Born in Baltimore, Bob Lind was just 5 years old when his parents divorced. His mother's second marriage to an Air Force sergeant meant the family was constantly relocating, and Lind found early solace in the songs of Burl Ives and Gene Autry before discovering early rock 'n' roll. It was Bob Dylan who changed everything, giving Lind a model for the kind of songwriter he wanted to be.
Though his childhood was transient, Lind developed deep ties to Colorado. He graduated from high school in Aurora, briefly attended Western State College in Gunnison, and became part of Denver's folk coffeehouse circuit, playing venues like the Exodus and the Analyst before moving to Los Angeles. In 2013, Lind was inducted into the Colorado Music Hall of Fame.
Richie Havens and Fred Neil were key influences. "Singers who don't put their voice ahead of the song but use it to carry the song from the heart," he told
Mojo magazine. That philosophy shaped Lind's own restrained, emotionally direct delivery on songs like "
Elusive Butterfly."
Bob Lind's debut hit, "Elusive Butterfly," reached #5 on both the US and UK charts in 1966, but it almost never happened. The song was originally the B-side to "
Cheryl's Goin' Home," and it was only when a DJ at Miami station WQAM flipped the single over that audiences took notice.
Lind grew increasingly disillusioned with the music business and walked away entirely in 1977. "It was a petulant move," he admitted to Mojo. "Chalk it up to my insecurity and propensity for alcohol and amphetamines. But it was also because I only wanted the kind of career Dylan had, based on a body of work, not singles."
The hiatus lasted 41 years - an unusually long vanishing act even by the standards of '60s burnouts.
During his hard-living years, Lind moved in bohemian literary circles well beyond the folk scene. He was a drinking companion of poet and novelist Charles Bukowski and became the inspiration for the character Dinky Summers - a down-on-his-luck folk singer - in Bukowski's 1978 novel Women. It is a legacy that says as much about the company Lind kept as about the music he made.
With music in the rear-view mirror and newly sober, Lind turned to writing in a different sense entirely. For eight years he was a staff writer for the supermarket tabloid Weekly World News, dreaming up stories about Bigfoot, UFOs, and witches. He also wrote five novels, plays, and in 1991 produced an award-winning screenplay called Refuge.
Despite walking away, Lind's songs never stopped being recorded by other artists. Over 200 musicians have covered his work, including Aretha Franklin, Dolly Parton, Marianne Faithfull, Richie Havens, Eric Clapton, and Glen Campbell. For a man who considered himself a body-of-work artist rather than a singles act, it was a curious kind of vindication from the sidelines.
Lind's long silence finally broke in 2006 when he self-released Live at the Luna Star Cafe as a tentative step back into the spotlight. Six years later, he paired with Ace Records to release Finding You Again, his first new studio set since 1971.
As far as we're aware, Lind is the only folk-pop one-hit-wonder to have a song named after him by a Britpop group. Pulp's downbeat track
"Bob Lind (The Only Way Is Down)" appears on their 2001 album
We Love Life, produced by Scott Walker. Lind acknowledged the tribute and admitted he hadn't helped his own cause by stepping away from music for so long.
