December 9, 2025 • 31 mins
Welcome to another special edition of our Buzz's Book Club week where Buzz shares top recommendations of new books on music, just in time for your holiday shopping.
Join Buzz Knight on “Takin’ A Walk” for an extraordinary conversation with legendary music producer and author Joe Boyd, whose new book “And the Roots and Rhythm Remain: A Journey Through Global Music” chronicles decades of discovering and championing world music. From producing Pink Floyd’s first singles and Nick Drake’s timeless albums to founding Hannibal Records and bringing global artists to international audiences, Boyd’s career reads like a roadmap of modern music history.
In this episode, Boyd takes us on a sonic journey across continents, sharing stories from his groundbreaking work with artists like Toumani Diabaté, Ali Farka Touré, and the Incredible String Band. The conversation explores how traditional music from Mali, Brazil, Bulgaria, and beyond has influenced contemporary sounds, and why these ancient roots and rhythms continue to resonate in today’s music landscape.
Boyd discusses the cultural and political forces shaping world music, the challenges of preserving traditional sounds in a globalized world, and his experiences documenting music from remote villages to major concert halls. From his early days at the UFO Club in 1960s London to recent field recordings in Africa and South America, Boyd offers insights into what makes music transcend borders and generations.
Listeners will discover behind-the-scenes stories from Boyd’s legendary production work, his philosophy on authentic music preservation versus commercial adaptation, and why he believes the roots and rhythm of traditional music hold keys to understanding our shared humanity. Whether you’re a world music enthusiast, a student of music history, or simply curious about sounds beyond the mainstream, this episode offers a masterclass in listening deeply and thinking globally.
Support the show: https://musicsavedme.net/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Taking a Walk.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
I'm Buzznight, the host of the Taking a Walk Podcast. Now,
what do Pink Floyd, a Bulgarian woman's choir, and a
Kingston recording studio have in common? The answer is going
to be our next guest here on Taking a Walk.
His name is Joe Boyd. He didn't just produce some
of the most influential albums in rock history. He has
(00:21):
spent six decades chasing sounds that most of us will
never hear, from village squares and Hungary to underground clubs
in Havana, always asking the same question, what happens to
music when the world tries to forget it. He's got
a new book, and The Roots and Rhythm Remain. It's
part memoir, part musical archaeology, and part love letter to
(00:45):
the rhythms that refuse to die. Joe Boyd is next
on the Taking a Walk Podcast. Taking a Walk, Joe Boyd,
Welcome to the Taking a Walk Podcast. It's so nice
to be with you.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
Wow, it's great to be here.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
We're going to talk about in the Roots and Rhythm
Remain your amazing book. But first we like to start
the podcast with a hypothetical question. The question is since
the podcast is called taking a Walk and we're not
walking in person. Is there somebody, Joe, you would like
to take a walk with living deceased? Who would that be?
(01:28):
Where would you take the walk?
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Wow, gosh, there's so many people. I mean, you know,
you give me such a huge scope to take a walk. Well,
you know, I guess of all the deceased people that
I would most like to talk to on a walk,
I'd like to take a walk around New Orleans with
Jelly Roll Morton. That would be a kind of dream
(01:53):
because he was such an incredible storyteller. And to find
out that sort of moment in American musical history when
rag time and Latin, Spanish music and Cuban music all
met the blues in New Orleans and jazz emerged. You know,
(02:13):
it's such a seminal moment, and to get first hand
reports would be would be great if it was a
living person, you know, I have in mind. I haven't
in my plans for the coming year, I'm definitely going
to try and spend a little time with Chris Blackwell,
(02:35):
who was, you know, a very important person in my
life and you know, he really kind of believed in
me and gave me the financial support to make the
Nick Drake Records, the Fairport Records, Sandy Denny Records, all
that stuff, very early in my career. And he's he's
you know, I'm add three. He's five years or six
(02:57):
years older than me, and I just like what to
be sure, I got to spend some time talking with
him walking around Jamaica. I love that, talking to the
local talking to the local rosters. He always knows all
the street guys. You know, he knows everybody. He doesn't
he doesn't live in a bubble.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Chris, Oh, that's great. I love it. Well, Joe, you've
had one of the most remarkable careers in music history.
I'm producing Pink Floyd Nick Drake to discovering Fairport Convention.
What drew you to this particular book, now, I mean
it took you a while. This book is a monster,
(03:38):
so it didn't just happen and appear on your desk.
But why focus on these specific musical traditions?
Speaker 3 (03:47):
I guess the combination of reasons. I always liked writing.
I mean I used to write outraged letters to the
editor and they got published. You know, I got published
in the New York Times, in the guardian sometimes, you know,
mister Angry of Princeton, New Jersey. But then I wrote
(04:08):
White Bicycles, and I really enjoyed the process, and I
really liked, you know, going out and talking about the
book and traveling around and kind of being my own guy.
You know, I was I'd been looking after musicians all
my life, and all of a sudden, I was looking
after this writer, guy who did everything I told him to,
(04:30):
you know, so I knew I wanted to write another book.
It didn't take me very long to figure out that
I would write this book, because I guess I was
very aware of and I like telling people things that
they don't know. They think they know what they don't know.
(04:50):
And one of the things that had been sort of
intriguing me was the way when Paul Simon released Graceland,
people were upset about breaking the Boy. You know, there
was the class with the anc there was all of that.
But at the same time, people then discovered Lady Smith,
Black Mambaso, and they discovered Maclatini and the mahotel A Queens.
(05:13):
And I felt this audience, this western, you know, middle
class white audience in Britain and America and Europe, whenever
they bought Ladysmith blackmun Baso record, they felt virtuous. It
was sort of like showing their support from Mandela and
black South African culture. And they didn't realize that in
(05:34):
South Africa Lady Smith, Black Mambaso and Maclatini represented the
enemies of the ANC and Mandela. They represented the Zulus,
and the Zulus were being armed by the apartheid government
to fight the ANC, and it was very complicated. And
I just thought, well, here's a classic example. Here's music
(05:58):
which is wonderful, which could I could explain a lot
more about the roots of that music, but also tell
people something they don't know about the political context and
the social context and the stories here. And then when
I realized that malcol McLaren in his Duck Rock project,
(06:19):
you know, went to Johannesburg and used basically the same
musicians that Paul Simon used three years later on Graceland,
that's another little twist to the tale. And so I thought, yeah,
this would be fun to dig into some of these
stories of music that people know but they don't know
(06:42):
the backstory. And I'd also I tried to work with
I've done a record where I brought Cuban musicians to
New Orleans, and the record didn't make a big impact.
It was sort of semi successful artistically, but it was
fascinating to watch the Cuban and the New Orleans musicians
(07:03):
in the studio together because they had such a different
concept of rhythm. And I was intrigued by that by like,
Havannah and New Orleans are like next door to each other,
but yet the sensibility is so different. And I started
digging into the history of that. How come African American
(07:26):
culture is so different from Afro Cuban culture, And that
turned out to be a fascinating story, And so I
decided there was a book in the hits, the sort
of global music hits, Samba, mambo, tango, Eastern European gypsy music,
(07:47):
Indian ragas, reggae, you know, the ones that everybody knows
but they don't really know where it comes from and
who are the story what are the stories behind it?
So I said that it's going to be a fun project.
I didn't think it was going to take me seventeen years,
but that's how I came to do it.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Seventeen years.
Speaker 4 (08:07):
All right, Well, that is a resilience in the writing world,
for sure. How important was somebody like as far as
the Cuban part of the story, how important was somebody
like Ry Cooter and Buena Vista Social Club what he
put together in sort of taking that to a foreground
(08:33):
in America.
Speaker 3 (08:35):
One of the themes in my book is that the explosion
of interest in the late eighties and the nineties in
the so called West in what we called world music,
it was great. I mean I was right in the
middle of it. It was very exciting. I heard some
(08:57):
fantastic concerts, there were some great music released on record.
It was a wonderful thing. But it was only the
most recent manifestation of something that's been going on forever.
And so I would say that in terms of broad impact,
(09:17):
eres Prado and the Mambo, and the Afrocuban All Stars
in the forties playing at the Palladium and the pot Vendor,
you know, being a worldwide hit in the early thirties,
these were much more impactful across the breath of Western
(09:39):
culture than Buenavis the Social Club and Buenavs the Social Club.
One of the fascinating things about it is that the
Cubans hated it. You know, they really didn't like it
at all. They thought, and as I say say in
the book, that it's a bit as if you know,
the rest of the world said to Britain, we're not
interested in massive attack court radio head, that we don't
(10:01):
like those people. We're we're falling in love with this
group of banjo and accordion players, who do you know,
music hall songs from the thirties. And that was the
Cuban view was this was yesterday's music. This was old
fashioned music. And not only that, but the way that
(10:23):
Ry Cooter and Nick Gold it was his co producer,
the way they recorded those musicians. They didn't have much drums.
They only had a little bit of bongo. They didn't
have a conga drum. So it was very emasculated from
a Cuban point of view. And so and then you know,
(10:45):
they just thought it was tourist music. And one of
the statistics that I cite in the book, which is
I found so interesting, was, you know, sold ten million
copies at Want a Grammy Latin radio and America. How
many radio plays did it get?
Speaker 1 (11:04):
Zero?
Speaker 2 (11:04):
Big zilch, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:06):
Big zilch. Latin radio had no interest in it. So
it was a phenomenon, but it was kind of a
strange corner pocket phenomenon, you know. And it's a globally record,
I mean, you know. And it's also I love telling
the story in the book about the way it came
to be, which was an accident because you know, Ry
(11:27):
and Nick Gold had this idea of exploring the commonalities
between Cuban music and Mali, the music of Mali from
you know, North Africa, from Africa, and they booked the
studio with that project for that project, and the Mallians
didn't get on the plane because some big guy who
(11:51):
was giving away mercedes arrived in Bamaco and he loves
musicians and he wanted a big concert and he was
lashing out huge, huge amounts of money to musicians right
and left, and they didn't want to leave town and
miss that. And so so Ry and Nick were stuck
in Havana with a studio booked and all these Cuban
(12:12):
musicians there, what are we going to do? Well, let's
record something, you know, And so they just started and
it's a great example of I mean, God, hats off
to them because I think they just didn't blink. They
just move forward and immediately found things that they loved
(12:33):
and got very excited by. And I love the image
of Rye right had a little pocket recorder and he
would wander around the studio listening to the musicians. He
told them to like, figure out tunes that they really
liked that they and he'd go around recording little bits
of it, and then he'd go home to his hotel
and staff all night listening to this and trying to
(12:55):
decide what they would record the next day. So, you know,
God bless them. You know.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
The title of the book and the roots in Rhythm
remain it suggests, obviously, you know, permanence and continuity. What
does the phrase mean to you personally? And what do
you hope readers take away from it?
Speaker 3 (13:14):
Well, it's a quote from a lyric. It's Paul Simon
wrote that phrase and from under African skies on Graceland.
And this is how we begin to remember. This is
the coursing of love in the vein, you know, calling
your name out. And the roots of the rhythm, these
are the roots of the rhythm, and the roots of
(13:36):
rhythm remain. It's a very beautiful stanza and it's uh,
you know, it's poetry, so you can't pin it down
to a literal meaning exactly, you know I did. I
had a wonderful interview with Paul for the book, and
he originally said, listen, I'm tired of talking about Graceland.
(13:56):
You know that was a long time ago. I've done
so many interviews. But you know I've known you for
a long time. I'll give you fifteen minutes, and we
ended up talking for two and a half hours. He
told me that he recorded these tracks in Johannesburg with
no lyrics. Yeah, he was just fascinated by the music
(14:21):
and he would try different chord changes, chord progressions, and
you know, try it with these great South Africa musicians.
And then he took these tapes back to New York
and he listened to them and he said they were
so good, they were so strong that he was intimidated.
He couldn't even start to write lyrics. And finally, after
(14:45):
about four or five six months, he started writing lyrics,
and he felt they're probably the best lyrics he ever wrote.
And I think they are. They're wonderful lyrics. They're extraordinary.
Some of them they're bom baby carriage, I mean, prescient stuff.
And that line. I love that. I just always love
(15:06):
that line. You know, this is how we begin to remember.
This is the coursing of love of the vein, and
the roots of rhythm remain. And I think that's you know,
to me, music lives in rhythm. That's why I've always
struggled a bit with a lot of records that people
call fusion. You know, when you combine Western you know,
(15:28):
Western music musicians with music from Africa or Latin America
or Eastern Europe or the Middle East. Very often, to me,
they turned it around. They kind of lay down a
kind of track of Western dance music or pop music
or guitaristrum, and then they overdubbed the exotic stuff on it.
(15:51):
To me, that's a waste, because the most interesting thing
about other cultures is the rhythms. And if you start
with the rhythm. And that's why Paul Simon I have
so much respect for him. That's what he did with
Mother and Child Reunion. He went to Jamaica and he
recorded a track pure reggae, and then he wrote a
(16:13):
song on top of that. He put the the West
on top of the rhythm of the other culture. And
he did the same in Graceland. He did the same
with El Condor Passa. He takes the music on its
rhythmic basis and pays it that respect. And I think
(16:35):
that's that's what I like anyway.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
And so.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
It's a totemic phrase as far as I'm concerned.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
We'll be right back with more of the Taking a
Walk podcast. Welcome back to the Taking a Walk Podcast.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
So we produced this other podcast. My friend Lynn Hoffman
hosts it called Music Save Me, and it's really about
the I think we believe that there's healing power to
music and the rhythms. And your book explores explores music
from obviously Cuba, Bulgaria, Hungary, West Africa, Jamaica and beyond.
(17:18):
So when you examine it across all cultures, do you
think music has with the rhythms a healing power.
Speaker 3 (17:28):
Oh yeah, I mean I'm not going to go into
like actual curing of diseases, you know, but you know,
those are some peak experiences for me in my life,
you know, as being in a room with great music
being performed live and there's a feeling that you get
from it which is pretty irreplaceable. I mean area you know,
(17:53):
it's it's not comfortable to anything else. It's it's a
kind of elation and a kind of joy and kind
of lifting you out of yourself into a kind of realm,
which you know, I don't know about spiritual, but it's
definitely if there is a sort of holy realm. That's
(18:17):
the closest I get is listening to too great music.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
Your chapter on the Bulgarian women's choirs is incredible. How
did you first encounter that sound? And what was it
about those harmonies that captivated you and you fell in love.
Speaker 3 (18:37):
With I In nineteen sixty five, I'd had a lot
of I was good friends with a guy called Paul
Rothschild who has worked for Electra Records. He produced the
Butterfield Band and The Doors and he worked with me.
He and I was the production manager at Newport in
(18:57):
sixty five, and I brought Paul up and he was
the guy at the sound controls when Dylan was electric.
I was on stage. He was at the sound controls
and we were both under attack from Alan Lomas and
it's eger turn it down, turn it down. And anyway,
we had a bond, and he felt he wanted to
(19:21):
get me into Electra and so he persuaded Jack Holtzman,
the owner of the label, to hire me to go
to England, where I'd spent quite a bit of time
and open an Electra office there and try and promote
Electra's records there. And the week that I went to England,
(19:43):
Electra released a record on their none Such Explorer series
called the Music of Bulgaria by the Philip Kutev Ensemble.
I later discovered how that came to be, which was
that Albert Grossman, who was Dylan's manager. It's all very
small worlds now, in this time of day, in this
(20:04):
time of musical history. Albert Grossman had been in Paris
and had gone to a dinner at somebody's friend's flat,
and somebody had played a record in the flat of
the Kuchev ensemble, and Grossman went berserk, and he said,
what is this record? You know? And he looked at
the cover and he saw that the address of the
(20:25):
label was in Paris. It was the Chant Dumont label.
It was a kind of side project of the Communist
Party of France. And so we went there the next
day and pulled out two thousand bucks and bought the
American rights and took the tape back to America and
when he was negotiating the deal for Paul Butterfield with
(20:47):
Jack Holtzman. Eventually they got to a deal and Grossman said, okay,
I'll accept the deal on condition that you released this record.
And he handed gross Did the colts of the tape
and hopefully listen to the tape and said, Wow, this
is great. I'd love to release it. And that was
the music of Bulgaria I later discovered. I mean when
(21:12):
I first heard it, I just said, wow, this is great.
And you know, around that time, a lot of hippies
bought that record. There was a thing, you know, to
put on your headphones, ride up a joint and trip
out on the kutev ensemble in the Bulgarian women's choir.
It's an incredible sound, and I was you couldn't imagine
(21:40):
where it came from. I mean, where does this come from?
You couldn't imagine it. And then twenty years later I
ended up going to Bulgaria and going to this huge
festival on the side of a mountain and hearing village
women singing with this kind of open throat voice, which
(22:01):
is so interesting because it's like a shout. There's no
vibrato it's a straight note, which is why they can
have such close harmonies. If you had these seconds and one,
you know, adjacent notes to each other in a harmony
the way they do, and you were singing in a
(22:22):
bellcanto vibrato voice, it would sound like a train wreck
because the note is very straight and doesn't wobble, you know,
it sounds it actually works. And what I later discovered,
which is what I wrote about, which is partly inspired
my writing about it, was that I was always puzzled
(22:43):
and I said, wow, this stuff is so great. And
every time I heard another Eastern European folk ensemble like
the check you know People's Choir or the Polish People's
Choir or what ever, it was always kitch boring kind
(23:04):
of stuff. And when I heard the Russian one Moisiev choir,
I thought that, well, that's really stupid. It's very acrobatic,
he's dancing, but the music is really silly. How is
it that Bulgaria has this great music and nobody else
in the Soviet block does? And I discovered it was
so fascinating that Kutev loved the music of the villages
(23:30):
and the voices of the villagers, the women in the villages,
and he recruited them from the village into the choir,
taught them how to read music. In Russia, Stalin had
hired Moisiev to start the ensemble because he wanted to
destroy peasant music. He wanted to invent a new peasant music,
(23:54):
and so no peasants are wherever in Moisiev's choir. The
choir was all like the second stringers from the Bolshoy,
you know, they were classically trained singers from the cities,
and the whole thing was fake lore. It was just
all invented. And so I loved that whole thing about
(24:17):
Bulgaria being the outlier in the Eastern Block, that they
really loved their own folk music and they did up,
you know, whereas the Soviets were trying to suppress peasant
culture because the peasants didn't like collectivisation, they rebelled against
Stalin and he wanted to destroy them. So it's a
(24:38):
story where music and politics overlaps, which was of course
meat and drink from me when I was looking for
writing my book.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
You had a front row seat to the ska and
the reggae explosion in Jamaica, and I wonder if you
look back and you realized that that that or did
you realize at that time that you were witnessing something
that was pretty revolutionary.
Speaker 3 (25:04):
Well, I don't know if I had a I mean,
I you know, I was producing records for Ireland for
Chris Blackwell, and Chris I knew, I mean, he was
at Jamaican. He loved Jamaica. I loved Jamaica culture, and
I knew that he had a dream of making Jamaican
music go worldwide. And he'd had a little taste of
(25:27):
it with my boy Lollipop back in the mid sixty four.
You know, he had this big hit with Millie. But
you know, I was like most people in the sixties.
There was a lot of Jamaican music around Britain, but
most people didn't listen to it. You know, it was considered.
You know. The people who liked it were the skinheads.
(25:49):
They liked ska and they would have these and they
were like war you know, they shaved their heads and
had tattoos on their skulls, and we're very unpleasant people.
And we thought thought, if they liked this music, why
should we. And it wasn't until I had a weekend
in nineteen seventy one when I visited Chris Blackwell and Bahamas.
(26:13):
Paul Rogers, who was the lead singer of Free Then
and Bad Company, he was there and we had a
great weekend. And then Sunday night we were sitting there,
Chris had fed us beautifully. We had a wonderful day,
and we're passing the joint around and he said, you
guy's ever heard tts of the Mateles And we said, no,
(26:35):
who's that? And he said okay, and he dropped the
record on the turntable, put on the knee one. Rogers
and I just sat there shaking our heads, like this
music is unbelievable. It's so cool, it's so good. We'd
never imagine that Jamaican music was that good. And then
like six months later Chris signed Bob Marley and the
(27:01):
Whalers and started work with them on their first record.
And then around the same time, the Heart of They
Come came out of the film, and so suddenly there
was like from different angles, there was all these revelations
about how amazing to make and culture was, and how
(27:22):
amazing this music was. And I never really had any
kind of key role in disseminating it or making it popular,
but in nineteen seventy six. Chris wanted to work with
Bob with Tutz the way he worked with Bob Marley,
but Marley got jealous and said, no, come on, Chris,
(27:46):
We've got work to do. Come to Nassau. And Tutz
was already in London with his tapes, and so Chris
asked me to finish working on this record to sell people.
Reggie got sold one of the greatest speriences of my
life in the studio, it was just such an amazing experience.
And the record is one you know, I say, there's
(28:09):
probably two records that I made that I can listen
to from beginning to end, and I frequently do and
never think to myself, Oh, I wish I'd brought that
off just a little bit more, or Ooh I wish
I'd edited that a little differently, or oh, you know,
why didn't I do that a little better? And that
(28:31):
reggae got sold as one and writer later by Nick
Drake or the other.
Speaker 5 (28:38):
So in closing, after all of your travels and all
of the music that you've experienced, is there still a
sound or a tradition out there that you're fascinated and
just desperate to explore.
Speaker 3 (28:59):
Well, you know, I'm realistic about first of all, the
music industry. There are very few labels out there have
the budget to send me an engineer out to record.
I mean, I am fascinated. I've always loved little I
don't have. My collection is not very big, but I
do have a few records of the music of the
(29:21):
South Pacific, you know, from Tahiti and places like that,
and I would love to go really record find the
best musicians. I stumbled onto a into a lobby of
a hotel in San Francisco in the mid seventies, and
there was a group of Taishan tourists who were staying
(29:42):
at the hotel, and they were having a party in
the lobby and they were singing. It was just the
most glorious sound I've ever heard. I couldn't believe it.
And I started talking in French to this girl that
was singing there, and she said, Oh, we're not any good,
We're just people, We're just tourists. And then she also
(30:04):
said she I never forgot this, she said. I said,
how are you enjoying your trip? She said, well, we've
been to Detroit, we've been to Chicago, we've been now
we're in San Francisco. I said, well, how do you
like the America. She said, well, it's fascinating. We've met
lots of great people. But and she looked around. She
waved her hand around San Francisco and she said, but
it's so ugly. And I said, I want to go
(30:27):
to Tahiti. If you think, if you think San Francisco
is ugly, I want to go to Tahiti because that
must be fantastic. So, yeah, that would be that would
I guess that would be one of the things on
my But there's so many there's so much music in
the world, you know, I could spend another lifetime, you know,
(30:50):
traveling around making records.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
Never say never, Joe Boyd, My god, you know, if
you love music, this is this is something you've got
to pick up in the roots and rhythm remain. Joe
boy takes us through a fascinating piece of music history
in the world that continues to unfold. And Joe, thank
(31:14):
you for it, and thank you for being.
Speaker 3 (31:16):
On, Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (31:19):
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Taking a
Walk podcast. Share this and other episodes with your friends
and follow us so you never miss an episode. Taking
a Walk is available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
and wherever you get your podcasts.
Taking a Walk.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
I'm Buzznight, the host of the Taking a Walk Podcast. Now,
what do Pink Floyd, a Bulgarian woman's choir, and a
Kingston recording studio have in common? The answer is going
to be our next guest here on Taking a Walk.
His name is Joe Boyd. He didn't just produce some
of the most influential albums in rock history. He has
(00:21):
spent six decades chasing sounds that most of us will
never hear, from village squares and Hungary to underground clubs
in Havana, always asking the same question, what happens to
music when the world tries to forget it. He's got
a new book, and The Roots and Rhythm Remain. It's
part memoir, part musical archaeology, and part love letter to
(00:45):
the rhythms that refuse to die. Joe Boyd is next
on the Taking a Walk Podcast. Taking a Walk, Joe Boyd,
Welcome to the Taking a Walk Podcast. It's so nice
to be with you.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
Wow, it's great to be here.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
We're going to talk about in the Roots and Rhythm
Remain your amazing book. But first we like to start
the podcast with a hypothetical question. The question is since
the podcast is called taking a Walk and we're not
walking in person. Is there somebody, Joe, you would like
to take a walk with living deceased? Who would that be?
(01:28):
Where would you take the walk?
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Wow, gosh, there's so many people. I mean, you know,
you give me such a huge scope to take a walk. Well,
you know, I guess of all the deceased people that
I would most like to talk to on a walk,
I'd like to take a walk around New Orleans with
Jelly Roll Morton. That would be a kind of dream
(01:53):
because he was such an incredible storyteller. And to find
out that sort of moment in American musical history when
rag time and Latin, Spanish music and Cuban music all
met the blues in New Orleans and jazz emerged. You know,
(02:13):
it's such a seminal moment, and to get first hand
reports would be would be great if it was a
living person, you know, I have in mind. I haven't
in my plans for the coming year, I'm definitely going
to try and spend a little time with Chris Blackwell,
(02:35):
who was, you know, a very important person in my
life and you know, he really kind of believed in
me and gave me the financial support to make the
Nick Drake Records, the Fairport Records, Sandy Denny Records, all
that stuff, very early in my career. And he's he's
you know, I'm add three. He's five years or six
(02:57):
years older than me, and I just like what to
be sure, I got to spend some time talking with
him walking around Jamaica. I love that, talking to the
local talking to the local rosters. He always knows all
the street guys. You know, he knows everybody. He doesn't
he doesn't live in a bubble.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Chris, Oh, that's great. I love it. Well, Joe, you've
had one of the most remarkable careers in music history.
I'm producing Pink Floyd Nick Drake to discovering Fairport Convention.
What drew you to this particular book, now, I mean
it took you a while. This book is a monster,
(03:38):
so it didn't just happen and appear on your desk.
But why focus on these specific musical traditions?
Speaker 3 (03:47):
I guess the combination of reasons. I always liked writing.
I mean I used to write outraged letters to the
editor and they got published. You know, I got published
in the New York Times, in the guardian sometimes, you know,
mister Angry of Princeton, New Jersey. But then I wrote
(04:08):
White Bicycles, and I really enjoyed the process, and I
really liked, you know, going out and talking about the
book and traveling around and kind of being my own guy.
You know, I was I'd been looking after musicians all
my life, and all of a sudden, I was looking
after this writer, guy who did everything I told him to,
(04:30):
you know, so I knew I wanted to write another book.
It didn't take me very long to figure out that
I would write this book, because I guess I was
very aware of and I like telling people things that
they don't know. They think they know what they don't know.
(04:50):
And one of the things that had been sort of
intriguing me was the way when Paul Simon released Graceland,
people were upset about breaking the Boy. You know, there
was the class with the anc there was all of that.
But at the same time, people then discovered Lady Smith,
Black Mambaso, and they discovered Maclatini and the mahotel A Queens.
(05:13):
And I felt this audience, this western, you know, middle
class white audience in Britain and America and Europe, whenever
they bought Ladysmith blackmun Baso record, they felt virtuous. It
was sort of like showing their support from Mandela and
black South African culture. And they didn't realize that in
(05:34):
South Africa Lady Smith, Black Mambaso and Maclatini represented the
enemies of the ANC and Mandela. They represented the Zulus,
and the Zulus were being armed by the apartheid government
to fight the ANC, and it was very complicated. And
I just thought, well, here's a classic example. Here's music
(05:58):
which is wonderful, which could I could explain a lot
more about the roots of that music, but also tell
people something they don't know about the political context and
the social context and the stories here. And then when
I realized that malcol McLaren in his Duck Rock project,
(06:19):
you know, went to Johannesburg and used basically the same
musicians that Paul Simon used three years later on Graceland,
that's another little twist to the tale. And so I thought, yeah,
this would be fun to dig into some of these
stories of music that people know but they don't know
(06:42):
the backstory. And I'd also I tried to work with
I've done a record where I brought Cuban musicians to
New Orleans, and the record didn't make a big impact.
It was sort of semi successful artistically, but it was
fascinating to watch the Cuban and the New Orleans musicians
(07:03):
in the studio together because they had such a different
concept of rhythm. And I was intrigued by that by like,
Havannah and New Orleans are like next door to each other,
but yet the sensibility is so different. And I started
digging into the history of that. How come African American
(07:26):
culture is so different from Afro Cuban culture, And that
turned out to be a fascinating story, And so I
decided there was a book in the hits, the sort
of global music hits, Samba, mambo, tango, Eastern European gypsy music,
(07:47):
Indian ragas, reggae, you know, the ones that everybody knows
but they don't really know where it comes from and
who are the story what are the stories behind it?
So I said that it's going to be a fun project.
I didn't think it was going to take me seventeen years,
but that's how I came to do it.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Seventeen years.
Speaker 4 (08:07):
All right, Well, that is a resilience in the writing world,
for sure. How important was somebody like as far as
the Cuban part of the story, how important was somebody
like Ry Cooter and Buena Vista Social Club what he
put together in sort of taking that to a foreground
(08:33):
in America.
Speaker 3 (08:35):
One of the themes in my book is that the explosion
of interest in the late eighties and the nineties in
the so called West in what we called world music,
it was great. I mean I was right in the
middle of it. It was very exciting. I heard some
(08:57):
fantastic concerts, there were some great music released on record.
It was a wonderful thing. But it was only the
most recent manifestation of something that's been going on forever.
And so I would say that in terms of broad impact,
(09:17):
eres Prado and the Mambo, and the Afrocuban All Stars
in the forties playing at the Palladium and the pot Vendor,
you know, being a worldwide hit in the early thirties,
these were much more impactful across the breath of Western
(09:39):
culture than Buenavis the Social Club and Buenavs the Social Club.
One of the fascinating things about it is that the
Cubans hated it. You know, they really didn't like it
at all. They thought, and as I say say in
the book, that it's a bit as if you know,
the rest of the world said to Britain, we're not
interested in massive attack court radio head, that we don't
(10:01):
like those people. We're we're falling in love with this
group of banjo and accordion players, who do you know,
music hall songs from the thirties. And that was the
Cuban view was this was yesterday's music. This was old
fashioned music. And not only that, but the way that
(10:23):
Ry Cooter and Nick Gold it was his co producer,
the way they recorded those musicians. They didn't have much drums.
They only had a little bit of bongo. They didn't
have a conga drum. So it was very emasculated from
a Cuban point of view. And so and then you know,
(10:45):
they just thought it was tourist music. And one of
the statistics that I cite in the book, which is
I found so interesting, was, you know, sold ten million
copies at Want a Grammy Latin radio and America. How
many radio plays did it get?
Speaker 1 (11:04):
Zero?
Speaker 2 (11:04):
Big zilch, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:06):
Big zilch. Latin radio had no interest in it. So
it was a phenomenon, but it was kind of a
strange corner pocket phenomenon, you know. And it's a globally record,
I mean, you know. And it's also I love telling
the story in the book about the way it came
to be, which was an accident because you know, Ry
(11:27):
and Nick Gold had this idea of exploring the commonalities
between Cuban music and Mali, the music of Mali from
you know, North Africa, from Africa, and they booked the
studio with that project for that project, and the Mallians
didn't get on the plane because some big guy who
(11:51):
was giving away mercedes arrived in Bamaco and he loves
musicians and he wanted a big concert and he was
lashing out huge, huge amounts of money to musicians right
and left, and they didn't want to leave town and
miss that. And so so Ry and Nick were stuck
in Havana with a studio booked and all these Cuban
(12:12):
musicians there, what are we going to do? Well, let's
record something, you know, And so they just started and
it's a great example of I mean, God, hats off
to them because I think they just didn't blink. They
just move forward and immediately found things that they loved
(12:33):
and got very excited by. And I love the image
of Rye right had a little pocket recorder and he
would wander around the studio listening to the musicians. He
told them to like, figure out tunes that they really
liked that they and he'd go around recording little bits
of it, and then he'd go home to his hotel
and staff all night listening to this and trying to
(12:55):
decide what they would record the next day. So, you know,
God bless them. You know.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
The title of the book and the roots in Rhythm
remain it suggests, obviously, you know, permanence and continuity. What
does the phrase mean to you personally? And what do
you hope readers take away from it?
Speaker 3 (13:14):
Well, it's a quote from a lyric. It's Paul Simon
wrote that phrase and from under African skies on Graceland.
And this is how we begin to remember. This is
the coursing of love in the vein, you know, calling
your name out. And the roots of the rhythm, these
are the roots of the rhythm, and the roots of
(13:36):
rhythm remain. It's a very beautiful stanza and it's uh,
you know, it's poetry, so you can't pin it down
to a literal meaning exactly, you know I did. I
had a wonderful interview with Paul for the book, and
he originally said, listen, I'm tired of talking about Graceland.
(13:56):
You know that was a long time ago. I've done
so many interviews. But you know I've known you for
a long time. I'll give you fifteen minutes, and we
ended up talking for two and a half hours. He
told me that he recorded these tracks in Johannesburg with
no lyrics. Yeah, he was just fascinated by the music
(14:21):
and he would try different chord changes, chord progressions, and
you know, try it with these great South Africa musicians.
And then he took these tapes back to New York
and he listened to them and he said they were
so good, they were so strong that he was intimidated.
He couldn't even start to write lyrics. And finally, after
(14:45):
about four or five six months, he started writing lyrics,
and he felt they're probably the best lyrics he ever wrote.
And I think they are. They're wonderful lyrics. They're extraordinary.
Some of them they're bom baby carriage, I mean, prescient stuff.
And that line. I love that. I just always love
(15:06):
that line. You know, this is how we begin to remember.
This is the coursing of love of the vein, and
the roots of rhythm remain. And I think that's you know,
to me, music lives in rhythm. That's why I've always
struggled a bit with a lot of records that people
call fusion. You know, when you combine Western you know,
(15:28):
Western music musicians with music from Africa or Latin America
or Eastern Europe or the Middle East. Very often, to me,
they turned it around. They kind of lay down a
kind of track of Western dance music or pop music
or guitaristrum, and then they overdubbed the exotic stuff on it.
(15:51):
To me, that's a waste, because the most interesting thing
about other cultures is the rhythms. And if you start
with the rhythm. And that's why Paul Simon I have
so much respect for him. That's what he did with
Mother and Child Reunion. He went to Jamaica and he
recorded a track pure reggae, and then he wrote a
(16:13):
song on top of that. He put the the West
on top of the rhythm of the other culture. And
he did the same in Graceland. He did the same
with El Condor Passa. He takes the music on its
rhythmic basis and pays it that respect. And I think
(16:35):
that's that's what I like anyway.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
And so.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
It's a totemic phrase as far as I'm concerned.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
We'll be right back with more of the Taking a
Walk podcast. Welcome back to the Taking a Walk Podcast.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
So we produced this other podcast. My friend Lynn Hoffman
hosts it called Music Save Me, and it's really about
the I think we believe that there's healing power to
music and the rhythms. And your book explores explores music
from obviously Cuba, Bulgaria, Hungary, West Africa, Jamaica and beyond.
(17:18):
So when you examine it across all cultures, do you
think music has with the rhythms a healing power.
Speaker 3 (17:28):
Oh yeah, I mean I'm not going to go into
like actual curing of diseases, you know, but you know,
those are some peak experiences for me in my life,
you know, as being in a room with great music
being performed live and there's a feeling that you get
from it which is pretty irreplaceable. I mean area you know,
(17:53):
it's it's not comfortable to anything else. It's it's a
kind of elation and a kind of joy and kind
of lifting you out of yourself into a kind of realm,
which you know, I don't know about spiritual, but it's
definitely if there is a sort of holy realm. That's
(18:17):
the closest I get is listening to too great music.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
Your chapter on the Bulgarian women's choirs is incredible. How
did you first encounter that sound? And what was it
about those harmonies that captivated you and you fell in love.
Speaker 3 (18:37):
With I In nineteen sixty five, I'd had a lot
of I was good friends with a guy called Paul
Rothschild who has worked for Electra Records. He produced the
Butterfield Band and The Doors and he worked with me.
He and I was the production manager at Newport in
(18:57):
sixty five, and I brought Paul up and he was
the guy at the sound controls when Dylan was electric.
I was on stage. He was at the sound controls
and we were both under attack from Alan Lomas and
it's eger turn it down, turn it down. And anyway,
we had a bond, and he felt he wanted to
(19:21):
get me into Electra and so he persuaded Jack Holtzman,
the owner of the label, to hire me to go
to England, where I'd spent quite a bit of time
and open an Electra office there and try and promote
Electra's records there. And the week that I went to England,
(19:43):
Electra released a record on their none Such Explorer series
called the Music of Bulgaria by the Philip Kutev Ensemble.
I later discovered how that came to be, which was
that Albert Grossman, who was Dylan's manager. It's all very
small worlds now, in this time of day, in this
(20:04):
time of musical history. Albert Grossman had been in Paris
and had gone to a dinner at somebody's friend's flat,
and somebody had played a record in the flat of
the Kuchev ensemble, and Grossman went berserk, and he said,
what is this record? You know? And he looked at
the cover and he saw that the address of the
(20:25):
label was in Paris. It was the Chant Dumont label.
It was a kind of side project of the Communist
Party of France. And so we went there the next
day and pulled out two thousand bucks and bought the
American rights and took the tape back to America and
when he was negotiating the deal for Paul Butterfield with
(20:47):
Jack Holtzman. Eventually they got to a deal and Grossman said, okay,
I'll accept the deal on condition that you released this record.
And he handed gross Did the colts of the tape
and hopefully listen to the tape and said, Wow, this
is great. I'd love to release it. And that was
the music of Bulgaria I later discovered. I mean when
(21:12):
I first heard it, I just said, wow, this is great.
And you know, around that time, a lot of hippies
bought that record. There was a thing, you know, to
put on your headphones, ride up a joint and trip
out on the kutev ensemble in the Bulgarian women's choir.
It's an incredible sound, and I was you couldn't imagine
(21:40):
where it came from. I mean, where does this come from?
You couldn't imagine it. And then twenty years later I
ended up going to Bulgaria and going to this huge
festival on the side of a mountain and hearing village
women singing with this kind of open throat voice, which
(22:01):
is so interesting because it's like a shout. There's no
vibrato it's a straight note, which is why they can
have such close harmonies. If you had these seconds and one,
you know, adjacent notes to each other in a harmony
the way they do, and you were singing in a
(22:22):
bellcanto vibrato voice, it would sound like a train wreck
because the note is very straight and doesn't wobble, you know,
it sounds it actually works. And what I later discovered,
which is what I wrote about, which is partly inspired
my writing about it, was that I was always puzzled
(22:43):
and I said, wow, this stuff is so great. And
every time I heard another Eastern European folk ensemble like
the check you know People's Choir or the Polish People's
Choir or what ever, it was always kitch boring kind
(23:04):
of stuff. And when I heard the Russian one Moisiev choir,
I thought that, well, that's really stupid. It's very acrobatic,
he's dancing, but the music is really silly. How is
it that Bulgaria has this great music and nobody else
in the Soviet block does? And I discovered it was
so fascinating that Kutev loved the music of the villages
(23:30):
and the voices of the villagers, the women in the villages,
and he recruited them from the village into the choir,
taught them how to read music. In Russia, Stalin had
hired Moisiev to start the ensemble because he wanted to
destroy peasant music. He wanted to invent a new peasant music,
(23:54):
and so no peasants are wherever in Moisiev's choir. The
choir was all like the second stringers from the Bolshoy,
you know, they were classically trained singers from the cities,
and the whole thing was fake lore. It was just
all invented. And so I loved that whole thing about
(24:17):
Bulgaria being the outlier in the Eastern Block, that they
really loved their own folk music and they did up,
you know, whereas the Soviets were trying to suppress peasant
culture because the peasants didn't like collectivisation, they rebelled against
Stalin and he wanted to destroy them. So it's a
(24:38):
story where music and politics overlaps, which was of course
meat and drink from me when I was looking for
writing my book.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
You had a front row seat to the ska and
the reggae explosion in Jamaica, and I wonder if you
look back and you realized that that that or did
you realize at that time that you were witnessing something
that was pretty revolutionary.
Speaker 3 (25:04):
Well, I don't know if I had a I mean,
I you know, I was producing records for Ireland for
Chris Blackwell, and Chris I knew, I mean, he was
at Jamaican. He loved Jamaica. I loved Jamaica culture, and
I knew that he had a dream of making Jamaican
music go worldwide. And he'd had a little taste of
(25:27):
it with my boy Lollipop back in the mid sixty four.
You know, he had this big hit with Millie. But
you know, I was like most people in the sixties.
There was a lot of Jamaican music around Britain, but
most people didn't listen to it. You know, it was considered.
You know. The people who liked it were the skinheads.
(25:49):
They liked ska and they would have these and they
were like war you know, they shaved their heads and
had tattoos on their skulls, and we're very unpleasant people.
And we thought thought, if they liked this music, why
should we. And it wasn't until I had a weekend
in nineteen seventy one when I visited Chris Blackwell and Bahamas.
(26:13):
Paul Rogers, who was the lead singer of Free Then
and Bad Company, he was there and we had a
great weekend. And then Sunday night we were sitting there,
Chris had fed us beautifully. We had a wonderful day,
and we're passing the joint around and he said, you
guy's ever heard tts of the Mateles And we said, no,
(26:35):
who's that? And he said okay, and he dropped the
record on the turntable, put on the knee one. Rogers
and I just sat there shaking our heads, like this
music is unbelievable. It's so cool, it's so good. We'd
never imagine that Jamaican music was that good. And then
like six months later Chris signed Bob Marley and the
(27:01):
Whalers and started work with them on their first record.
And then around the same time, the Heart of They
Come came out of the film, and so suddenly there
was like from different angles, there was all these revelations
about how amazing to make and culture was, and how
(27:22):
amazing this music was. And I never really had any
kind of key role in disseminating it or making it popular,
but in nineteen seventy six. Chris wanted to work with
Bob with Tutz the way he worked with Bob Marley,
but Marley got jealous and said, no, come on, Chris,
(27:46):
We've got work to do. Come to Nassau. And Tutz
was already in London with his tapes, and so Chris
asked me to finish working on this record to sell people.
Reggie got sold one of the greatest speriences of my
life in the studio, it was just such an amazing experience.
And the record is one you know, I say, there's
(28:09):
probably two records that I made that I can listen
to from beginning to end, and I frequently do and
never think to myself, Oh, I wish I'd brought that
off just a little bit more, or Ooh I wish
I'd edited that a little differently, or oh, you know,
why didn't I do that a little better? And that
(28:31):
reggae got sold as one and writer later by Nick
Drake or the other.
Speaker 5 (28:38):
So in closing, after all of your travels and all
of the music that you've experienced, is there still a
sound or a tradition out there that you're fascinated and
just desperate to explore.
Speaker 3 (28:59):
Well, you know, I'm realistic about first of all, the
music industry. There are very few labels out there have
the budget to send me an engineer out to record.
I mean, I am fascinated. I've always loved little I
don't have. My collection is not very big, but I
do have a few records of the music of the
(29:21):
South Pacific, you know, from Tahiti and places like that,
and I would love to go really record find the
best musicians. I stumbled onto a into a lobby of
a hotel in San Francisco in the mid seventies, and
there was a group of Taishan tourists who were staying
(29:42):
at the hotel, and they were having a party in
the lobby and they were singing. It was just the
most glorious sound I've ever heard. I couldn't believe it.
And I started talking in French to this girl that
was singing there, and she said, Oh, we're not any good,
We're just people, We're just tourists. And then she also
(30:04):
said she I never forgot this, she said. I said,
how are you enjoying your trip? She said, well, we've
been to Detroit, we've been to Chicago, we've been now
we're in San Francisco. I said, well, how do you
like the America. She said, well, it's fascinating. We've met
lots of great people. But and she looked around. She
waved her hand around San Francisco and she said, but
it's so ugly. And I said, I want to go
(30:27):
to Tahiti. If you think, if you think San Francisco
is ugly, I want to go to Tahiti because that
must be fantastic. So, yeah, that would be that would
I guess that would be one of the things on
my But there's so many there's so much music in
the world, you know, I could spend another lifetime, you know,
(30:50):
traveling around making records.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
Never say never, Joe Boyd, My god, you know, if
you love music, this is this is something you've got
to pick up in the roots and rhythm remain. Joe
boy takes us through a fascinating piece of music history
in the world that continues to unfold. And Joe, thank
(31:14):
you for it, and thank you for being.
Speaker 3 (31:16):
On, Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (31:19):
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Taking a
Walk podcast. Share this and other episodes with your friends
and follow us so you never miss an episode. Taking
a Walk is available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
and wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Lynn Hoffman
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark
My Favorite Murder is a true crime comedy podcast hosted by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark. Each week, Karen and Georgia share compelling true crimes and hometown stories from friends and listeners. Since MFM launched in January of 2016, Karen and Georgia have shared their lifelong interest in true crime and have covered stories of infamous serial killers like the Night Stalker, mysterious cold cases, captivating cults, incredible survivor stories and important events from history like the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. My Favorite Murder is part of the Exactly Right podcast network that provides a platform for bold, creative voices to bring to life provocative, entertaining and relatable stories for audiences everywhere. The Exactly Right roster of podcasts covers a variety of topics including historic true crime, comedic interviews and news, science, pop culture and more. Podcasts on the network include Buried Bones with Kate Winkler Dawson and Paul Holes, That's Messed Up: An SVU Podcast, This Podcast Will Kill You, Bananas and more.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com