[This is a picture of Joe Boyd, with hat, at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, when Dylan went electric.]
This is Joe Boyd’s Wikipedia entry:
Record producer Joe Boyd was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He first became involved in music promoting blues artists while a student at Harvard University, and in 1964 made his first visit to Britain, returning the following year to establish an overseas office of Elektra Records. He was eventually to settle in London.He became best-known for his work
with British folk and folk rock artists, including the Incredible String Band, Martin Carthy, Nick Drake, John Martyn, Fairport Convention and Richard Thompson. Some of these were produced by his own production company, Witchseason. He also co-founded London’s UFO Club and worked with UFO regulars Pink Floyd (producing their first single Arnold Layne) and the Soft Machine. Boyd returned to the States in the 1970s, assembling footage for the eponymous film documentary on Jimi Hendrix (1973) and producing records by Maria Muldaur and Kate and Anna McGarrigle among others. He went on to found his own Hannibal label (now a part of Rykodisc) which released records by the likes of Richard Thompson and various discs of so-called world music. Boyd also produced R.E.M.’s third album Fables of the Reconstruction (1985), and records by Billy Bragg and 10,000 Maniacs. Boyd has written a book about the music of the 1960s called “White Bicycles,” published in May 2006 by Serpents Tail Press in the UK. [Via Wikipedia]
This is what legendarily gonzo Brit music journo Nick Kent has to say about Joe Boyd:
“Joe Boyd is one of the most influential figures of the 1960s music scene and White Bicycles is his extraordinary memoir. 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, 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. Boyd’s dryly humorous observations and anecdotes about many great musicians,
combined with his understanding of the cultural changes that shaped the era, have more impact than any previous ’60s music autobiography and offer the real story of what it was like to be there at the time. Record and film producer Joe Boyd was born in Boston in 1942 and graduated from Harvard in 1964. 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, REM, Billy Bragg, and many others. As head of music for Warner Brothers Films, he organized the scoring of Deliverance, Clockwork Orange and McCabe & Mrs Miller and made Jimi Hendrix, a feature length documentary. In 1980 he started Hannibal Records, which he ran for 20 years and in 1988, he was Executive Producer of Scandal. Joe Boyd recently won an award for producing the “Most Influential Folk Album of All Time” at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards for Fairport Convention’s Liege & Lief. He lives in London and occasionally writes for the Guardian, Independent and OpenDemocracy.com “What a wonderful book! I was so engrossed I missed my train station. A gripping piece of social history and the best book about music I’ve read in years” – Brian Eno “A wonderful book, full of interesting and quirky detail, funny, wise and elegantly written” – Zoe Heller “An insightful and deeply evocative memoir of a truly enchanted era as seen through the still-razor-sharp mind of one of the great talent-magnets of the 20th century.”
This is where Joe Boyd will be on Thursday:
Robin’s Bookstore
108 S. 13th St.
7 PM