Dear Mailing List,
Almost forgot! Another very worthwhile event is the screening of “Bayou Maharajah”, a documentary about New Orleans pianist James Booker. It’s part of the Everyman group’s “Music Film Festival” the weekend of May 14-15 in London. I’m going to be at the 3.30pm Hampstead screening and answer questions afterwards (I produced Booker’s first solo lp in 1975 and appear in the film.)
I know there is a blur of music docs these days on television, but this one is head and shoulders above the rest and it makes a nice change to see music on the big screen with big sound. Tickets can be booked here:
http://www.everymancinema.com/films/film-info?film=12176
There are simultaneous screenings at the Everyman in Barnet and Muswell Hill that day, but I can only be at one!
And speaking of booking tickets, I neglected to include a box-office link for the May 12 Nick Drake concert in Birmingham in the previous newsletter. So here it is:
https://www.thsh.co.uk/boxoffice/ticket/246135
Please stop and say hello if you come to one of these events. In Birmingham, I’ll most likely be camped at the sound controls in the back of the stalls…
best
Joe
Dear Mailing List,
I know, I’ve been back from Cuba for a while and I promised a full report. It was great……! OK, I’ll expand on that but first some ‘housekeeping’ as event comperes are wont to say.
First, “Way To Blue”, the concert tribute to the music of Nick Drake that I have – with Catherine Steinmann, Kate St John and Bryn Ormrod – organized in various UK venues and abroad over the past seven years is performing an encore at Symphony Hall in Birmingham on May 12. Birmingham is where it all began and the organizers there wanted us to return to the scene of our first concert to celebrate the new hall’s tenth anniversary. The singers are a mix of rookies and veterans, with Green Gartside and Vashti Bunyan joined by Sam Beam (Iron and Wine), Glen Hansard (of “Commitments” fame), Sam Lee (Mercury prize nominee), Olivia Chaney, The Rails (Kami Thompson, Richard and Linda’s daughter plus James Walbourne of The Pretenders) and Mark Abis. The band is (almost) the same, with Kate, Zoe Rahman, Neil MacColl, Leo Abrahams, Martyn Barker but without our totemic bassman, Danny Thompson, who’s recovering from an illness. John Thorne, a disciple of Danny’s, will deputize.
I’m excited – it’s been four years since our wonderful night at the Sydney Opera House and I’m ready to hear these wonderful songs again from a new angle.
In other news, JOE BOYD’S A-Z has settled into its new fortnightly format and we’re already up to EE. The audience is growing, the plaudits are being gratefully received and, hey, I think I’m getting (even) better at it! We’ve been from Mongolia to the Brill Building with many stops in between.
I was asked to contribute to Rebecca Solnit’s new urban atlas of New York and in my piece about the song that drew me to a particular New York neighbourhood, I evoked the greatest female rock n roll voice of the 1950s. And, just coincidentally, she is the subject of podcast EE.
So, on to Cuba. You can imagine how hesitant I was to be a part of a busload of Americans being disgorged in small Cuban towns for a specially arranged concert of Afro-Cuban dancing and drums. The vision brings up all kinds of uncomfortable clichés. But it turned into the most wonderful 10 days. Here are some of the reasons why:
Like most others, I did some filming on the trip and I plan to put it up on my site or YouTube or something. I’ll let you know when that happens.
To find out about more Ned Sublette-guided musical trips to Cuba, write to ned@qbadisc.com. If you go, don’t miss laesperanza@nauta.cu (closed Sundays) and tell Hubert Joe sent you.
As ever –
Joe
Letter AA is now available to download here and will be added to this site very soon…
Dear Mailing List
Londoners and Thames Estuary denizens can find me this Friday evening (Feb 26) at the Victoria & Albert Museum. It’s one of their Friday Late Specials – this month’s theme is Radio.
I’m going to ‘perform’ a few elongated versions of the A-Z podcast. Admission is free, it starts at 6:30 and goes until 10. I’ll be in a room near the ‘ethical’ rum bar on the first floor with a good sound system. Admission is free; come up and say hello.
Some of you may be aware that I’ve finished all 26 letters of my musical alphabet and am starting round again. AA will appear March 4 and the alphabet will carry on from there at fortnightly intervals. All episdoes continue to be a click away on www.joeboyd.co.uk and on the iTunes or acast websites.
In early March, I follow Ned Sublette’s siren call to rural Cuba where he’s taking a group of enthusiasts to hear the kind of Afro-Cuban roots music that probably won’t be around too much longer – at least in its non-touristic, unself-conscious form. In my next newsletter, I’ll report on what I heard and saw.
Later
Joe
Dear Mailing List,
Let’s hear it for Cerys Matthews! She sweeps all before her as champion radio presenter. And to prove what good taste she has, she did an hour-long programme with me, playing records and talking Sixties, for the World Service. For those of you who haven’t heard enough of me lately, it’s on the BBC iPlayer until Feb 9.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03dg4ct#play
And let’s hear it for Richard Morton Jack of Flashback magazine who is sending me his copy of the Sydney Carter ep! (Flashback is an erudite fanzine – in this case, not a contradiction in terms…)
Other responses to my last newsletter include the most welcome news that Norma Waterson is up and about and singing like the angel she is. Wonderful! I have also been told that a photo exists of Bob Dylan singing from the stage of the Singers’ Club. Yet more about Mr MacColl that I have to take back! I’m (almost) always happy to stand corrected.
And so many people have told me – via email and in person – how much they loved Sydney Carter…
It has been brought to my attention that the podcast track-listing which can be seen on iTunes, is not visible when you listen from my website. We are working to correct this and hope to have a full listing of all tracks visible in the coming days.
ciao for niao
Joe
Happy New Year! The A-Z podcasts are back after a fortnight’s hiatus with “T”. Easy as pie at www.joeboyd.co.uk – click on a letter and the ten-minute podcast plays.
* * *
As a teenager, I was horrified by the idea of white blues singers, but modified that view when I heard my friend Geoff Muldaur successfully channelling Lonnie Johnson on a Boston coffee-house stage. I was also put off by middle-class singer-songwriters until I was bowled over by Bob Dylan in a tiny room at a Cambridge, MA party in 1963. These prejudices never evaporated entirely; for every Nick Drake or Joni Mitchell, there seem to be thousands of well-bred strummers whose cds I recycle to Oxfam. And don’t get me started on the Stevie Ray Vaughn and Johnny Winter cults! But I digress from the subject at hand…
When I arrived in London in 1964, I had already developed, then lost or modified a number of such prejudices. Before setting out for London, I had a very bad attitude about English folk music. (I know, some of you, my dear English readers, still have a bad attitude about your own folk music; if so, perhaps you’d better skip this newsletter and wait for the next one…) I have written elsewhere about having these views confounded by an encounter with the Ian Campbell Group and Dave Swarbrick, and then by Norma and the rest of the Watersons. (White Bicycles, Ch. 7). But when I went to the famous “Singers Club” in Farringdon, there was Ewan MacColl singing shanties with a finger in one ear, conforming to the humourless stereotype prevalent across The Pond. MacColl had notoriously barred Bob Dylan from singing at the club; only songs from whence you came were allowed! His rigid, snotty attitude was just as advertised and I never went back to The Singers’ Club.
Around the same time, producer Bill Leader took me to small basement flat just down the road from MacColl’s club to meet a man from the opposite end of the class and stylistic spectrum of British songwriters. Sydney Carter was eccentric, middle-class, donnish, kind, off-hand and idealistic (He had worked in an ambulance corps in WW2 rather than fight…). He wrote poetry and taught a bit, but his primary source of income seemed to be fees and royalties from writing songs with Donald Swann of the Flanders and Swann comic duo. (Economic guru Stephanie Flanders is the daughter of the other half of that team.) I was entranced by his odd, off-hand songs. When I returned to London a year and a half later to open the Elektra Records office, I took Sydney into the studio to make an EP “The Lord of the Dance”. The title song was to become his most famous, gleefully sung by happy-clappy liberal Christians the world over. But don’t hold that against him! Like Springsteen’s “Born In The USA”, which became a red-neck anthem despite the ironic lyrics, “Lord” is a secular sceptic’s attempt to portray Christ as the very human founder of a cult of joy and ecstasy (which is pretty close to how it actually was until killjoys like St Paul got ahold of it). I think my EP was the first recording of “Lord”, but I wish the God-botherers had been quicker off the mark with the title song; the EP might have sold better and not been a black mark against my track record with the Elektra bosses back in New York. (If anyone has a copy and wants to sell it or make me a digital version, I would be very grateful; it’s the only one of my productions not in my collection.)
A series of concerts last year took me back to Year Zero of my exposure to the London folk scene. In April, there was a tribute to Carter (who died in 2004) in a small, medieval theatre adjoining the Porter’s Lodge at Balliol College, Oxford. One driving force behind this event was Martin Carthy, a longtime supporter who accompanied Sydney on that 1966 Elektra EP (and who shared my dislike of MacColl). Martin led a great group of singers in the canon of Carter songs, including my personal favourite “Taking Out the Dustbin in the Gray’s Inn Road” as well as his anti-war song, “Crow on the Cradle”, for years a staple at Jackson Browne concerts.
The other instigator was Stephen Sedley, whom I met in my first years in London. He grew up a folksong buff; his lawyer father represented many folksingers as well as Topic Records. Sedley now teaches law at Oxford, having retired from the bench after a heroic career championing human rights as a Lord Justice of Appeal, a member of the European Court of Human Rights and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. (After I introduced a girlfriend to him at a Human Rights Lecture, she told me it was far more impressive and thrilling than the time I introduced her to Mick Jagger.)
Earlier last year, I impulsively purchased a train ticket to Glasgow to hear some of my favourite singers pay tribute to one of my least favourite songwriters. Celtic Connections had brought together Norma Waterson, Chaim Tannenbaum, Martin Carthy (who knows a good song when he hears it, regardless of who wrote it), Jarvis Cocker, Eliza Carthy, Dick Gaughan, Paul Buchanan (The Blue Nile) and Karine Polwart to honour the long-deceased (1989) MacColl’s memory. One attraction for me was that the evening was curated by Ewan’s sons Neil and Calum and Neil’s wife Kate St John. Working with those three in various combinations on my own live tributes to Nick Drake and Kate McGarrigle has been an unalloyed pleasure. And there was in the back of my mind the nagging thought that if he had such great kids, maybe it was time for a reassessment…
The concert was terrific. Chaim and Norma stole the show with their renditions of “My Old Man”, “Go Down You Murderers” and “Shoals of Herring” (Tannenbaum) and “The Moving On Song” (Waterson). Sitting in the audience, I was forced to admit the old crank wrote a lot of great songs, full of anger and passion and wonderful folk-based melody. Even the often-corny “First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” sounded pretty good in Buchanan’s hands.
But another reassessment was also slowly dawning in my prejudiced mind. Researching my world music book, I’ve discovered a hero-figure in Dimitri Pokrovsky, the man who defied Soviet ideologues to revive regional Russian folk music. Cultural specifics are anathema to authoritarian regimes; they prefer broad generalities and the music that expresses them (the Soviet Moiseyev Ensemble being the archetype). The Right-Left divide in politics these days often comes down to denial vs acceptance of facts. Local music is the equivalent of factual research. Pokrovsky was not only opposed to Soviet kitsch, but he peered into the future and recognized the dangers of post-Soviet Russian nationalism; he refused to call any folk song “Russian”. They were ‘from Voronezh’ or ‘Irkutsk Oblast’, never “Russian”.
At a time when cultural battles are being waged over what it means to be “British”, or “English”, MacColl’s strictures that you should sing songs from your home territory begins to seem like a good idea, an antidote to the kitsch clichés of UKIP and the Tories. And when I went to give a talk at the English Folk Expo last year, I found many wonderful musicians fully committed to the notion of local music, usually their own. It was inspiring, and yet another reason to give the old finger-in-his-ear crank a respectful reappraisal: he might have been right after all!
The Glasgow concert was such a success that they took the show on the road in November and the London show was, again, terrific. I hope a few of you got to see it. And I am so glad I bought that train ticket last January; Norma Waterson’s health has taken a turn for the worse and it’s hard to say when we’ll hear her sing like that again.
It was nice to see Jarvis Cocker and Norma bonding backstage. I remember the 1996 Mercury Prize awards, when the jury announced a deadlock between Pulp’s “Different Class” and Norma’s solo record for Hannibal. They gave it to Pulp in the end, but Oasis had also been nominated, and I’ve saved the Daily Mail headline “Grandmother beats Oasis in Mercury Prize Vote”.
Tribute concerts have sprouted like toadstools in recent years, but for me, 2015 was a vintage year because of those celebrations of two eccentrically British songwriters. They were based only a few hundred yards from each other along Roseberry Avenue, but between them there was a chasm of class, attitude, style and personality. Somehow, last year, they seemed quite nicely balanced, resonating beautifully across the decades, never to be forgotten.
* * *
On-line reviews of the A-Z podcasts…
“Digestible wisdom for all”
by electrophreek
Joe Boyd is one of the titans of music production and his hard fought insights into the nature and scope of global music are among the finest you will ever encounter. This is the bench mark of music podcasts and the standard by which all should be judged.
“Brilliant”
by modal d
Exhilarating, mesmerizing, poignant. That such a pivotal figure, responsible for so much music I love, would take the time to put together this series is just an incredible gift. Listen!
If any of you are near Bristol, England this Monday (November 2) evening – come along to the Institute of Art and Ideas where I’m giving a talk and answering questions. It starts early, at 6pm, which is appropriate for the now-geriatric era which is the subject of the event, “The Sixties”! The location is 15 Berkeley Square, Bristol BS8 1HB and the phone there is 0117 921 0455.
I promised to fill you in about the late Les Blank’s film on Leon Russell – “A Poem Is A Naked Person” – which I saw at the BFI London Film Festival 2 weeks ago. I was certain it had been re-edited since Les screened if for me in 1972 as some scenes I vividly remembered were not now in it, according to those who had seen it more recently. And also because Leon had agreed to its release – something I could never imagine him allowing based on what I recall seeing 45 years ago….
Well, it turns out that the film is almost entirely unchanged since then. It’s just my brain that has changed… or something. I still don’t consider it a very flattering portrait of Mr Russell, but it’s not as cruelly realistic as I remember. For those of you who have never seen a Les Blank film, I recommend that you remedy that lacuna straight away. (http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/Flowerfilm.html or amazon) Les was a master documentarian. He would hang out with the subject, in his understated way, sometimes carrying a camera with no film, until he had become part of the wallpaper. Only then would he start.
In the case of a wonderful musician like the Zydeco great Clifton Chenier, this created a warm, affectionate and unself-conscious portrait of a man you wished had invited you over to share his gumbo and listen to his tales and his music. In the case of Leon Russell, it reveals a man from whom you would run a mile to avoid having to spend any time in his company. Or at least the Leon Russell of 1971; he may have mellowed in the intervening years.
The general atmosphere among Leon and his musicians and friends that Les captured in “Poem” stood in stark contrast to the prevailing mood at the English Folk Expo in Bury immediately prior to the screening. Over two days in this relaxed Lancashire mill town, I heard wonderful music, met engaging and inspiring people and generally enjoyed myself. I heard old faves Eliza Carthy and Sam Lee, new faves Stick In The Wheel and discovered Ollie King, the Rhiengans Sisters and Dan Walsh. The overall standard was very high and the atmosphere of mutual support and friendly exchange that prevailed during my two days there (I missed the Saturday so I could see ‘Poem’) made the contrast with the drugged and ego-fuelled atmosphere in Russell’s compound in the early ’70s all the more disconcerting. Sex and Drugs and Rock n Roll were really fun, honest! Don’t let films like this re-write history. And don’t let my comments put you off seeing it. Les Blank was a wonderful film-maker and “Poem” is grimly fascinating.
In my keynote address at the Folk Expo, I talked about the “American Epic Sessions”, the sounds and images from which have stayed with me and which I cannot stop talking about. I was taken to task for mentioning T-Bone Burnett and Jack White but not director Bernard MacMahon and producer Allison McGourty. I plead guilty! They were so nice to me at the reception after, as well! My excuse is that I write these things off the top of my head and am determined to keep the newsletters informal stream-of-consciousness essays that evade the exigencies of proper journalism. But I would hate anyone to feel slighted. And, by way of redress, I should point out how beautifully shot the film is, claustrophobic in the best possible sense. Well done, everyone.
I am looking forward to immersing myself once again in the warmth and good music that is the English folk scene these days. Saturday I go to Cecil Sharpe House for a celebration of Shirley Collins and look forward to seeing many of my favourite singers and people. I am particularly keen to hear Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker, whom I heard in the BBC Folk Awards earlier this year in Cardiff. On my lunchtime stroll today (after recording some more A-Z podcasts nearby) I stopped by Rough Trade to say hello to Geoff Travis and he told me he’d signed the duo. A good match, I say!
This is getting too long – I’ll write another one soon about the Womex conference in Budapest… A multi-cultural event in an “illiberal” (according to Hungarian Prime Minister Orban) country… and where I led a discussion on “Nationalism and Folk Music”… stay tuned.
Joe
PS – some complaints that podcast “Letter D” is unplayable. Unfortunately, there was a brief time when D was on the blink. Anyone who subscribed via iTunes during that period got delivered a faulty “D” and will have to delete, unsubscribe and re-subscribe to hear it… but hey! it’s all free…
Meanwhile, last weekend I attended a screening of “American Epic Session” – a BBC Arena project (coming to your screens – and PBS in America) next March. It is a wonderful film, in which T-Bone Burnett and Jack White supervise a series of recordings on a replica of the first electrical recording machine from 1925. Only one mic, balances obtained by moving the musicians closer or farther away from the microphone; the mono sound goes directly into a mastering stylus and carves out the unalterable grooves. Now that’s the way to make a record!
The theme of the project is to re-create that moment in 1925 when the music industry was in a crisis very similar to where it finds itself today. The first nationwide radio networks had been formed, broadcasting dance bands and crooners and vaudevillians into every corner of America – with radio available all day, why would anyone ever again buy a record? The desperate solution to this dilemma was to seek out the only demograpic that couldn’t listen to the radio – the rural poor! (Many of whom had no electricity, but did possess wind-up grammophones.) Thus record producers such as the great Ralph Peer went out into the hinterlands to find hillbilly and blues singers who would appeal to this newly targeted demographic.
T-Bone believes, and I think he’s right, that this moment led directly to America’s domination of the world’s popular music. Without those recordings of the Carter Family, Blind Lemon Jefferson and the rest of the great rural music catalogue, the ‘authentic’ music of America would never have established itself as an important genre. Hence, there would have been no Sam Phillips (Sun Records) and no Elvis Presley, no LIttle Richard, no rock n roll revolution et etc.
Burnett and White make their point eloquently by enlisting an array of talent, young and old, to perform material, mostly from that period, the old-fashioned way, around a single mic. Los Lobos with acoustic instruments perform a 19th century Jarocha song from Vera Cruz, there are ancient Hawaiians singing and a parade of great Anglophones performing blues and country music. Betty Lavette singing the Beale Street Sheiks’ version of “Ain’t Nobody’s Business” was my personal highlight, but there isn’t a make-weight song in the film. It culminates in Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard duetting on some old country songs. Don’t miss it!
I head back to the LFF tomorrow to see the late Les Blank’s “A Poem Is A Naked Person”, his documentary about Leon Russell. I saw a different version of this film in 1972 when Les brought it to me at Warner Bros in LA. He had been commissioned by Leon and his label, Shelter Records, to make a film about the Oklahoma singer along the lines of the great films Les had made about Lightnin’ Hopkins, Clifon Chenier and other great Texas and Louisiana musicians. The problem was that Les’ approach, in which he hangs around the musicians long enough to become invisible and then starts filming, tends to reveal a great deal about their lives and the background of their music. In the case of Hopkins or Chenier, the warts-and-all films make them into more sympathetic and interesting figures. With the Russell film I saw, this was not the case. Les wanted me to plead his case with my friend Denny Cordell, boss of Shelter. It was a wonderful film, but if I had been Leon and Denny, I too would have done anything I could to keep the film being show. Thus, “Poem” has been buried in Les Blanks vault for almost 45 years until Russell finally gave his OK. It will be interesting to see how different this version is from the one I saw those many years ago….
I’ll let you know….