Serpent’s Tail £11.99 pp282
This protein-packed memoir entwines a number of stories that reach well beyond the subtitle’s modest brief. At one level it’s a boy’s own adventure. Joe Boyd, a preppy boarding-school kid from Princeton, New Jersey, starts out listening, entranced, to his grandmother playing Brahms on the family piano and by the age of 25 has turned into a prime mover — an éminence grise in his own words — in the pop musical roller coaster of the 1960s.
Beyond that it offers a vivid eyewitness account of how the various currents of jazz, blues, folk and R&B rapidly fermented, around 1965, to create a commercial behemoth we now know, generically, as rock. At another remove still White Bicycles — a reference to the song which for him encapsulated the hippie 1960s — is a wise reflection on the way in which, thanks in part to the well-meaning efforts of learned preservationists such as himself, Boyd feels that pop has eaten itself: dumbed down into a sampling culture with no real sense of its own history. “We fuelled ourselves with inspiration from our cultural heritage and, in doing so, turned it to smoke.”
Though it ends on a sad note, with a list of obits far longer than that of 1960s survivors, this is not a glum book. It pulses with the mad enthusiasms of its period and its author. Obsessed, like so many white baby boomers of his generation, with escaping the confines of a middle-class upbringing, the teenage Boyd felt the liberating call of old blues and jazz records, and their mysterious clues about “becoming male sexual beings”.
While a student at Harvard he single-handedly organised shows by ancient, often drunk black blues singers, then got embroiled in the Boston branch of the East Coast folk revival. After graduating in 1964 he headed for London where he was enthralled to discover that the local John Lee Hookerfans weren’t nerdy, educated types such as himself, “they were just kids”. The exotic strangeness of old England grabbed him the way the old black culture in his own had. So did its comparative poverty. Intrigued by the way “the British didn’t seem to own anything”, Boyd vowed to make Britain his home and has lived here, on and off, ever since.
By the time he helped to organise the festival at Newport, Connecticut in 1965 where Bob Dylan unveiled his electric band and scandalised the beardie folk crowd, Boyd was based in London. He embarked on a chaotic joint career as a record producer, official head of the European office of the US folk label Elektra, and — by virtue of running the Saturday night UFO club in an Irish bar on the Tottenham Court Road — unofficial ringleader of London’s psychedelic underground.
By the end of the decade Boyd had worked with everybody who was anybody, from Eric Clapton to Pink Floyd and Fairport Convention. He had his own production company, Witchseason. He had taken his most successful discovery, an eclectic Scottish folk troupe called the Incredible String Band, to appear at the Woodstock festival and was about to launch the career of a cripplingly shy singer songwriter, Nick Drake, via his friend Chris Blackwell’s Island label.
The one thing he hadn’t done was make any money, and it is the yawning gap between Boyd’s musical smartness and his naivety as a businessman which helps to make this book such a lively read. As a rule the managers of the brightest British bands of the 1960s were pin-sharp, working-class barrow boys who ran rings round a transatlantic toff. “America had no equivalent of these managerial hustlers,” Boyd reflects after losing out in a bid to sign The Move, whose career was being tended at the time by Tony Secunda, an ex-con wrestler from south London. Trying to secure the services of Pink Floyd for Witchseason, Boyd is confronted, and swiftly outmanoeuvred, by a trio of bizarrely attired hardmen who “looked like monkeys dressed up for a PG Tips commercial”.
He is less amused by Jimi Hendrix’s manager Mike Jeffreys, a tough nightclub owner from Newcastle whose big idea was “to put two white guys with the flashy nigger in the middle” and who, Boyd believes, drove his client to despair. But in general he applauds the ruthless showbiz values of the British managers and their appreciation of the value of gimmicks. “New York would never have moulded Hendrix’s genius into as powerful a pop persona as London did.” The American who learnt most from the Brit school of artist management was, in the author’s view, the media tycoon David Geffen.
What a scholarly type such as Boyd learnt had as much to do with British social history and mores as it did with the pop trade. Rather than nailing down deals with future smashes such as Stig Anderson, and Bjorn Ulvaeus of Abba, whom he met in Stockholm in 1970, Boyd was promoting Fairport Convention’s more traditional music. “Why does England hate its own folk music?” he muses, suggesting that “at some visceral level” England has never recovered from the Norman yoke which taught the “lower orders . . . to be ashamed of their roots”.
Like many Americans, Boyd is fascinated with the class system, which is one reason why he was so taken by Drake, an upper-middle-class boy from Cambridge University who committed suicide in 1974. Drake’s popularity in recent years — in marked contrast to the general indifference he inspired while alive — makes him now the most prominent figure in Boyd’s legacy. “Has Nick’s music been liberated from its period by failing to connect with audiences when it was released?” he wonders.
Eventually he concludes that Drake’s ear for strange chords and tunings — “the core of his musical nature” — derived from the songs his mother played on the grand at home in rural Warwickshire. By a nice symmetry this is more or less how Boyd set out on his own path to rock, when he heard his grandmother “talk about Vienna at the turn of the century and play Brahms in a long forgotten style, feeling in my teens that the past was so close I could touch it”.
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