Listen: Don’t Ha Ha / Casey Jones & The Governors CaseyJonesHaHa.mp3

Casey (real name Duncan) Jones left Liverpool for London stumbling around with rotating-door lineups that included Eric Clapton and Tom McGuinness in his band The Engineers. Like a few before them, off to Germany they went. Why I’m not sure. I always thought England was the happening place in the 60′s. It was in Hamburg that Casey Jones & The Governors formed and had some success as a live band, basically reinventing RnR standards of the day with a Beat Goup twist.

I picked this up in one of those 39¢ bins of flop 45′s at a Two Guys Department Store near the Thruway in Syracuse back in ’74. It was a treasure trove, predominantly loads of Philips/Smash/Mercury/Fontana titles, for some reason.

Listen once and you’ll hear that it’s Huey Piano Smith’s ‘Don’t You Just Know It’. Smith is credited as writer and the title switch fooled me into thinking it was an original for years.