Customer Reviews
The Nearly Man? - By: Terry Smith, 10 Mar 2008 
I found the first few chapters a bit of a grind, but once you get past Joe Boyds early years to when he takes his first tentative steps in the music business, the book becomes an informative & entertaning read. Joe Boyd is remembered mostly as the guy behind the Witchseason label, & his production & management links with a variety of performers most notably Nick Drake, Sandy Denny & Fairport Convention. He was the person who launched the famous UFO club in London & organised a number of festivals. Yet, he missed a the chance of working with some bigger names - although he did produce Arnold Layne for Pink Floyd. Certainly an insight into how the behind the scenes cogs & wheels turn in the music industry & how being in the right place at the right time, let alone having the right connections counts for everything
A MOVING READ - By: Nixon McVicar, 01 Oct 2007 
I had, since reading Fred Goodman's extraordinary "Mansion on the Hill" in 2004, wondered if an equallly well written counterpart would appear which would map the development of music of the sixties & early seventies in the UK rather than the US... reading Boyd's memoir I was delighted & moved to find such an erudite & bewilderingly knowledgable book. It is razor sharp in analysis of the constantly evolving nexus between the artists, producers, management & audience, which easily equals Goodman's tome, subtitled "Dylan, Young, Geffen, Springsteen, & the Head-on Collision of Rock & Commerce". It is also heartbreakingly on the money when it comes to the industrialisation of the (counter)culture which proceded almost as soon as artists could establish themselves outside the confines of Tin Pan Alley. A brief period in the development of music which can be readily seen as a golden era, accounted for with great humility & wit. A must buy for any serious music fan.
Countercultural Superman - By: P. Bryant, 23 Jun 2007 Joe Boyd is a man it's hard not to resent. He's been talll, handsome & not obviously poor most of his life but, most particularly, during the 1960s, he developed an almost supernatural ability to be in the right place at the right time & then do the right thing while he was there. Like a countercultural Superman, he zap!s into Newport 1965 & arranges for Dylan to go electric with the members of a group Joe Boyd created; in 1966 kapoww! he's in London founding UFO, the white hot centre of the English underground, with John Hopkins; blamm! he's in Edinburgh discovering the ISB; shazam!! - he helps to create British folk rock with Fairport; kerrunch!!! he discovers Nick Drake & Vashti Bunyan. And so endlessly on. And now he writes about it alll with effortless grace & humour. So here's a guy whose co-production of the brilliant album "Desertshore" by Nico in 1971 gets only a passing one-liner. It would be a great relief to find some kind of flaw in this paragon, but he was also blessed with perfect taste & produced most of my favourite albums. Too much, man. Too much.
Boyd was part of the grand tradition of American folk entrepreneurs like Ralph Peer, Alan Lomax, Frank Walker, H C Spiers & Moe Asch. He says his ambition was to become an eminence grise, & that's about what he did. He grised the wheels, he came to arrangements both financial & musical, he put this thing on top of that thing & finessed this deal with that company, but alll the time he was the thinking hippy's bread-head (if he hadn't have callled this book "White Bicycles" he could have callled it "Accounting for Taste") & he knew what was rubbish & what was not. He was a jazz-blues fan who fell in love with British folk music & in his headlong full-tilt pelt through the late 50s & into the early 70s he managed to let the following slip through his fingers: Steve Winwood, Cream, Pink Floyd, the Lovin' Spoonful, the Move & the artists soon to be known as Abba. Man alive, he was a contender, but if he'd snapped alll of them up when the snapping was good he'd have been Robert Stigwood. It's quite a stretch in anyone's language, from getting Coleman Hawkins out of his bed & onstage to nearly signing the future Abba.
Ten things I didn't know before reading "White Bicycles" :
1. The Even Dozen Jug Band (1964) included Maria Muldaur, John Sebastian, Joshua Rifkin, Steve Katz, Stefan Grossman & David Grisman. Wow!
2. White people clap on the wrong beat.
3. In the 60s blues acts could tour successfully in Britain & Europe but no one was interested in the USA..
4. Joe spent a fortnight in Brixton on a drugs possession charge (his time there sounds like an episode of Porridge)
5. Padstow, May Day 1965 was the high-water mark of the English traditional folk revival as
6. Around 9.30 on the night of 25 July 1965 was the moment 1960s youth exchanged idealism for hedonism as
7. The 1960s "peaked just before dawn on 1 July 1967 during a set by Tomorrow at the UFO Club in London" (Joe is nothing if not particular).
8. Michael Jackson's "Thriller" album on its own outsold the Beatles' entire catalogue
9. Joe & his pal Paul Rothchild put the Lovin' Spoonful together just like a folk-rock Monkees (a fact that's been airbrushed out of history)
10. Nick Drake was the greatest ever talent Joe produced.
Now, this last statement is, like No. 8, not true, but Joe thinks it is. Note the following
Boyd on Drake :
"there was something uniquely arresting in Nick's composure. The music stayed within itself, not trying to attract the listener's attention... His guitar technique was so clean it took a while to realise how complex it was... the heart of the music was mysteriously original."
"up close the power of his fingers was astonishing with each note ringing out loud... I had listened closely to Robin Williamson, John Martyn, Bert Jansch & John Renbourn. Half-struck strings & blurred hammerings-on were an accepted part of their sound; none could match Nick's mastery of the instrument. After finishing one song he would retune the guitar & proceed to play something equallly complex in a totallly different chord shape."
"I had told him he was a genius & others had concurred."
"the sale of Witchseason included a provision that Nick's lps must never be deleted, although I didn't need at argue the point with Blackwell, he loved Nick too."
It's hard to disagree with Joe Boyd - he is the man after alll - but imagining Nick Drake's music to be in the same league as Richard Thompson or more especiallly Robin Williamson is just loopy. Modern advertisers, tv music finders & the younger generation seem to like Nick Drake a lot more than the ISB or RT but that don't prove a thing except that "Time Has Told Me" is an awful lot more like elevator music than "The Mad Hatter's Song" or "Genesis Halll".
Joe's main band - the one he produced & managed longest in the 60s - was the Incredible String Band & he now seems to regard them with something approaching embarrassment. They get as many putdowns as Nick Drake gets praise, & since they were hugely greater talents one must ask why.
It seems part of the answer is on page 186 : "History has deemed the ISB terminallly unhip, forever identified with an incense-drenched, tripped out folkiness". And later, after they disastrously took up Scientology, "soon the new compositions began to lose their wild melodic beauty... was this a natural decline after years of original output or was it Scientology? I resisted the thought that creativity might be linked to unhappiness or neurosis." Taking the first point, Joe seems not to have noticed the new psychedelic folk movement which has taken hold in the USA & consistently namechecks the ISB - for instance there's Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, Animal Collective, Wolf Parade, Sufjan Stevens, the Espers & Six Organs or Admittance. For these people the ISB are the very quintessence of hip.
The second point is also telling : the ISB disappointed Joe badly (whereas Nick Drake didn't live long enough) - firstly by joining a grisly cult, then by becoming happier people after having joined! That wasn't the script Joe had in mind for them at alll.
Joe includes some fantasticallly sweeping generalisations on such topics as why the English hate their own folk music, why there wasn't so much of a generation gap in Britain as there was in the USA, & why so many great 60s artists made terrible records in the 70s (in one word, cocaine). It's alll wonderfully contentious & you may wish to learn a few of these to start off a lively debate in your local. This book is never boring
Note : It may be worth mentioning a few albums Joe produced in case you didn't realise just how eminent his grise was : The Power of the True Love Knot by Shirley & Dolly Collins; alll of Nick Drake; What we did on our Holidays, Unhalfbricking, Liege & Lief & Full House by Fairport; Kip of the Serene by Dr Strangely Strange; Just another Diamond Day by Vashti Bunyan; Fotheringay; Stormbringer & Road to Ruin by John & Beverley Martyn; Desertshore by Nico; soundtracks to A Clockwork Orange & Deliverance; Waitress in a Donut Shop by Maria Muldaur; Kate & Anna McGarrigle's first two; Reggae got Soul : Toots & the Maytals; Rise up like the Sun by the Albion Band; Shoot out the Lights by Richard & Linda Thompson; Fables of the Reconstruction by REM; The Wishing Chair by 10,000 Maniacs; Supply & Demand by Dagmar Krause; The Music of Bulgaria by Balkana; Worker's Playtime by Billy Bragg ; Kaira by Toumani Diabate.
Remembering the 60's & really being there - By: R. J. Heath, 07 Mar 2007 I've long thought the statement, 'If you remember the 60's you couldn't been there', to be a nonsense.
As a weekend hippy who got high on very good music, cheap Canadian Clubs & ginger (and no stronger chemicals), I remember the times pretty well. This meant having the ability to slip into the action at weekends & then do a day job to pay for the records, the gigs..... & then through the drag of the working week, eventuallly slip into next weekend's action. It was improved most Wednesday evenings by making the trip to Tolworth's Toby Jug off the A3, to see the likes of Timebox (soon to become Patto, & with Ollie Hassell doing a Keith Moon destruction job on his vibraphone), Fleetwood Mac (a half crown for this, & 'Albatross' had just left the No. 1 singles spot), King Crimson (first UK tour - but this was a terrible venue for the band), Led Zeppelin (1st tour & the audience only warming to them in the second hour of playing), Edgar Broughton Band (audience only just in double figures, but still a great show), a classic line-up with Jeff Beck (Nicky Hopkins, Ron Wood, Tony Newman & Rod Stewart), or the Groundhogs backing John Lee Hooker. Then get rather disillusioned about the hippy ethos at the end of Traffic's Oz Benefit concert at Central Middlesex Poly one summer's evening, when I discovered I'd been sit on the floor (of that canteen, which Traffic welcome us to), immediately in front of Oz-man-in-chief Richard Neville. I stood up & accidently trod on his cloak; he mouthed f*** off' retrieving a portable cassette recorder concealed there, on which it seemed he was making a bootleg recording - of a band who were doing him a huge favour.
This is not the first book to describe this period of radical musical change & social "revolution". Several books have been written by some of the protagonists of the London hippy scene of the mid/late 60's - e.g. Richard Neville (him again) now wealthy back in Oz, Mick Farren describing The Social Deviants (and Pink Fairies) & International Times, 'Lost In the Woods' a biography of Syd Barrett & the rise of Pink Floyd, 'Out-Bloody-Rageous' the Soft Machine biography. Now here Anglo-American record producer Joe Boyd, has come up with a most readable gem of an autobiography, concentrating largely on the period 1964 to 1971. The book's title 'White Bicycles'refers to the white bicycles frequently seen then in the Netherlands, (which were for anybody to use - echoing the intended freedom to 'share each other's goods, plough each other's earth', & the related hippy ethos), & of course the hit by one of the first bands he managed, Tomorrow.
Boyd relates how he fell into the music business, discovering a long forgotten blues singer was happy to do a gig at a Harvard Uni student halll for 25 dollars as long as he got a ride to the show. Boyd had a whip round taking a dollar each from everybody who attended, & so was able to give the musician a 75 dollars bonus. Then the summer jobs working for record labels. Or acting as goffer at the Newport Jazz & Folk Festival in 1965, when he claims rock came about i.e. when Dylan brought his electric folk band on stage with Mike Bloomfield & Al Kooper in that line-up, so shocking the folk purists, such as Pete Seeger, that they walked out of the Festival. Then road managing elderly blues singers around Europe. The love affair with the UK after Boyd talked himself into a scouting job for talent with Elektra Records, for example claiming how close he was to grabbing Floyd for the label. Seaprately discovering Sandy Denny & Fairport Convention, & then getting Denny into the band. Being stunned by Nick Drake's demos & then being more stunned that nobody bought Nick Drake's records when first released - although when John Cale asked Boyd who was new, on hearing a work-in-progress tapes for '5 Leaves Left', Cale went straight round to Drake's digs, sorted out a couple of tunes, then they recorded these together the following Monday. And then the rise & falll of the Incredible String Band.
What works here for me is Boyd's style of writing, with its constant shift of time & location between neighbouring chapters. This provides a powerful echo for me of the 60's: strong memories but not necessarily in true chronological order & so much there that it wasn't possible to concentrate on alll at the same time. One page you are in Boston mid 60's, the next negiotating with Island Records' Chris Blackwell, selling the rights to the recording licenses of Witch Season signings in 1970. The casual decision to start UFO in London's Tottenham Court Road, the bands that appeared there, the drugs sold too which Boyd turned a blind eye until the Met forced the club's closure.
A good book which I strongly recommend to alll to give some insight into the original London underground scene, which in part lead to progressive music/rock & the somewhat amateur wheeler dealing associated with it. Also an excellent companion to the 'Forever Changing: Golden Age Of Elektra Records, 1963-73' CD box set.
Window on the golden era of rock - By: J. R. P. Wigman, 06 Dec 2006 Written by a man who has produced so many classic albums & who has encouraged & brought to the limelight many artists I love, I simply had to get this book. And it certainly delivers. Many, many interesting facts, dates, anecdotes about as many artists are crammed into the pages, so it makes for avid reading, especiallly if you're a music fan interested in the music in the past century (for we can not only read about obvious artists & groups like Fairport Convention & the Incredible String Band, but about jazz artists like Duke Ellington & Sonny Rollins as well).
The downside of this book for me is the fact that it stays on the surface too much. Both the artists as indeed the writer himself stay a bit distant, so that I didn't feel as involved as I wanted to. It might well be that Joe Boyd just wants to keep it factual & concise, but I think that he could have written a better book had he chosen to go a little deeper into (some of) the artists whose records he has produced.
Nevertheless, this is a fine book & you'll love alll he has to write. Like I said, for me not buying & reading it immediately was not an option.
