The Limeliters - Look At Love… In Depth (1965/2015) [Hi-Res]

Along with the Kingston Trio, the Limeliters were one of the most successful folk groups of the early '60s, a time when the folk music revival was in itself a sort of backlash against the anti-establishment rock & roll generation. The original group consisted of Glenn Yarbrough, vocal and guitar; Lou Gottlieb, vocal and bass; and Alex Hassilev, vocal, guitar. The group was active from 1959 until 1965, when they disbanded.
With this album, the Limeliters ceased to be a folk music act, at least for the time being. RCA Victor, seeing folk disappear from the charts in favor of Bob Dylan's electricification, was getting impatient, and decided to augment the Limeliters' relatively spare recordings with fuller elements. Enter Perry Botkin, Jr., arranger and conductor of pop/smarm/pseudo-rock. Botkin proceeded to "spruce up" the thin tunes (all written by the team of Bud Freeman and Leon Pober) with a female vocal accompaniment and a rock & roll combo rhythm section. The theme for this album, ostensibly, was a humorous look at love songs. The zany cover, featuring smock-clad Limeliters measuring a Mary Travers lookalike, is easily their silliest. Lou Gottlieb, always the professional iconoclast, lurched into this project with his usual eclectic abandon, but it didn't work. The only thing that could have saved the departure of Glenn Yarbrough (by now flying high on the success of "Baby the Rain Must Fall") was either another tenor or superior material. Neither had surfaced by now. This would be the last release of new material by the Limeliters for three years.