What is Ben Stiller’s dad doing on an album cover? Great question.

That’s John Adomono, and to make a long story short he was a Hawaiian lounge act in the mid-20th century. Adomono played unaccompanied with lots of reverb, resulting in a sound that’s somewhere between Roy Clark and Dick Dale.  Roy and Dick are two of my favorite guitarists, so that’s saying something.

You can catch a bit of Adomono’s A Night at the Beachcomber lounge act on Youtube:

Not too shabby, right? Whether Adomono ever gets the credit he deserves remains to be seen, but you can pick up some cuts on iTunes now so at least he’s one step closer to being saved from oblivion.

Gypsy is yet another album in my stacks that’s worth a quarter to the guy who doesn’t know what he’s looking at and maybe ten bucks to the guy who does. None of Adomono’s records could have had a very big run, so finding them in the wild might be a challenge. They pop online now and then though, so happy hunting.