Mark Lindsay's Arizona

Arizona arrived in 1970 at a moment when Mark Lindsay badly needed to be taken seriously on his own terms. For most listeners, he was still inseparable from Paul Revere & The Raiders, the rousing singles, the tricorn hats, the television-friendly swagger. This album was his attempt to step out of that frame, to be heard not as a frontman in costume but as a singer with range, ambition and a sense of where pop music was heading as the 1960s gave way to something more reflective.

From the opening bars, it was clear that Arizona was not a Raiders record in disguise. Produced by Jerry Fuller, the sound was polished, expansive and unapologetically lush. Strings and brass were everywhere, sometimes swelling, sometimes gliding, always framing Lindsay’s voice as the main event. It was sunshine pop moving toward adult contemporary, music designed less for teen dance floors than for car radios and late-night listening.

Lindsay himself seemed acutely aware of what he was trying to do. In his cover notes, he talked about wanting to grow, about songs that reflected a changing America and a more personal set of concerns. There was a sense of a man consciously shedding an old skin. Vocally, he rose to the occasion. This might well be his peak as a singer: confident, flexible, capable of grit when needed and smooth when the arrangement called for it.

The title track remains the album’s centre of gravity. Arizona is bright, catchy and faintly psychedelic, with a chorus that lodges itself in the mind almost immediately. However, the lyric carried the seeds of its own unease. The narrator’s urge to rescue a free-spirited girl and bring her back to “reality” sounded very much of its time but it captured that late-60s moment when idealism was colliding with disillusion.

Elsewhere, Man from Houston allowed Lindsay to lean into a tougher, more soulful persona, while Silver Bird soared on its own sense of drama, carried by his voice and the album’s cinematic production. What stood out was not any single experiment, but the consistency. This is not a one-hit album padded with filler. It had a mood and it sustained it.

If there was a drawback, it was in the very qualities that defined it. Listeners who loved the raw snap of Kicks or Hungry may find Arizona too smooth. At times it flirted with the middle of the road. But taken on its own terms, it succeeded.

More than anything, Arizona documented a transition. It captured Mark Lindsay at the point where pop spectacle gives way to adult self-definition. He did not entirely escape his past, but for one album at least, he proved that the voice at the centre of all that Raider noise could stand unadorned on its own.

Addendum: I also own this compact disc which combined two of Mark Lindsay's albums, Arizona and the follow-up Silverbird. Building directly on the momentum of Arizona, Silverbird arrived later the same year as a natural companion piece. If Arizona captured Lindsay stepping out of costume, Silverbird was the sound of him settling comfortably into his new skin as a fully formed solo stylist.

Once again produced by Jerry Fuller, the album leaned even more decisively into lush, cinematic orchestration. The title track remained one of the high points of early 1970s pop: grand, sweeping and built around a melodic arc that called on the full range of Lindsay’s vocal power. As a successor to Arizona, the second album exchanged the open-road optimism of the earlier album for something more expansive and atmospheric.

Elsewhere, Silverbird found its strength in material that bridged Top 40 polish and the emerging singer-songwriter sensibility. Lindsay’s reading of And the Grass Won’t Pay No Mind revealed a quieter, more inward voice, handling Neil Diamond’s reflective writing with surprising tenderness and restraint.

In the end, Silverbird helped define what might be called the Lindsay sound: soulful grit softened by velvet phrasing, framed within Fuller’s refined approach. At times it edges into the middle-of-the-road territory but it never lost its poise. More importantly, it confirmed that Arizona was no one-off success. Mark Lindsay had completed his transition from teen idol to mature contemporary artist, capable of sustaining a full album with confidence, control and grace.

Side One: Arizona, Something, Sunday mornin' comin' down, Love's been good to me, Small town woman, First hymn from Grand Terrace
Side Two: Miss America, The name of my sorrow, Leaving On a jet plane, I'll never fall in love again, Man from Houston