“Lookin’ In” (1971) – Bobbie Gentry * Written and produced by Bobbie Gentry * LP: Patchwork * Label: Columbia
“Mystique” became a key word for Bobbie Gentry when her very first (and biggest) single, the Southern-Gothic “Ode to Billy Joe” (1967), darkened the Love Summer sky with its moody account of an unclear event. Then, after a handful of distinctive albums, a popular run in Vegas, and a final public-eye appearance at the Academy of Country Music Awards in 1982, she vanished and became impossible to contact.
Her last proper album, 1971’s Patchwork, featured orchestral interludes and closed with a track called “Lookin’ In.” This turned out to be a suitable swan song of sorts. “I’m packin’ up and I’m checkin’ out,” she sings, claiming full ownership for the state she was in and eschewing the notion of “sacrifice” as the “ugliest word” that keeps people from being who they’re meant to be.
Maybe one of the best clues for explaining her eventual disappearance comes from former Capitol Records executive Ken Mansfield. He writes in his memoir Between Wyomings (2009) about traveling with Gentry and seeing how intensively she’d study Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. The novel was Rand’s 1957 thousand-plus page opus about her “objectivist” philosophy, which boiled down to a belief in the complete, unregulated rights of the individual to pursue wealth and prosperity. There’s a key character in the book named John Galt, a genius innovator, engineer and philosopher who goes on strike, due to the inability of his world to allow him to work with no regulations and restraint. He also talks other innovators into joining him in his act of defiance. Makes you wonder, then, if Gentry simply pulled a John Galt.