Nov. 4, 2025
Joe Boyd
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Joe Boyd has spent more than six decades as a producer, label executive, and writer whose influence extends far beyond the studio. From producing Nick Drake's luminous folk albums to working with Fairport Convention, Pink Floyd, and R.E.M., Boyd has shaped some of the most enduring recordings in modern music history.
But Joe Boyd isn't just a behind-the-scenes architect of sound—he's also a chronicler of the music he loves. In his 2007 memoir, White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s, he offered an insider's perspective on a transformative era, while his latest book, And the Roots of Rhythm Remain: A Journey Through Global Music, published in 2024, takes readers across continents in search of the traditions that continue to shape contemporary sound. From Cuba to Mali, from Brazil to Bulgaria, Boyd traces the connections that bind global music together and celebrates the artists who keep these traditions alive.
On today’s episode Justin Richmond talks to Joe Boyd about working with famed Warner Brothers CEO Mo Ostin in the ‘60s. He also talks about the exhaustive research he did in writing his latest book and why he decided to pinpoint three specific Global regions as the genesis for all popular music. And Joe recalls how he came to produce the seminal 1973 documentary on Jimi Hendrix.
You can hear a playlist of some of our favorite songs from Joe Boyd HERE.
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00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin. Joe Boyd spent more than six decades as a producer, label executive and writer whose influence extents far beyond the studio. From producing Nick Drake's luminous folk albums to working with Fairport Convention, Pink Floyd, and Ram, Boyd has shaped some of the most enduring recordings in modern music history. But Joe Boyd isn't just a behind the scenes architect of sound. He's also a chronicler of the music he loves. In a two thousand and seven memoir, White Bicycles Making Music in the nineteen Sixties, he offered an insider's perspective on that transformative era of nineteen sixties British music that was so well received readers were clamoring for him to write a follow up about the nineteen seventies. He wrestled with that idea for a little bit, and then pivoted to the voluminous new book and The Roots of Rhythm Remain, a journey through global music, published just last year. This tom takes across continents in search of the traditions that continue to shape contemporary sound. From Cuba Tomali, from Brazil to Bulgaria, Boyd traces the connections that bind global music together and celebrates the artists who keep these traditions alive. On today's episode, I talked to Joe Boyd about working with famed Warner Brothers CEO Moostin in the sixties. He also talks about the exhaustive research he did in writing his latest book and why he decided to pinpoint three specific global regions as the genesis for all popular music, and Joe recalls how he came to produce the Seminole nineteen seventy three documentary on Jimi Hendrix, one of my personal favorite films of all time. This is broken record, real musicians, real conversations. Here's my conversation with Joe Boyd. There were a number of Americans to get out to London in the sixties that you weren't alone in that, but it does seem to one of the rare ones that stayed as long as he did not seem to come back. Did you ever move back to the States?
00:02:17
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I lived in la for a few years in the early seventies. I was back and forth La to London for another few years, and then I was back and forth to New York for a bit In the nineties and the noughties. But I've always I mean, basically except for a couple of years when I was working for Warner Brothers in la in the early seventies. I've always had a flat in London since nineteen sixty five.
00:02:46
Speaker 1: I want to kind of toggle between your career, not as a writer, not as part of the book, also the book. So the theme of the book, because you mentioned Warner Brothers, can you tell me about that mo austin early seventies, Warner Brothers culture and how you got involved.
00:03:03
Speaker 2: One day in nineteen sixty eight, I guess it was early sixth on a kind of willful impulse, I called up Bill Graham and I said I wanted to come see him, and he said okay, and gave me a time and a date, and I jumped on a plane, went to San Francisco and booked the Incredible String Band to open for the Jefferson Airplane because I thought they shouldn't be in folk clubs, they should be opening for the Jefferson Airplane. And while I was there, I met a guy called Andy Wickham. And Andy Wickham was an Englishman who had once worked for Andrew Luke Oldham I think, and he'd somehow migrated to California around the time of the Monterey Pop Festival, and he was now working at Warner Brothers. And we hung out and we spent some time together in San Francisco, and he said, you got to come to Burbank and meet Moe. And so I flew down to burber Bank. I met Mo and we just got along great. And Joe Smith and and Andy Wickham, who passed away recently, ended up being a questionable guy. I mean, he was one of those people who revealed him his sort of slightly racist and slightly aristocratic and snobbish sides as he grew older. But at that time he was the one who introduced Moe. And Moe and Joe, you know, came from Sinatra, from Top forty Radio, from these other worlds. And Andy introduced them to the Grateful Dead, He introduced them to Joni Mitchell, he introduced them to Van Morrison, and he opened those doors for them somehow. Moe just, you know, the same charm that worked with Natra's wise guys, worked with the Laurel Canyon guys. And Moe was just a sweet guy. I mean, he was tough and He didn't always reveal how tough he was unless he was pushed. But his charm was such and he had that wisdom to let you know. He surrounded himself with Lenny Warrenker and Russ Titlement and you know, all this this kind of a and R team Van Dyke Parks, and he let them be the ones who judged the music. The record company existed in a kind of old warehouse across the street from the studio, and they kept adding people and adding offices, and so it was completely crowded. It was like you had three feet and then there was the next office with a little divider and you went to go have a pee, and you're standing next to Moe or Joe or the head of sales or the head of you know. And so there was there was so much communication. Everybody talked to everybody else all the time. And then of course, you know, they ended up selling ten million Neil Young records and ten million Joni Mitchell records and got so much money that they said, oh, let's build a new headquarters. And I think by seventy seven or seventy six or something like that, they built that new building down the street and everybody was like thirty yards from each other, with padded carpets, deep pile carpets in between, and the atmosphere was never the same, and the record company I don't think was ever the same again. You know, I got I started doing some stuff. I produced a Jeff and Maria Muldor record I produced. I sold them of John and Beverly Martin record, neither of which sold. But for some reason they liked me, and I think there was also it's a complicated story, but they didn't have a European operation, and so they decided the way that they would enter Europe was by buying Island Records. And I helped introduce them to Chris Blackwell because I was working with Chris in London, and Chris, in his inimitable casual Caribbean way, kind of fucked them around. I mean, he just didn't take it all very seriously, and they did, and they went out on a limb to make him a very serious offer, and he never really responded, and so they got furious and they offered Chrysalis, who was making records for Ireland. They offered them a label deal to move to Warner Brothers, and they went out to get revenge. This was most tough side and he went out to get revenge to take stuff away from Blackwell from Ireland, and later they became great friends again. So this was a brief period of vengefulness and part of that was to steal me. And so they offered me the job of music director for the film company. And I was burnt out, you know. I had been struggling so much to keep Witch Season afloat, and we never sold enough records, and I was just getting more and more in debt. And they offered me a big salary. And Chris may have sensed the edge in this offer, but he couldn't have been nicer. He said, it's a great opportunity. You'll kick yourself if you don't take it. I'll pay off your debts and look after your artists and all that, and so go with my blessings. And so I went to California in nineteen sid one and became the so called director of music services for Warner Brothers Films.
00:09:17
Speaker 1: And so you was sort of in that role the liaise between the music and the film, so Warner Brothers music would end up in Warner Brothers films.
00:09:27
Speaker 2: That was one of the jobs. I discovered that my main job, as far as most of the directors and producers were concerned, they'd call me up and say get me John Williams, and you know, so it got kind of tedious, but I had some fun, you know, Stanley Kubrick. I'd worked on Clockwork Orange, I worked on Deliverance, the banjo saying with dueling banjo's that was me? And who played that again?
00:09:58
Speaker 1: Who played that banjo part?
00:09:59
Speaker 2: Eric Weisberg, because it should have been Bill Keith. Bill Keith was the guy. He was the city billy guy who'd played with Bill Monroe. I knew him from Harvard Square the best. And what John Boorman wanted was doling banjos, but he wanted it slow, fast, minor key, major key as a soundtrack, as a score, and Bill Keith would have been perfect. But Keith was on tour. He'd met a girl. He wanted to go hang out with her in Ireland. He said, how much are you paying? I said two thousand bucks. He said, get Weisberg, and so I got Weisburg and Weisberg made a fortune, you know, basically, and then But what happened then was that I sort of maneuvered my way into producing a Jimmy Hendrix documentary called Jimmy Hendrix, who came out in seventy three, And when that began to be really a full time thing, I said to Warner Brothers, I said, listen, let me find you a successor. And I went on. I thought that making the Jimi Hendrix film made me a film producer, but that was delusional.
00:11:16
Speaker 1: I think any Hendrix fan, that's the thing that they need to see. If there's anything that they need to see, that is the thing that they should see.
00:11:24
Speaker 2: You know, it's not available online. You can't stream it. I think there's secondhand DVDs available on Amazon, but nothing else. And I've screened it during my last trip to America to promote the book and the Roots of Them Remain, I did an event up the Hudson River Valley and Sagerates and the local cinema. The night before my event, they showed the Jimi Hendrix film and it got me to introduce it and that was great.
00:11:56
Speaker 1: It's amazing, by the way, how Fay I can't remember her last name, but his friend face. She's like completely just the same Faine prigeon Faine prigein Thank You she passed recently.
00:12:07
Speaker 2: Yeah, she passed recently. She was fantastic.
00:12:10
Speaker 1: She is just so vibranting in that thing. It's it's unbelievable. She's almost as charismatic as Jimmy in the movie, you know.
00:12:17
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and you know she had I don't know enough. I mean, somebody, it's really a shame. I don't know what's happened to it, but somebody I heard of somebody doing interviews with her to do a kind of biography. And evidently she was, you know, a friend or a girlfriend of like ten of the top musicians of the seventies and eighties. You know, she knew everybody, and everybody adored her because she never and she never jibed anybody. She told it like it was she was. And no, I mean, there's so much in her interview. There was a moment, my fa One of my favorite moments in the movie was her describing when she and Jimmy were living in a cold water flat like fifth floor and Harlem fit for a walk up and she gives him some money to go out and get some groceries or something, and he disappears and he comes back and he hadn't got any groceries, he's got an LP and she tries to get the LP and finally she grabs it and says, Bob Dylan, Who the fuck is Bob Vilan?
00:13:32
Speaker 1: So good? What was the process of making that?
00:13:36
Speaker 2: It was so weird because basically, all during Jimmy's life, over the last few years of his life when he was famous, everybody wanted to film him, and people were constantly coming up and wanting to film him. And Mike Jeffries, who was his manager, who was kind of thuggish guy from Newcastle, former club owner in Newcastle, he would say, yeah, sure, here he wants some lights. Here's where you plug in the sound. Here's you want an electrical extension corved you know you want if all areas pass here work out. And then they kept saying, well, you know, we have this release form that we need you to sign. Oh, we'll talk about that later. And then when they'd filmed Jimmy, they would come to him and try to get him to sign the release and he said, now I've got my own form, and he would give him give them the form which gave him fifty one percent ownership of the film, and so nobody would sign it, and so all this footage never got released during Jimmy's lifetime. After his father appointed this wonderful guy called Leo Branton, who was an attorney, LA attorney who represented Miles Davis, nat Cole Dorothy Dandridge. You know, he was an African American, but he was also civil rights attorney. He defended Angela Davis. And in fact, we were making the film during the trial of Angela Davis up in the Bay Area, and they had every Friday off at the trial. The trial would go Monday, Tuesday, munch a Thursday, and Leo would fly back from Oakland to Burbank and would come straight to Warner Brothers to see what we had done in the previous seven days with the film, and we'd show him a new scene or whatever, and he would he wasn't that interested in Jimmy's music. He was a Miles Davis guy. And he would then do his imitation of the judge, the prosecutor Angela Davis in the trial. And we spent the whole time just sitting there listening to him to tell us the inside story of the trial. And I went to Thanksgiving dinner at his house and sat next to Angela Davis, and you know, that was what was going on sort of the background, because because what happened was that when he got the job to represent the estate, he discovered there was all this footage that had never been seen. And Jefferies was now powerless because he'd represented Jimmy, who was deceased. Now was a family the heirs could appoint wherever they wanted, and they appointed Leo, and he came to see Mo because Jimmy was signed to Warner Prize at the time in America. And then Mo took and walked him across the street to see me and Ted Ashley, who was the head of the film company. And out of that meeting came the idea, well, at the first originally, just Joe, why don't you have a look at all this footage and see what you think of it and see if you think there's a film there?
00:17:00
Speaker 1: So he's asking you.
00:17:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, so he asked me. That was my job, you know, I was the liaison between the two sides of the street. And so I said, yeah, and we could film interviews with this and this and this, and we could put this together, and they okay, you do it.
00:17:14
Speaker 1: Joe. Did Moe have much of a relationship with Hendrix. I mean did I mean, I know they met backstage at Monterey I believe right when.
00:17:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't think there was much Jimmy, you know, his relationship. I think Mike Jeffries worked very hard to keep Jimmy away from MO. You know, he wanted everything to go through him. And also initially the deal was through Track Records in England, and so it was like he signed to Track for the world and then Track licensed it to and then at a certain point they paid some money to get Track out of the middle.
00:17:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, and the roots of Rhythm remain is It's an astounding book. I have to imagine this idea came to you many decades ago.
00:18:11
Speaker 2: You know, I always liked to write. I mean I always wrote the press releases for Hannibal Records, and I wrote some articles, and then I started doing some book reviews in the early two thousands, and I just thought, yeah, I'll write a book. I started writing a biography, and I thought, you know, like when I was born and please stop. Oh no, no, that's not right. It can't be about me. It's got to be about the sixties. And so I wrote My Bicycles. You know, focused on this decade because I felt I had something to say about the decade. And you know, I've been around for a lot of important moments in the decade, and I enjoyed doing it a lot. And then, you know, I started going out and doing interviews and book readings and stuff, and people will come up to me and say, so, when are you going to do the book about the seventies, And I said, you must be joking. You know, the seventies was not fun for me. I didn't have a good seventies. I don't have anything interesting to say about it. But I liked riding my bicycles, and I liked I liked the fact that I was no longer was I looking after the career of musicians who rarely did what I wanted them to. But I was looking after somebody who did everything I wanted him to me, you know. And I thought, yeah, I'll write another book. That's what I'll do. I'll write another book. And very quickly it came to me what I would do. I guess there were a couple of kernels of ideas that had been festering in my brain a little bit, and I would say, there's three that really pushed me off the edge of that ski jump so that I had no choice but to keep going. One was what I put in the preface to the book, which is the realization of how different Cuban and American rhythmic sensibilities are and try to get to the bottom of that, because I knew enough to know that it had something to do with history and with slavery, but it was worth digging into. And I had also read Ned Sublett's book by that time, Cuba and Its Music, which is a great book, and it really kind of opened my eyes to the depth of what you could discover when you dug into a musical culture like Cuba. And then also at the time, I'm way back in the late eighties when Graceland was so popular, everybody thought there was a controversy about Paul Simon, you know, not respecting the boycott. And I know a lot about South Africa. I've been there a couple of times. I hadn't spent a lot of time there, but I'd worked with a lot of South African musicians. I produced to play a kind of anti apartape musical and so I knew a lot about South Africa. I read a lot about South Africa, and I knew that what people thought was the controversy wasn't really the controversy. And I saw all these Paul Simon fans buying Lady Smith Black Mambaza records and buying Machlatini and the Machatella Queens records, which was great. I mean, because it's great music, it's worth those records are very much worth buying. But everybody felt virtuous about buying them and that they were somehow supporting Mandela by buying them. And I knew that they were Zulus, and the Zulus were kind of the enemy of Mandela, that supporting Zulu culture was not the same as supporting the anc In fact, it was quite different and even opposed. And I thought, well, that's something that people don't know that I could tell them. And then I also thought about my time working in Bulgaria, and you know, I'd love those choir records, you know, the Mysterio a bulgar and the Kutev Ensemble. And I was always a bit head scratching, you know that those Bulgarian national ensembles were so great, and the rest of the Eastern European state ensembles were a kitsch and kind of weird and boring and you know, like acrobatic and what's that all about? And then I had I talked to Philip Kutev's daughter, who told me how much the Russians hated her father and why they hated him because of he used the authentic peasant voice in the choir and how Stalin was trying to get the you know, completely obliterate pleasant culture. And I thought, well, that's interesting too. So these three things, these three ideas, the Cuban rhythms, South African Zulu versus a NC, and Russians hating Bulgarian choirs. There's stories in here that I would have fun telling people. And I figured if these stories exist in Eastern Europe and Cuba and South Africa, they probably exist. And I knew enough about other cultures to know that there was probably some more fun stuff to dig up there. And so I just got started. And that took me seventeen years, and realize it's going to take that long.
00:24:11
Speaker 1: We'll be back with more from Joe Boyd. After the break in the history of the nineteenth and twentieth century kind of does seem to be region to region, this sort of repression and this sort of cultural movement bubbling up from people to to counter state repression with art, and your book really wonderfully tells that story. I wasn't expecting that to be narratively done so well in your book. But then there's also the way in which these cultures then shared. You know, all of the all of the music moved around the globe and then back again. And so music from Africa would go to the Caribbean and then back to Africa and then come to the States. And there's this cultural exchange happening amongst cultures and countries and various forms of music that we don't often think about.
00:25:12
Speaker 2: Yeah, everything, I mean the take one of the takeaways I hope people would get from the book is there is no pure culture. There is no pure musical culture. For sure, it's all mixed. It's all a blend. As you said, it bubbles up from underneath, and underneath in a way are two groups, Africans and Roma. I just sort of realized, and I've realized almost more after I finished the book and I've been touring and talking about it and doing Q and a's and things like that. One of the things I've realized is and I mentioned in the book, but maybe I might have if I went back and rewrote the book, I might make more of a theme of it is the fact that going way back, certainly to the beginning of that night eighteenth century, what defines modernity is how African it is or how Roma it is. You know, by the late nineteenth century, Cakewalk, the Grizzly Bear, you know, the Charleston all that became the dominant force of young for young people to dance to. And if you weren't dancing to that sort of rhythm, you were square. And if you go back a little further to Gerta and the Romantics, who was the big musical revolutionary list, you know, he was this matinee Idol who toured across Europe with fainting females, and he modeled his whole performance style on a roma musician that he saw that was famous in Hungary when he was a kid. And this flamboyance, this joy, this kind of decorate, taking the note written on the page and decorating them and playing them with trills and playing them with accents and playing them in a crazy new way. That's Roma. It defined what was new and what was shiny and what was attractive to young people. You know, that's one of the problems that European folk music has had, you know, in the more recent the last fifty years, has been that it lacks any kind of African feeling rhythmically and therefore is consigned to being square.
00:27:47
Speaker 1: You about it be English folk music in there's an example for me discography that kind of illustrates the way in which a group of people sometimes learn about themselves best from outsiders. You know, outsiders can sort of reaffirm your sense of who you are. And it's in this sort of this example from the Fairport convention.
00:28:08
Speaker 2: Yeah, convention.
00:28:10
Speaker 1: It's not until nineteen sixty nine and they discover song A Sailor's Life that they really embrace English folk music. Prior to this they sort of are working more from an American tradition. And maybe you can talk a bit about that, because I think.
00:28:25
Speaker 2: It's Yeah, when I first heard Fairport, I was very impressed with their musicianship. The upside was how good they were in particularly Richard Thompson on their instruments. The downside was they kept singing, you know, Richard Farina, Eric Anderson and Phil Oakes and to be fair, Bob some very good Bob Dylan songs. But I thought, why are these English kids so wrapped in this music that I kind of left America to get away from No, I mean, I just would never that sold on the white middle class singer songwriter idea, and so then they added Sandy Denny to the group. And Sandy had been around the folk clubs for a few years and she had never been a songwriter. Before, she had been a balladeer. She sang traditional Scottish Irish English ballads and she would play these ballads to them in the van when they would go to gigs, and little by little it kind of got through to them. And so then they did that track You mentioned Sailor's Life, but they just still thought of it as one string to their bow. You know. One thing that they did along with other things. Richard and Sandy were writing songs that was a new aspect, new dimension of their music. And then they had this terrible crash and the drummer, Martin Lamble, was killed and a girl, Jeanie the Taylor, was killed as well, and they were devastated and they thought they would break up. They would never play again, and then when they decided to reform, they wanted to do something completely new, so they would never play the songs that they played with Martin on drums with a new drummer. That was the idea, and right at that time out came music from Big Pink, and everybody, all musicians in London were just gobsmacked, as the English say, by music from Big Pink. And again there's a little outsider element there because they're Canadians, but still what they were doing was a fresh approach to a very American form of music and building something unbelievably original, appealing virtuasak all this, you know, with that record, And in a way they were following on from Bob Dylan at Newport in nineteen sixty five more than Bob Dylan was, yeah, and doing something really rich and interesting. And so in a way it hit the Fairport like a rebuke. Like you English boys from Muswell Hill, you think you can play some American stuff, you know, is how you want to reinvent yourself after the crash, forget about it. This is defining that moment. And so they really went to try and do with British traditional music. What the band was doing with American traditional music. And they were so lucky because they found well a lot they were clever. They found a drummer in Dave Masseox who was not a rock drummer. He was a jazz drummer. He was a dance band drummer, and he found the dance rhythms in all the songs that they wanted to play. The record is just comes alive, you know. Because of that mix and adding Dave Swarbrick, who was a very wonderful traditional fiddle player into the band, made this record that changed everything in Britain in the folk scene anyway. Legion Leaf, Yeah, he already had a huge.
00:32:29
Speaker 1: Impact, and he brings in the rhythms that you know, to your point where English folk music could be seen a square, he sort of starts to bring in some rhythms that maybe help you.
00:32:41
Speaker 2: Yeah, he does it with jazz chops.
00:32:44
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:32:44
Speaker 2: At that time, I don't think Legion and Leaf was at the top of the list of the hippist records on the charts, but it was a lot hipper than any other folk record at that time, and it captured the imagination of a certain portion of the audience.
00:33:08
Speaker 1: It's just fascinating to me that this group that we think of as a consummate English folk group starts because they're sort of doing American folk music. In the process, we discover the English folk tradition. Canadian group does Americana better than and the American possibly could, and then forces Fairport Convention to confront who they you know, their own roots, and who they are as people.
00:33:37
Speaker 2: And this process repeats and repeats. I mean, one of the things I talk about in the book is that back and forth was Fela and James Brown. Yeah, you know that somebody said about when James Brown's extended jams, you know, extended dance tracks began making inroads. There's a woman writer who I quoted the book saying those records told us that we were really from somewhere else, that Africa was really over there, that there was something different about African American culture. And then Fela, you know, who had been watching as James Brown imitators spread all across West Africa, people imitating James Brown, very slavishly, trying to sound exactly like James Brown. And then he came to La and somehow that exposure to black panthers to the music to the culture. He went back to Nigeria and created something that was a bit James brownish but very Nigerian. Yeah, and so that back and forth happens, you know, not just between the band and Pairful Convention. And by the way, there was a lovely footnote to the Pairful Convention story that many years later later, an English singer who I know was playing at the festival and he met the guys from Los Lobos and they said, oh, do you know Richard Thompson in the Federal Convention. He said, yeah, I know those guys. They're friends of mine. He said, well, when you see them, tell them that if it hadn't been for Legion Leif, we would have still been a heavy metal band from East la whoa that it was Legion Leif which convinced Los Lobos to dig into their own cultural background.
00:35:44
Speaker 1: You would never listen to Los Lobos here, Legion Leaf that is.
00:35:48
Speaker 2: But it's just a conceptual thing. It's like like that, oh oh, maybe that's what we should do instead of trying to sound like you know, def lepper.
00:35:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's an additional wrinkle really in a way to the James Brown Fela interplayed and if you think about it, slave trade initiates from Africa in Cuba, you get these African rhythms that start to form and influence, you know, the music of Cuba. You get things like the habanera you talk about, which is a Cuban rhythm, Havana rhythm. Right, it comes to America likely i'd imagine through New Orleans probably, yeah, and you get these these rhythms that starts to influence early R and B music, which would then of course influence James Brown, which would then influence Fela fala Is also taking in Cuban music. Happened to be a big fan of Cuban music, was taken in those records directly as well. Comes to America, picks up the James Brown goes back, you know, and you sort of so you start to get this really bizarre Africa influence being Cuba going back to Africa through this James Brown connection in FLA, and it just becomes like whoa, Like there's no there really are no boundaries, there's no borders, there's yeah.
00:37:15
Speaker 2: Yeah. The whole extended jams of those James Brown records from the late sixties early seventies were inspired by the Montuno you know, the the scratch guitar parts are most of them are clavi one two one two three, one two one two three one two one two three. So you have the the influence of Latin Africa, Cuban music into America into Africa, meeting in the middle of the Atlantic. And you know you're never going to get a simple diagram, no, you know, a linear explanation of anything to do with music culture. It's so whirls around in the wind. You know.
00:38:05
Speaker 1: It's yeah, whether history is of any trees or cultures you considered including but ultimately didn't get didn't get to.
00:38:16
Speaker 2: Not really because basically the idea from the beginning was the music we all know but we don't know about it. So I love Rebetico, I love Fado, I love Northern African music, Algerian, Moroccan, Egyptian. That would have made it a different book. Okay, you know everything that's in this book is suddenly said, oh yeah, I've got a couple of Ravi Shankar records, I'll read that, or I took those Latin dance lessons when I was in college. And you know, I mean everything in there is hopefully got some tangential relationship to people's ex experience, listening experience with music.
00:39:12
Speaker 1: How is digital distribution in the modern age aided and or disrupted this global flow of music that you illustrate in the book.
00:39:26
Speaker 2: Well, in some levels, of course, it aided it, you know. I mean, my wife and I put together two playlists of one hundred tracks each on Spotify and Apple. You know that we can send out. I'm preparing a newsletter that'll send this out to everybody. And that's great, you know. And I can and in my research I was able to dig things out on YouTube and Spotify and hear things that I never would have been able to hear, and to write about it in a way that probably I couldn't have some in some cases. And I think that a lot of the changes that have pulled music away from the sort of thing that I like listening to didn't happen because of digital distribution. I think, you know, the traditional record companies that made so many great records and pressed so much great vinyl, and that whole ecosystem of vinyl records and jukeboxes, and you know that was destroyed by the cassette first and foremost. So on the one hand, you know, technology gives with one hand takes away with the other, and the same thing has happened with then happened with CDs and the death of vinyl, the rebirth of vinyl. The biggest change has been the rhythm machines. You know, in terms of the music that I write about in this book, I write about music that's made by people in a room in moment, playing off each other. You know, rhythms that have been learned from elders to youngers, that have been absorbed through culture. And now you know, rhythms fly around the world very fast, and you can, you know, you can, you know, sit in Tokyo and hire somebody to give you a rhythm track in Marseille, send it to you digitally and you can relay a Japanese wrap track over it. It's just a different thing. It's a whole different thing. And I you know, people say, how far up to the present did you write the book? I said, really, I wrote from antiquity up to the drum machine, because that's where everything changes and it becomes a different subject and not one that I could really address and keep the book under nine hundred pages.
00:42:09
Speaker 1: You know, there's another question I had, what do you make of hip hop and sampling?
00:42:16
Speaker 2: You know, when I hear even with it like a singer songwriter, and from the first bar, I know that there's a clip track going on here. It's not that you can even hear the percussion. It's just you can hear the regularity. You can hear the absolute inflexible regularity of the rhythm. And sometimes I'll hear very nice singing and a very nice words. But I don't feel I have to listen to it again. To me, I don't know. This is just my crack pop theory. If music was made in a moment where nobody knew what was going to happen next, from beat to beat, minute to minute, that sense of danger, that sense of adventure. You're not just laying it down with your heads and earphones. You know, with a click track somebody sent you and you're adding a base part to something that already has a keyboard. You know, if you're doing it live in a room with musicians and nobody knows how it's going to turn out. Is it going to be a good take or a bad take. It's a collective adventure. Yeah, That feeling passed through the technical process to the final product, whether it's a streaming file or a CD or a cassette or a vinyl or whatever it is, When the listener gets some of that sense of adventure, it translates. It feels more adventurous to listen to for me.
00:43:59
Speaker 1: Anyway, Well that's break and we'll come back with Joe Boyd. There was a you know, and Prince famously used the lind drum and various rhythm machines and drum machines. But you know, he forgat which hip hop producer was now, like we won't say a name because I don't remember who it was, but a very famous hip hop producer. At some point I had a conversation with Prince, and Prince said, you know what you're making these Like, I know, I used drum machines, but like you guys are only producing on the computer. At least with the drum machine, I would connect it to speaker. I was moving I was moving air still with my drum machine. Yeah, you know, I was moving air with it and then adding other things on top of it. You're only creating in a computer, and this is so this isn't music. There's no air being moved at all. Yeah, that is a great example of why Prince was great with the drum machine. And it's sort of.
00:44:56
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I mean, he's an exception that kind of proves the role or whatever because he did. But I have to say I went to see Prince one of the early times she came to London. It wasn't in an arena. It was in like a three thousand seat hall, and I had a pretty good box seat overlooking the stage, and I was kind of excited to see him, and but you know, there were light effects and there was things going on. Everybody had a little earbud and so you knew that somewhere underneath the stage there was a hard drive with something queueing, you know, like a pulse, and it got a little boring, a little tiring after a while, and then there was this moment where you could tell that he it switched off and Prince just got out his guitar and he started playing Purple Rain I think or something, and he was completely free of the click and it was just transcendent. You know, it's just realiant. It was just fantastic. I went to Lee years later. I went to see him at the O two and I got so there's some weird connection. My second cousin was playing keyboards in the opening act, and so I got to go backstage. And then we went to the after party, which the after show, which was in a small theater behind the two and some of the people in the back in the in the opening band and some of Prince's guys. They all were out on stage like hooking up their instruments, and Prince walked out on stage and he went up to the microphone and he looked around at the band. He looked around. He said, let's do Stevie. And so they did an hour long set of Stevie Wonder covers, just no click, nothing rehearsed, just these guys, this great band and Prince playing Superstition and you know, all this stuff. And then they take a break and they said we'll be back, and they come back like fifteen minutes later, and again everybody goes their instruments. They're all sitting there waiting, what's Prince is going to do? And he goes up to the microphone. He says, Sly and they did an hour of Sly covers and it was just fantastic, you know, yeah, and I did I have to say, I loved it more than the show, which was good.
00:47:37
Speaker 1: Oh than the two show, yeah, the O two show.
00:47:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I had a good seat and everything, but it was you know, you could feel it was very programmed. Everybody knew exactly when the cues were and the whites did this, and the you know, and even though the drummer was playing but he you know, everybody had had had earbuds and you know, it was okay, it was a good show, but that after party was never to be forgotten.
00:48:06
Speaker 1: In hindsight. Who knew the unfocused the drummer you can never get to pay attention or foot would be our greatest asset all these years. But it's like, you know, the drummer speeding up or change into it. It's like that, really, you know.
00:48:23
Speaker 2: But you know, sometimes, yes, of course, there are times when you as a producer, you tear your hair out because the drummer can't keep time. But other times it just picks up. The intensity sort of picks up in a nanosecond just because something has happened, somebody's done something on an instrument, and everything just gets that little more intense, and everything just picks up a little bit. And also, I mean and now there's some you know, Al Jackson and some of those, you know, you can't define it. It's just he lays back, he plays at the it's the last moment that can the last nanosecond that can still be considered the beat. Yeah, and it's and it's got a sensuality to it that a lot of modern references just are different. You know, it's not the same thing.
00:49:20
Speaker 1: And it's also the way that he's playing behind the beat in relation to Duck Dunn or yeah, exactly on playing bass or yeah, it's all or if you listen to or the Carl it's it's the way, Yeah, the piano players unique sense of rhythm against the bass player's unique sense against Tito's against it's and it's just all working against each other.
00:49:44
Speaker 2: If anyone ever says, well, I don't know, I don't think you're I don't think you're right. I you know, everybody should playing time, I would say Exhibit A would be try a little tenderness. You know, the way it begins, you know, it's just I think it's just a guitar and then just a piano comes in and it's very tenderative rhythmically, and everybody's just listening to Otis singing, and then it grows and then it speeds up and it gets more into you know, It's like the difference between the feel at the end of that track and the field at the beginning is a journey, unbelievable journey. And it's you could just feel the room these guys just looking at each other. Yeah, shall I do this now? Okay, Okay, I'll try that. Okay. Oh wow, Otis just did something and let's answer that. And you know, and it's just so intense that track.
00:50:47
Speaker 1: I feel like reading the book thinking about that. I love I've always loved to talk about it a bit, just the way cultures interact, interplay that the great boogeyman around this conversation these days is the word cultural appropriation. On one head, I understand the critique. On another hand, I hate that just the existence of the word could put in to anyone thinking about borrowing this from that culture or this thing from that culture, and then putting it together into their own thing and making it something completely unique.
00:51:20
Speaker 2: In the events that I do, Andrea County is usually with me, and she's running the Spotify streamer. When we want to have illustrations. I say, okay, let's go to the heart of cultural appropriation. Here is the error moment of cultural appropriation. And we play The Lions Sleeps Tonight, and then we play wim Away. And you know, Pete Seeger is a heroic figure who always was for the underdog, and he was, you know, for fairness and you know, but he was in an era when anything that you didn't have a composer credit was considered public domain or you know whatever. So he's getting money from wim Away. He's getting a little bit more a bit of the money from the Lions Tonight. And then I play boobe which is the original. And it's fascinating to see to feel the audience because they know Lions Sleeps Tonight by the tokens that everybody knows that they know Pete Seeger singing wom Away. That's familiar, or at least it's not surprising. Then they hear him Boobey. It's so intense and so profound and so rich and so individual, like this guy Solomon Linda who improvises the hook that has made millions and millions and millions of dollars for Disney. Now that the fact that no money reached Solomon Linda is cultural appropriation. That is cultural appropriation. There's a series now on in a film on Netflix called The Lions Share about the royalties of the Lions Sleep Tonight. It's fascinating, it's depressing, it's shocking, but you know, you understand in a way. It was a time before anybody had lawyers and thought about all these kinds of things. But you know, cultures all over the world, African cultures, African American cultures use the Hawaiian guitar slide steel guitar. It was invented by Joseph Kaikuku on Oahu Island in eighteen eighty seven. Yeah, you know, nobody never paid him anything. I mean, and to try and draw a border and say, now, okay, whatever went before is one thing, but now we're going to put up a fence. You can't actually listen to this stuff and use that influence in your music because that's appropriation. I think it's kind of ridiculous because nothing is pure. There is no pure culture. And the story of the Roma is some perfect example. I mean, they went from South Asia all the way across the Middle East, up into the Balkans, up into Europe. They changed European music totally, and popular music all over the world wouldn't be what it is today if it wasn't for the African influence through Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Carolina, Virginia, Texas, Mississippi, Chicago, you know whatever. And it always mixed. You know, the root of it all started with African slaves being forced to play for dances for the French did contra dance and quadrilles. And you know, it wasn't just African music they were playing. They were playing French music, but they're playing it mixed in with their own culture. And it's always been a mix. All music is a mix. So how you actually begin to parse out where the line can be drawn, I don't know. It's beyond me.
00:55:33
Speaker 1: We didn't talk about this, but you spend a lot of time with some early blues Grates, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Sisters at a Dar and on and on and on. You also got to spend a lot of time in England. Where do you in this particular era, where do you land on the led Zeppelin?
00:55:53
Speaker 2: I mean I was never a big led Zeppelin fan, but not because I objected to what they did with no anymore than object to Eric Clapton. I mean who I object to because of some of his public positions. I don't have a problem with Eric Clapton playing Crossroads. And you know, eventually, when the legal world woke up to the values of copyrights and all these things, Robert Johnson's sister, I think made you know, his family long after he died. Of course, got a pretty decent payday, a pretty good share of all those box sets that CBS issued of Robert Johnson, and even I think some covers, you know, by rock bands. And I know for a fact that Muddy Waters and Rosetta and people loved the fact that they found a white audience and the fact that they found people who ate up their music and loved their music. And you know, part of that would be the simple fact of buying a ticket to go see Rosetta. But you know, Chuck Berry stole from Rosetta.
00:57:17
Speaker 1: That's a good call, you.
00:57:18
Speaker 2: Know, I mean, Chuck Berry is pure Rosetta. Yeah, and then everybody else stole from Chuck Berry. And so you can't where do you draw the line, but you should Chuck not have stolen from Rosetta.
00:57:33
Speaker 1: Yeah, last question and I'll let you go. You talked about how the way music from Big Pink really changed everything. There were a lot of groups that then changed their style of music. Pete Townsend I said, when he heard that, you know, it definitely inspired him to write in a particular way. Other people as well. But you know, six months earlier, so it's a different record, but it's still it's a return to Americana in a sense. In the middle of psychedelia and all this stuff, Bob Dylan released John Leslie Hardy, and why did that not disrupt the sort of psychedelic thing and sort of re orient people the way music from Big PinkWood six months later.
00:58:14
Speaker 2: I mean, I love that record. I think it's a very good record, but it's not in the top five Dylan records of all time, so it didn't have the same impact at Blonde on Blonde, for example. And also, as Dylan himself acknowledged, I think in some interview or some something, I think Jimmy Hendrix had something to do with it, with the failure of John Wesley Harding record to have that impact, because Jimmy's cover of All Along the Watchtower blew it out of the water. I mean, Dylan acknowledged that, he said, I can't listen to my own recording of All on the watch Shower because I'd rather listen to Jimmy's and Jimmy's take on that just you know, it was so immense and so extraordinary, and I think, you know, you can't go back to the culture, can't go back to the well that often. You know, Dylan had huge impact, like three four times in a short space of time, you know, like whiplash. The whole Western culture suffered whiplash from Dyla, like, wait a minute, he done this, Oh now he's doing this. Oh my god. And I think, you know, at a certain point, particularly because it's sort of a subdued record, and that and Natural Skyline are and Self Portrait are kind of curiosities. And I like them all, I mean, but particularly John Wesley Harding. It doesn't surprise me that they weren't course change, they didn't like spin. The steering mechanism of the ship makes sense.
00:59:52
Speaker 1: Man, there's so much more of One Happened another time, Great speaking to.
00:59:55
Speaker 2: You, Okay, all of that.
00:59:59
Speaker 1: In episode description, you'll find a link to a seven hour playlist Joe Boyd created to accompany his new book and the Roots of Rhythm Remain a journey through global music. Be sure to check out YouTube dot com slash Broken Record Podcast to see all of our video interviews, and be sure to follow us on Instagram at the Broken Record Pod. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is produced and edited by Leah Rose, with marketing help from Eric Sandler and Jordan McMillan. Our engineer is Ben Holliday. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and ad free listening for four ninety nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple podcast subscriptions and if you like this show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app. Our theme musics by Kenny Beats. I'm justin Richmond.
Speaker 1: Pushkin. Joe Boyd spent more than six decades as a producer, label executive and writer whose influence extents far beyond the studio. From producing Nick Drake's luminous folk albums to working with Fairport Convention, Pink Floyd, and Ram, Boyd has shaped some of the most enduring recordings in modern music history. But Joe Boyd isn't just a behind the scenes architect of sound. He's also a chronicler of the music he loves. In a two thousand and seven memoir, White Bicycles Making Music in the nineteen Sixties, he offered an insider's perspective on that transformative era of nineteen sixties British music that was so well received readers were clamoring for him to write a follow up about the nineteen seventies. He wrestled with that idea for a little bit, and then pivoted to the voluminous new book and The Roots of Rhythm Remain, a journey through global music, published just last year. This tom takes across continents in search of the traditions that continue to shape contemporary sound. From Cuba Tomali, from Brazil to Bulgaria, Boyd traces the connections that bind global music together and celebrates the artists who keep these traditions alive. On today's episode, I talked to Joe Boyd about working with famed Warner Brothers CEO Moostin in the sixties. He also talks about the exhaustive research he did in writing his latest book and why he decided to pinpoint three specific global regions as the genesis for all popular music, and Joe recalls how he came to produce the Seminole nineteen seventy three documentary on Jimi Hendrix, one of my personal favorite films of all time. This is broken record, real musicians, real conversations. Here's my conversation with Joe Boyd. There were a number of Americans to get out to London in the sixties that you weren't alone in that, but it does seem to one of the rare ones that stayed as long as he did not seem to come back. Did you ever move back to the States?
00:02:17
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I lived in la for a few years in the early seventies. I was back and forth La to London for another few years, and then I was back and forth to New York for a bit In the nineties and the noughties. But I've always I mean, basically except for a couple of years when I was working for Warner Brothers in la in the early seventies. I've always had a flat in London since nineteen sixty five.
00:02:46
Speaker 1: I want to kind of toggle between your career, not as a writer, not as part of the book, also the book. So the theme of the book, because you mentioned Warner Brothers, can you tell me about that mo austin early seventies, Warner Brothers culture and how you got involved.
00:03:03
Speaker 2: One day in nineteen sixty eight, I guess it was early sixth on a kind of willful impulse, I called up Bill Graham and I said I wanted to come see him, and he said okay, and gave me a time and a date, and I jumped on a plane, went to San Francisco and booked the Incredible String Band to open for the Jefferson Airplane because I thought they shouldn't be in folk clubs, they should be opening for the Jefferson Airplane. And while I was there, I met a guy called Andy Wickham. And Andy Wickham was an Englishman who had once worked for Andrew Luke Oldham I think, and he'd somehow migrated to California around the time of the Monterey Pop Festival, and he was now working at Warner Brothers. And we hung out and we spent some time together in San Francisco, and he said, you got to come to Burbank and meet Moe. And so I flew down to burber Bank. I met Mo and we just got along great. And Joe Smith and and Andy Wickham, who passed away recently, ended up being a questionable guy. I mean, he was one of those people who revealed him his sort of slightly racist and slightly aristocratic and snobbish sides as he grew older. But at that time he was the one who introduced Moe. And Moe and Joe, you know, came from Sinatra, from Top forty Radio, from these other worlds. And Andy introduced them to the Grateful Dead, He introduced them to Joni Mitchell, he introduced them to Van Morrison, and he opened those doors for them somehow. Moe just, you know, the same charm that worked with Natra's wise guys, worked with the Laurel Canyon guys. And Moe was just a sweet guy. I mean, he was tough and He didn't always reveal how tough he was unless he was pushed. But his charm was such and he had that wisdom to let you know. He surrounded himself with Lenny Warrenker and Russ Titlement and you know, all this this kind of a and R team Van Dyke Parks, and he let them be the ones who judged the music. The record company existed in a kind of old warehouse across the street from the studio, and they kept adding people and adding offices, and so it was completely crowded. It was like you had three feet and then there was the next office with a little divider and you went to go have a pee, and you're standing next to Moe or Joe or the head of sales or the head of you know. And so there was there was so much communication. Everybody talked to everybody else all the time. And then of course, you know, they ended up selling ten million Neil Young records and ten million Joni Mitchell records and got so much money that they said, oh, let's build a new headquarters. And I think by seventy seven or seventy six or something like that, they built that new building down the street and everybody was like thirty yards from each other, with padded carpets, deep pile carpets in between, and the atmosphere was never the same, and the record company I don't think was ever the same again. You know, I got I started doing some stuff. I produced a Jeff and Maria Muldor record I produced. I sold them of John and Beverly Martin record, neither of which sold. But for some reason they liked me, and I think there was also it's a complicated story, but they didn't have a European operation, and so they decided the way that they would enter Europe was by buying Island Records. And I helped introduce them to Chris Blackwell because I was working with Chris in London, and Chris, in his inimitable casual Caribbean way, kind of fucked them around. I mean, he just didn't take it all very seriously, and they did, and they went out on a limb to make him a very serious offer, and he never really responded, and so they got furious and they offered Chrysalis, who was making records for Ireland. They offered them a label deal to move to Warner Brothers, and they went out to get revenge. This was most tough side and he went out to get revenge to take stuff away from Blackwell from Ireland, and later they became great friends again. So this was a brief period of vengefulness and part of that was to steal me. And so they offered me the job of music director for the film company. And I was burnt out, you know. I had been struggling so much to keep Witch Season afloat, and we never sold enough records, and I was just getting more and more in debt. And they offered me a big salary. And Chris may have sensed the edge in this offer, but he couldn't have been nicer. He said, it's a great opportunity. You'll kick yourself if you don't take it. I'll pay off your debts and look after your artists and all that, and so go with my blessings. And so I went to California in nineteen sid one and became the so called director of music services for Warner Brothers Films.
00:09:17
Speaker 1: And so you was sort of in that role the liaise between the music and the film, so Warner Brothers music would end up in Warner Brothers films.
00:09:27
Speaker 2: That was one of the jobs. I discovered that my main job, as far as most of the directors and producers were concerned, they'd call me up and say get me John Williams, and you know, so it got kind of tedious, but I had some fun, you know, Stanley Kubrick. I'd worked on Clockwork Orange, I worked on Deliverance, the banjo saying with dueling banjo's that was me? And who played that again?
00:09:58
Speaker 1: Who played that banjo part?
00:09:59
Speaker 2: Eric Weisberg, because it should have been Bill Keith. Bill Keith was the guy. He was the city billy guy who'd played with Bill Monroe. I knew him from Harvard Square the best. And what John Boorman wanted was doling banjos, but he wanted it slow, fast, minor key, major key as a soundtrack, as a score, and Bill Keith would have been perfect. But Keith was on tour. He'd met a girl. He wanted to go hang out with her in Ireland. He said, how much are you paying? I said two thousand bucks. He said, get Weisberg, and so I got Weisburg and Weisberg made a fortune, you know, basically, and then But what happened then was that I sort of maneuvered my way into producing a Jimmy Hendrix documentary called Jimmy Hendrix, who came out in seventy three, And when that began to be really a full time thing, I said to Warner Brothers, I said, listen, let me find you a successor. And I went on. I thought that making the Jimi Hendrix film made me a film producer, but that was delusional.
00:11:16
Speaker 1: I think any Hendrix fan, that's the thing that they need to see. If there's anything that they need to see, that is the thing that they should see.
00:11:24
Speaker 2: You know, it's not available online. You can't stream it. I think there's secondhand DVDs available on Amazon, but nothing else. And I've screened it during my last trip to America to promote the book and the Roots of Them Remain, I did an event up the Hudson River Valley and Sagerates and the local cinema. The night before my event, they showed the Jimi Hendrix film and it got me to introduce it and that was great.
00:11:56
Speaker 1: It's amazing, by the way, how Fay I can't remember her last name, but his friend face. She's like completely just the same Faine prigeon Faine prigein Thank You she passed recently.
00:12:07
Speaker 2: Yeah, she passed recently. She was fantastic.
00:12:10
Speaker 1: She is just so vibranting in that thing. It's it's unbelievable. She's almost as charismatic as Jimmy in the movie, you know.
00:12:17
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and you know she had I don't know enough. I mean, somebody, it's really a shame. I don't know what's happened to it, but somebody I heard of somebody doing interviews with her to do a kind of biography. And evidently she was, you know, a friend or a girlfriend of like ten of the top musicians of the seventies and eighties. You know, she knew everybody, and everybody adored her because she never and she never jibed anybody. She told it like it was she was. And no, I mean, there's so much in her interview. There was a moment, my fa One of my favorite moments in the movie was her describing when she and Jimmy were living in a cold water flat like fifth floor and Harlem fit for a walk up and she gives him some money to go out and get some groceries or something, and he disappears and he comes back and he hadn't got any groceries, he's got an LP and she tries to get the LP and finally she grabs it and says, Bob Dylan, Who the fuck is Bob Vilan?
00:13:32
Speaker 1: So good? What was the process of making that?
00:13:36
Speaker 2: It was so weird because basically, all during Jimmy's life, over the last few years of his life when he was famous, everybody wanted to film him, and people were constantly coming up and wanting to film him. And Mike Jeffries, who was his manager, who was kind of thuggish guy from Newcastle, former club owner in Newcastle, he would say, yeah, sure, here he wants some lights. Here's where you plug in the sound. Here's you want an electrical extension corved you know you want if all areas pass here work out. And then they kept saying, well, you know, we have this release form that we need you to sign. Oh, we'll talk about that later. And then when they'd filmed Jimmy, they would come to him and try to get him to sign the release and he said, now I've got my own form, and he would give him give them the form which gave him fifty one percent ownership of the film, and so nobody would sign it, and so all this footage never got released during Jimmy's lifetime. After his father appointed this wonderful guy called Leo Branton, who was an attorney, LA attorney who represented Miles Davis, nat Cole Dorothy Dandridge. You know, he was an African American, but he was also civil rights attorney. He defended Angela Davis. And in fact, we were making the film during the trial of Angela Davis up in the Bay Area, and they had every Friday off at the trial. The trial would go Monday, Tuesday, munch a Thursday, and Leo would fly back from Oakland to Burbank and would come straight to Warner Brothers to see what we had done in the previous seven days with the film, and we'd show him a new scene or whatever, and he would he wasn't that interested in Jimmy's music. He was a Miles Davis guy. And he would then do his imitation of the judge, the prosecutor Angela Davis in the trial. And we spent the whole time just sitting there listening to him to tell us the inside story of the trial. And I went to Thanksgiving dinner at his house and sat next to Angela Davis, and you know, that was what was going on sort of the background, because because what happened was that when he got the job to represent the estate, he discovered there was all this footage that had never been seen. And Jefferies was now powerless because he'd represented Jimmy, who was deceased. Now was a family the heirs could appoint wherever they wanted, and they appointed Leo, and he came to see Mo because Jimmy was signed to Warner Prize at the time in America. And then Mo took and walked him across the street to see me and Ted Ashley, who was the head of the film company. And out of that meeting came the idea, well, at the first originally, just Joe, why don't you have a look at all this footage and see what you think of it and see if you think there's a film there?
00:17:00
Speaker 1: So he's asking you.
00:17:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, so he asked me. That was my job, you know, I was the liaison between the two sides of the street. And so I said, yeah, and we could film interviews with this and this and this, and we could put this together, and they okay, you do it.
00:17:14
Speaker 1: Joe. Did Moe have much of a relationship with Hendrix. I mean did I mean, I know they met backstage at Monterey I believe right when.
00:17:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't think there was much Jimmy, you know, his relationship. I think Mike Jeffries worked very hard to keep Jimmy away from MO. You know, he wanted everything to go through him. And also initially the deal was through Track Records in England, and so it was like he signed to Track for the world and then Track licensed it to and then at a certain point they paid some money to get Track out of the middle.
00:17:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, and the roots of Rhythm remain is It's an astounding book. I have to imagine this idea came to you many decades ago.
00:18:11
Speaker 2: You know, I always liked to write. I mean I always wrote the press releases for Hannibal Records, and I wrote some articles, and then I started doing some book reviews in the early two thousands, and I just thought, yeah, I'll write a book. I started writing a biography, and I thought, you know, like when I was born and please stop. Oh no, no, that's not right. It can't be about me. It's got to be about the sixties. And so I wrote My Bicycles. You know, focused on this decade because I felt I had something to say about the decade. And you know, I've been around for a lot of important moments in the decade, and I enjoyed doing it a lot. And then, you know, I started going out and doing interviews and book readings and stuff, and people will come up to me and say, so, when are you going to do the book about the seventies, And I said, you must be joking. You know, the seventies was not fun for me. I didn't have a good seventies. I don't have anything interesting to say about it. But I liked riding my bicycles, and I liked I liked the fact that I was no longer was I looking after the career of musicians who rarely did what I wanted them to. But I was looking after somebody who did everything I wanted him to me, you know. And I thought, yeah, I'll write another book. That's what I'll do. I'll write another book. And very quickly it came to me what I would do. I guess there were a couple of kernels of ideas that had been festering in my brain a little bit, and I would say, there's three that really pushed me off the edge of that ski jump so that I had no choice but to keep going. One was what I put in the preface to the book, which is the realization of how different Cuban and American rhythmic sensibilities are and try to get to the bottom of that, because I knew enough to know that it had something to do with history and with slavery, but it was worth digging into. And I had also read Ned Sublett's book by that time, Cuba and Its Music, which is a great book, and it really kind of opened my eyes to the depth of what you could discover when you dug into a musical culture like Cuba. And then also at the time, I'm way back in the late eighties when Graceland was so popular, everybody thought there was a controversy about Paul Simon, you know, not respecting the boycott. And I know a lot about South Africa. I've been there a couple of times. I hadn't spent a lot of time there, but I'd worked with a lot of South African musicians. I produced to play a kind of anti apartape musical and so I knew a lot about South Africa. I read a lot about South Africa, and I knew that what people thought was the controversy wasn't really the controversy. And I saw all these Paul Simon fans buying Lady Smith Black Mambaza records and buying Machlatini and the Machatella Queens records, which was great. I mean, because it's great music, it's worth those records are very much worth buying. But everybody felt virtuous about buying them and that they were somehow supporting Mandela by buying them. And I knew that they were Zulus, and the Zulus were kind of the enemy of Mandela, that supporting Zulu culture was not the same as supporting the anc In fact, it was quite different and even opposed. And I thought, well, that's something that people don't know that I could tell them. And then I also thought about my time working in Bulgaria, and you know, I'd love those choir records, you know, the Mysterio a bulgar and the Kutev Ensemble. And I was always a bit head scratching, you know that those Bulgarian national ensembles were so great, and the rest of the Eastern European state ensembles were a kitsch and kind of weird and boring and you know, like acrobatic and what's that all about? And then I had I talked to Philip Kutev's daughter, who told me how much the Russians hated her father and why they hated him because of he used the authentic peasant voice in the choir and how Stalin was trying to get the you know, completely obliterate pleasant culture. And I thought, well, that's interesting too. So these three things, these three ideas, the Cuban rhythms, South African Zulu versus a NC, and Russians hating Bulgarian choirs. There's stories in here that I would have fun telling people. And I figured if these stories exist in Eastern Europe and Cuba and South Africa, they probably exist. And I knew enough about other cultures to know that there was probably some more fun stuff to dig up there. And so I just got started. And that took me seventeen years, and realize it's going to take that long.
00:24:11
Speaker 1: We'll be back with more from Joe Boyd. After the break in the history of the nineteenth and twentieth century kind of does seem to be region to region, this sort of repression and this sort of cultural movement bubbling up from people to to counter state repression with art, and your book really wonderfully tells that story. I wasn't expecting that to be narratively done so well in your book. But then there's also the way in which these cultures then shared. You know, all of the all of the music moved around the globe and then back again. And so music from Africa would go to the Caribbean and then back to Africa and then come to the States. And there's this cultural exchange happening amongst cultures and countries and various forms of music that we don't often think about.
00:25:12
Speaker 2: Yeah, everything, I mean the take one of the takeaways I hope people would get from the book is there is no pure culture. There is no pure musical culture. For sure, it's all mixed. It's all a blend. As you said, it bubbles up from underneath, and underneath in a way are two groups, Africans and Roma. I just sort of realized, and I've realized almost more after I finished the book and I've been touring and talking about it and doing Q and a's and things like that. One of the things I've realized is and I mentioned in the book, but maybe I might have if I went back and rewrote the book, I might make more of a theme of it is the fact that going way back, certainly to the beginning of that night eighteenth century, what defines modernity is how African it is or how Roma it is. You know, by the late nineteenth century, Cakewalk, the Grizzly Bear, you know, the Charleston all that became the dominant force of young for young people to dance to. And if you weren't dancing to that sort of rhythm, you were square. And if you go back a little further to Gerta and the Romantics, who was the big musical revolutionary list, you know, he was this matinee Idol who toured across Europe with fainting females, and he modeled his whole performance style on a roma musician that he saw that was famous in Hungary when he was a kid. And this flamboyance, this joy, this kind of decorate, taking the note written on the page and decorating them and playing them with trills and playing them with accents and playing them in a crazy new way. That's Roma. It defined what was new and what was shiny and what was attractive to young people. You know, that's one of the problems that European folk music has had, you know, in the more recent the last fifty years, has been that it lacks any kind of African feeling rhythmically and therefore is consigned to being square.
00:27:47
Speaker 1: You about it be English folk music in there's an example for me discography that kind of illustrates the way in which a group of people sometimes learn about themselves best from outsiders. You know, outsiders can sort of reaffirm your sense of who you are. And it's in this sort of this example from the Fairport convention.
00:28:08
Speaker 2: Yeah, convention.
00:28:10
Speaker 1: It's not until nineteen sixty nine and they discover song A Sailor's Life that they really embrace English folk music. Prior to this they sort of are working more from an American tradition. And maybe you can talk a bit about that, because I think.
00:28:25
Speaker 2: It's Yeah, when I first heard Fairport, I was very impressed with their musicianship. The upside was how good they were in particularly Richard Thompson on their instruments. The downside was they kept singing, you know, Richard Farina, Eric Anderson and Phil Oakes and to be fair, Bob some very good Bob Dylan songs. But I thought, why are these English kids so wrapped in this music that I kind of left America to get away from No, I mean, I just would never that sold on the white middle class singer songwriter idea, and so then they added Sandy Denny to the group. And Sandy had been around the folk clubs for a few years and she had never been a songwriter. Before, she had been a balladeer. She sang traditional Scottish Irish English ballads and she would play these ballads to them in the van when they would go to gigs, and little by little it kind of got through to them. And so then they did that track You mentioned Sailor's Life, but they just still thought of it as one string to their bow. You know. One thing that they did along with other things. Richard and Sandy were writing songs that was a new aspect, new dimension of their music. And then they had this terrible crash and the drummer, Martin Lamble, was killed and a girl, Jeanie the Taylor, was killed as well, and they were devastated and they thought they would break up. They would never play again, and then when they decided to reform, they wanted to do something completely new, so they would never play the songs that they played with Martin on drums with a new drummer. That was the idea, and right at that time out came music from Big Pink, and everybody, all musicians in London were just gobsmacked, as the English say, by music from Big Pink. And again there's a little outsider element there because they're Canadians, but still what they were doing was a fresh approach to a very American form of music and building something unbelievably original, appealing virtuasak all this, you know, with that record, And in a way they were following on from Bob Dylan at Newport in nineteen sixty five more than Bob Dylan was, yeah, and doing something really rich and interesting. And so in a way it hit the Fairport like a rebuke. Like you English boys from Muswell Hill, you think you can play some American stuff, you know, is how you want to reinvent yourself after the crash, forget about it. This is defining that moment. And so they really went to try and do with British traditional music. What the band was doing with American traditional music. And they were so lucky because they found well a lot they were clever. They found a drummer in Dave Masseox who was not a rock drummer. He was a jazz drummer. He was a dance band drummer, and he found the dance rhythms in all the songs that they wanted to play. The record is just comes alive, you know. Because of that mix and adding Dave Swarbrick, who was a very wonderful traditional fiddle player into the band, made this record that changed everything in Britain in the folk scene anyway. Legion Leaf, Yeah, he already had a huge.
00:32:29
Speaker 1: Impact, and he brings in the rhythms that you know, to your point where English folk music could be seen a square, he sort of starts to bring in some rhythms that maybe help you.
00:32:41
Speaker 2: Yeah, he does it with jazz chops.
00:32:44
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:32:44
Speaker 2: At that time, I don't think Legion and Leaf was at the top of the list of the hippist records on the charts, but it was a lot hipper than any other folk record at that time, and it captured the imagination of a certain portion of the audience.
00:33:08
Speaker 1: It's just fascinating to me that this group that we think of as a consummate English folk group starts because they're sort of doing American folk music. In the process, we discover the English folk tradition. Canadian group does Americana better than and the American possibly could, and then forces Fairport Convention to confront who they you know, their own roots, and who they are as people.
00:33:37
Speaker 2: And this process repeats and repeats. I mean, one of the things I talk about in the book is that back and forth was Fela and James Brown. Yeah, you know that somebody said about when James Brown's extended jams, you know, extended dance tracks began making inroads. There's a woman writer who I quoted the book saying those records told us that we were really from somewhere else, that Africa was really over there, that there was something different about African American culture. And then Fela, you know, who had been watching as James Brown imitators spread all across West Africa, people imitating James Brown, very slavishly, trying to sound exactly like James Brown. And then he came to La and somehow that exposure to black panthers to the music to the culture. He went back to Nigeria and created something that was a bit James brownish but very Nigerian. Yeah, and so that back and forth happens, you know, not just between the band and Pairful Convention. And by the way, there was a lovely footnote to the Pairful Convention story that many years later later, an English singer who I know was playing at the festival and he met the guys from Los Lobos and they said, oh, do you know Richard Thompson in the Federal Convention. He said, yeah, I know those guys. They're friends of mine. He said, well, when you see them, tell them that if it hadn't been for Legion Leif, we would have still been a heavy metal band from East la whoa that it was Legion Leif which convinced Los Lobos to dig into their own cultural background.
00:35:44
Speaker 1: You would never listen to Los Lobos here, Legion Leaf that is.
00:35:48
Speaker 2: But it's just a conceptual thing. It's like like that, oh oh, maybe that's what we should do instead of trying to sound like you know, def lepper.
00:35:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's an additional wrinkle really in a way to the James Brown Fela interplayed and if you think about it, slave trade initiates from Africa in Cuba, you get these African rhythms that start to form and influence, you know, the music of Cuba. You get things like the habanera you talk about, which is a Cuban rhythm, Havana rhythm. Right, it comes to America likely i'd imagine through New Orleans probably, yeah, and you get these these rhythms that starts to influence early R and B music, which would then of course influence James Brown, which would then influence Fela fala Is also taking in Cuban music. Happened to be a big fan of Cuban music, was taken in those records directly as well. Comes to America, picks up the James Brown goes back, you know, and you sort of so you start to get this really bizarre Africa influence being Cuba going back to Africa through this James Brown connection in FLA, and it just becomes like whoa, Like there's no there really are no boundaries, there's no borders, there's yeah.
00:37:15
Speaker 2: Yeah. The whole extended jams of those James Brown records from the late sixties early seventies were inspired by the Montuno you know, the the scratch guitar parts are most of them are clavi one two one two three, one two one two three one two one two three. So you have the the influence of Latin Africa, Cuban music into America into Africa, meeting in the middle of the Atlantic. And you know you're never going to get a simple diagram, no, you know, a linear explanation of anything to do with music culture. It's so whirls around in the wind. You know.
00:38:05
Speaker 1: It's yeah, whether history is of any trees or cultures you considered including but ultimately didn't get didn't get to.
00:38:16
Speaker 2: Not really because basically the idea from the beginning was the music we all know but we don't know about it. So I love Rebetico, I love Fado, I love Northern African music, Algerian, Moroccan, Egyptian. That would have made it a different book. Okay, you know everything that's in this book is suddenly said, oh yeah, I've got a couple of Ravi Shankar records, I'll read that, or I took those Latin dance lessons when I was in college. And you know, I mean everything in there is hopefully got some tangential relationship to people's ex experience, listening experience with music.
00:39:12
Speaker 1: How is digital distribution in the modern age aided and or disrupted this global flow of music that you illustrate in the book.
00:39:26
Speaker 2: Well, in some levels, of course, it aided it, you know. I mean, my wife and I put together two playlists of one hundred tracks each on Spotify and Apple. You know that we can send out. I'm preparing a newsletter that'll send this out to everybody. And that's great, you know. And I can and in my research I was able to dig things out on YouTube and Spotify and hear things that I never would have been able to hear, and to write about it in a way that probably I couldn't have some in some cases. And I think that a lot of the changes that have pulled music away from the sort of thing that I like listening to didn't happen because of digital distribution. I think, you know, the traditional record companies that made so many great records and pressed so much great vinyl, and that whole ecosystem of vinyl records and jukeboxes, and you know that was destroyed by the cassette first and foremost. So on the one hand, you know, technology gives with one hand takes away with the other, and the same thing has happened with then happened with CDs and the death of vinyl, the rebirth of vinyl. The biggest change has been the rhythm machines. You know, in terms of the music that I write about in this book, I write about music that's made by people in a room in moment, playing off each other. You know, rhythms that have been learned from elders to youngers, that have been absorbed through culture. And now you know, rhythms fly around the world very fast, and you can, you know, you can, you know, sit in Tokyo and hire somebody to give you a rhythm track in Marseille, send it to you digitally and you can relay a Japanese wrap track over it. It's just a different thing. It's a whole different thing. And I you know, people say, how far up to the present did you write the book? I said, really, I wrote from antiquity up to the drum machine, because that's where everything changes and it becomes a different subject and not one that I could really address and keep the book under nine hundred pages.
00:42:09
Speaker 1: You know, there's another question I had, what do you make of hip hop and sampling?
00:42:16
Speaker 2: You know, when I hear even with it like a singer songwriter, and from the first bar, I know that there's a clip track going on here. It's not that you can even hear the percussion. It's just you can hear the regularity. You can hear the absolute inflexible regularity of the rhythm. And sometimes I'll hear very nice singing and a very nice words. But I don't feel I have to listen to it again. To me, I don't know. This is just my crack pop theory. If music was made in a moment where nobody knew what was going to happen next, from beat to beat, minute to minute, that sense of danger, that sense of adventure. You're not just laying it down with your heads and earphones. You know, with a click track somebody sent you and you're adding a base part to something that already has a keyboard. You know, if you're doing it live in a room with musicians and nobody knows how it's going to turn out. Is it going to be a good take or a bad take. It's a collective adventure. Yeah, That feeling passed through the technical process to the final product, whether it's a streaming file or a CD or a cassette or a vinyl or whatever it is, When the listener gets some of that sense of adventure, it translates. It feels more adventurous to listen to for me.
00:43:59
Speaker 1: Anyway, Well that's break and we'll come back with Joe Boyd. There was a you know, and Prince famously used the lind drum and various rhythm machines and drum machines. But you know, he forgat which hip hop producer was now, like we won't say a name because I don't remember who it was, but a very famous hip hop producer. At some point I had a conversation with Prince, and Prince said, you know what you're making these Like, I know, I used drum machines, but like you guys are only producing on the computer. At least with the drum machine, I would connect it to speaker. I was moving I was moving air still with my drum machine. Yeah, you know, I was moving air with it and then adding other things on top of it. You're only creating in a computer, and this is so this isn't music. There's no air being moved at all. Yeah, that is a great example of why Prince was great with the drum machine. And it's sort of.
00:44:56
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I mean, he's an exception that kind of proves the role or whatever because he did. But I have to say I went to see Prince one of the early times she came to London. It wasn't in an arena. It was in like a three thousand seat hall, and I had a pretty good box seat overlooking the stage, and I was kind of excited to see him, and but you know, there were light effects and there was things going on. Everybody had a little earbud and so you knew that somewhere underneath the stage there was a hard drive with something queueing, you know, like a pulse, and it got a little boring, a little tiring after a while, and then there was this moment where you could tell that he it switched off and Prince just got out his guitar and he started playing Purple Rain I think or something, and he was completely free of the click and it was just transcendent. You know, it's just realiant. It was just fantastic. I went to Lee years later. I went to see him at the O two and I got so there's some weird connection. My second cousin was playing keyboards in the opening act, and so I got to go backstage. And then we went to the after party, which the after show, which was in a small theater behind the two and some of the people in the back in the in the opening band and some of Prince's guys. They all were out on stage like hooking up their instruments, and Prince walked out on stage and he went up to the microphone and he looked around at the band. He looked around. He said, let's do Stevie. And so they did an hour long set of Stevie Wonder covers, just no click, nothing rehearsed, just these guys, this great band and Prince playing Superstition and you know, all this stuff. And then they take a break and they said we'll be back, and they come back like fifteen minutes later, and again everybody goes their instruments. They're all sitting there waiting, what's Prince is going to do? And he goes up to the microphone. He says, Sly and they did an hour of Sly covers and it was just fantastic, you know, yeah, and I did I have to say, I loved it more than the show, which was good.
00:47:37
Speaker 1: Oh than the two show, yeah, the O two show.
00:47:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I had a good seat and everything, but it was you know, you could feel it was very programmed. Everybody knew exactly when the cues were and the whites did this, and the you know, and even though the drummer was playing but he you know, everybody had had had earbuds and you know, it was okay, it was a good show, but that after party was never to be forgotten.
00:48:06
Speaker 1: In hindsight. Who knew the unfocused the drummer you can never get to pay attention or foot would be our greatest asset all these years. But it's like, you know, the drummer speeding up or change into it. It's like that, really, you know.
00:48:23
Speaker 2: But you know, sometimes, yes, of course, there are times when you as a producer, you tear your hair out because the drummer can't keep time. But other times it just picks up. The intensity sort of picks up in a nanosecond just because something has happened, somebody's done something on an instrument, and everything just gets that little more intense, and everything just picks up a little bit. And also, I mean and now there's some you know, Al Jackson and some of those, you know, you can't define it. It's just he lays back, he plays at the it's the last moment that can the last nanosecond that can still be considered the beat. Yeah, and it's and it's got a sensuality to it that a lot of modern references just are different. You know, it's not the same thing.
00:49:20
Speaker 1: And it's also the way that he's playing behind the beat in relation to Duck Dunn or yeah, exactly on playing bass or yeah, it's all or if you listen to or the Carl it's it's the way, Yeah, the piano players unique sense of rhythm against the bass player's unique sense against Tito's against it's and it's just all working against each other.
00:49:44
Speaker 2: If anyone ever says, well, I don't know, I don't think you're I don't think you're right. I you know, everybody should playing time, I would say Exhibit A would be try a little tenderness. You know, the way it begins, you know, it's just I think it's just a guitar and then just a piano comes in and it's very tenderative rhythmically, and everybody's just listening to Otis singing, and then it grows and then it speeds up and it gets more into you know, It's like the difference between the feel at the end of that track and the field at the beginning is a journey, unbelievable journey. And it's you could just feel the room these guys just looking at each other. Yeah, shall I do this now? Okay, Okay, I'll try that. Okay. Oh wow, Otis just did something and let's answer that. And you know, and it's just so intense that track.
00:50:47
Speaker 1: I feel like reading the book thinking about that. I love I've always loved to talk about it a bit, just the way cultures interact, interplay that the great boogeyman around this conversation these days is the word cultural appropriation. On one head, I understand the critique. On another hand, I hate that just the existence of the word could put in to anyone thinking about borrowing this from that culture or this thing from that culture, and then putting it together into their own thing and making it something completely unique.
00:51:20
Speaker 2: In the events that I do, Andrea County is usually with me, and she's running the Spotify streamer. When we want to have illustrations. I say, okay, let's go to the heart of cultural appropriation. Here is the error moment of cultural appropriation. And we play The Lions Sleeps Tonight, and then we play wim Away. And you know, Pete Seeger is a heroic figure who always was for the underdog, and he was, you know, for fairness and you know, but he was in an era when anything that you didn't have a composer credit was considered public domain or you know whatever. So he's getting money from wim Away. He's getting a little bit more a bit of the money from the Lions Tonight. And then I play boobe which is the original. And it's fascinating to see to feel the audience because they know Lions Sleeps Tonight by the tokens that everybody knows that they know Pete Seeger singing wom Away. That's familiar, or at least it's not surprising. Then they hear him Boobey. It's so intense and so profound and so rich and so individual, like this guy Solomon Linda who improvises the hook that has made millions and millions and millions of dollars for Disney. Now that the fact that no money reached Solomon Linda is cultural appropriation. That is cultural appropriation. There's a series now on in a film on Netflix called The Lions Share about the royalties of the Lions Sleep Tonight. It's fascinating, it's depressing, it's shocking, but you know, you understand in a way. It was a time before anybody had lawyers and thought about all these kinds of things. But you know, cultures all over the world, African cultures, African American cultures use the Hawaiian guitar slide steel guitar. It was invented by Joseph Kaikuku on Oahu Island in eighteen eighty seven. Yeah, you know, nobody never paid him anything. I mean, and to try and draw a border and say, now, okay, whatever went before is one thing, but now we're going to put up a fence. You can't actually listen to this stuff and use that influence in your music because that's appropriation. I think it's kind of ridiculous because nothing is pure. There is no pure culture. And the story of the Roma is some perfect example. I mean, they went from South Asia all the way across the Middle East, up into the Balkans, up into Europe. They changed European music totally, and popular music all over the world wouldn't be what it is today if it wasn't for the African influence through Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Carolina, Virginia, Texas, Mississippi, Chicago, you know whatever. And it always mixed. You know, the root of it all started with African slaves being forced to play for dances for the French did contra dance and quadrilles. And you know, it wasn't just African music they were playing. They were playing French music, but they're playing it mixed in with their own culture. And it's always been a mix. All music is a mix. So how you actually begin to parse out where the line can be drawn, I don't know. It's beyond me.
00:55:33
Speaker 1: We didn't talk about this, but you spend a lot of time with some early blues Grates, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Sisters at a Dar and on and on and on. You also got to spend a lot of time in England. Where do you in this particular era, where do you land on the led Zeppelin?
00:55:53
Speaker 2: I mean I was never a big led Zeppelin fan, but not because I objected to what they did with no anymore than object to Eric Clapton. I mean who I object to because of some of his public positions. I don't have a problem with Eric Clapton playing Crossroads. And you know, eventually, when the legal world woke up to the values of copyrights and all these things, Robert Johnson's sister, I think made you know, his family long after he died. Of course, got a pretty decent payday, a pretty good share of all those box sets that CBS issued of Robert Johnson, and even I think some covers, you know, by rock bands. And I know for a fact that Muddy Waters and Rosetta and people loved the fact that they found a white audience and the fact that they found people who ate up their music and loved their music. And you know, part of that would be the simple fact of buying a ticket to go see Rosetta. But you know, Chuck Berry stole from Rosetta.
00:57:17
Speaker 1: That's a good call, you.
00:57:18
Speaker 2: Know, I mean, Chuck Berry is pure Rosetta. Yeah, and then everybody else stole from Chuck Berry. And so you can't where do you draw the line, but you should Chuck not have stolen from Rosetta.
00:57:33
Speaker 1: Yeah, last question and I'll let you go. You talked about how the way music from Big Pink really changed everything. There were a lot of groups that then changed their style of music. Pete Townsend I said, when he heard that, you know, it definitely inspired him to write in a particular way. Other people as well. But you know, six months earlier, so it's a different record, but it's still it's a return to Americana in a sense. In the middle of psychedelia and all this stuff, Bob Dylan released John Leslie Hardy, and why did that not disrupt the sort of psychedelic thing and sort of re orient people the way music from Big PinkWood six months later.
00:58:14
Speaker 2: I mean, I love that record. I think it's a very good record, but it's not in the top five Dylan records of all time, so it didn't have the same impact at Blonde on Blonde, for example. And also, as Dylan himself acknowledged, I think in some interview or some something, I think Jimmy Hendrix had something to do with it, with the failure of John Wesley Harding record to have that impact, because Jimmy's cover of All Along the Watchtower blew it out of the water. I mean, Dylan acknowledged that, he said, I can't listen to my own recording of All on the watch Shower because I'd rather listen to Jimmy's and Jimmy's take on that just you know, it was so immense and so extraordinary, and I think, you know, you can't go back to the culture, can't go back to the well that often. You know, Dylan had huge impact, like three four times in a short space of time, you know, like whiplash. The whole Western culture suffered whiplash from Dyla, like, wait a minute, he done this, Oh now he's doing this. Oh my god. And I think, you know, at a certain point, particularly because it's sort of a subdued record, and that and Natural Skyline are and Self Portrait are kind of curiosities. And I like them all, I mean, but particularly John Wesley Harding. It doesn't surprise me that they weren't course change, they didn't like spin. The steering mechanism of the ship makes sense.
00:59:52
Speaker 1: Man, there's so much more of One Happened another time, Great speaking to.
00:59:55
Speaker 2: You, Okay, all of that.
00:59:59
Speaker 1: In episode description, you'll find a link to a seven hour playlist Joe Boyd created to accompany his new book and the Roots of Rhythm Remain a journey through global music. Be sure to check out YouTube dot com slash Broken Record Podcast to see all of our video interviews, and be sure to follow us on Instagram at the Broken Record Pod. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is produced and edited by Leah Rose, with marketing help from Eric Sandler and Jordan McMillan. Our engineer is Ben Holliday. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and ad free listening for four ninety nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple podcast subscriptions and if you like this show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app. Our theme musics by Kenny Beats. I'm justin Richmond.
