После 50 лет молчания обнаружены редкие записи Линн Кэсл, известной как «Леди-парикмахер»

In 1967, Lynn Castle’s image was plastered on a full-page billboard ad, heralding the release of her very first single. A full-length album, though, would not come for another fifty years. Back then in Los Angeles, Castle was known as the Lady Barber, a term that now reads a little archaic, perhaps a little campy, but at the time, it was radical. Women didn’t work in barber shops, but Castle, who also apparently styled her own magnificent, towering mane, had grown bored of setting hair in rollers. She ditched the drudgery of beauty salons for a joint on the Sunset Strip called the Rogue Barber Shop, where she specialized in cutting the long locks that dusted the shoulders of male musicians and actors of the day: The Byrds, Del Shannon, Sonny Bono, Stephen Stills, Neil Young. She wrote songs for some of them too. Hair was her day job, paying the bills for two young kids at home, but music was her dream. For a minute it seemed as though she might be able to turn it into a career: There was the advance buzz for “The Lady Barber” (with “Rose-Colored Corner” as the B side), appearances on “What’s My Line” with Frank Sinatra and in the Sonny and Cher film Good Times, a profile in the Washington Post. But for whatever reason, Castle’s bewitching, moody songs stayed mostly unreleased for decades, until Light in the Attic’s repeat diggings into the seemingly bottomless mine of Lee Hazlewood recordings recently turned up the psychedelic cowboy’s collaborations with the lady barber. Rose Colored Corner, sourced mostly from her demo tapes, is a time capsule of a quiet, obscure side of 1960s L.A. You can picture Castle, perhaps sitting on a barstool, spotlit on a dim stage at the Troubadour, maybe, strumming her rhapsodic, melancholic tunes. Reader Score No score yet, be the first to add. 0.0 Her songs alluded to her remarkable life, which is spelled a bit more out in the liner notes, written by Hunter Lea, who co-produced LITA’s Lee Hazlewood releases. Castle spent her childhood shuttling from Catholic school to living with her father and his new family. Feeling unloved but undeterred, she sought refuge in music and boys and running away from home. While still in high school, she met a teenaged Phil Spector, who snuck into her window and played songs by his band the Teddy Bears; he took her cruising around the Valley in his blue Corvette. By 22, she was a mom and a hairdresser, and writing songs in her closet on a rosewood Martin guitar that Hazlewood gave her. Somewhere along the way, they’d become friends; in the 1950s they’d make drives to Phoenix together where they heard a young Waylon Jennings play with his band the Waylors. Hazlewood introduced Castle to legendary producer Jack Nitzsche, but it was Hazlewood who told her, enthusiastically, that her songs were quite good. He was right. There is a smoky ache in Castle’s voice—tough and deep, wise and wistful, somewhere in between Nico and early ’70s Cher—that belies these searching ballads. Sometime after Castle’s first acid trip, she wrote a thinly veiled song about LSD for her flip-haired clients the Monkees (“Teeny Tiny Gnome” would eventually appear on the band’s rarities comp Missing Links in the ’80s). In her own songs, nature is a magical, otherworldly presence: “Diamond sundrops fall/Kaleidoscoping patterns on the floor of quiet Forest,” she sings on “Forest,” the standout opener. In Castle’s sweetly acid-tinged imagination, quite likely, there are indeed wizards in them woods. Several of the songs that follow hover in a similar register and cadence, accompanied by Castle’s soft strumming. There’s a rawness about them, unvarnished, honest, and occasionally prone to downright laments (“What in the World Would I Do”) and the fragile confessions (“Lonesome Look-Out,” “The Stranger”). The final two songs offer evidence of what might have been if Castle’s work had gotten a full production treatment back then. Both “The Lady Barber” and the album’s second version of the title track of Rose Colored Corner were recorded one midnight by Hazlewood in the silo tank in Phoenix where he also recorded with Duane Eddy, yielding the same chorusy reverb of the Eddy sessions, with LHI Records artist Last Friday’s Fire adding fuzz guitar and organ drone. “The Lady Barber” has the kind of buoyant, rollicking tempo that chugs along in Hazlewood’s Trouble Is a Lonesome Town and the fuzz guitars; this rendition of “Rose Colored Corner,” also backed by a full band, feels anthemic. If Castle had done more elaborate sessions with Hazlewood or Nitzsche and been granted the confidence and career boost of an album release back then—would she have won the fame of Hazlewood star Nancy Sinatra, or gone on to make records that soared a little higher, got a little weirder? Instead, Castle slipped back into introverted obscurity, contributing to B-movie soundtracks under the alias Madelynn Von Ritz, raising her kids, and continuing to record her music largely for herself. Now a grandmother in Los Angeles, she recently taught herself ProTools. But these songs, delivered in Castle’s premature world weariness, aren’t seeking instant gratification—their sorrow and loneliness finds solace in escapism and fantasy. Castle may have written out of sadness, but she’s made peace with it. When she sings “I’m happy in my rose-colored corner,” you believe her.