Bob LindElusive Butterfly—The Complete Jack Nitzche Sessions
Ace CDWIKD 265
**The result of ‘coffee and uppers’, Lind’s complete works fail to provide the listener with much stimulation
Bob Lind was a reasonably gifted folk singer who graduated from playing the coffee houses around his home town of Denver, Colorado, and headed west to Los Angeles via San Francisco where he arrived bang in the middle of the 1960s flower power era. Lind’s lightweight, whimsical songs fitted the dippy-hippy profile of the time perfectly and he fell in with top producer and arranger Jack Nitzche. He liked young Bob enough to take him in as a lodger and produce his recordings for the World Pacific label, a subsidiary of Liberty. One of these tracks was Elusive Butterfly, a pleasant summery song originally scheduled as the B-side of the single Cheryl’s Going Home. West Coast disc jockeys preferred Butterfly, however, and gave it heavy airplay, which lifted it into the Top Ten on both sides of the Atlantic. The disc features a typical Nitzche string arrangement and the trick is repeated throughout this 25-track compilation.
In the sleeve notes, Lind confesses that in his early years he was living on uppers and coffee while trotting out five or six songs a day. ‘A lot of drugs were involved,’ the singer cheerfully admits. Well, after listening patiently to a succession of dreary and dated ditties with turgid titles such as Whose Is The Funeral and The World Is Just A B-Movie I was sorely tempted to ingest a few uppers myself just to combat the depressing effect of the music. Producer Nitzche, of course, courted fame as the right-hand man of the now-discredited Phil Spector and subsequently worked on seminal albums by Buffalo Springfield and Neil Young. But no amount of subtle sound tweaking can disguise the fact that Bob Lind’s material, while striving to appear bright and ethereal, soon loses its lustre and descends into bland banality. Now if you’re seriously searching for 1960s folk with mind-expanding lyrics and a raw edge, another Bob could be just the job. His name is Dylan. BK
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