It’s 8am in California when Lynn Castle answers the phone, and she hesitates briefly before confirming her identity. The 78-year-old lives as the rather more extravagantly titled Madelynn Von Ritz; interest in her old name relates to recordings made some 50 years ago, only two of which were ever released. Now, after half a century, she is celebrating the release of her first album, Rose Colored Corner.
It follows an extensive reissue campaign of much of Lee Hazlewood’s catalogue; he produced and released Castle’s only single, ushering her into the US top 100 in 1967. “I don’t remember,” she laughs, “but it was definitely more towards 100 than 1!” The song was Lady Barber, a psychedelic number whose title nodded to her day job: hairdresser to the longhaired stars of LA’s music scene in the 1960s.
Music first helped her flee an otherwise unhappy existence. Aged two, she was sent – with her brother, just six months old – to what she calls a boarding school, “an ancient craft house built in the 20s, with an austere woman by the name of Mrs Sullivan in her black knit dress every day, and her long, skinny, grey hair braids wrapped around her head. We were totally unwanted, but my father couldn’t find anybody to take us. They took us. So we were raised by them for the first 12 years of our life.”
She barely got to know her mother, “a blues singer they used to call the white Ella Fitzgerald. Her name was Lillian Wells. I don’t know much about her because she had a pretty sketchy thing going on.” It was a lonely, strict upbringing, but the school allowed her to learn piano and dancing. Her father, meanwhile, remarried, and after Von Ritz eventually joined his new family – “an escapee in wonderland” – she began dating an unprepossessing but romantic young songwriter called Phil Spector.
“He wasn’t the most attractive,” she concedes, “but when people are so frigging fantastic inside, they’re just so beautiful, as the old story goes. He was so darling, and had this sweet expression.” She recalls fondly how he serenaded her, climbing through her bedroom window at night. “I remember sitting in the moonlight with Phil. I had to be careful because my half-sister was sleeping in the other bed in the same room.”
They were together, on and off, for three years. “He asked me to marry him, but I said I couldn’t until I met Elvis!” Von Ritz kept a secret from Spector, however, and almost everyone she knew: she was a songwriter, too. Her uncle, a singer called Rush Adams, helped her sell one tune – Love’s Prayer, carelessly credited to Len Castle – to the Spinners in 1958. Generally, though, she was so crippled by insecurity that she hid in a closet when she wrote. Even after she married another songwriter, Joey Cooper, she instead pursued a career as a hairdresser. Ironically, she met Cooper “through the circle of Elvis’s people”.
Quitting the women’s salon where she worked – “I couldn’t stand to roll another roller again!” – and working independently, she found herself cutting the hair of some of the city’s most famous. “Oh, my God!” she gasps, recalling clients that included Del Shannon, the Byrds and Sonny and Cher, in whose Good Times movie she makes a brief cameo. “I mean, frigging Vincent Price! I used to do Neil Young! Johnny Mathis would come in, and I ended up doing Ray Bradbury’s hair all the way until three, four months before he died. Here’s a fun one: Jim Morrison. I’d find him sitting on my step. He’d be so quiet, and he’d just mess with his hair while I was cutting it. I remember it was very beautiful.”
Slowly, word of her music began to spread, leading to a low-key session with Spector collaborator Jack Nitzsche, by now a close friend. Her stylishly coiffured clients Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart produced her song Kicking Stones for the Monkees, and Hazlewood – who had given her her first guitar, a Rosewood Martin that her ex-husband later left out in the rain – invited one of his label’s bands, Last Friday’s Fire, to back her in his Phoenix studio. “It might sound as if I was this totally hip chick that had it all down, but I didn’t! It was a last-minute thing: ‘I want you to come over. Let’s cut this song.’”
The songs collected on Rose Colored Corner are notable for their fragility and Castle’s deep voice, which is reminiscent of – yet distinctly more vulnerable than – Nancy Sinatra’s, who Hazlewood was concurrently shaping into one of the late 60s’ most ubiquitous. But the demos’ appealingly raw, uncontrived nature reveals they weren’t meant for public consumption. During the mournful I’m Getting Tired, for instance, her voice cracks, forcing her to clear her throat, and at times she can be heard chatting to Nitzsche.
“Jack just said: ‘Sit there and play,’” she recalls. “That’s what it was. I never played well. The songs were just skeletons. Maybe one day I’d make them better. But I remember sitting there on that stool with my guitar. It was kind of dim, and I was glad.”
A follow-up, sadly, never arrived, although she writes songs to this day. Hazlewood soon disappeared to Sweden, while Von Ritz focused on raising three children. “And what happened after that?” she laughs mischievously. “Do I dare say … the acid years?” So, although at one stage she nearly recorded with Bob Dylan – “the whole session was cancelled, and that’s just one of my ‘almost’ stories” – she returned to hairdressing. She resurfaced only occasionally, under her real name, contributing to William Friedkin’s 1980 cult Al Pacino vehicle, Cruising, and a handful of 90s B-movie soundtracks.
Until the Lady Barber single was included in 2013’s Grammy-nominated Hazlewood boxset, There’s a Dream I’ve Been Saving, only one further recording had seen the light of day, a 2001 reading, in collaboration with new-age composer Michael Hoppé, of Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant. It’s indicative of Von Ritz’s love of fairytales, and with Rose Colored Corner’s release, she acknowledges that aspects of her life nowadays seem like one. She is, however, typically sanguine when asked if this is the happy ending she dreamed of as a songwriter. “Is it the end already? Anything could happen, any second, any second, any second.”
Rose Colored Corner is out now on Light in the Attic.
