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I listened to no new music between 1984 and 1987. Instead, an obsession with 60s soul and R&B led me down the path of dusty record stores, car boot sales and charity shops in an attempt to find some musical thrills. I made an exception for the Prisoners. The Medway-based garage rock four-piece were one of the most exciting live acts I have ever seen – in those days, as a callow youth, they were mind-blowing. A devastatingly good rhythm section consisting of Johnny Symons on drums, James Taylor on organ and Allan Crockford on bass, were fronted by guitarist-vocalist Graham Day, whose voice gave them a soulful edge and who wrote songs that were truly memorable.

The group had formed at school and made their debut album “A Taste Of Pink” as a document to their early days together, at a point when Taylor was supposed to be heading North to start university. It had a raw sound influenced by the Kinks, the Beatles, the Who and the Small Faces, but its inception was fuelled by the DIY ethos of punk. The sleeve was put together around Graham’s kitchen table and they took the resultant pressing to Rough Trade to see if they would distribute it. Taylor didn’t stay on at university, John Peel picked up on the album and the Prisoners suddenly found themselves with gigs in London.

Their presence in the capital saw them sign to Ace Records’ Big Beat label, where they recorded their second album, “The Wisermiserdemelza”, and the “Electric Fit” EP. This period saw the band record many of their best-loved songs, including ‘Last Thing On My Mind’, ‘Hurricane’ and ‘Melanie’, honing their influences and creating their distinctive sound.

A side effect of being with Ace was Graham’s access to the company’s latest Northern Soul LPs, which inspired him to write a new set of songs for their next album. That release, “The Last Fourfathers”, is probably their most satisfying recording. The group worked with Russell Wilkins of the Milkshakes and Graham’s vocals were captured to perfection on numbers such as ‘Nobody Wants My Love’, ‘The More I Teach You’ and ‘Take You For A Ride’, whilst on the electrifying ‘I Am A Fisherman’ you could properly hear Alan’s harmonies for the first time. Our CD version of the album contains a recording of the live highlight ‘Hush’, the Joe South song the Prisoners made their own, only to have their arrangement appropriated by the Charlatans on their hit ‘The One I Know’ and by Kula Shaker for their cover of ‘Hush’.

The group could never quite bring themselves to want success enough, but in 1986 they made one final attempt by signing to the Stiff Records subsidiary, Countdown, run by future Acid Jazz Records owner Ed Piller. The band didn’t like what producer Troy Tate was trying to turn them into and were on the verge of falling apart. The record that emerged, “In From The Cold”, contained impressive songs and performances, but the group advised their fans not to buy it. Stiff Records collapsed into bankruptcy at about the same time.

There was just enough time left for a swipe at the music industry with ‘Pop Star Party’, which was then partially wiped and lost, before the Prisoners called it a day. In the years since, all except Johnny have kept up a presence in music, making many great records in a variety of settings, whilst they have reformed intermittently to make triumphant returns to the stage. I am thrilled to have seen them at their peak. Big Beat have reissued their whole catalogue, with plenty of bonus material. If you don’t own every piece of music by the band, you’re losing out.

Urged on by rare soul collector Gilly, who had solved the Northern Soul mystery of “What was the identity of the singer who recorded the Rose Valentine cover-up ‘When He's Not Around’?” (as played on acetate by Richard Searling in the latter days of Wigan Casino), Ace Records went ahead and purchased the tapes and rights to the work of Detroit producer Dave Hamilton. Gilly told me how Dave had been an original member of Motown’s Funk Brothers, had played guitar on ‘Reet Petite’, ‘Boom Boom’ and ‘Please Mr Postman’, had recorded the Chalfontes for Mercury and had run the Topper label. He also said there were some great unissued numbers that Dave had copied onto a reel for him to get played on the Northern Soul scene.

I was not that knowledgeable about the Wigan cover-up, but I realised it made a great story and would create much interest. After Dave’s untimely death, I visited his widow Alice and listened to some of his tapes. I thought they were worth gambling on. At the time I could identify only one full CD’s worth of material with a few spin-offs for other compilations. We shipped the tapes back to London, allowing us the luxury of time to fully explore the material.

Our first “Dave Hamilton’s Detroit Dancers” CD featured most of the tracks that had drawn us to the catalogue. In further researching the tapes we began to discover unheard gems such as ‘Who Are You Trying To Fool’ by Little Ann (the true artist on that Rose Valentine cover-up), a recording later described by Ian Levine as the best non-Motown Detroit soul production. The rare soul collecting scene continued to view Dave’s work favourably and records such as ‘Sweep It Out In The Shed’ by Tobi Lark, Dottie & Millie’s ‘Talkin’ About My Baby’ and James Lately’s super-rarity ‘Love, Friends And Money’ went from strength to strength. Then the rare funk scene exploded and Dean Rudland was able to compile a BGP CD of late 60s and early 70s grooves. Additionally Dave’s jazz productions on himself and his tight band came out as the unreleased “Soul Suite” LP he had hoped would make his name in the late 60s. Dave’s jazz background also led to several of his tracks featuring in our “Mod Jazz” series and there were some excellent modern soul recordings from artists such as of Gil Billingsley and James Carpenter.

Meanwhile, we had been sitting on many unmarked tapes. Every few years we would haul a couple of boxes up from our storage facility, don the headphones and plough through several days’ worth of recordings. These varied from poorly copied old jazz radio shows to fully produced versions of songs Dave was trying to get to Motown’s Jobete Music publishing company. Tapes for some incredibly rare 45s eventually turned up, along with odd acetates, allowing us to release a third volume of “Detroit Dancers” and a new volume of funk, followed by a general “Detroit Soul” CD.

The EU then joined in the fun with a request from the Finnish company Timmion to issue an LP of Little Ann’s recordings. The faux 60s album was a great hit, particularly among the younger soul demographic, and it led to a similar project on O.C. Tolbert, who also cut enough tracks for a very impressive Kent CD of his own.

That one mythical 1966 recording that remained embedded in an old acetate was responsible for eight great CDs and we’re still counting. From small acorns, mighty oak trees do grow, and we’ve not even started on the gospel tapes yet.

SHEL TALMY, the man behind ‘You Really Got Me’, ‘My Generation’, ‘Friday On My Mind’ and countless other touchstone records of the 1960s, the American whose impact upon British rock can never be discounted, has left the building. His friend Alec Palao offers final thoughts on the late, great producer.

GWP were the initials of Gerard W Purcell, an artist manager who had great success with country musician Eddy Arnold and trumpeter Al Hirt. He also worked with Lena Horne, the poet Maya Angelou and Dizzy Gillespie among many others. In the mid-60s he expanded the recording side of his business with Gale Garnett and several R&B acts, notably Benny Gordon and Kenny Carter. For the Benny Gordon releases he used veteran producer Teacho Wiltshire, but by the time of the Kenny Carter recordings he had brought in Larry Banks to produce and provide great songs. Other acts that fell under Larry Banks’ auspices were the Geminis, the Exciters and his life partner Joan Bates, aka Jaibi.

Originally married to R&B singer Bessie Banks, with whom he made the deep soul classic ‘Go Now’, Larry fell in love with Joan Bates, a singer with the Pleasures group, and they set up as a couple. He then cut another deep soul masterpiece, ‘You Got Me’ by Jaibi, this time for GWP Productions, who placed the record with the Kapp label. Still pursuing his own singing career (he originally sang with the vocal group the Four Fellows in 1955), he cut ‘I’m Not The One’, another GWP/Kapp deal.

GWP’s big hopes for the R&B market lay with the emotive vocals of Kenny Carter, who released three singles on RCA in 1966. Our excavation of the tape vault revealed another 10 sides, mainly big-voiced ballads, including some standards intended for an LP. Some sort of fall out between him, GWP and RCA led to the project being shelved; a real pity as the material is superb.

Success came GWP’s way when Cleveland vocal group the Hesitations came under Jerry Purcell’s management once Kapp decided to move the act away from the Detroit-based Pied Piper production team to GWP and Larry Banks. GWP had been responsible for bringing Pied Piper to RCA with singles from Lorraine Chandler, Sharon Scott, Nancy Wilcox, the Cavaliers, the Dynamics and the Metros, who managed an R&B hit and issued a full LP. However, GWP switched the Hesitations’ style from happening black music to sophisticated ballads and had immediate success with a soulful revival of ‘Born Free’, which became a major hit and led to two albums aimed at mature black and white markets.

When sales eventually dwindled, the Hesitations were released from their Kapp deal, which led to Jerry Purcell forming his own GWP label in 1969. Larry Banks having moved on, the new production team included acclaimed arranger Ed Bland, who was given young songwriters Ray Dahrouge and Billy Terrell to work with, along with superb vocalist Debbie Taylor and the Persians. The Persians arrived with New Jersey producer George Kerr, whose team was used on other GWP releases and productions, including Alice Clark’s monster Northern number ‘You Hit Me (Right Where It Hurt Me)’. Ed Bland signed up very cool jazz outfit the Pazant Brothers and recruited funky females Betty Barney and Little Rose Little.

There was immediate success when the first release, Debbie Taylor’s ‘Never Gonna Let Him Know’, became an R&B hit but, despite top quality soul records and a new subsidiary called GWP’s Grapevine, the label failed to score another hit and lost its way releasing oddball pop records and a series of orchestral LPs inspired by the signs of the zodiac.

Jerry Purcell reverted to artist management and, once he retired, was happy to set up a deal with Ace Records to purchase his R&B recordings, which included unreleased masters from Benny Gordon, Jaibi, the Shaladons, Milton Bennett, Bobby Penn, the Modettes and others. The Kenny Carter sides are still in contractual dispute but we continue to work for their release. 

Robert Neale Lind was born in Baltimore, Maryland on 25 November 1942. His parents separated when he was five and his mother remarried a master sergeant in the Air Force. After several years of constantly moving home, the family settled in Denver, Colorado.

“When I was in the 7th grade I discovered rhythm and blues,” Lind recalled when I interviewed him in 2007. “Before that, I used to listen to Gene Autry, Tex Ritter and Burl Ives, particularly. Burl Ives shaped my whole life. I knew what a guitar was. I knew you kinda raked across the strings with a pick and made noises. But here was a guy who was playing with his fingers, singing about mysterious things, like bats with leather wings and cowboys dying in the streets of Laredo. Oh man, I’d never heard anything like it.”

When Lind was 10, his parents bought him a guitar. He took a few lessons, but lost interest. “A few years later I began to realise that I wasn’t a particularly handsome guy, I wasn’t real smooth, but the guys that played music got all the hot girls. I thought, ‘Me for that!’ But somewhere along the line, I actually got into music for its own sake.” Forming a duo with his pal Jerry, Lind’s first paying gig was at a used car lot. “I played guitar and we sang R&B. Now they call it doo wop but nobody called it that then. It was rhythm and blues – dark and dangerous. We got all the hot dogs we could eat. Then we formed a band and played the teen clubs, where you could work underage.”

After graduating from high school, Lind enrolled at Western State College in Gunnison,Colorado, where he studied theatre arts. “I wasn’t really very serious about college. I was serious about playing music, learning how to finger-pick. I would wake up in the morning, take a bunch of uppers and coffee, and write maybe five or six songs a day. Then I’d go hear somebody play or have a gig myself. I’d come back, stay up most of the night and write more songs. Most of my songs from that period of time came from that line between sleep and wakefulness. That’s where ‘Elusive Butterfly’ was written. This was during the folk boom. There were two schools around then. There was the Kingston Trio, the Journeymen and Peter, Paul & Mary – these very slick guys who wore the striped shirts. Then there was a whole undercurrent, like Judy Henske, Josh White and Phil Ochs. And Dylan, of course. I played a place called the Analyst quite a bit. The first guy to hire me, Al Chapman, owned the place. They had things on the menu like the Freud Burger and the Psycho Salad. I still credit Al Chapman with discovering me. Al taped one of my sets and made a little reel-to-reel of five of my songs. He suggested that I take the tape around to the record companies.”

By 1964 the folk scene had started to dry up in Denver, but was still thriving in San Francisco; Lind headed there. “I was scared to death, because I didn’t know if I could make it there. I didn’t know if I would be able to get work, but in no time at all I was earning … I’m not sure if you’d call it a living. I was holed up in a crummy little hotel where people would die on a daily basis. They’d be hauling stiffs out of there every day – old guys dying lonely deaths in front of the communal TV, or junkies overdosing. It should have depressed me, but I found it romantic. I was maybe 21. I felt like Kerouac, you know. I was there for about three months before I moved on.”

Lind left his belongings with a friend and got on a plane down to Los Angeles to shop around the tape Al Chapman had made for him. “Liberty Records had just bought a jazz label called World Pacific and there was a guy running it named Dick Bock – a strange guy, eats yoghurt, stands on his head, a real free thinker. Bob Dylan was very popular at the time with ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ and the Byrds were happening, so they were looking for a folk rocker, a poet-with-guitar. I didn’t know that. I just went toLibertybecause it was the first on my list. I gave them this tape and they said, ‘Yeah, we’d like to sign you’. I was amazed. It was that easy. They signed me as a songwriter to their publishing company, Metric Music, and as a recording artist. I think they were much more excited about my songs than me as a singer.”

Meanwhile, noted arranger Jack Nitzsche was looking for material for artists he was producing. Lenny Waronker, the head of Metric Music, called Lind in to play Nitzsche some of his songs. “I thought that was the dumbest idea I could imagine. I knew who he was and I even had a copy of his “Lonely Surfer” album. This guy is classically trained. This guy is Phil Spector’s right-hand man. He writes those beautiful string lines. This is too crazy! What was a brilliant, classically trained arranger with his melodic scope going to hear in my twangy, folky little songs? So with great trepidation I sat down and plunked out a couple of my folky three-chord tunes. He turned to Lenny and said: ‘You finally got yourself an honest writer.’ I hadn’t thought of myself as honest. I just wrote what I felt. So I played a few more and he said, ‘Boy, this guy’s really good.’ Jack didn’t choose any of my songs for the acts he was producing that day, but I thought of our first meeting as a good ego-boosting experience.”

When it came time to record, Dick Bock was assigned to produce, but things didn’t work out. “There were some technical difficulties that had nothing to do with the music itself. So they were trying to find another producer. They were talking to Chad Stuart and Sonny Bono. Then they said, ‘Let’s try Jack Nitzsche’. Lenny remembered that he had expressed an interest and asked him if he’d like to cut me. Jack said, ‘Yeah.’ He came over to my place, a terrible little $50-a-month apartment onHawthorne. He looked at this place and said, ‘Man, you can’t create here in this awful place. Come and stay at my house.’ I’d only met him two or three times.”

Lind accepted Nitzsche’s offer and moved in to his house in the Hollywood Hills. Nitzsche and his wife, Gracia, were separated at the time. “It was an Odd Couple kind of deal. Jack and I both loved to drink and to get high. We had a beautiful friendship. He turned me on to music I’d never even heard of before. Fred Neil, Bulgarian folk music, all these jazz guys, classical music: Wagner – he loved Wagner! He had this wide cosmopolitan taste that spanned everything. Even when Gracia came back with the baby – and a more wonderful woman no one has ever met – he never kicked me out. Gracia treated me like a son, even though there wasn’t much difference in our ages. She was wonderful – aces as a person and as an artist. Gracia tended to crash early and when she went to bed, Jack and I would get drunk and put on Ray Charles or Otis Redding and cry like big maudlin babies.”

Lind’s first session with Nitzsche yielded ‘You Should Have Seen It’, ‘Truly Julie’s Blues (I’ll Be There)’, ‘Elusive Butterfly’ and ‘Cheryl’s Goin’ Home’. “‘Elusive Butterfly’ was five verses long. I wanted to do all five verses. Jack said no one would listen to a song that long, and I should only do two. Of course, he was right. Hal Blaine was the drummer. He was the drummer on every session done in LA in 1965. After we’d finished these four, the company was looking for a single. We both favoured ‘Cheryl’s Goin’ Home’. So we released that and – just to be safe, so we wouldn’t get split airplay – we put what we thought was the weakest song, ‘Elusive Butterfly’, on the other side. But the record went nowhere. There was no interest in it at all. Then a disc jockey in Florida turned it over and started to play ‘Elusive Butterfly’. It started to catch on, one market, then another.”

A month after the record’s release, Lind and Nitzsche returned to the studio to cut the eight tracks that would complete the “Don’t Be Concerned” album, released in February 1966. ‘Elusive Butterfly’ entered Billboard’s Hot 100 in January, eventually peaking at #5 in March, by which time ‘Remember The Rain’ / ‘Truly Julie’s Blues (I’ll Be There)’ had been released as Lind’s follow-up single.

“Things were very fast then. I think the “Don’t Be Concerned” album took about three sessions. The two World Pacific albums were recorded so close together that I kinda lump them both together in my mind. Later on I learned that all of these famous people had played on my sessions, like Carol Kaye. I didn’t know who Carol Kaye was! I didn’t know Henry Diltz was playing banjo, or Larry Knechtel was on keyboards. I do remember Leon Russell. He scared the hell out of everybody. He was a strange dude, with long, long hair, even for those times. He was quiet and scary, but he played great piano.”

Divided radio play resulted in ‘Remember The Rain’ and ‘Truly Julie’s Blues (I’ll Be There)’ each reaching the charts, albeit at only #64 and #65, respectively. Meanwhile, ‘Elusive Butterfly’ had taken off in Britain, prompting a promotional visit.

“I loved being in England. My managers, Greene & Stone, brought me over. There was a guy named Val Doonican who cut ‘Elusive Butterfly’ too. There were people who thought he was stealing food out of my children’s mouths, but I felt that when you write a song, you can’t claim ownership of it. Val Doonican’s version was different from mine, but I kinda liked that. I had a wonderful time in England. I met Eric Burdon, Paul Samwell-Smith, Keith Relf and a guy from the Pretty Things. He came up to our hotel one time. There were about 15 people in our room and we were all smoking this hash. He told us all this long improvised fantasy story. I thought what a great world this guy lives in!”

Bob Lind and Val Doonican each reached the Top 5 with ‘Elusive Butterfly’ in the UK, where Lind’s follow-up, ‘Remember The Rain’, was also a modest hit, as were Keith Relf’s recording of ‘Mr Zero’ and Adam Faith’s version of ‘Cheryl’s Goin’ Home’. “‘Cheryl’s Goin’ Home’ turned out to be my second most-recorded song. Cher recorded it, and the Blues Project, Noel Harrison and the Cascades did it. A group called the Rokes did an Italian language version, and one of ‘Remember The Rain’.”

May 1966 saw the opportunistic release of an album titled “The Elusive Bob Lind”. “I was 17 when I made that album. Some of my friends wanted records, so I got nine of them together, they put in $12 each, and I went and got an hour of studio time. I took my guitar and recorded these 12 songs – all acoustic, just me and my guitar – all in an hour. I got an acetate copy for everybody and thought that was the end of it. Jump ahead to Los Angeles. ‘Elusive Butterfly’ becomes a hit and my managers get a letter from Verve Folkways saying that they’d just bought these masters. The next thing I know, I hear this album that has strings, drums and all these other instruments, all dubbed over me and my guitar. They didn’t even get the titles right, and credited me with writing songs like ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ and ‘Song Of The Wandering Angus’. I suppose I should be flattered that some people like the album, but it’s a terrible piece of shit.”

With a Top 5 single to his name, Lind found himself in demand for TV appearances, but it was not the type of work he enjoyed. “My managers had a certain view of my career. Their decisions for Sonny & Cher were great. They were pop singers; they didn’t care. The kind of music that I wrote was intimate stuff. It was about feelings that are not general commodities that can be packaged. They were wrong for lip-sync shows with go-go dancers jumping around. It made no sense. This wasn’t the course that I was trying to follow. Right then I started hating the business. I had gotten bent and warped and taken so far away from the direction I was trying to head.”

In the spring of 1966 sessions began for his second World Pacific album, “Photographs Of Feeling”. When Verve released a single from their LP, World Pacific responded with ‘I Just Let It Take Me’ from the new sessions. A further Verve single was countered by ‘San Francisco Woman’ on World Pacific, but it too failed to reach the charts. The “Photographs Of Feeling” album, released in August 1966, was the last record Lind would make with Nitzsche.

“Jack had his demons. If I said something that struck him wrong, he would suddenly go off on me about ‘being a fucking star’. At that time, far from being ego-ed out, I was constantly scared shitless, but he seemed very threatened by the success of the records we had made together. He was a hard man to figure out. It didn’t particularly end well with our friendship. Over the next few years, we’d see each other every once in a while and get close again. Then things would get nasty and we’d float away into our separate worlds. I’ll never forget Jack’s generosity, his belief in my music, his love of my music. When I think of him today, I can’t think of anything but that patience and generosity of his, and the fact that he had confidence in me way before I had any in myself. Jack was a strange guy. I miss him.”

The singles ‘It’s Just My Love’ and ‘Goodbye Neon Lies’, both produced by Tommy Oliver, were Lind’s only other releases over the next five years. Disenchanted, he moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. “I was a drunk. I was an abuser of drugs. That wasn’t Jack’s influence. He and I were just similarly inclined. I just wanted to go the desert and get my head straight, but Santa Feended up being the place where I did some of my worst drinking and using. So go figure. But while I was there I wrote the songs for an album.” Recorded with arranger Jimmy Bond and producer Doug Weston, the “Since There Were Circles” album was released by Capitol in 1971. Not long afterwards, Lind quit the music business and settled in Florida.

“I just got more and more disgusted and sick of these people in suits who had no feeling for music, but were making all the musical decisions. It wasn’t that I nobly made the decision that, ‘None of that for me anymore’. It was a mutual decision. The music business and I both had distaste for each other. I was a pain to work with. Drugs and alcohol will do that to you. I felt like a fraud. I felt that I wasn’t as talented as people said I was. All that’s completely turned around with sobriety. I haven’t drunk and I haven’t used since 1977. Now I honour my audience and I honour my music. I see that there is value in what I do. And my music has improved with sobriety.”

Lind never stopped writing and worked for a while for Weekly World News. “It was a fun paper where you could dream up stories about Big Foot, witches, UFOs and space aliens. You get paid to make things up all day. By night, I’d write literary short stories. One of them was called Emmett’s Last Day, about a guy in the Everglades. Another was called Nuisance Calls. A screenplay I wrote won the Florida Screenwriters Competition in 1991, I’ve written five novels and I’ve had plays produced. One of them won the Bronze Halo Award. I just like to write. But music never left me. I continued writing songs and once in a while I played, if the vibe was right. I did the Indian River Festival with Arlo Guthrie, who’s an old friend. There are over 200 cuts of my songs – Nancy Sinatra, Cher, Aretha Franklin, Dolly Parton, Marianne Faithfull, Richie Havens, Eric Clapton, Carmen McRae, Johnny Mathis, the Turtles, Glen Campbell – so technically I don’t have to work anywhere I don’t wanna work.” Eventually his desire to make music returned. In 1998 he sold his Gold Wing motorcycle and bought something more dangerous, a tenor sax.

“I had never learned how to read music. I didn’t know chords. I didn’t understand music theory. It had been all instinct with me. I decided that when I learned the saxophone I was gonna learn it the right way. So I took lessons. I learned how to read music and I learned how to make chord charts. I learned why a major seventh is a major seventh, for example – what a D minor flat nine is. I made a little album for my friends, but I wasn’t much of a saxophone player. I was passable, but to be a good sax player takes years – more years than I really had to devote to it. But that’s really the thing that got me back into music. My melodic scope started to open and I started to write more jazz-oriented songs. I thought people had to hear these things, so I started gigging again.”

Signs of Lind’s cult following became apparent in 2001 when Britpop band Pulp recorded a song titled ‘Bob Lind (The Only Way Is Down)’. “What’s great about Britain is that there is a whole new generation of people who are interested in older artists, not just because of what they did in their prime, but what they’re doing now. About a third of the people who visit my website are from the United Kingdom. I think young people in England pay more attention to the history of music than people in America do. I’m baffled by the quality people who talk about me – Jarvis Cocker, Richard Hawley and Sean O’Hagan from the High Llamas, and that delightful madman, John Otway.” Closer to home, guitarist Jamie Hoover of US group the Spongetones released “Lind Me Four”, a CD EP of Lind compositions. Long-time fan Hoover subsequently played on “Bob Lind: Perspective”, a concert/documentary DVD produced and directed by filmmaker Paul Surratt.

A frequent live performer, but no fan of the recording process, Lind made some of his recent compositions available on a self-released CD, “Live At The Luna Star Café”. A new studio album, “Finding You Again”, eventually appeared here on Ace’s Big Beat label in 2012. “I’ve written at least 300 songs since my last LP came out. For 41 years I’ve known I have to get ‘product’ onto the market. Over those years, I talked to dozens of producers. Some, I knew right away were wrong for me. Others seemed right for a while, but egos (theirs and mine) crushed the trust needed for the fragile producer-artist relationship.”

Fortunately, Lind found a dependable producer in Jamie Hoover. “It started with me sending him a god-awful piano demo of ‘Finding You Again’. I love the song but the demo sucked, as all my self-made demos do. A week later I got an mp3. ‘Stunned’ is an understatement. Somehow he had transformed that piece-of-shit demo into a pulsing, exciting representation of the song. I kept playing it over and over, marvelling at how he had Frankensteined it to life. I sent him a simple demo of ‘Maybe It’s The Rain’. Again, he found the soul of the song, adding those tasteful electric guitar, bass and string lines. After he repaired and rejuvenated ‘Exeter (The Wedding Waltz)’, I called him up and said, ‘Who are we kidding? We’re making an album here!’. His love for my music brought out the best in his production artistry. He constantly sought to bring my ideas to life in his unique and creative way. All of the songs are new except ‘May’ and ‘How The Nights Can Fly’, both of which are over 30 years old – along with a first for me, the authorised release of a song I didn’t write. I’m genuinely happy with what we’ve done.”

His voice and songwriting undiminished by time, Lind still gigs regularly around theUSAand has performed in Europe in recent years. “Since There Were Circles” was reissued by RPM in 2006 and is still available. “Live At The Luna Star Café” and the “Perspective” DVD are obtainable via his website (http://boblind.com). “Finding You Again” and “Elusive Butterfly: The Complete Jack Nitzsche Sessions” are in catalogue at Ace. 

With thanks to Bob Lind for the interview and to Dawn Eden, Spencer Leigh, Martin Roberts and Ben Vaughn for additional quotes.

photo (c) Henry Diltz