Miss Butters

Family Tree - Miss Butters

Miss Butters
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Music CD Cover

Artist: Family Tree
Edition: Music CD
Audio: English (Unknown)
Format: Import, Original recording remastered
CD Release Date: 2007-05-15
Music Label: Rev-Ola
Soundtracks:
  1. Birthday/Dirgeday
  2. Melancholy Vaudeville Man
  3. Any Other Baby
  4. Sideshow
  5. Mrs. McPheeny (Has Flu in Her Chest and Has Needed a Rest for So Long)
  6. Butters Lament
  7. Simple Life
  8. Slippin' Thru My Fingers
  9. Nine to Three
  10. Lesson Book Life
  11. Nickelodeon Music
  12. Miss Butters
  13. The Underture
  14. Keepin' a Secret [*]
  15. Do You Have the Time [*]
  16. She Had to Fly [*]
  17. He Spins Around [*]

Free Music Notes for Miss Butters

Free Music Review: Outstanding...a True Lost Classic!
Hit: 5 Stars

So recently I had really been getting into the first two Harry Nilsson albums, and especially enjoying their creative arrangements and production sound. I became curious about what other albums the producer (Rick Jarrard) and arranger (George Tipton) worked on, so I looked up their credits in the Allmusic database. This 1968 album was was among those listed. I had never heard of the band nor album before, and I have a fairly extensive collection of 60s music. For example, I was familiar with Family and with Fever Tree, but not The Family Tree. I read the review of the album on that site, and the reviewer compared it to The Left Banke and The Kink's "Village Green Preservation Society", some of my all-time favorite music, so I ordered it immediately.

It turns out that the album was actually recorded at the same time and place (RCA Studio) as Nilsson's "Aerial Ballet", with the same session musicians. Nilsson even co-wrote one of the songs. The band was from Northern California, but shared little with the Bay Area sound of that time. They were instead major Anglophiles, and had absorbed the Beatles influence in a manner similar to UK bands such as The Move and Idle Race. The arrangements are creative and feature strings, horns, piano, calliope, even an early appearance of the Moog synthesizer. Although not a heavy guitar album, the solos that do appear on some songs have a nice distorted tone. The song writing, singing, and vocal harmonies are fantastic. The songs form a cycle that tells the life story of a school teacher (Miss Butters) from birth until death. It may be one of the first concept albums, preceding similar projects by The Pretty Things and The Who. One of the members, Bob Segarini, was later in bands such as The Wackers, that appeared to take a more "back to basics" approach, judging from the clips I've heard, and then made some solo power pop albums for Bomp Records.

Based on their work on this album, as well as on the Nilsson material, Rick Jarrard, George Tipton, and their session men deserve kudos as another great, unheralded production team. Their production sound is not unlike what their contemporary Lenny Waronker was doing at Warner Brothers. Working with Van Dyke Parks and Randy Newman, they also created a sound that was contemporary but not afraid to draw from the pre-rock music of the twentieth century. I think that rock critics of that time did not give this sound enough credit, perhaps because it did not reflect the turmoil of the times, musically or topically.

Many obscure or even unreleased albums from the 60s and 70s are getting re-released on CD and hailed as "lost classics". And while many of them are in fact worth a listen, I don't think they quite deserve that title. This, on the other hand, in my opinion, does. I can understand, in a way, why an album with this subject matter did not attract much attention during the "street fighting" days of 1968. I don't think it even charted. A similar fate befell other great albums from that year, such as The Everly Brother's "Roots". There were a lot of flamboyant characters drawing the public's attention at that time (Jim, Jimi, Janis, Mick, etc). But to my ears, this album can stand proudly with the likes of "Odessey and Oracle", "Forever Changes", and "The Village Green Preservation Society". It's that good.
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