The joke used to be that if you remembered the 1960s, you weren’t there. That’s based on the assumption that those there were too busy enjoying the uninhibited decade and its creative pop music, presumably while imbibing the hallucinogen of their choice, to remember a thing.
But we’re starting to see some excellent memoirs by those who were in the thick of the era’s music scene and remember everything about it, seemingly down to what books they were reading and when. Bob Dylan’s “Chronicles: Volume One” was the first and now comes Joe Boyd’s “White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s.”
The question you’re probably asking at this point, even if you’re an aficionado of 1960s music, is: Who’s Joe Boyd? Neither a star nor a famously flamboyant record executive, Boyd is a consummate behind-the-scenes person. And his story parallels the Grateful Dead’s lyrical summation of the times in “Truckin’ ” – “what a long, strange trip it’s been.”
In Boyd’s case it helps that he was as much an enthusiast as a businessman – his musical involvement began as a blues/jazz-loving Harvard student in the early 1960s. It also helps that he has a fantastic memory and an engagingly conversational writing style.
He remembers, for instance, first hearing Dylan play impromptu at a Cambridge party during a 1963 spring blizzard. Boyd later worked sound balance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, and his account of what happened when Dylan went electric is the most thorough and insider-ish I’ve read. (Dylan’s “Chronicles” skipped it.)
In the early 1960s, Cambridge was the center of the college roots-music revival and Boyd hobnobbed with fellow students Tom Rush and Geoff Muldaur, later to become important folk musicians. In 1964, just graduating, he got hired by Newport Jazz Festival producer George Wein as manager for a blues and gospel tour of Europe featuring Muddy Waters, Blind Reverend Gary Davis and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, among others.
Boyd writes with excitement and amusement about being so young and so close to such now-revered figures, who quarreled among each other but also bonded around their music. He also vividly recalls a Newport Jazz in Europe tour later that year, where one night he had to settle differences after backing musicians stood up volatile, avant-garde horn player Roland Kirk for an encore – and Kirk didn’t realize it because he was blind.
But Boyd, like other young adults of the time, moved toward rock. He moved to England to work for an American record company, and when he subsequently left (the company wouldn’t take his advice to sign Cream, he says), he became involved with the emerging British counterculture.
He met Pink Floyd at a London Free School benefit and produced the psychedelic band’s first single. He started the UFO Club where the best and/or weirdest British bands played, like The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, whose lead singer’s head appeared to be on fire. He also started the Witchseason production company and discovered such eccentric, quintessentially British folk/rock artists as Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention and Nick Drake.
This period is where the heart of the book is – Boyd’s writing about Drake’s dreamy, wistful nature is elegiac, pained even, given the singer-songwriter’s tragic drug-overdose death in 1974. (When Boyd sold Witchseason, he stipulated that Drake’s albums always remain in print.)
The title refers to, quixotically, the way Amsterdam radicals left white bicycles around town for people to ride. Later one of Boyd’s favorite UFO bands, Tomorrow, made “My White Bicycle” its theme. Like Boyd himself, the title is obscure but represents the spirit of the time.
Steven Rosen is a freelance writer in Los Angeles.
FICTION
White Bicycles
Making Music in the 1960s
Joe Boyd
$18
