Sixties Troubadour Bob Lind Makes His way to New York
Chances are, if you’re under 50, you don’t know Bob Lind, who performs his first-ever 
ith nets of wonder/I chase the bright elusive butterfly of love.” Sound familiar?) Riding the already-ebbing wave of the Greenwich Village acoustic fad (tellingly, he was too busy recording TV lip-synch shows to ever play a live gig in New York) his first album, a collection of exquisitely-produced baroque-pop gems produced by L.A. Wall of Sound engineer Jack Nitzsche, seemed destined to disappear without a trace. Fed up with being a hamster running on the corporate wheel, Lind did what any good troubadour would do – hit the road, where, over the next few decades, he tried his hand at prose writing, including, briefly, a stint as a staffer at the infamous now-defunct tabloid Weekly World News.
In the past thirty years, his songs have been covered by artists from everyone from The Four Tops to Adam Faith (“Cheryl’s Goin’ Home”) to Cher (“Come to Your Window”), keeping the music, if not the man, alive in the public imagination. Not to mention allowing him to live quite comfortably in royalties --- safely out of reach of the long arm of the label. But now with a Web site and the full control he always fought for, he’s releasing new demos and connecting with old fans, and most importantly, finally getting the chance to be truly indie – a chance that, these days, artists take for granted. An ardent believer in evolution (the musical kind), Lind combines new songs with the old, presented in new ways. But as Lind tells Beyond Race, don’t be concerned --“Elusive Butterfly” isn’t going anywhere.
Beyond Race: It was surprising to learn that you’ve never played
Bob Lind: A lot of people were. In New York I did the lip-sync shows, the national television shows [“Shindig,” “Hullabaloo”]. I was never there during the Gerde’s Folk City, Bitter End kinds of times. For some reason, I’ve never gotten to New York. And now I’m really looking forward to it.
BR: What do you think about
BL: You know, if I can make it there, I can make it anywhere. Yes, of course. Who wouldn’t? It’s hard to say why I haven’t played there before. The times I’ve been there, I haven’t found it to [have a] rude, hustle-and-bustle, brusque to out-of-towners kind of vibe. I’ve never felt that about New York, at least in the circumstances in which I’ve been there. I’ve never experienced anything but good there. I love it.
BR: What’s your best
BL: I think it was walking around the Village. When I was in New York, obviously I was interested in it, and I could just feel the ghosts of Fred Neill and Dylan at that time. I had to work a little bit for it, because obviously it’s changed a lot. It’s just a joy to visit those places. A lot of them have changed. A lot of them don’t even have the same name anymore. And there’s just a spell about New York. I like riding the subways. I just like it because it’s something new. It’s the same thing as when I went to London. There, I even liked riding the Underground during peak traffic.
BR: You live in
BL: I lived in
BR: What do you like most about it?
BL: What I like is the
BR: Does it inspire you to write?
BL: Not particularly. I’m never sure what inspires me to write songs. Most of my songs really come from relationships with people, not so much the beauty of nature. I can’t think of a single song that has centered itself on scenic things. I have a friend out here, Graham Livingston, who’s a very popular local folk singer. He’s always saying, you ought to write a
BR: On your recent release Live at the Luna Star Café, you have a song called “Sophia’s Lullaby.” The notes say it’s dedicated to all Chinese children adopted by American parents. Was this inspired by someone you know?
BL: As a matter of fact, yes. It was inspired by a friend of mine. He and his wife went over and adopted a Chinese baby. Now it’s a just very well-known phenomenon. Angelina Jolie, Mia Farrow, and all these people have been doing it for a while. But at the time, and this must have been 2003 or 2004, I hadn’t heard that it was common. Not common, because that reduces it to mundanity, and is a really important, gracious thing to do. It’s a life-saving thing to do. I had never noticed him to be particularly noble or particularly selfless, and when he and his wife decided to do this, I was astonished. And she’s a great little girl. Really sweet, and now getting very feisty.
Very rarely do I write political songs, songs about big issues. Only when they can get seen through a very specific lens. I’ll give you an example. I can read that [8,000] people die in an earthquake. But it does not have the impact on me as hearing about one little kid who wandered into the wrong thing, because the enormity of 8,000 people dying is way too vast for me to get my mind around. But the immediacy of one person particularly is not. That’s why some photographs are so powerful. I can’t get my mind around mass starvation, or even genocide. I’m not trying to sound cold-blooded here, although I probably do. I’m just saying it’s too immense. But the individuality of seeing one person in pain is something that I can relate to, almost directly, even if it’s not a kind of pain I have in my life.
BR: Have you ever, either back in the sixties or today, felt pressure to use your music as a platform to speak out politically?
BL: Sure, but I wouldn’t call it pressure, exactly. There was a time when I was in my twenties, and everybody around me, everybody who played acoustic music, was playing protest songs. But most protest songs, frankly, aren’t very good. Most of them are deck-stacked, and they always resonate with people for whom those themes are important, or people who already agree with those ideas. Two come to mind, incredibly powerful protest songs. One of them is “Lives in the Balance,” by Jackson Browne, and the other one is “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.” They’re just good songs, period. They’re powerful songs, because they have the impact and the credence. Particularly “Hattie Carroll.” It’s just one tiny little example of racism, but when you see it through that prism, and it hits you with that last verse, it brings something home. And I’m not necessarily saying that people are going to got out and say, “oh, I heard this song, my life is going to be different now, I’m going to go out and risk my life and march in
There’s a song on my Web site. It’s called “Home.” I wrote that under a completely different set of circumstances. It had nothing to do with armies or soldiers or wars or battles or Iraq or Vietnam or Korea. But I put it up as a demo on my Web site. And about two months later, I was in contact with an organization called Welcome Home, USA. And they’re an organization whose function is to help veterans make the transition from being over in Iraq and Afghanistan, to help them re-integrate themselves into society. Some of them come back very damaged, physically and mentally. Most people think, oh boy, I’m out of the war, great, I’m home. But there’s much more to it than that. And they’ve adopted my song and are using it as their theme song. So there’s an example of something that I never wrote with a political idea at all. And then I hear it in that context, and I say wow, that is a pretty strong statement about that. But it was never the intent.
BR: It’s said that once you put a work of art into the world, it’s not yours anymore. It’s free for people to interpret however they want. Do you agree?
BL: Yes. Too few people realize that. Sometimes we want to keep our hands on it. I’m not one of those. I freely give up any control over how people record my songs. As a matter of fact, I like nothing more than to hear a song that I’ve written done in a completely different way than the way I do it. I love to hear somebody show me a dimension of one of my songs that I had not realized was there. With the example that I just gave you “Home,” the only change is the context. But [a different example is] John Otway’s version of “Cheryl’s Goin’ Home.” I have a friend who had a tape of a movie, and the movie was about punk rockers. This was made back in the mid-eighties, when punk rock was very big. There’s this movie called Urgh! A Music War that is all about that era and its groups; a concert [movie]. He [Lind’s friend] says “Look, there’s a guy who does one of your songs on it.” I say, “Oh really?” He says, “Yeah, John Otway sings your song, ‘Cheryl’s Goin’ Home.’” I said, “Oh great! Lend me the tape, will you? I want to see it. He said, “Well, no, you don’t really want to see this.” I said, “Sure I do.” And he hesitated, and I had to all but wrest it out of his hand. And you know what? I love it. It’s a complete 180° from the way I do it completely. He does somersaults on the stage, with a little raft in between. It’s on YouTube . But the point is, I like that. I like the fact that he didn’t look at what I did and say, “Oh, that’s how the song ought to be done.” One of the great things about writing songs, and again, this is an incidental thing, is the fact that it gives other artists a venue to present their work. It’s a vehicle for their art, and I love that, and I have no right to mess with that.
BR: What were some other covers of your songs that were especially meaningful for you?
BL: Perhaps my favorite cut, and I don’t know why, is Richie Havens’ version of “How the Nights Can Fly.” Richie Havens has always been an idol of mine. If the Vatican made little plastic statues of Richie Havens I’d probably have one on my dashboard. I’ve admired him for years, not his writing, but his ability to take a song and interpret it and make you hear it for the first time. When you hear Richie do “Like a Rolling Stone” or “Lives in the Balance” or “Just like a Woman,” he [makes] the song completely his own. [The version] is completely different from mine. My manager heard it and she said, “It‘s beautiful. It’s a different song, but it’s beautiful.” So I like it a lot because it’s Richie, but also because he makes me listen to the song in a new way.
The other delight that I have, and I’ve got so many, is Nancy Sinatra’s version of “Long Time Woman.” I wrote “Long Time Woman” in the depths of this angst and remorse about a relationship that I’d fucked up. I never, when I wrote it, expected that it would ever be covered, because it was just dripping with the raw nerves and the nostalgia and the regret that we all feel when a relationship goes south. And so when I heard that Nancy Sinatra was going to do it, I just went, “what?” First of all, I never thought it would be cut. Secondly, I never thought it would be cut by a woman. Thirdly, Nancy Sinatra, boots [“These Boots are Made for Walking”]? Come on. And when I heard it, it just absolutely blew me away. It’s beautiful. She does it in this very understated, sweet way. It’s kind of subdued, but when I say subdued I don’t mean to say without feeling. There’s a lot of heart, but it’s reigned in. Reigned in, even, much more than the way I do it.
BR: You released “Since There Were Circles” in 1971, and after that, you were out of the public eye for around thirty years. Why?
BL: First of all, I got to hate the music business. I never hated music. I never did not want to play music for a living. But I was sick and tired of seeing idiots in suits who had no empathy making creative decisions about my music. I could not stand that I was being forced to play a game that I did not want to play, did not have a choice in. [It was] in much the same spirit of the kid who just wants to get one punch in the bully’s face, who knows he’s going to get his ass kicked, but just [wants] the satisfaction of that punch, no matter what happens afterwards. That was the attitude that I had. And that’s not a healthy attitude. That’s an attitude that’s spawned by drugs, alcohol, and a babyish, infantile attitude. But those things defined me. It’s who I was. So it’s not surprising that I said, okay, fuck you, music business, you’re going to treat me that way, I’m out. I was thinking of myself as unique. But there’s no artist who I know, or know of, who hasn’t had their ups and downs with the music business. Most people don’t get out of it. Most people are mature enough to say, “Okay, this is something that I don’t like. But I love being able to play. I love being able to play and participate and express myself more than I hate the price that I have to pay. So I will pay this price, and eventually I will transcend any kind of control that the music business might impose on me.”
When I was hot, when “Elusive Butterfly” was topping the charts, my manager got me these kinds of shows where you sit or stand and you move your mouth to a record that you’ve already made, and then there’s go-go dancers behind you. One day I went to do [the show “Shindig”], which moved around to various locales in Los Angeles to shoot, and I had a song called “Mister Zero.” It’s a complex, raw nerve, intimate, subjective song. And they wanted me to do it, and one of these guys, one of these Los Angeles coke-spoon-around-the-neck, thin-tie, go-getter, Madison Avenue types, decided that hey, we’ll tell you what we’ll do, let’s put Bob on the stool, and we’ll put this ocelot at his feet, one of those jungle cats, and he can lip-synch the song. The theme is Jungleland, we’re in Jungleland here. So I was sitting there and they said, now don’t move too fast, you’ll be all right, he’s tame, he’s sedated, he won’t hurt you, don’t make any sudden moves. So while they’re getting everything ready, I started to think, what the fuck am I doing? When I wrote this song I had a picture of the way it worked, a picture of the theme of it. I knew what I wanted to play. I knew what I wanted to do with this song. Now I’m up here moving my mouth to a record I already made, with a jungle cat at my feet, to a TV audience. It had absolutely nothing to do with this song. And that’s when I first realized that the gigs that I’m getting now are not the kind of gigs that are right for me.
BR: You gradually started recording and touring again about five years ago. What brought you back?
BL: I realized that now we live in an age where we don’t depend on those stupid guys [from the labels] anymore. The point is, I made this. I didn’t have a label for it. I recorded it, I did what I wanted to do, I did it the way I wanted to do it. I put it out myself, and I’m selling it myself. I’m selling it at my gigs and on my Web site. There’s nobody interfering. There’s no middleman. Can I get the distribution that I could if I were with Capitol or Columbia? No, I can’t. At some point I might even have to have a label. That’s all right. But the point is, the artist has so much autonomy now. I’m living in Florida. That’s unthinkable [in the past]. Everybody knows that if you want to play music, you have to be in one of three places. You have to be in Nashville, you have to be in New York, or you have to be in Los Angeles. The game is different now. You live where you want. You travel. People have access to you through your Web site. They can learn about you. You can get gigs anywhere you want to go. You can operate with great autonomy.
BR: There’s a lot of debate about what it’s doing to music, now that there are so many other channels through which to disseminate outside of the major labels.
BL: Well, it used to be, “so-and-so’s a country artist.” Well if he’s a country artist, he’ll go through these venues, he’ll use this management company, he’ll get this record label, he’ll get this publisher. And God forbid that you become a country artist who begins to evolve, and I’m not saying just cross over. I mean evolve, so that your style can no longer be confined by that country label. Then what happens? You’re ill-equipped to move in a structure that will name you. The Nashville circuit. So, yeah, I think that one of the big things that’s different is that there’s so much music now. And it’s possible for someone to be famous and able to sell out the Hollywood Bowl, even if 80 percent of Americans don’t know who they are. You don’t have to hit the home run. You don’t have to have mass appeal to be famous and make a good living.
BR: Let’s talk about your activities during the time you were out of music. I know you’ve novelist. Have any of your novels been published?
BL: My first novel [East of the Holyland] is coming out on Lulu. It should be out within a month. It has a lot of my heart in it. It’s probably the most personal of all my novels. It’s about a folksinger in the 1960s in Denver who’s playing the coffeehouse circuit. He’s coming into his own as an artist just as the folk fad is coming to an end. It’s the pressure of, where do you go, now that you’ve learned how to do something well? You’ve hit your pinnacle, the demand for it is dying, and you’ve realized you are evolving into something past just a folksinger, and what happens from there? It’s about a very important historical time that I haven’t seen represented. I wrote it in the eighties. It was, even then, a memoir, sort of. I’m being very, very careful about that. As any fiction writer will tell you, you always get people who want to take these things literally and say, “Oh I see, so you’re writing about so and so here.” This character is the person you really knew. And I don’t know how to be any more emphatic than I am [about that]. I talk about it in the prologue. These are not real people. They’re not all real situations. There’s a thematic reality to it. It’s about a time. One movie that got to it pretty good was A Mighty Wind. That movie was hysterical. The movie was careful. The research was careful. They, of course, took a light, breezy tone about it. This is a bit more serious.
BR: Tell me about the documentary that Paul Surratt and Ian Marshall [The Kingston Trio Story: Wherever We May Go] are making on you.
BL: The documentary: this is something we did not hunt down. I’m the first non-famous guy that they have ever done. They followed me around with a camera to tape one of my rehearsals.
BR: Are you concerned at all about how you might be portrayed on-screen?
BL: I don’t have to worry if they’re going to do a hatchet job on me, because I’m not famous enough. There’s nothing to de-humanize. There’s a certain amount of vulnerability. Do I have secrets that I would rather the world not know? Yes, I do.
BR: Was anyone in your family musical?
BL: My real father played guitar and ukulele. He was radio personality named Eddie Hubbard. But when he was gone, he was gone
BR: Who were some of your early musical influences?
BL: Gene Autry. People still say they hear him in my voice. And there was a guy named Burl Ives. Most of the music around [in the forties and fifties] was swing bands, Guy Lombardo. But my parents had this album named Down to the Sea in Ships. He sang about bats with leather wings, cowboys dying in the Texas streets, moonshiners. I also liked R&B, or doo wop as they call it now. Lightnin’ Hopkins, Muddy Waters. I like Ray Charles, too, Bobby Bland. It’s hard to hear those influences in my work now. Later on, the new folk singers, like Phil Ochs, Richie Havens I don’t think I necessarily sound like any of them, though.
BR: Is there any artist who you’d say changed your life?
BL: Bob Dylan changed my life. But nobody’s going to mix me up with Bob Dylan. [When I first started out in music, people told me] “Don’t mention Dylan, or people will compare you to him.” He had a mystique about him. He freed everyone.
BR: How do you feel about touring and being on the road again?
BL: [In the sixties] I went almost instantly from coffeehouses to having a hit record. I did the Hollywood Bowl, the Palladium. This was the heart of my drugs and alcohol. But I’m sober 31 years now. Clean and sober. Marijuana makes you introspective in a not –so-good way. It made me paranoid, and I was paranoid to begin with. There’s something about having a hit record that’s intoxicating. I had an attitude about my audiences that started to develop. I could only call it hostility. Don’t they see that I’m a phony? I’m not this thing that they think I am. I’m not this guy that they’re coming to see. I have to fool them. There’s a certain amount of terror that I felt onstage. Over the years as I got sober, my whole attitude started to turn around. Call it modesty if you want to. I do have something to give. This music is good. I’m good at presenting it. I have developed a love for my audiences. I want to help them feel what I feel. To communicate with people on a deep level helps jolt me alive. Being in front of my audience is the closest thing I have to love in my life. That’s no insult to my girlfriend. There’s some magic I have when I’m performing. It’s love. It’s something I care about. I don’t have a lot of friends. I don’t let a lot of people in. [Onstage] I feel free.
BR: Where do you see yourself in five years? Ten years?
BL: I’m not looking to play huge venues. What I do is much more intimate than that. I can see myself playing in auditoriums and theatres. Yes I hope my records sell. I hope my songs continue to be recorded. At this point, my income comes from my songwriting. I don’t have to [play places I don’t want to]. Anything you continue to do with care and love and persistence you can get better at. I believe my voice is better and I believe my songs are better. [Recently] I was listening to Joni Mitchell’s Clouds. She burst onto the scene and she burst onto it great. She stayed great and she got better. I’m a little embarrassed. I don’t write as often and I don’t write as much. It takes me longer. But the songs are better. I’ve learned something now that I didn’t know then. I’m still intoxicated, but now it’s a slow warm glow. Not a fevery bonfire.
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