An Irregular Joe
Seeing record producer Joe Boyd read from his new memoir, White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s, at Joe's Pub last night brought a couple of Woody Allen movies to mind.
The first was Zelig. Raised in New Jersey, Joe Boyd seems to have been everywhere any music fan of a certain age, and with a certain passion for hardcore blues, folk music, and the psychedelic sixties, would have wished to have been. Boyd has illuminating stories about booking the likes of nearly forgotten Southern blues greats Lonnie Johnson and Sleepy John Estes while still a student during the early-sixties East Coast folk revival. He became a believer after hearing Bob Dylan serenade a pair of girls with "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" and "Masters of War" in a tiny bedroom during a party. He recorded classic albums by Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, the Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny, and Richard and Linda Thompson. And he enjoyed both the peaks and valleys of the sixties as founder of legendary London psychedelic ballroom UFO and manager of the Incredible String Band during their Woodstock debacle.
And there was a little bit of Marshall McLuhan's appearance in Annie Hall during Boyd's enhanced reading, too. Discussing his collegiate passion for the blues, he was able to invite longtime co-conspirator Geoff Muldaur onstage to perform Johnson's "He's A Jelly-Roll Baker." He enlisted Geoff and Maria Muldaur's daughter, Jenni, to evoke the oceanic folk spirit of the late Fairport Convention singer Sandy Denny's "The Sea." And Robyn Hitchcock, as sophisticated yet pixielike a musical eccentric as could be, blew us away with his renditions of the Incredible String Band's "Chinese White" and Nick Drake's "River Man."
White Bicycles ends prior to Boyd discovering the joys of non-Western popular music and subsequently producing the likes of Cubanismo, Balkana, and Toumani Diabate. I think there may be a sequel in there somewhere. Until he gets around to it, you can still catch Boyd reading in Philadelphia, Cambridge, and Los Angeles over the next few days.