When Muddy Waters came to London at the start of the '60s, a kid from Boston called Joe Boyd was his tour manager; when Dylan went electric at the Newport Festival, Joe Boyd was plugging in his guitar; when the summer of love got going, Joe Boyd was running the coolest club in London, the UFO; when a bunch of club regulars called Pink Floyd recorded their first single, Joe Boyd was the producer; when a young songwriter named Nick Drake wanted to give his demo tape to someone, he chose Joe Boyd. More than any previous '60s music autobiography, Joe Boyd's White Bicycles offers the real story of what it was like to be there at the time. His greatest coup is bringing to life the famously elusive figure of Nick Drake ? the first time he's been written about by anyone who knew him well. As well as the '60s heavy-hitters, this book also offers wonderfully vivid portraits of a whole host of other musicians: everyone from the great jazzman Coleman Hawkins to the folk diva Sandy Denny, Lonnie Johnson to Eric Clapton, The Incredible String Band to Fairport Convention.
Whenever anything musically noteworthy occurred in the ’60s, Joe Boyd was probably nearby. In 1964, at age 21, he served as European tour manager for elder statesmen Coleman Hawkins and Muddy Waters. He was stage manager at the Newport Folk Festival when Dylan went electric the following year. He managed the UFO Club in London, where Pink Floyd and Soft Machine got their start. And all that was before he became a legendary record producer, recording Floyd’s first single and seminal albums by the likes of Fairport Convention, Nico, and Nick Drake. Miraculously, he made it through with his memory and critical faculties intact, as White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s attests.
Part personal memoir and part social history, White Bicycles bursts with rollicking anecdotes, eyewitness accounts, and canny observations about politics and youth culture that remain accurate and timely today. And, unlike many music biz memoirs, it’s refreshingly free of self-congratulation. Boyd often modestly credits his various successes to good timing or favorable circumstance: “The economy of the ’60s cut us a lot of slack, leaving time to travel, take drugs, write songs, and re-think the universe.” There’s also an undercurrent of sadness, as Boyd mourns departed friends and collaborators like Nick Drake and Sandy Denny, as well as larger cultural losses.
“The destructiveness that comes with innovation is as old as history,” Boyd writes, and it is not without regret that he describes a ’60s rock culture industry that gradually swept aside more regional variants of folk, blues, and jazz. This bittersweet edge helps White Bicycles keep an emotional balance as Boyd guides us through the decade with keen ears and restless intellectual curiosity. –Matthew Murphy
