R.I.P., Sugarloaf Bassist Bob Raymond

During bassist Bob Raymond’s stint with Sugarloaf, he played on each of the Denver-based band's four albums, including the 1970 self-titled debut that included the hit single “Green-Eyed Lady.” Raymond, who was inducted into the Colorado Music Hall of Fame with Sugarloaf in 2012, died on February 11, at the age of 69, after a seven-month battle with lung cancer.

Early on, Sugarloaf, which had previously been known as Chocolate Hair, included three other musicians named Bob – guitarist Bob Webber, drummer Bob MacVittie and singer/guitarist Bob Yeazel — as well as keyboardist Jerry Corbetta. It was a seven-song demo that got the band signed to Liberty Records, which wanted to use the demo as the band’s debut.

G. Brown, director and curator of the Colorado Music Hall of Fame, said in a previous Westword feature that the band insisted on doing one more song, which ended up being “Green-Eyed Lady, “ named after keyboardist Corbetta’s girlfriend. Brown says they had the music for the song, went to lunch, wrote the lyrics on a taco bag, then went back into the studio and cut the song, which ended up going to number three in the charts in 1970. Brown notes that the song still endures to this day.
About a decade after Raymond left Sugarloaf in 1975, he met John Gore, who was a DJ at various nightclubs around town. Gore says Raymond would come into one of the bars, always well mannered and well dressed, sometimes wearing a tie. "You’d never know in a million years if you had run into Bob that he had anything to do with rock and roll," Gore says.

“The one thing that I will say that everybody will tell you about Bob — he was a total gentleman," Gore says. "He never had a bad thing to say about anybody.”