Lynn Castle

Though her path crossed with numerous prominent figures in music during the 1960s, Lynn Castle issued only one single that attracted scant attention at the time, yet she later attracted a devoted following among collectors. Born in Brooklyn, New York on May 28, 1939, she began studying piano at age four, where her skill drew notice from instructors and classmates at the Catholic boarding school she attended. The pain of her parents’ divorce and her strained bond with her stepmother prompted her to start composing songs as a teenager as a way to process those emotions. Her high-school boyfriend, Phil Spector, then at the outset of his own path as part of the vocal group the Teddy Bears, offered encouragement for her efforts. In 1958 she created a doo wop-styled piece titled “Love’s Prayer,” which reached Capitol Records’ A&R department through singer Rush Adams, her uncle, and was subsequently assigned to the vocal group the Spinners.

Despite the apparent opportunity of having a major-label act record her material, no further placements followed, and after relocating to California she entered a relationship that led to her becoming the mother of two children. She maintained contact with Lee Hazlewood, whom she had first encountered in the 1950s; he supplied her with a Martin guitar and urged her to persist in refining her songwriting. By the mid-1960s she had established herself as a hair stylist whose specialty in men’s cuts coincided with the rise of longer hairstyles in Hollywood, allowing her Sunset Strip shop to serve clients that included members of the Byrds, the Monkees, and Buffalo Springfield, along with Del Shannon and Sonny Bono. She even appeared onscreen trimming Sonny’s hair in the Sonny & Cher film Good Times. Songwriters Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, two regular customers then enjoying success with the Monkees, responded positively to one of her compositions, “Teeny Tiny Gnome.” Retitled “Kicking Stones,” it was cut by the Monkees in 1966, although the track remained unreleased until it surfaced on a 1987 compilation of rarities.

Another admirer, producer and arranger Jack Nitzsche, brought her into a studio one evening in 1966 to record acoustic versions of twenty-three of her songs, pieces that blended playful psychedelia with reflections of her personal struggles in life and relationships. A year passed before she made her recording debut; produced by Lee Hazlewood and backed by the band Last Friday’s Fire, the single “The Lady Barber” b/w “Rose Colored Corner” appeared on Hazlewood’s LHI label. Even with the modest notoriety noted on the A-side and support from the label, the release failed to connect with listeners, and subsequent personal difficulties halted any further performing career, though she never ceased writing songs for her own fulfillment. As Hazlewood’s catalog gained renewed attention in the new millennium, collectors rediscovered her lone single, which Light in the Attic Records reissued in 2014. The first full Lynn Castle album arrived in 2017 under the title Rose Colored Corner, containing both sides of the LHI single plus ten tracks drawn from the 1966 Nitzsche session.