Consumer Guide Album

Paul Butterfield's Better Days: It All Comes Back [Bearsville, 1973]
In which Butter returns to his own better days, when his miraculously unaffected but colorless singing provided pleasant valleys from which his weirdo sidemen could peak. The prize here is Geoff Muldaur's rendition of Bobby Charles's "Small Town Talk," a song about back-stabbers that sounds as if it was made for the exurban bohemian community where the music originated--probably because that's the community it was written about. Ronnie Barron's frenetic remake of his own "Louisiana Flood" comes in second. B+