Bob Lind
Interview
February 8, 2013
By Christopher Hollow
He’s elusive. He’s been eulogised by Jarvis Cocker and Pulp. He’s the man who, according to Verve Records, wrote “The Times They are a-Changin’”. He’s American singer-songwriter Bob Lind and he’s alive and well and back with his first studio album in 40 years – aptly titled Finding You Again.
The fabulous news is – the songs are strong and the production by Spongetones mainman Jamie Hoover is incredibly sympathetic and holds up well against Lind’s other three studio gems – Don’t Be Concerned, Photographs of Feeling and Since There Were Circles.
It was 1966 when “Elusive Butterfly” was a worldwide hit, going top 5 in the UK and US and reaching number one in Australia. Maybe for this reason, Bob still has a strong fan base here – despite never touring. It also takes him a while to get his head around my accent.
Bob, it’s a pleasure to be talking to you, you’re alive and well …
Yes, I am, knock some wood.
I see on the internet that you have avid fans in Australia. Do you feel you’ve neglected us by never touring?
Not at all, man, it’s not me, it’s circumstances. But I gotta get over there. It’s amazing how many people write me from Australia.
The new album, Finding You Again, hasn’t come out of nowhere but it has been a long time – 40-odd years – why so long?
Well, what’s the rush? [Laughing] No, man, here’s the story: I don’t enjoy recording, I’ve never really gotten into it. I don’t have the patience for it. I don’t have the trust in most producers and I just really haven’t been in a hurry to get a record out for various reasons. One reason is this – once you record something it’s like you’ve roped a wild stallion and put them in a corral. Music to me is a fluid thing. People are always surprised when they hear this but my strength is not writing. I love to write and I’ve had hits along the way; writing has basically kept me alive. I have 200-plus covers by people like Aretha Franklin, Eric Clapton, Dolly Parton, the Four Tops, Richie Havens. There’s all kinds of people out there who have done my stuff – the Kingston Trio, Carmen McRae, The Turtles. So people think my strength and the thing I like best is writing. But it isn’t. It’s performing, that’s what I love to do. What happens is, once you record something, people get a taste in their mind of what the song ought to sound like. When I perform there’s no guarantee that I’m going to sing that song the way I did it on the record. Music is constantly alive for me. For instance, the first song on the new album, it’s called “How Dare You Love Me”. It’s a rock n roll thing but, live, I might want to play it as a ballad or finger-pick it or whatever and a lot of people are going to be disappointed because I’m not playing it like I recorded it and I don’t like to disappoint people. I’d prefer to have a career more like a stand-up comedian or a jazz musician than a pop singer. When you go and see a stand-up comedian you don’t want to hear what you’ve heard before. You’re there because you respect the person as an artist. You want to hear what they have to say, you’re interested in their mind and perceptions of life. You’d be bored hearing the same thing. It’s the same with jazz. I was fortunate enough to see Dave Brubeck a few years before he die. He did “Take Five” and he had a new sax player. Paul Desmond had passed but they didn’t do the song at all like the record. It was the same 5/4 time and same groove but the solo was completely different because it was alive and spontaneous and in the moment.
I love the stand-up comic analogy. It perfectly sums up what you’re talking about. Which stand-ups do you like?
I like Carlos Mencia. I like Chris Rock and Seinfeld. I love Steve Martin, of course. It’s very easy to make me laugh – anyone who has a command of the stage and confidence. I like Bill Maher. I liked George Carlin and Richard Pryor, if I’m allowed to bring dead guys into it.
Well, you have. But here’s the thing – you have been tamed and corralled on this record and it’s a beautiful record. I love the strings.
The record part is Jamie Hoover, I can’t give the guy enough credit. He’s the one who designed these tracks. We’d talk about what we wanted and, basically, if you like the song, that’s me. If you like the recording, that’s Jamie.
You’re known as a confessional songwriter, how much of your life can we ascertain from this record?
Well, my life is more truly reflected in the album than anything that I will tell you. I’ll lie to you in person; I’m not a real honest person but my music is. I think you can always get more of a sense of me by listening to what I do, particularly if you come to hear me live than you will by anything that I’ll tell you. I’m a fearful person, I don’t have a lot of courage and forthrightness on a personal level but I do put it into my work. Your obligation as an artist is to tell the truth but not necessarily the factual truth. You tell the emotional truth and that’s what I try and do in my music.
“How the Nights Can Fly” – this is a song that you’ve carried around for a long time.
Yeah, I had this song for a long time. I wrote it in 1974. Richie Havens recorded it, which I consider one of the hallmarks of my career.
Who does a better version – you or Richie?
Well, it’s really apples and oranges. If you hear his version, you’ll hear that he does it in a completely different way because he’s such a unique artist. Naturally, I like mine but I also love his because, let me put it this way, if the Vatican made little plastic statues of Richie Havens, I’d have one on my dashboard. I admire Richie Havens, he’s an idol of mine and the finest interpreter of songs that I’ve ever heard.
“Maybe It’s The Rain” is my favourite track – is this a song that you wrote recently or another you’ve had in the kit-bag for a while?
No, this is very recent. Most of the songs have been written in the last three to four, maybe five years. That’s recent for a guy my age [Laughing]. It was Jamie’s idea to do that pizzicato string thing in the break that sounds like raindrops. Usually I just dismiss that stuff out of hand, that little sound effect of the rain that you hear at the start and finish. Usually I hate that kind of stuff and I knee-jerked when I first heard it. The first thing I did was say, ‘No, no, I don’t like it.’ But I did like it. So I just held back a little bit and let myself get used to it. Yeah, that’s a really good idea.
What criticism of your music do you accept?
Critics are good and bad. There are some really good critics and then there are some critics who just want to show you how clever they are by how negative they can be and I don’t really pay much attention to those. But there’s a guy who’s always giving me bad reviews. Usually the critics are pretty good to me, I don’t get a lot of record sales but I do get a lot of good, critical reviews. There’s a guy named Richie Unterberger who has taken me to task for a lot of things and, when I read about them, I think, ‘Yeah, he’s right.’ I think my voice on the early records was a little bit stiff and tight. I wasn’t used to recording and I wasn’t totally comfortable in the studio. So I think, on the early records, my vocals are kinda tight-ass. Also, this is not really a musical criticism, but on my record Since There Were Circles I misspelled, I didn’t do it, but Gene Clark’s name was misspelled and so was Bernie Leadon from the Eagles. They showed it to me and I was just drunk and I let it pass and I shouldn’t have done that. Richie Unterberger, in his review of that, mentioned that fact. But, you know what, it’s so subjective, man, it really is. To be honest, I don’t really care that much. What I care about is standing on a stage and being as truthful and involving and putting it all out there as much as I can. People are going to form their own opinions about it.
Were you a Gene Clark fan?
Yes and no. I liked some of Gene’s stuff. I liked Gene’s work with Doug Dillard a lot. I like the Dillard and Clark Expedition and I liked some of the Byrds things. He did have a solo album that I liked some of the cuts from. I can’t really remember it that well now. We knew each other, our paths crossed, we ran in the same circles.
Did you ever run into Bob Dylan?
No, no, and I regret that. I met Dylan long before either of us was famous. He did a concert in Denver and, back then, he was just this folkie playing to 700, 800 people. This is back in around 1964. I just waited by the stage door and said, ‘Hi, hello’, that kind of thing, but I haven’t run into him, no.
What would you say, if you did?
Oh, man, what could you ask Bob Dylan? Bob Dylan is in a class all by himself, he really is, there’s just nobody like him. I don’t know that I would say anything to him; I don’t know what I would ask him. All of us, every singer-songwriter who plays the guitar, owes him because he opened the door for us. There’s Dylan and then there’s all the rest of us. I just think he’s brilliant and one of the most brilliant things about him, the most impressive things to me, is his courage. When Dylan went electric and these purists tried to hold onto him and make him be this King of the Folkies and tried to make him stay in that groove, he had the courage to go out and follow his heart and develop this style that ran completely at odds with the things he was known for, to be booed night after night and get threats on his life and he still continued, he heard his own muse. That’s the most impressive thing about him to me.
Let’s take a left turn, Bob. Each year I make a Christmas compilation for friends and family and this year I included a Bobby Sherman song, written by you, “Christmas On Her Mind”.
Well, here’s the trick about that song. That’s not a Christmas song! Everybody thinks it is and that record made me a lot of money because Bobby Sherman came to my publishing company and said he was looking to make a Christmas album. They said, ‘Here we have this song called “Christmas On Her Mind” by Bob Lind’, and he put it on his Christmas album. Well, the thing is, I wrote that song in the summertime, it’s about a very positive, upbeat woman who made everybody happy around her and had that kind of joy throughout the year. So, I just thought that was a convenient parallel. Next year, if you want to make a Christmas album, think about the only other Christmas song I’ve written called “New Year’s Carol”. It’s on my website as a special holiday bonus. That’s my Christmas song. But, anyway, I’m glad you like “Christmas On Her Mind”.
What’s the cover version you’ve made the most money from?
Well, probably “Elusive Butterfly” in all its incarnations. Mine, I think, sold the most. But all kinds of people have recorded it. Johnny Mathis, Glen Campbell, Petula Clark’s version is my favourite, nobody believes me when I say that – she wasn’t considered cool in the 60s – she was considered mainstream and very vanilla but I love her version of “Elusive Butterfly”. A group called The Rokes did an Italian version of “Cheryl’s Goin’ Home” that sold a million copies in Italy. That helped me, I loved that.
What about the cover that gave you the biggest surprise?
Let me tell you one thing about covers: I love covers and I can’t judge them. I’m just happy when anybody covers one of my songs. The covers I’ve enjoyed the most are the ones where the artist will do a completely different thing to what I have done. They’ll surprise me and show me an aspect of the song I hadn’t considered. The ones I like the least are the ones where they imitate me. I like the versions where people will come at it from a completely different point of view. There’s an artist called John Otway, who’s big in England and was around during the punk rock time and he did “Cheryl’s Goin’ Home” in a hard-driving, crazy, wild way. He does somersaults on-stage and does this rap in the middle of the song and created an opera around the song. He completely turns it upside down. People often say to me, ‘Oh, God, he ruins the song.’ Well, no, he doesn’t. As a matter of fact, there are people who have heard his version first that feel mine is too tame and wimpy.
What’s the best song that’s been covered by someone else that you haven’t recorded?
I think it would be Nancy Sinatra’s version of “Long Time Woman”. The story behind that is I wrote that song never expecting it would be covered. I certainly never expected it would be covered by a woman. This is a song I wrote – it was either suicide that night or write a song and I chose to write a song. I wrote it and I had it for a long time and Mac Davis, who became a famous songwriter, was, at that time, a song plugger for Metric Music, my publishing company and he got together with Billy Strange and they were looking for material for Nancy Sinatra and he thought about “Long Time Woman” and brought it to her. I was never really a big Nancy Sinatra fan, I didn’t really care for “Boots” and that whole Lee Hazlewood experience. But she does this song with such sweetness and such realness, she understates the song so beautifully. Very different to the way I would do it. To hear a woman singing it, giving it that point of view, just really opened my eyes and I loved it. There’s a couple more that I like, for sentimental reasons. One is The Turtles version of “Down in Suburbia”. The Turtles were the first people, ever, to cover one of my songs and this is at least six months before “Elusive Butterfly” was released. They believed in my music, Mark [Volman] and Howard [Kaylan] and the same with Cher. Before “Elusive Butterfly” ever came out, Cher recorded a song of mine called “Come To Your Window” that I really like. At that time, Sonny and Cher were white-hot. There was the Beatles, an emerging Bob Dylan and Sonny & Cher. They were the top people. The fact she did that song was really touching to me.
What about Pulp’s song “Bob Lind” – is this an appropriate tribute?
Well, I hope so. I know that Jarvis Cocker and Richard Hawley are big fans. I had no idea who they were; these guys are not as popular in America. I got an email one day from a guy named Jarvis Cocker and he said, ‘Listen, we have this song and the style of it is very influenced by you. We never really named it and whenever we play it we’ll be like, ‘Let’s do that Bob Lind song’ and we just started to call it “Bob Lind”. Would you have any objection to that?’ I was, like, ‘Of course not.’ Again, I had no idea who these people were so I asked some friends of mine who are aware of what’s happening in other countries and they were like, ‘Wow, that’s Pulp! Man, are you kidding, what a tribute that is’. It made me feel really good.
Have you sat on the couch, got out the guitar and played “Bob Lind” to yourself?
[Laughing] No, I got so many of my own songs, man. But I just think that both Jarvis and Richard Hawley are tremendous artists and wonderful people. They’ve given me so much support. Obviously my career has been ice-cold for some time and they’ve started to spread the news. They’ve played with me on-stage and never miss an opportunity to mention me, when asked about their influences. God, it just feels wonderful to have that kind of support from guys who are such big stars in the UK.
Jarvis included one of your songs, “Cool Summer”, on a compilation he did called The Trip. That song is off a controversial album called The Elusive Bob Lind. Have you made your peace with this record?
I’m afraid not, my friend, I’m afraid not. My hackles go up every time I think about that album. When I was 17 years old some friends got together with me, I’d just learnt to finger-pick and I’d written some of these candy-ass songs, I hadn’t developed as a writer or even as a singer yet. But, you know, it was an opportunity to go in and make a record. It only cost $100 to make a record so nine of my friends contributed $11 and got an acetate out of it. So I went in and in one hour I did 12 songs, some of them were my own, some weren’t. The studio that I recorded from was a studio for a local Denver company called Bandbox Records. If I start to get too boring, let me know…
We’re with you, Bob…
Alright, okay. Well, what happened was they signed me to a contract – time went by and they never recorded me and finally just dropped me. I thought I had been released from that contract, turns out I hadn’t. So I went to Los Angeles, I signed with World Pacific, “Elusive Butterfly” hit and these people came at me, they sold the masters to Verve Records and Verve came to my managers and said, ‘If you pay us a whole load of money we’ll not release this thing. Otherwise we’re going to release it’. And they’d put these strings and rhythm section, that mistitled song, that thing called “Cool Summer”, that’s not the name of that song. It’s called “The Summer Was Too Long” but they didn’t even bother to get the titles right. Plus, they credited me with all the songs which included, get this, ‘The Times They are Are a-Changin’’. These people are so stupid they think I wrote “The Times They Are a-Changin’”. There was another one on there, “Hey Nelly Nelly” that was written by Shel Silverstein, there were a couple traditional songs including “Polly Vaughn”, that they called “The Swan”. The album has haunted me, it just makes me cringe. So, the short answer is, ‘No, I have not made my peace with it’. [Laughing].
You sound like a stand-up taking us through how you wrote “The Times They Are a-Changin’”…
[Laughing] Yeah, I know. And, that’s the thing – I never saw any money from it anyway. Don’t get me wrong – at the time when Jarvis compiled that record [The Trip] he didn’t know any of this story and I am getting paid on that, so it’s not Jarvis or that compilation album that my beef is with. I really hate my voice on that record but, nevertheless, if people like my music then okay. I’m not going to argue with it. It’s just so distant and removed from what I’m doing now.
Your original producer, Jack Nitzsche was obviously a larger than life character.
He was a good friend and severely missed. When I came to Los Angeles, I knew nothing about recording. I had no idea. I was signed to Metric Music, which was the publishing arm of Liberty Records and World Pacific Records and my publisher, Lenny Waronker, said, ‘Listen, Jack Nitzsche is looking for material for artists that he wants to produce but your demos aren’t very strong.’ He said, ‘In fact, your demos are pretty bad, why don’t you come into the office, meet Jack face-to-face and play your music for him.’ Well, I knew who Jack Nitzsche was and I said, ‘That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard. I play these twangy, little folk songs and this guy is a classically-trained musical genius. He’s not going to have any interest in these things.’
He came in and I knew his reputation, I knew he was Phil Spector’s right hand man and I even had his record, Lonely Surfer. He came in with that crazy professor long hair that stood out. It wasn’t like neat, Beatles stuff. It was wild, Einstein hair and he had that briefcase that he always carried and I started to play my songs for him and he amazed me when he turned to Lenny Waronker and said, ‘You finally have got an honest artist here, man, an honest writer. These things are really great.’ I couldn’t believe it, it was such a boost to my confidence that this guy who likes Wagner and was trained in Beethoven and Chopin, is listening to my songs and getting them. He was feeling them. He didn’t use any of those songs for the artists he was cutting but Lenny remembered that he had liked the songs so when they were looking for a producer to do my album, he thought about Jack. So they got Jack together with me and Jack came up with those brilliant, breathtaking string lines and woodwinds and those beautiful arrangements over the top of these songs.
What’s your favourite track off Don’t Be Concerned?
Maybe “Truly Julie’s Blues”, maybe “Drifter’s Sunrise”. I just don’t like those albums anymore, not because of anything Jack did. My songwriting was so immature then and so undeveloped and so was my voice. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad people like them but I don’t think they compare to what I’m doing now. Let’s say “Drifter’s Sunrise”.
What about Photographs of Feeling?
Probably “West Virginia Summer Child”, I think I sing that pretty well. Maybe “I Just Let It Take Me”. Oh, one other one – I think my favourite is “A Nameless Request”. I just think I sing that better than I sing most of the other songs. There’s more vocal presence there and I’m a little bit more relaxed on that song than I was on the other ones.
Since There Were Circles?
Of the early work, that’s my favourite album. That’s the album when I started to get loose but I also have sad feelings about that record. First of all, I was just such a pain in the ass to work with – I was really crazy, I was so protective of the songs and every idea that Jimmy Bond and Doug Weston had, I would shoot down. I regret that. I was just a raging drunk and drug addict then but I do think this: I do think some beauty came out of that disharmony and conflict. I do know why because I basically believe that most good collaborative art comes out of harmony and peace and I was just at odds with them all the time. The musicians were so good on that album and so faithfully executed the ideas of the songs. I do like that album a lot.
Favourites?
Well, let’s see. I like “Anymore”, I like “Spilling Over”. I like “She Can Get Along”. It’s hard for me to pick favourites. It depends what mood I’m in. I don’t listen to it anymore so it’s been a while since I’ve heard it.
There’s a bunch of rare, late 60s singles that haven’t been released again including “Goodbye Neon Lies” and “We May Have Touched”. Are there any plans to release those?
Well, if there are any plans, I’m not aware of them. I don’t own the rights to those records. EMI has those. So I have no idea, but I’d be surprised because there’s so few of them. It’s not like they could compile an album of them. There’s “We May Have Touched”, “Goodbye Neon Lies”, “It’s Just My Love” and I can’t even remember what the other ones are. There’s four at the most.
What about demos for things like “Long Time Woman” and “Christmas On Her Mind”. Have you got those lying around?
No, I don’t. But I know someone has them. But I wouldn’t want those released. I wouldn’t mind re-recording “Long Time Woman” or any of these things. But it’s really not my main interest. I’d much rather do some of these songs now.
How about the live album – The Luna Star Café – your first comeback record?
I don’t know if it was the comeback record, it’s kinda grandiose for me to think of it that way. It’s just a record that I made. The good side of records is that they do bring people in to hear you play so I just made a limited edition live cd CD. I’m kinda happy with that. Obviously there’s always limitation with the live record. It’s hard to get the sound the way you want it. But that’s okay, because you can make up for it in spontaneity and I think that’s what we did. On that record, I like … what do you like on that record?
I like your intros.
[Laughing] Okay. Yeah, you know, I kinda do too. As I say, that’s where I really shine – being on stage. I kinda like the way I do “How the Nights Can Fly” on that album. There’s two songs on that album that are also on the new album –“May” and “How the Nights Can Fly”. Thank you very much for that, by the way.
###
