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Joe Boyd, White Bicycles: making music in the 1960s

"Joe Boyd knows." That's what Kate Bush said about him. Who's Joe Boyd? Put simply, he is a record and film producer. At least that's what it says on his Web site. His biography is so succinct I offer it here in total: "Born in Boston in 1942, he graduated from Harvard in 1964. After university, he worked as a production and tour manager for George Wein in Europe where he traveled with Muddy Waters, Coleman Hawkins, Stan Getz and others; and at Newport where he supervised Bob Dylan's electric debut. In 1966, he opened UFO, London's psychedelic ballroom. His first record production was four tracks by Eric Clapton and the Powerhouse for Elektra in 1966. He went on to produce Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, The Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny, Richard & Linda Thompson, Maria Muldaur, Toots and the Maytals, REM, Kate & Anna McGarrigle, 10,000 Maniacs, Billy Bragg, Cubanismo, Taj Mahal and many others. As head of music for Warner Brothers Films, he organized the scoring of Deliverance, Clockwork Orange and McCabe and Mrs Miller and made Jimi Hendrix, a feature-length documentary. He later went into partnership with Don Simpson to develop film projects. He helped set up Lorne Michaels' "Broadway Pictures" in 1979-1980, then started Hannibal Records, which he ran for 20 years. In 1988, he was Executive Producer of the feature film Scandal."

That's it -- sixty-three years of sitting on his hands.

Look at the list of careers he's been involved with: Muddy Waters! Stan Getz! Bob Dylan! Pink Floyd! Fairport Convention! Others! (I love them!) It's simply amazing. And this book, White Bicycles, tells tales about them all. Reading it is like sitting in a room with an elegant raconteur, listening to story after story, and never tiring.

He was there when Bob Dylan played electric at the Newport Folk Festival. And finally he clears up the details of Pete Seeger wielding an axe to cut the cables! It didn't happen. Sure there was an axe, and Pete Seeger was there, and true he wasn't happy about Dylan's electrical experiment -- but it just didn't happen!

He was there when Pink Floyd played for the film Tonight Let's All Make Love in London. He drove Sleepy John Estes around to the odd gig. He argued with Coleman Hawkins. And he details these events and more in White Bicycles. He does it in a wonderful, chatty voice, that is honest, forthright and true. This is a book about making music in the 1960s, and apart from a brief section discussing some later work, it ends with the death of Nick Drake. Boyd concludes with this statement, "I never got too stoned. I became the eminence grise I aspired to be, and disproved at least one sixties myth: I was there, and I do remember."

Read it!

David Kidney