When you get to my age, the music of your youth is not only nostalgic but a vivid reminder of better times and a simpler life. For me, the ’60s were filled with some of my favorite songs and artists so when I heard that a stage show/concert was coming to the Waterville Opera House called “The Sixties Show,” I was very interested in talking with someone who was involved. The cast of this production is made up of co-founder/producer, musical director (bass, vocals, guitar) Craig O’Keefe who is joined by Tom Licameli (co-founder/producer,  guitar, vocals); Jim Boggia (guitar, vocals); Scott Devours (drums); Kevin Bents (keyboards, guitar, vocals); and Peter Chiusano (keyboards/orchestrations). I caught up with O’Keefe when he was in New York City and asked him to give me a breakdown of this show, for instance, how do you pick the material that’s performed?
O’Keefe: Good question, this is a multi-media show about time traveling back to the 1960s based around a concert. What we do as far as the material: we don’t do anything pedestrian so even though there are hits in the show, we also do some B-sides and deep album cuts.

Q: Oh, cool.
O’Keefe: And we reproduce the songs so they sound exactly like they sound on the records, and we’re not using any backing tracks or samples or pre-recorded music which is pretty commonplace these days, we’re just doing it with live musicians. So I choose what songs to do and I also look to see how the artists got the sounds they used.

Q: How do you go about doing that?
O’Keefe: You can go online and often find who’s the producer, what studio did they record it at, what type of mike pre-amps did they have, what type of tape machine, what type of compressors were used, a lot of stuff that’s boring to most people. But looking at that information we can determine, as musicians, this is how we can get that sound. That’s our whole thing, and we use vintage and re-issued amplifiers and gear and drums and guitars and basses to get those sounds, and then you stir it up in a pot and it sounds like the record, which is what we’re known for.

Q: Now you mentioned that it is a multi-media production, what does that involve?
O’Keefe: There are lots of archival footage, whether it’s news footage or old commercials or old events and images. There is also a light show, and we dress in period costumes. It’s not cliché, hippy-dippy, frat-boy garbage — it’s legitimate Carnaby Street-fitted suits. It’s the whole experience we bring to the show.

Q: What are some of the groups that you draw upon?
O’Keefe: Well, let’s see, the Beatles, Stones, The Who, Tom Jones, Nilsson, the Mamas & Papas, Rascals, a lot of great groups from the ’60s. We only have 26 songs or so in our set, so it’s always tough to choose which out of 30,000 songs do we choose? But I think we cover it pretty well.

Q: At 74 I know that decade really well. Groups like The Association, Marmalade, The Buckinghams, Paul Revere & The Raiders, The Dave Clark Five, and their songs, when I listen to them now I get goose bumps just like I did back then when they first came out.
O’Keefe: Definitely! I know what you mean. Though I can’t really say that the ’60s is my generation, because I was barely out of diapers at the end of that decade, I love the music of the ’50s, the ’60s and the ’70s. I think the ’60s and ’70s produced the best music ever written or recorded.

Q: I do know what you mean, man, I really do.
O’Keefe: Those groups you mentioned are phenomenal, and you still hear, whether its commercials or soundtracks, those groups and others from that decade, because they really are so good. If you compare them against groups today, not that there aren’t some amazing artists today, but there are, frankly and honestly, just less of them then there were in the ’60s, so you still keep hearing this music because nothing can beat it, in my opinion. And that’s the ’70s, too.

Q: I agree whole-heartedly. Yeah, I concur. Just out of curiosity, how long have you been doing this show?
O’Keefe: I’ve been a professional musician all of my life. I’ve been a songwriter and had record deals and toured. I’ve written music for television and movies. Everyone in the show, the whole cast, are A-list and pretty well-known guys, but The Sixties Show is something I started a long time ago, and it took me a while to get it to where it is now.

Q: How did the progression go?
O’Keefe: By the end of the first year, we were playing little restaurants and clubs. At the end of the second year we were selling out clubs, and the third year we started to dip our toes in outdoor festivals. By the fourth year we started to play small theaters. Since then we’ve been playing bigger and bigger theaters and selling out theaters. It’s been a gradual progression. Now we’re touring around the country, shows offered in the U.K., Australia, Japan. We’re also developing this for a Broadway-type show in Vegas, so it’s taking off big time. But this is the first time the show’s ever been to Maine, so we’re pretty excited about that.

Q: Seeing you’ve never been to Maine before, is there anything, Craig that you’d like me to pass on to the folks reading this article?
O’Keefe: One thing I can definitely say, and I can say this because we hear this all the time at every show, it’s something that they’ve never seen before.

Lucky Clark, a 2018 “Keeping the Blues Alive” Award winner, has spent more than 50 years writing about good music and the people who make it. He can be reached at luckyc@myfairpoint.net if you have any questions, comments or suggestions.

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