404) Prufrock — “Whisper of Love”
From ’67, this song is a truly wonderful plea for reconciliation to a departed lover. RD Records, the label that enabled us to hear this treasure 40 years after its recording, proclaims of the album it rescued that:
Here is another lost and unreleased at the time Californian psychedelic masterpiece . . . from 1967! . . . The music is a mixture of superb garage folk, swinging London style garage pop and heavy fuzz loaded psychedelic to the max tracks with some incredible great eastern influences!
http://www.rd-records.com/releasedprojects_vinyl.htm
Yeah, the record label said it, but it’s true, true, true! OK, the song’s not The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, but it is a love song by Prufrock and the lyrics are heartfelt and touching.
In a story ripe for a cinematic retelling, Tom Lubin, Prufrock’s producer, relates that:
By October [’67] Prufrock had made what we thought was a pretty good album. . . . So that we all had some to remember, when no one was around at [Gold Star Studios where I was an assistant engineer], I made 6 acetates of Visions. . . . I also made several song demos and gave them to a publisher who liked the songs. But . . . Visions was never released. That was the end of it, or so I thought until mid 2006. It seems one of the publisher demos had found its way to Europe and . . . one song “Too Young” was released in Austria on a sampler of rare recordings of the 60s. A couple of years later the acetate was pictured in a record collector’s book. The Gold Star label had the titles with my name as producer. So, from an acetate label seen in a book to a Google Search, I was found and contacted by e-mail.
“Dear Sir Are you the Tom Lubin who produced and engineered the band Prufrock in 1967….?”
I was floored. It seems the sender was an avid fan of 60s music, and had a label that released recordings of that era. He was based in Switzerland and had heard only one song . . . . [A] few years ago I [had gone] into a studio and transferred all the tapes I had in a box to digital, and Prufrock’s Visions was one of them. . . . Once the[ label] heard it, they wanted to give it its first release . . . .
liner notes to the CD issue of Visions
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