famous for being, at various times, (1) not a group, (2) a touring group pretending to be the group, and (3) a different group entirely that later became another group. Simple, really.

The “band” wasn’t a band at all. Liberty Records needed a band. The Wrecking Crew needed a paycheck.  A handshake was exchanged, a name was slapped on the sleeve, and boom: The T‑Bones were “born,” sketched into existence like a cartoon suspect — one circle for a head, one alias for a name, and no questions asked.

Then “No Matter What Shape” became a hit, and Liberty realized they needed actual humans to tour. The Wrecking Crew said, “No way, the cash in the studio is better". And who could argue? In the studio, the air‑conditioning worked, the coffee was free, and nobody asked you to mime along to your own playing in front of teenagers. The T‑Bones “band” existed on paper, but the Wrecking Crew existed on the payroll — and that’s the version history tends to remember. Enter a revolving door of touring musicians, and for the final T-Bones album Joe Frank Carollo, Danny Hamilton, and Tommy Reynolds — the musical equivalent of stunt doubles who eventually take over the whole movie just before they’d reinvent themselves in the ’70s as Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds.  

Fast‑forward to this acetate. It was not released on a 45. It’s not on an album. It’s not on Discogs, Wikipedia, or that one guy on a forum who claims to know everything about obscure ’60s pressings.

And yet here it is, a Liberty acetate with “In the Midnight Hour” and “Summertime,” both performed with the kind of energy that suggests someone in the studio said, “Let’s make this one count, just in case Liberty is listening.” Spoiler: Liberty was not listening.

Did it chart? No. Would it have charted? Also no. Should Liberty have released it anyway? Absolutely — if only to save that one T-Bones completist collector from tearing their hair out.

How many copies were pressed? Hard to say. Could be a handful. Could be one. Could be that Liberty cut it, shrugged, and tossed the rest into a filing cabinet now serving as a planter in someone’s backyard. But I can confirm at least one. And it lives with me, a relic from a band that wasn’t a band, playing songs they never released, on a record no one knew existed.