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January 16, 2025 115 mins

He did the sound at Newport when Dylan went electric. He produced Nick Drake and Richard Thompson and many more. This is the story of someone who lived his life in the music business, left his mark and survived to tell the story.

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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Repsetts Podcast. My
guest today is Joe Boy, who has a new comprehensive
book on world music entitled In the Roots of Rhythm
remained Joe, Why this book? Why now?

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Well? I wrote a book seventeen years ago called White
Bicycles Making Music in the nineteen sixties, and people would
ask me, so, when is the book on the nineteen
seventies coming, And I said never. I really didn't enjoy
the seventies. I have nothing really good to say about
the seventies. And the thing they kept nagging at me

(00:51):
was the fact that there's so many great books about
the music popular music of America, Britain, the Anglo American
whatever you know, from jazz to pop music to R
and B to country Peter Garounick Nick Toosh's, you know,

(01:12):
these great figures, but very little about all the music
from far away that has had such a huge impact
on our culture. And I just felt like, yeah, I
love that stuff. I love those stories, I love those characters,
and I had a vision. It was sort of there

(01:32):
are a few things that it kind of nagged at me,
all the misunderstandings that existed in America and Britain over Graceland,
how little people understood about the South African culture that
have produced that music. And I felt that was a
good example of the kind of thing that would be

(01:56):
fun to tell in the story. And then, you know, I,
as I talk in the preface, I've been always fascinated
by the way that Afro Cuban rhythms have crept into
American popular music, whether it's Dizzy Gillespie or Save the
Last Dance for Me, and what the backstory of that is,

(02:18):
which is just so fascinating. And I just thought, Okay,
those are two great hooks to start this book on.
And I didn't realize it. We can take me seventeen years,
but I got started and I just didn't stop until
I finished.

Speaker 1 (02:32):
Okay, the book is very comprehensive in six hundred plus pages.
At some point, did you say I'm writing the comprehensive,
definitive book.

Speaker 2 (02:44):
Well, I mean it's not really comprehensive and definitive in
the sense that it's quite a personal selection of what
I like, stories, I like, music I like, and there's
a lot of great music from around the world that
I don't even mention, you know, there's not even a
look in for Greek rebetico music, or Portuguese fato or

(03:08):
Souse Islands music, or Peruvian Andean music. But my criteria
was that I would stick to the hits, the music
which had really had an impact in Western so called
Western culture, meaning salsa, samba, reggae, so called gypsy music,

(03:32):
you know, all that the stuff that people know but
don't know the backstory.

Speaker 1 (03:39):
Well, the book is broken down by region, and you
mentioned Graceland at first. You talk about Zulu and Graceland.
Can you tell us some of the misconceptions people have
about that.

Speaker 2 (03:50):
Well, there were a few. I think the biggest one
to me was that when people embraced this record, which
they was quite right that they should. It's such a
wonderful record, and they felt this affection for this black

(04:10):
South African culture, and in a way it was kind
of in defiance of the white South Africans who were
imposing this imparti system who had imprisoned Nelson Mandela. Everybody
wanted Mandela freed from prison, and it became almost I
felt at the time, there was almost a feeling that

(04:32):
buying a Ladysmith Black Mombaso record was a way of
showing solidarity with the ANC and with Nelson Mandela. But
I knew a lot about South Africa and its politics,
and I knew that it wasn't like that that. In fact,
Ladysmith Black Mombaso is Zulu music, and the Zulus were

(04:53):
very much at war with the A and C. They
were being armed by the South African government to fight
the ANC, and most young ANC comrades preferred funk and disco.
They thought English lyrics were modern and progressive and Zulu

(05:16):
lyrics were regressive and tribal. And so there was a
kind of a disconnect between what we in the Northern
hemisphere felt about this music and what was really happening.
And you know, that was one thing, and then there were,
you know, lots of other things, including all this fuss

(05:38):
about the breaking of the boycott. Everybody was upset. A
lot of people were upset with Paul Simon, but nobody
ever said boo about Athol Fuguard and all the great
plays that were running on Broadway and in the West End.
There were productions from the Market Theater in Johannesburg with

(05:58):
South African actors white and black, just like Graceland you know,
and nobody ever criticized that. So anyway, those are a
few of my little actses I had to grind as
I embarked on this.

Speaker 1 (06:13):
Okay, we live in an era where they do a
TV special and the past is looked at through new eyes,
not only would TV series but other So now it's
almost forty years after Graceland. Do you think this imprimature,
This perception of Paul Simon going to South African ripping

(06:36):
off the culture still persists or what is the decades
that have ensued changed the perception of this record.

Speaker 2 (06:44):
Well, I was a bit shocked when I mean, we're
not talking about twenty twenty four now, but if we
talk about I think it was around twenty ten there
was a documentary film about the making of Graceland. I
think it was called Under African Skies or something and
Paul actually the filmmaker got Paul to sit down with

(07:05):
somebody from the ANC and talk about the boycott by
you know, the whole thing, and the guy from the
A and C all these years later was still very hostile,
very bitter, very antagonistic towards Paul about what he had done.

(07:27):
And I think, you know, there are still people who
have that feeling about him. But I think, you know,
the fact is that Graceland is a phenomenon. I write
in the book about going to see the Reunion tour
when it came to Hyde Park in London and two

(07:48):
thousand and twelve was it? I think, and walking through
this vast crowd, tens of thousands of people, hundreds of
thousands of people, everybody mouthing or singing the words, twenty somethings,
fifty somethings, teenagers, sixty somethings. You know, it just covered

(08:14):
all shades. And I think it's a good lesson about
the power of music that can is. That's why it
makes a lot of dictators and a lot of governments nervous,
because it transcends anything they can say against it. People
either love it or they don't, you know, And people
love that record.

Speaker 1 (08:35):
Okay, this theme you see in the book where people
go to get a sound and like you say, you know,
the Zulus were playing this music, but the anc is
more than funk, etc. So what can you tell us
around the world where there's an authentic sound, yet the

(08:57):
people who are living there have moved into a more
modern zone.

Speaker 2 (09:02):
Well, one of the best examples, in a way, is
in our own backyard. I remember being very conscious as
a teenager who was obsessed with blues. I started collecting
blues records when I was about eleven or twelve, and
it soon became clear that African American audiences had no

(09:28):
use for blues. You know, right, radio stations in Chicago
that in the late forties and the early fifties have
been playing Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf were no longer
playing Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf. And there was a
feeling that it was old fashioned. And there's a sense

(09:51):
that I get through much of the book. It's not
always it's not a universal truism, but it's a trend.
You can see that most cultures, particularly in poorer countries,
developing parts of what used to be called developing countries

(10:13):
in the world, love modernity. They want to be modern.
Modernity is a way out of the poverty, the backwardness,
the limitations on life that has been a hallmark of
their cultures. Whereas the middle class in the West has

(10:37):
seen enough of the future, they don't really necessarily like
the future so much. They're worried about social media, they're
worried about pollution. They're worried about, you know, all these
things that the modern world has brought. And they seek
out natural fibers, they seek out organic food, they seek
out authenticity wherever they can find it, and they seek

(10:59):
out roots music. And there's a disconnect sometimes between the
cultures that are seeking to modernize. There's a there's an
there's a moment I talk about in the Africa chapter
where this guy that I know who's a wonderful guy

(11:19):
who teaches music at the University of Akra and Ghana
and he specializes in highlight. He's written wonderful books about
high life music. And by the late eighties, none of
his students, none of the youth of Ghana had any

(11:43):
time for high life. And there was a kind of
big concert in the main square and they had before
the hip hop started, before the rap started. They had
a kind of oldies group of high life stars and
people through rocks, people through stuff and got them off stage.
The crowd was very hostile, and he went to one

(12:07):
of his students and he asked him to explain this,
and the students said, what has high life ever given us?
What is that tradition, that old way of this society.
The way it was, we end up with no job
prospects were very poor. As a country. Tradition just stifles us.

(12:34):
So why should we like traditional music? They loved the
cheapest Casio drum machine, hip hop and because it sounded
modern and it was implicitly rejecting the past.

Speaker 1 (12:52):
Okay, I want to do a little cleanup work. You say,
essentially you have no time for the seventies, although some
of your greatest success producing records were in the seventies.
Shoot Out the Lights Nick.

Speaker 2 (13:03):
Drake album eighties. That was eighties shoot Out the Lights eighties,
Nick Drake sixties.

Speaker 1 (13:10):
Okay, well, let me instead of instead of you correcting
me where I'm wrong, sorry, which I know which I am,
let me just make it simple. Why do you have
no time for the seventies?

Speaker 2 (13:23):
I guess in terms of writing, I mean, obviously I
had a lot of good times in the seventies. I
made some records that I'm very proud of, Midnight at
the Oasis, the McGarrigle sisters took some of the may towles.
But I struggled the whole time. I was sort of
my own life was torn between trying to be a

(13:45):
film producer. I've made a documentary about Jimmy Hendrix in
nineteen seventy two, and I thought that made me a
film producer, and I started developing projects, real dramas, you know,
and it was totally frustrating, and I never got anywhere

(14:10):
with any of them. And look is standing back and
looking at the arc of our culture, musical culture, and
the way music and culture interacted. I h the thing
that stands out for me about the seventies, particularly the
late the end of the seventies, the climax of that
decade was disco and punk, which were kind of implicit

(14:37):
in their nature or in many of the spokesmen for
those types of music was a rebuke to the hippie
music that I had been part of. You know, they
were sort of against psychedelia. They were against the kind
of virtuosity of you know, all the great groups from

(15:00):
the late sixties, early seventies, you know people. You know,
there was a kind of fetish for the machine beat
of disco, for the anonymous sex that it kind of
was a soundtrack for. And punk was you know, they

(15:21):
hated anything to do with you know, kind of great
long guitar solos, or great saxophone solos, or delving into
the roots of rhythm and blues and writing songs around that.
So I didn't feel that I had a connection that

(15:42):
would lead to a nice book. You know, I didn't
have a story to tell in the sixties. You know,
my story in the sixties of being a fan of
folk music and blues and jazz, and then getting to
work at Newport and being there when Dylan went electric,
and then producing Pink Floyd and running the UFOL Club.

(16:07):
This was all part of the story of the era.
So my story had a kind of resonance. But I
thought in the seventies my story was completely out of
tune with what was happening.

Speaker 1 (16:27):
Okay, you're highly educated, you went to Harvard. Just speaking
with you, you're an intellectual. I'm going to be point
blank here. This tends to be a dumb business. They're
more smart people actually who are making records. But there
are a lot of people uneducated who are just sort
of channeling God. As they say, you have all these theories.

(16:49):
Who do you talk to that can talk on this level?

Speaker 2 (16:55):
Well, hopefully everybody who reads the book.

Speaker 1 (16:57):
I'm telling you about your everyday life. Yes, you've done
a great thing with the book.

Speaker 2 (17:00):
Come on, every so many people that I've worked with,
most people I worked with, I can have great conversations with.
I mean, I can't tell you.

Speaker 1 (17:09):
I used to.

Speaker 2 (17:10):
Spend hours on the phone in the late seventies and
the early eighties and even in the nineties with Kate McGarrigle.
You know who's Rufus Wainwright's mom. She and I both
loved reading history, and she was a huge fan of
books of history, and you know she I'm particularly Canadian history,

(17:34):
you know, and she turned me on to great writers
of history about the missionaries heading west across the Great Lakes,
and the fur trappers and the discovery of the Mississippi Basin,
which I use in this book. You know, some of
those things started in those conversations with Kate McGarrigle. Richard Thompson,

(17:56):
you know, he's a very thoughtful guy. He's a very
uh you know he he you know, he's pursued a
lot of spiritual quests in his life through Sufi'sism and
things like this, and he can talk to you about
Duke Ellington and Django rein Hart and what it all means.

(18:21):
And I don't know. I mean, I think, uh, I've
always found musicians to be very thoughtful people, and I
think particularly I mean one musician who I have huge
admiration for that I'm the one musician that I ever

(18:42):
felt frustrated because we could never get a real conversation
going was Tutz Hibbert. When I worked with him and
I went to see him in live performances in years afterwards,
I'd go back backstage and you know, he he I

(19:03):
don't know what it was. I mean, I think he's
smoked a lot, but his lyrics demonstrate such an extraordinary
intelligence and emotional intelligence and sort of sensitivity to nuance
and personal relationships. But I could never reach him on

(19:24):
that level in a kind of one to one conversation.
But you know Haesus Alamanni who was the leader of Cubanesemo,
or taj Mahal or Toumani Diabate, or you know people
like that, or you know that those artists were people

(19:45):
that I could sit down and have a drink with
and talk to endlessly about music, and not just in
the kind of limited or surface kind of way. I
would say, all of them are intelligent people.

Speaker 1 (20:03):
Okay, let me do another clean up you talk about
collecting blues records at age eleven and twelve. You know,
there's the blues revival when you're in college and people
talk about looking up the old blues men in the
phone book who might be doing something other than playing music.
Eleven and twelve. How did you get turned on to

(20:23):
blues music?

Speaker 2 (20:25):
Well, it was an extraordinary event, one of those lucky
moments in my life. I had two grandmothers, obviously, like everybody.
One grandmother, my father's mother, had been a concert pianist
when she was young, and then taught concert pianists later

(20:47):
on in her life, and had studied in Europe and
lived in Berlin and Vienna and all this. And she
was very musical, but she had no interest in anything
but classical music. I could never talk to her about
jazz or popular music. My other grandmother, my mother's mother,

(21:11):
knew nothing about music, didn't care, didn't listen, but she
was aware that I, or I think my mother had
told her how much I loved music, and that I
was sort of listening to my mother's record She had
Carmen Miranda and Edith Paff records and stuff HM and

(21:33):
so one birthday or Christmas, I can't remember which. My
mother's mother went into a record store and said, I
have a grandson who likes music. I think it's kind
of jazz or something like that that he likes. What
have you got? And so he handed her this record
called the RCA Encyclopedia of Classic Jazz. It was one

(21:57):
single disc. She packed it up, said it to me,
it's an unbelievable record. It has Sugarfoot stomps Fletcher Henderson,
it has Black and Tan Fantasy by Duke Ellington, it
has a great Armstrong track, it has a great Sydney

(22:17):
Beschet track. And in the middle of all these great
jazz tracks, as I played through the second side, like
track three or track four, all of a sudden, it's
sleepy John Estes working Man Blues. And I was just staggered.

(22:40):
I'd never heard of anything like it. I played it
over and over again, and you know, I started listening
to Led Belly and I started listening to you know,
there were not that many records around, but there was
Led Belly was around, and I don't know Barbara Dane

(23:02):
and I don't know there were people like that in
the mid fifties that where you could pierce the you know,
pull back the curtain a little bit into blues. And
then it just expanded as I went along, you know,
the ripples spread out, and I got more and more
understanding of what this music represented. And when I was sixteen,

(23:27):
I discovered a book. I don't know how, I think,
I'm not sure how I even heard about it, but
I went in I ordered it. It was a book
by Samuel Charters. It was called The Country Blues, and
it had stories about Sleepy John Esty's and the Memphis
Drug Band and all these people. But the central character,

(23:50):
or a character whose story ran through the whole book,
was a guy called Ralph Peer, who was a record
producer working for Victor Records and going through the South
and renting hotel rooms and setting up a recording gear
and recording blues singers and country singers. And I remember

(24:12):
thinking to myself, now that's what I'd like to do.

Speaker 1 (24:18):
Okay, when you get to Harvard, are you the progenitor
of the blues revival? Or do you get there and
find like minded people.

Speaker 2 (24:30):
I got there and found like minded people. Before I
got there, my brother, who's two years younger, but he
his interest wasn't two years behind mine, He was right
neck and neck with me all the way, collecting records

(24:50):
more avidly than I did. And he met some kid
who was halfway between. It was in one year older
than him, one year younger than me, called Jeff Muldor,
and we all lived in Princeton, New Jersey, and Jeff
Muldor later went on to be the vocalist for Paul

(25:11):
Butterfield Blues Band and for the Question Jug Band and
doing lots of great solo stuff. The three of us
used to spend weekends saying, Okay, this Saturday, we're going
to listen to nothing but Lonnie Johnson records, or we're
going to listen to nothing but Book of White records
or jazz, or we're going to listen to nothing but

(25:35):
Fletcher Henderson. And so we had a very intense sort
of self education. But then we got to when I
got to Harvard, I discovered the Club forty seven, which
was the where Joan Baez used to sing twice a week.
But on the nights when she wasn't singing, there were
people like Eric von Schmidt and Rolf Kahan were singing,

(26:00):
who were you know, local bohemians who loved blues and
weird music from different parts of the world and sang
it and had collections. So I was like a kid
in a candy store, you know. I was like, Wow,
can I come and hear your collection? So it wasn't

(26:20):
I wasn't really a pioneer. I ended up bringing Sleepy
John Estys and Big Joe Williams to Harvard for concerts
and that was sort of what started my career in
a way, you know, was that step into the world
of professional events.

Speaker 1 (26:40):
Okay, Eric Fonschmidt, the other people Club forty seven were
folkies really, and you're talking Sleepy John ASTs etc. As
a blues guy, you bring them to Harvard? Are they
playing music when you bring them to Harvard? And is
anybody else looking for these old bluesmen? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (27:00):
There was a guy called Dick Waterman who ended up
managing Son House. He was around Harvard Square in those days.
There was a lot of it going on. You know.
There were and people I would later discover were doing
things that I wasn't aware of, Dick Spotswood and Tom
Costner and I'm not Tom Costner anyway. There was a

(27:28):
rapidly expanding community and one of the things that, as
you say, they were folkys. But what I discussed and
when I went to Harvard, I had a very negative
attitude about folk music. I loved Lead Belly records, but

(27:48):
I didn't really like Cisco Houston and Pete Seeger and
people like that much. And I didn't like the Weavers.
I didn't like Ronnie Gilbert's voice. The whole idea of
sort of middle class white people strumming guitars and singing
folk music seemed a bit silly to me. And but

(28:12):
when I first heard Eric von Schmidt and Rolf Khan,
I realized that there was a whole different esthetic going
on here. That the people that I didn't like were
the New York people, where folk music was a political thing.
It was music of the people. And the way you

(28:35):
communicated music of the people was by finding like Spanish
Civil War song, a miners song from Yorkshire, a cowboys song,
a South African song, and singing them all in the
same kind of strum, the same kind of way to

(28:59):
unify and make it accessible. You know. Pete Seeger had this,
which is a bit ironic because Pete Seger was a
brilliant musician, a fantastic virtuoso, but he wanted to simplify
music and make every song singable around a campfire or
at a picket line. What I found, which is an

(29:22):
attitude that I sort of didn't feel connected to. But
when I went to Harvard Square, I found these people
who had the opposite idea, which was, let's not make
it accessible, Let's make it hard. Let's find out exactly
how Doc Bogs picked his banjo. Very complicated, weird tunings,

(29:46):
weird fingerings, let's decode that. Let's figure it out and
spend six months locked in our rooms smoking a joint
figuring out how Doc Bogs did that, and then dazzle
people by going on stage at the Club forty seven
and playing that way or book a White with his

(30:06):
slide guitar. And that attitude, which I found prevalent in Boston,
was much more empathetic. I was much more empathetic with
that point of view. And I discovered the Harry Smith anthologies,
which everybody in Boston had, and which Bob Dylan writes

(30:30):
about in his book Chronicles about how that changed his life.
Hearing Harry Smith's anthology of American folk Music, he suddenly
dove in the deep end of authenticity and discovered a
whole different aesthetic from the esthetic that he originally embraced

(30:55):
as a folk singer of protest song and the kind
of folk coffee house folk movement. So yeah, I mean
it was very interesting sociological divide and musicological divide.

Speaker 3 (31:12):
Political okay, jumping across the pond.

Speaker 1 (31:23):
You have the people in Liverpool, it's support the import
American records. They're influenced by blues records. Since you spent
so much time in England, this may be a little
out of your purview. Are they going through the same
process as you or are they just listening to certain

(31:44):
acts and being inspired by them.

Speaker 2 (31:47):
The process in Britain was a bit different. In America,
it all got caught up in these politics that came
to a head in nineteen sixty five at Newport acoustic
music versus electric music, and people in America were very

(32:08):
conflicted about Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf because they were
on the same label as Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley.
They played electric guitars the same way, and so people
had much more time. The Newport Folk Festival crowd revered Mississippi,
John hurt Son House, Robert Pete Williams. You know all

(32:31):
that in Britain that split never happened, at least with blues.
People loved Big Bill Brumsey, they loved Muddy Waters, they
loved Lead Belly, they loved Howling Wolf, mostly from records
occasional visits. And that was one of the reasons that

(32:57):
I ended up staying in Britain was that when I
arrived there in the spring of sixty four as a
tour manager with Muddy Waters and Cis Rosetta Tharp and
Brownie McGinn Sunny Terry, nobody made any distinction between Brownie
and Sonny, who were acoustic blues men, and Muddy who
had his electric guitar in his electric band. And the

(33:22):
first night in nineteen sixty four Spring of sixty four
Bristol Colston Hall packed almost two thousand people queuing outside
the dressing room after the show for Muddy Water's autograph.
And this was such a revelation to me. You know

(33:43):
that these people just loved this music. They didn't have
any of the issues that people had in America about
being conflicted about whether it was authentic or acoustic or electric,
or commercial or uncommercial. They just loved it. And I
think that was the process that has been chronicled endlessly

(34:06):
of Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger and John Mayle and
all these people absorbing American blues, bringing it across the
Atlantic to America and then saint you American's listen, this
is yours and triggering an explosion of interest in America
in the blues. But we had to be led there

(34:27):
by the British.

Speaker 1 (34:29):
How do you get that gig? As tour manager?

Speaker 2 (34:32):
The concerts I put on with Sleepy John, Esty's Brann
and Big Joe Williams.

Speaker 1 (34:38):
I mean, just one second, was that with your money
or the college's money?

Speaker 2 (34:42):
My money? Because what happened was I went long story short,
I got into Harvard on an advanced placement, so I
only had three years I had to do for my
bachelor's and I thought they gave me an edge, and
I took a year half year off and I worked
for a record company in California contemporary good time jazz,

(35:04):
and on the way back East, I convinced a label
in Chicago and another label in New York to let
me distribute them in Boston, and so I became a
distributor and I had a warehouse. The warehouse was under
the bed in my dorm and I would go out

(35:26):
to the Harvard Coop and a couple of other shops
around Harvard Square and more in downtown Boston and sell
these records and made a little money. And I was
completely I was completely over optimistic. But I would take
whatever money I had and I would say, Okay, that'll

(35:49):
buy me the bus ticket to get Big Joe Williams
from Chicago to Boston, and then I'll sell a bunch
of tickets and I'll be able to pay him. And
I just about did. But it was a very close
front thing. But it was all kind of speculative and crazy,
and but I did pull it off. And Manny Greenhill,

(36:12):
who was the big concert promoter in Boston, manager of
Joan Biaz and the kind of gonzamacher of folk music
in Boston, he noticed and he was bringing Jesse Fuller
to Boston to play a folk festival, do a gig

(36:33):
at a coffee house, and do a record for prestige.
And he called me up and offered me twenty five
bucks to look after Jesse Fuller for a weekend. So
I did, and I think he thought I did a
good job. So when he then booked Brandon McGinn's Sonny Terry,

(36:57):
who he also managed on to join George Ween's blues
gospel caravan going to England in the spring of sixty four.
And I asked Manny if he had any ideas about it,
what I could do to keep my body and soul
together if I went to Europe. He picked up the

(37:17):
phone called George. He said, if you found a tour
manager for that show yet? And then he said to me,
can you be in New York tomorrow morning at ten o'clock?
And I said yeah, And I talked to George for
half an hour and he said, there's a telephone and
a chair. Go get on the phone to Chicago and
hire a bass player. And I had a job.

Speaker 1 (37:37):
Okay, fake it till you make it, but there are
some skills in being a tour manager. So how was
your experience?

Speaker 2 (37:47):
It was great. The first day we had a day off.
The first day the musicians arrived and I assembled. I
persuaded the tour agency in England to get us a
rehearsal room. I got everybody there and I said, okay,
I got some ideas for this show. How we're going
to do this show? I want Otis. You can play

(38:07):
gospel piano. Otis Span You'll play with Sister Rosetta and
Brownie McGhee. You're a great guitar player. You'll play with
cousin Joe. That'll work great, and you know, and they
all looked at me like, white boy, get out of here.
You know, we're trying. This is a day off. Just

(38:28):
don't don't bust our ass for all this shit. And
so I was kind of humiliated. But then over the
course of a two and a half week tour, little
by little, they started doing all the things I had suggested.
And the last concert was one of the greatest nights

(38:50):
of my life because they did everything that I'd originally
proposed to them to do, and it was fantastic and
they all loved each other by the end. What I
did I didn't realize that first night was that they didn't
know each other. I had that sort of naive outsiders
thing of well, they're all blues singers, they must know

(39:12):
each other, you know. But Money was from South side
of Chicago, One World, Brownie and Sonny were from Coffee
House Circuit, East Coast. Sister Rosetta was from the gospel scene,
cousin Joe was like a fixture on Bourbon Street in
New Orleans. They were all from different worlds. They'd never
met many of them, some of them had, but by

(39:36):
the end they just adored each other. There were tears
at the airport when the tour ended.

Speaker 1 (39:43):
And.

Speaker 2 (39:45):
It was one of the great I mean, I sometimes
choke or sort of joke that if I look at
my life in my career, that was the peak and
it's kind of been downhill from there. You know that
last night in Brighton, Okay.

Speaker 1 (40:05):
Many of these people did not achieve commercial success due
to the degree they did at all. Until this point
in the middle sixties. Did you find that these people
were bitter as a result of their experience or they
were so experienced you know, I've had this experience with

(40:27):
some musicians even had fame in their youth. They're going
through the motions, you know, this is a payday, next city.
What were they like?

Speaker 2 (40:37):
There was so much difference differentiation among them. I think
Brownie McGhee, who had a very bad limp and he'd
somehow been put in this duo with Sonny Terry, who
was blind, and so he had to kind of look
after Sonny and he had this limp made it hard

(41:00):
for him to get around. He was overweight, and I
think he spent a lot of time with chuckun and
jiving white promoters and folk people, and he was kind
of bitter. Muddy Waters had been a star in Chicago.
He was a very dignified, very accomplished man who really

(41:28):
appreciated the adulation he got in Britain and was in
a kind of quiet, dignified way enjoying it. Sister Ozetta
had been a star three or four times in her life,
up and down in the thirties with Lucky Millinder, then

(41:48):
in the gospel scene. Then she toured France a bunch
of times in the fifties. And she had high heels.
She had a very expensive red wig. She had a
fur collar on her coat. She lorded it over everybody
until she got to know them and then realized how

(42:09):
wonderful they were, And you know, couldn't have been sweeter
to everybody. But she had a kind of persona that
she projected as a woman of the world and loved
the adulation the Audience's cousin Joe Pleasant, was such a character.

(42:31):
I used to buy the International Herald Tribune every morning,
and he used to grab it from me and read
it and then walk up and down the aisle of
the bus as we were traveling from Bristol to Lester
or whatever, telling everybody in the whole tour what had
been happening in the world that day, and then quizzing

(42:53):
them about it. And he just was an ebulliant, terrific
who everybody adored. And so it was a it was
a mixture, you know of and Reverend Gary Davis, of course,
was a fantastic character who blind old, didn't look after himself,

(43:17):
didn't have you know. He was you know, ash from cigarettes,
you know, or from pipe tobacco, all up and down
his shirt, eating eggs at breakfast with his hand and
dripping yoke onto his shirt front. But he was so
witty and so funny. And one day somebody gave us

(43:42):
some dope in Liverpool and somebody you know, me and
the other there was. I had a guy who was
supposed to be there with one of the Blue singers
who actually got sick and didn't come. But this guy
Tom what's his name, Tom something rather, who had helped
find Mississippi on her he came as my helper and

(44:03):
he'd loved. You know, we were sitting in the back
with Otis Van, you know, smoking a joint. Gary you know,
started yelling from his seat, give me some of that,
Give me some of that. And so he would he
would have, you know, make sure that Tom would stuff
dope into his pipe. And he was just a character.

(44:27):
And so it was every everything was different, everybody was different.
It was a cross section of a wonderful slice of humanity.
And that you can't make generalities.

Speaker 1 (44:37):
Really, what did your parents do for a living?

Speaker 2 (44:42):
My father went to Harvard but never graduated, was convinced
that he had he'd been fascinated by He studied economics
at Harvard as well as being on the heart Crimson,

(45:02):
and he ended up starting local newspapers and then local
he started the first local credit card in America in
the Delaware Valley, and he went bankrupt, and eventually that
led by some circuitous route to MasterCard. Not that he
owned a piece of it, but he kind of inspired it,

(45:27):
and he ended up putting out local telephone directories. He
was very frustrated because he had big ideas about how
to reshape the world's economy through local circular feedback of money.
That stayed in local communities and ways to accomplish that,
but he never really got to do it. And my mother,

(45:55):
because my father went bankrupt and couldn't didn't make much money.
She had go to work and she ended up running
the photography department at the Princeton University store. And so
she sold cameras and film to Robert Oppenheimer and Albert

(46:15):
Einstein and you know, David Wigner and some of these
brilliant people who were at the Institute for Advanced Study.
They all loved her and came and bought film and
cameras from her. And she was a wonderful a stalwart

(46:35):
of the Democratic Party in Princeton, New Jersey. And that's it.
They were. I had one brother, and you know, we
we My parents divorced. They didn't have a great marriage,
but they stayed very friendly. And my brother went to

(47:00):
Columbia and went to law school, became a lawyer in Albuquerque,
New Mexico. And he went three thousand miles one way.
I went three thousand miles the other way.

Speaker 1 (47:17):
So what do your parents think about an Ivy league
educated son who is pursuing, you know, this parapatetic life
in music?

Speaker 2 (47:28):
When I graduated from high school, which was actually a
boarding school, my father wanted me desperately to get into Harvard,
and he somehow managed between a scholarship and borrowing money
from a wealthy friend of ours, got me through this
boarding school, which I didn't really like, but anyway. He

(47:49):
came to pick me up after graduation and we were
driving back to Princeton and he asked me what I
was my idea about Harvard and what I was going
to do, and what my aim was what I wanted
to become. And I told him I wanted to be
a record producer. And he said he had no idea

(48:12):
what that was. And he said, okay. Well I tried
to explain it to him. He said, no, no, forget that.
Just tell me how many people in the world today
are doing this job in the way that you imagine
yourself doing it. And I said I didn't really know much.

(48:33):
I said, well, probably fifteen or twenty. And he said, okay,
So that's the target you're aiming for. That, that small
bullseye is what you're aiming for. And I said yeah,
and he said, and you're comfortable with that? I said yeah.
He said okay, and he was cool. He was relaxed,

(48:54):
and my mother never stopped being supportive anything I did.
She was very supportive. And you know, I brought the
Incredible String Band to play a new in Princeton at
a concert, and my mother and my father came to
the concert and I remember looking over. It was a
kind of get together after the show. And I remember

(49:17):
looking at Robin Williamson from the Incredible String Band. Who
was this, you know, complete William Blake, psychedelic William Blake
character from Edinburgh. I looked over and he and my
father are deep in conversation in the corner, and I thought, cool.

Speaker 1 (49:37):
Okay, once you graduate from college, are you self sustaining
or do you have to call your parents from money?

Speaker 2 (49:45):
I had to call my parents for money twice in
my life, A little bit of money, I you know.
I went, I got a job. We're opening the Electra
office in London, and then I got fired a year later.

Speaker 1 (50:07):
Ooh, I'm interested. Why did you get fired?

Speaker 2 (50:12):
I think it was a combination of reasons. I think
Jack Holtzman was the owner of Electra, the guy who
started as his label. He had hired Paul Rothschild, who
was my friend who had come I had invited up
to Newport, who did the sound for sixty five when

(50:35):
Dylan went electric. I was the stage manager, he was
the sound guy, and I'd helped him sign the Butterfield band.
I'd helped him find the Butterfield band. So he had
this agenda that he owed me one or he wanted
me to come into the to Electra, and he and

(50:58):
I had been to England a couple of times, and
I told Holtzman when I met him that Electra had
a very low profile and nobody knew much about the
label blah blah blah, and so Rothschild was able to
convince Holtsman to hire me to go to London to
open the London office with it just a little desk
in the corner of the distributor's office, and m I

(51:23):
think the two of them had different ideas about what
I was doing. Holtsman's idea was that I was going
to promote phil Oaks, Tom Paxston, Judy Collins and then Butterfield.
I My idea, encouraged by Paul Rothschild, was that I
was going to find talent. And so I think at

(51:47):
a certain point Holtsman got very nervous with this crazed
kid with the Electra checkbook and walking around London offering
people deals even though he loved he did he I mean,
the Incredible String Band. I had to play him a

(52:07):
track and I remember him saying, yeah, Okay, they're pretty good.
You can sign them, but don't spend more than fifty pounds,
and then I had to. Then some other label offered
them seventy five pounds, and I went back and offered
them one hundred pounds without asking Holtzman and that sort

(52:27):
of thing got up his nose. And I think he
also hated the mess that I had on my desk.
Whenever he come to London, he always walk in and
give me this scathing look because of all the clutter
that was on the top of my desk, and I
think it just got too much for him.

Speaker 1 (52:45):
Okay, A, were you surprised when you're fired? B how'd
you handle it? See? What did you then do?

Speaker 2 (52:54):
I guess I wasn't entirely surprised. I was a little disappointed,
but I think tension had been building the first thing
I did. I'd already recorded the first Incredible String Band album,
but it hadn't been released. Yet, but I knew it
was coming out shortly, and I really knew. I felt

(53:15):
it's going to do well. So I went to see
Robin and Mike and I said, I'm leaving Electra. I
want to stay in London. If I stay in London,
can I manage you guys? And they said sure. And

(53:36):
then I called George Ween. I said, do you need
somebody on your autumn jazz tour of Europe? He said, yeah,
you know, meet me in Paris on October tenth. And
so I went back on George's payroll, which was by
the standards. I was living in London well. I was

(53:57):
sleeping on a friend's couch supported me pretty well for
a month month and a half, and then my friend
Hoppy Hopkins, who was a great photographer, decided to throw
it all over and start the International Times, which is

(54:18):
the first underground newspaper in London, and suddenly he had
no income, I had no income. We went out for
a cheap curry one night and came up with the
idea to under National Times. That had a great launch
party with Pink Floyd and Soft Machine, who were both

(54:39):
unknown at the time, playing and psychedelic lights everywhere and
great crowd, and we said, let's do something like that
but charge admission, and so we started the UFO Club
and that's how we paid our rent.

Speaker 1 (54:56):
To start a club takes money. Where'd you get the money?

Speaker 2 (55:00):
No, didn't we We didn't actually rent a premises. We
knocked on the door of an Irish dance hall in
Tottencourt Road and we noticed that they were dark on Fridays.
They had events Katie dances on Thursdays and Saturdays, and
so we said, we'll pay fifteen pounds for Friday and

(55:24):
he said if he got the concession to sell soft drinks.
It was a deal. So all we needed was fifteen
pounds to pay and we didn't even have to pay
them in advance, so we just printed some leaflets handed
them out on Portobello Road. The place was full the
first night. Pink Floyd was the group and Hoppey had

(55:48):
some friends with psychedelic lights and people ca You know,
it wasn't absolutely packed, but a lot of people came
and all the freaks looked around and went wow. We
never realized there were many of us.

Speaker 1 (56:01):
Let's go back. You're steeped in this blues world. That's
it its own people don't understand that the record business
was a much smaller business at the time. So you
had the Top forty business, which I'm sure you were
aware of but had no interest in.

Speaker 2 (56:18):
Oh I was very interested. I loved it when I
was When Jeff Muldor and my brother and I would
play obscure blues records every Saturday afternoon for six hours.
We then get our good trousers on and go to
a party and dance to Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley
and dance to do Wop and dance to Ray Charles,

(56:40):
and we love that stuff. We were You know, that
was a great time for Top forty.

Speaker 1 (56:46):
Let me put it differently. Prior to the Beatles, we
had the Four Seasons in the Beach Ways to survived
the Beatles, almost nobody else did. There were a lot
of acts that even at the time, didn't get that
much respect. Be in Bobby Rydell. There were people who
are now looked fondly upon Bobby Darren. To get to

(57:06):
my ultimate question, the Beatles come along and they break
a year earlier in the UK, but they break in America.
In the Beinia sixty four, there's a whole British invasion
are you thumbs up or thumbs down?

Speaker 2 (57:20):
Totally thumbs up. I was. I loved the Beatles. I
thought they were incredible, And you know, that was, in
a way one of the another part of that divide
that I talked about opening up in the folk scene
in Boston. I would go to parties after the Club
forty seven closed in somebody's apartment and you'd have a

(57:44):
bunch of folkies banjo's, mandolin's guitars playing She's a Woman.
People loved the Beatles, but you know, I think Alan
Omax and Theodore Bicquel and the establishment figures that ran

(58:05):
the New York scene didn't love the Beatles.

Speaker 1 (58:10):
Okay, let's just go to Newport for a second. History
keeps being rewritten. First, the big story was Dylan was booed.
Then they say, no, he really wasn't bowed. What really happened.

Speaker 2 (58:26):
It was pretty straightforward. It was half and half, you know.
I at the end of Maggie's Farm, I was standing
in the little press enclosure right in front of the stage,
and you heard this waft of sound that was absolutely
a mixture. Some people were definitely booing, some people were cheering,

(58:52):
and at the end, after the three songs, the only
three songs he had rehearsed with the band, and he
left the stage more and they are a very similar sound,
and you had that wave of sound. You can hear
it on the recordings. I don't think there's any real

(59:14):
debate about it. It was a very you know, the
whole event was a schismatic event, and everybody knew it beforehand,
the whole weekend before Sunday night. If you just overheard
conversations passing, it was like, what about Dylan, What do

(59:35):
you think he's gonna do? Would he dare? No, he
wouldn't dare? Would he That was a kind of talk
that was going around, not just backstage, but among the audience.
People were intrigued. But Dylan was on the top forty
radio like a rolling stone, playing electric guitar with a
drum kit. Would he bring that to Newport? Would he dare?

(01:00:01):
That was the big question on everybody's mind. And so
it was one of those moments that was not just
a ground you know, a kind of world shaking moment
in retrospect. It was at the time we knew that

(01:00:21):
things would never be the same.

Speaker 1 (01:00:23):
Okay. The Incredible String Band late sixties have a moment.
I can't speak to England. In the UK, this is
a I mean, the US is a very fertile era
where we have FM, underground rock burgeoning. People are seeking
out records and they have a presence in the scene.
We talk about Dylan, we talk about Richard Thompson. They

(01:00:47):
have continued to reinvent themselves, more Dylan than Thompson, but
Thompson has survived. The Incredible String Band. I think you
probably find two people under the age of forty, you know,
Robin Williamson. Is My question is, with these acts and
your experience, why do they tend to have a period

(01:01:09):
of fertile creation which ends and usually almost never can
regain it.

Speaker 2 (01:01:16):
Well, that's certainly true of the Incredible Strength Band, but
I'm not sure who else it's true of. I mean,
I mean, I think, well, I think it's it's certainly
true of an awful lot of bands or groups or
artists that I wasn't involved in.

Speaker 1 (01:01:31):
I mean, yeah, I'm talking in general, not just the action.

Speaker 2 (01:01:37):
In general, I think the output the creation of somebody
who's writing songs, singing to a microphone for the first
time just because they can, and writing songs about the

(01:01:59):
real life, you know, life that they've had as teenagers,
young young people is a lot less self conscious than
once you've had a hit record or a successful LP
or done a big tour and can draw thousands of people.
It's much more difficult to find subject matter for songs.

(01:02:21):
It's much more difficult you start being aware self aware.
Self awareness is a trap, you know, it's a very
difficult thing to overcome, and some people are are are
great at it, and some people aren't. But you know,
the Beatles, even the Beatles, you know, they the magic

(01:02:42):
of a certain era was hard to replicate in many ways.
And the Incredible String Band are an extreme example of
a group that had an incredible output. I mean, in fact,
you know, it's on my mind these days because Rough
Trade Records in Britain has just concluded a deal to

(01:03:05):
reissue the first five Incredible String Band albums and they're
going to try and overcome this fact that you so
aptly said that nobody under forty knows who Robin Williamson is.
And there what happened with them happened very quickly from

(01:03:27):
a height of I think in nineteen sixty nine we
did we filled the filmore East twice, Fillmore West twice,
the Lincoln Center once, but then we played at Woodstock
and it was a disaster and they didn't make the
cut for the film. They didn't make the cut for
the record. Suddenly everything just went in another direction and

(01:03:52):
passed them by their spot that Friday night because it rained,
because they were using electric pickups, they didn't want to
play acoustically. Melanie stepped into their slot, you know, and
became a star, and they became scientologists, and I think it,

(01:04:14):
you know, had an effect on the quality of their songwriting.
Maybe I don't know who knows.

Speaker 1 (01:04:20):
But.

Speaker 2 (01:04:24):
It happened very quickly, and I think still for me
and for many people, those first five albums are fantastic
records and there's incredible songs, wonderful songs on there. And thankfully,
you know, the big bosses of Beggars Banquet and Rough
Trade grew up with incredible string band and are determined

(01:04:47):
to try and show everybody what they're missing. And I
think that would be fantastic what happened. But with a
lot of artists, there's just a moment you know that
the comes and it goes, you know, and you try
the more the harder you try to recapture a certain

(01:05:10):
moment in your life, you know, the more difficult it
can be. I'm trying to think of I don't know
what would your I mean solved.

Speaker 1 (01:05:24):
I have a take on it, just to mean this
is a value. My personal take is most of these people,
you know, as we say, there's so many acts, there's
always going to be exceptions. A lot of these people
are alienated people whose lives don't work, and they have
a fantasy that if they have the success, their lives

(01:05:45):
will work. And even though they may make money, they
may have some sex, may have some drugs, they still
end up finding the same people and then I find
they can't do it again because they don't have that drive.

Speaker 2 (01:05:59):
Yeah, I mean I think it's Yeah, that's another I
think it's similar, a slightly different angle on that self awareness.
The thing that it's easier to write songs about your
real life, it's like other people's real lives. Once you
become somebody who's touring all the time and has a

(01:06:22):
record label saying come on, you've got to have ten
new songs written by next in two months for this session,
it's a whole different circumstance. Of creation, of creation, you're
creating watching yourself do it instead of just having it

(01:06:43):
pour out of you. But I have huge admiration for
people who can continue to reinvent themselves. And it's obviously
it's different for people who are musicians or singers versus

(01:07:06):
people who are songwriters. You know, that's a kind of
a different challenge, you know, to be to have a
to come up with truly original song compositions.

Speaker 1 (01:07:23):
Okay, you're a record producer. It's one thing to have
a debut album. You've worked with acts different times. How
do you produce a record such that you get the
act over their self awareness?

Speaker 2 (01:07:39):
I think, I mean, as I have banged on about
probably more than I this is wise. I'm a great
believer in recording as much live as possible, of putting
a bunch of musicians in a room, getting them all
to play together, and putting it all and you know,

(01:08:03):
maybe doing overdubs later, fixing things, adding harmonies, adding a
saxophone solo. But the core track is live, and so
it's all about what happens in that moment. I think,
if you know the advent of pro tools and the

(01:08:23):
way a lot of people make records these days. You know,
you have a click track, you put a guitarist from down,
you sing a guide vocal, you send it to Seattle
for somebody to put a bass part on, and then
they send it to Boston for somebody to add a
drum part. You're never going to get over that self awareness.
I mean, it's it's just rhythmically to me, plotting somehow.

(01:08:48):
It doesn't have the life, the sense of adventure that
a great recording has. But how to get them if
you do once you do establish the fact that you're
and record live in a moment, and you get a
bunch of and I think getting other musicians around a
singer songwriter or a musician or a central figure is

(01:09:13):
a key thing because I think the interaction between people
is central.

Speaker 1 (01:09:25):
Tell us about the faithful meeting where you and others
came up with the term world music.

Speaker 2 (01:09:34):
Nineteen eighty seven. It was, you know, it was kind
of an exciting time in the record business. I mean,
you know, I in looking back on that period, I

(01:09:57):
have conceptual it quite a lot. You know, I have
a lot of theories about what was going on. I think,
as I mentioned when we talked about the seventies, that
punk and disco were Although there were some great things

(01:10:19):
that came out of punk and disco, overall, they weren't
what I would call positive developments in the history of music.
But you know, they are what they are. They happened,
they're real. But I think it deprived a lot of

(01:10:39):
people listeners of the sort of music that they had
learned to love and the way they'd gotten into music.
They've gotten a lot of people came in to music
through great pop music, through blues, through jazz, through country music,
all this music that people are virtuosic they play. There's

(01:11:03):
a feeling of roots, there's a feeling of flamboyant in
the moment, whether it's Bill Monroe or whether it's you know,
I don't know, Miles Davis in some of his electric stuff.
I mean, all that stuff brought lot. You know, there

(01:11:25):
was a huge audience for music that was sort of
oriented around great playing, and then suddenly in the late
seventies early eighties, there wasn't so much of that coming
out anymore. And I think it's like a weather system.
There was a low pressure system and it sucked in

(01:11:50):
things from over the horizon, African music, Latin music, you
suddenly had DJs starting to make Latin tracks in with
disco tracks. You had people fell a kooti, you had
African music, you had you know, and and and it,

(01:12:11):
and the ripples just spread wider and wider into and
people realized how much music was out there in the world.
And another thing that people that I certainly realized because
I was still signing, you know, I put out Shootout
the Lights in nineteen eighty two. I was still making
records with the likes of Richard and Linda Thompson, and

(01:12:35):
but I began to realize that every week there were
hundreds of singer songwriters records being released into the into
the English and American markets, and and if you had
a great singer songwriter, it was a struggle if you

(01:12:57):
were a little label with no money. And whereas if
you put out a record of music cash Hungary's greatest
traditional band, nobody else is putting out Hungary's greatest traditional
band or anything like it. And so if you find

(01:13:18):
an audience for that sort of music, you've you're going
to sell a few thousand. And and so more and
more labels were exploring this kind of territory, and we
were getting frustrated because the record stores didn't know how
to deal with it. They had a they some some

(01:13:39):
record stores had a little divider saying ethnic some record
stores had a divider saying international folk. And you'd end
up behind those kinds of dividers, and so some one, somebody,
one of the record label guys said, let's all get
together and talk about this, and so we did, and

(01:14:01):
we had this idea. The idea came together to make
like five hundred dividers that we would give out free
to record stores, and on the back of the divider
would be a checklist of all the records in small
type that they should stock to go behind this divider,
and all the labels would pay fifty pounds for each

(01:14:24):
record they wanted on that list. So we ended up
with a budget of like four thousand pounds three eight
hundred pounds or something, and we voted for Okay, what
are we going to put on this divider? World music
seemed obvious, good idea, and it wasn't a new invention,
and people had pointed out like Wesleyan University had a

(01:14:45):
world music department starting in the fifties, and there's a
world music building in Middletown, Connecticut and Wesleyan College. But anyway,
it was new, and we just thought, hey, it's just
a divide or to help us get records into stores.

(01:15:06):
And people have criticized it and later as a kind
of way of categorizing and other othering music from other cultures,
and but my view is we were just categorizing the audience.

(01:15:27):
You know, we knew that somebody who was interested in
neust Fata Ali Khan was probably our best bet for
somebody who might buy an Orchestra Baobab record or of
Susannah Baka records. And and that those categories, you know,

(01:15:48):
you wouldn't get You wouldn't get very far by putting
everybody in a separate country or a separate category. But
if you had, you know, this one category that was
like this kind of music that people seem to like.
Now it's a category defined by its audience. And and

(01:16:09):
it worked like crazy, so so much so that we
were caught unawares. And within a year of that meeting,
there were world music seasons at art centers from you know,
Berkeley to Belgrade, not Belgrade and then but but you know,

(01:16:30):
but Berkeley to Athens, and there were World music radio shows,
and there were music World music labels, and there were
Music World music review columns in newspapers once a week
or once a month. It just, you know, expanded. It
was just like and we spent like sixteen hundred pounds

(01:16:54):
on PR for the thing, and it was like the
most high leveraged PR campaign in history.

Speaker 1 (01:17:04):
I would say, you talk about this period the late
seventies for eighties. Of course, then the business is revolutionized
by MTV. What's your assessment of the music landscape today.

Speaker 2 (01:17:18):
I'm not a good person to ask for it, because
I've been so closeted trying to finish this gigantic opus
of mine that I don't do a lot of listening
to what's going on today. That's one excuse. The other
excuse is that I don't you really hear that much
that I really like. Although there's some great stuff. You

(01:17:39):
do hear some terrific stuff. But the way that it works,
and the how tiny the share of proceeds is that
goes to musicians, and how little financing there is for

(01:18:02):
for recording projects, it's just such a completely different landscape
than the one that I am familiar with that I
hardly know where to start in trying to think about
it or what it is. It's just very, very different,
and I'm glad I'm not starting a record label today,

(01:18:26):
you know. I think it's a very difficult world. On
the other hand, so much is available, you can hear
so much stuff. But again that's a little bit of
a double edged sword.

Speaker 1 (01:18:42):
I think, Okay, I'll buy your excuses, so let's move on.
The blue is ever going to come back?

Speaker 2 (01:18:57):
I don't think. I mean, I don't think it'll come
back except in a I mean, there are young you know,
there's lots of interesting things around. For example, I just
saw a headline the other day Rhanna and Giddens is
reforming the Carolina Chocolate Drops and they're gonna play at
her festival in Carolina in April next year. And but

(01:19:25):
I think that's something else, you know, blues. I think,
you know, so much of the music that I have collected,
written about, recorded, that I talk about in the book

(01:19:47):
doesn't any longer grow from the soil easily. It has
to be. It's become self aware, like what we're talking
about earlier, with say or songwriters. It's and yet there's

(01:20:08):
always great music, and there's always great musicians, and there's
always you know. I have a little sidebar to my
work on the book was that during the course of
writing the book ten years ago, I went someplace I'd
always wanted to go, which was Albania, and heard some

(01:20:31):
music there, and I met a German woman who was
working in environmental projects there but knew all the dances
from all the regions of Albania, knew everything about Albanian music. Anyway,
she's now, that's Andrea. You just met her, my wife,
And over these years we made a few records together

(01:20:53):
in the Balkans, which is an area that she really likes,
and we put together a kind of buena vista, a club,
kind of team of sase musicians from southern Albania. I
made an album called Saziso Tat by the group called
Saziso at least wave your handkerchief at me. And at

(01:21:16):
first when it came out like six seven, seven years ago,
I think, and it got very nice reviews. They did
concerts in Germany and Scandinavia and around Britain. Nobody in
Albania paid it any more. But over the years that

(01:21:39):
has changed, and one of the fascinating things that's happened.
You know that Kosovo is a separate country. It's a
new country, part of the old Yugoslavia, and its identity
is that they all speak Albanian. It's Albanian, and they
would love to be a part of an ou Gradio,
a greater Albania, but that's not going to happen in

(01:22:01):
the European UN and Europe won't let them. And there's
this whole generation of young people in Kosovo who have
discovered Saziso and who love them like the way, almost
the way people in Boston love the Blues sixty years ago.

(01:22:25):
They've just done a huge concert there last weekend, and
there's a gro and even within Albania itself now you
walk down the streets and suddenly you start to hear
traditional acoustic music which you would never hear five years ago.
And so whether that's going to lead to great players

(01:22:49):
and people who are of the stature musically of some
of these great people that we have on these on
this record, I don't know, but it is wonderful that
it's become a way of you know, it's all a
bit mixed up with some of this nationalism and like

(01:23:10):
pride in your country and you know, it's a complicated business.
But I'm very encouraged by that, and I'm very encouraged
when I go to some place like New Orleans, because
I remember once I went to a Second Line march

(01:23:30):
uptown in New Orleans and I was just following along.
There was this great brass band and people dancing, and
one guy was just incredible dancing and I was watching him.
And then all of a sudden, there was a side street.
A car pulled into parks on a side street just

(01:23:50):
next to where the band was going, and it was
blaring out rap on a sound system with a huge
base uh speaker, and it almost drowned out the Second
Line band, and I was like, oh, damn, you know,
why don't you shut up and have some respect. The

(01:24:11):
car stopped, they turned the key off, the sound disappeared.
Two guys got out of the front seat of the car,
went around to the trunk of the car, opened the trunk,
and these were two guys who had been, you know,
bouncing along to this rap music in the trunk of
the car. One of them had a saxophone case and

(01:24:32):
one of my had to trumbone case, and they pained
with their instruments and they joined the second line band
playing this music, and so it can live side by side,
you know, the two things. It doesn't It doesn't happen everywhere.
It happens in Havana and Matanzas. It happens in Salvador,
Dubaia in Brazil, where people go back and forth from

(01:24:56):
digital beats to the tradition, which seems in those contexts
to be alive. And so, you know, I get depressed sometimes,
but then I also get very encouraged by places like
that and by that kind of thing. And you know,

(01:25:18):
there's have you ever heard of dust to Digital the
label there's a label anyway. It's a great label of
reissue obscure stuff old seventy eight And they have an
Instagram feed once a month and it's people send them
clips of live music from around the world and it's

(01:25:42):
just fabulous. And it's hardly a drum machine in sight.
It's all live and real and it's just fabulous. So
you know, I think music is music will live.

Speaker 1 (01:25:58):
Okay, leaveless to say business changed. The Beatles blow up
the business much bigger. We have FM underground radio. People
have a wider palette of what they're listening to where
I'm ultimately going. And today it's you know, it's just
a s mortgage board if anybody can play. To what

(01:26:20):
degree when you make a record in the more modern era,
do you say I have a need to get this
on wax, so to speak, or do you consider commercial
impact or reach irrelevant of the dollars?

Speaker 2 (01:26:38):
Well, this has to be divided into two parts. I mean,
there was a time for twenty years I ran Hannibal Records.
For ten years. I ran it on my own, and
I really I'm not a great business man, you know.
I struggled. I had some successes, but I didn't budget well.

(01:27:03):
I was over optimistic, you know. I tried to think
like balance, create, you know, the artistic side and the
commercial side, and make it work because I had to.
I had to pay salaries every Monday morning. That was
what I thought of. How do I meet the payroll
on Friday? So I had to think commercially and eventually

(01:27:24):
I had to sell the company to a Rikodisc. But
even within riko Disc, I was expected to deliver records
that sold, and I was very fortunate. I struck lucky
a few times, you know, with TOUMANI diabate with Cubanismo,

(01:27:45):
with you know, a number of things. But I had
to have that thought always in mind. And then by
two thousand, you know, the label had been sold to
a hedge fund and the whole thing was just too
I decided to hell with this, I'll write a book instead.

(01:28:06):
And so ever since then, so last twenty five years,
I have made very few records, and the records that
I do make, I make for the first reason you
said that, I got to get this down on disk.
This is important. I want this to be done. I

(01:28:26):
don't know whether it's going to sell. I think it
probably won't. But let's figure out if I can raise
the money to finance making it, and let's try and
get it to critics, and let's try and get some
live events going and at least make some people hear
this music. But I'm not trying to do it as
a first step and starting another record label.

Speaker 1 (01:28:57):
Okay, Switching gears a little bit. Talked about your wife.
How many times have you married, and how many children?
And what are they up to if you have them?

Speaker 2 (01:29:08):
Once marriage? No children?

Speaker 1 (01:29:12):
How old were you when you got.

Speaker 2 (01:29:14):
Married seventy five or seventy four.

Speaker 1 (01:29:22):
Yeah, okay, when you were in your mid thirties.

Speaker 2 (01:29:26):
No, no, so no, no not you wait wait, I
was seventy five years old, That's.

Speaker 1 (01:29:31):
What I thought.

Speaker 3 (01:29:31):
And then I absolutely so seventy five years old.

Speaker 1 (01:29:35):
Right, So you just hadn't met the right person, or
you were too invested in work.

Speaker 2 (01:29:42):
Mixture of all those things. You know, talk to my shrink.

Speaker 1 (01:29:47):
Do you go to the shrink I used to.

Speaker 2 (01:29:50):
I mean that helped me a lot. I mean, but no,
I mean I had relationships, I had came close to
getting married a couple of times. But I don't know.
There's all you know, as I said, you're getting into
psychological things now that I can't talk about with the

(01:30:12):
same authority that I talk about musical.

Speaker 1 (01:30:15):
Well, you know they were, as depeche Mode said, people
are people. So you know, it always astounds me. You
have these musicians that are very successful on the road
almost all the time. They have wives, they have children.
I have never had that drive and do whatever success
I've had has taken all my effort. So I'm more

(01:30:37):
interested with you is that you're just so just talking
about the children aspect, irrelevant of the marriage aspect. Has
it been well, this is my passion. I don't want
to get off the path.

Speaker 2 (01:30:51):
I always thought that I would like to have children,
but I didn't really do much about it. And and
I m I think I probably if I was honest,
I mean, I would never have said it quite as
bluntly as you said it about yourself. But it's probably true,

(01:31:16):
you know that I was. And that's my way. That's
the way my father was, you know. He he got married,
and he always felt that this was, you know, a
great thing that he did. To make a mistake of
getting married and having two kids, he always felt was
the best thing you'd ever done. And he always used

(01:31:36):
to hector me, No, you don't have to get married,
just have kids, you know. And hmm. He he felt
that I was missing out. But he lived his life
basically oriented around following his quest. And I think probably

(01:32:00):
I have, you know, but I've been very fortunate to
meet somebody who shares so much of my quest and
who tolerates.

Speaker 1 (01:32:18):
Okay, you've had some landmark work with great respect critical response.
Have you done financially.

Speaker 2 (01:32:33):
Not particularly well? I'm okay, I mean I was, but largely,
I mean, you know, in a way, if you look
at where I am now, which is okay. I own
my flat in London, you know, but I there's a
mortgage on it. But I'm you know, and I get royalties,

(01:32:57):
but not enough to live, you know, like a king.
Nick Drake. Royalties just keep going up and up and up,
white bicycle. Audiobook royalties go up and up and out. Yeah,
well lately, particularly since the new book came out, but

(01:33:18):
also steadily over the years a little bit of an increase.
And but you know, mixed in with that have been
some lucky strikes with property and some a little bit
of inheritance from my parents. So it's a mixture of

(01:33:38):
earned fair and square in the music business. Plus bought
and sold an apartment in downtown New York a good time,
bought and sold an apartment in Nottinghill Gate ad a
good time. And ah, and you know, bought the right

(01:34:00):
stocks at the right time.

Speaker 1 (01:34:03):
Okay, you live in London. What do Americans just don't
understand about London or the UK in general?

Speaker 2 (01:34:12):
Oh, I'm not sure about that. I don't know what
to say about that question. I think I'm a bit
I used to be intrigued or kind of scratch my head,
like what is this about these letters in the articles
think pieces in the New York Times from Americans living
in London who say English people are so unfriendly. I

(01:34:36):
never get invited to somebody's house, you know, are they?
And I don't know. I just wherever I've gone, including Britain,
I've never I guess I grew up my grandmother, who
you know, spent all that time in Austria and Germany,

(01:34:59):
and she had this sort of attitude that America was
kind of a barbaric place and that real civilization was
over there. And I think that, you know, came into
my head. But from the minute I arrived at Heathrow Airport,

(01:35:22):
or Orly Airport in Paris or wherever, I never perceived
myself as a foreigner. I just deal with I don't know,
I feel I'm somehow, I've got a quirk. That's very fortunate.

(01:35:45):
The first day I was ever in France, I was
with the Muddy Water since cince Rosetta. We were doing
a show for French television, and I'd been speaking my
kind of bad schoolboy French to the promoter promoter by
the telephone about hotel rooms and playing arrival times and

(01:36:09):
things like that. And we're driving in from the airport
to Paris, and so I said, I'd need to talk
to whoever's announcing the show tonight, because everybody has a
certain way they like to be introduced. And they said, oh,
may sa Ou, it's you. What do you mean me,
I don't speak French. He said, no, no, no, you're

(01:36:30):
obviously the announcer. You're going to announce it. So my
first day in France, I was on French television speaking
French badly. But as he said, hey, it's cute. We
appreciate people who try, and so I had never stopped.
I just kept speaking French badly, and eventually I spoke
French pretty well. And the same thing in Britain. I just,

(01:36:52):
I don't know. I fell in with John Hopkins and
a few other people from all different tie of worlds.
In Britain. They weren't all upper class, they weren't all
lower class, they weren't all middle class. They were all different,
and I just, I don't know, I just I never

(01:37:15):
thought of myself. I you know, I have a season
ticket at Queen's Park Rangers. I sit, you know, in
the in the stands, surrounded by working class British people,
and we argue.

Speaker 1 (01:37:28):
About what sport do they play there?

Speaker 2 (01:37:31):
Football?

Speaker 1 (01:37:31):
Okay, what we call or what I want to make
sure it's not cricket.

Speaker 2 (01:37:36):
No, no, no, no, I never. I mean I I
enjoy I love explaining baseball to an Englishman and cricket
to an American. That's a real bliss for me if
I get that opportunity. Somebody says, please explain. Oh great, okay,

(01:37:57):
sit down. How long have you got.

Speaker 1 (01:38:00):
Okay forgetting the personal? What do we know? England left
the EU the health system, although national is struggling. United States,
everybody who lives here says, greatest country in the world.
So many people don't have passports, haven't been anywhere. Okay,

(01:38:23):
certain things we take for granted. I mean, landline's not
really a thing anymore, but it used to be. You
can get a landline right away in America. You might
have to wait weeks in London. What can you tell
us about the difference of the countries in the American
perception of England relative to what it's really like.

Speaker 2 (01:38:44):
Well, it's much less different than it used to be.
I mean, in the sixties, I was startled by so
many things. The biggest thing I was startled by was
how little possessions people had. Nobody had a car, very
few people had a car, very few people had refrigerators,

(01:39:05):
you know. I remember I, you know, one day in
my early in my first day in England, I spent
the night in a young lady's apartment and in the morning,
she said, you want a cup of tea and she
boiled the water with an electric kettle that she plugged
into the wall, and then she opened the window. It

(01:39:27):
was wintertime, and she took the milk bottle off the
window ledge because she didn't have a fridge. And I
was kind of amazed, you know. And people would get together.
One person had a television set. We all got together
to watch something that was important, to watch, some television.

(01:39:48):
But it seemed that it didn't actually make people less happy,
and quite the contrary, and in fact, there was a
there was a sort of you know, I was kind
of judged mental about the way a lot of British
people accepted their lot in those days, back in the
sixties or the seventies. If you were working class, if

(01:40:11):
you had working class parents, you were going to be
working class. That's it. That was a deal. No movement
up or down, and I thought that wasn't very good.
But when I would fly to California from London and
run into a lot of people in California who were

(01:40:31):
bitterly disappointed with their failure to become stars, you know,
I would think to myself, huh, actually, those Brits seem
a bit happened in these people.

Speaker 1 (01:40:44):
Okay, so let's go back to the book for a second.
You break it down basically by countries slash regions. Can
you tell my audience what those varying countries are.

Speaker 2 (01:40:55):
Well, I start with South Africa because of Graceland, because
of all that. You know, there's so much not just Graceland.
As I say in the book, Graceland is not the
biggest Zulu related record of the twentieth century. The biggest
Zulu related record is A Lion Sleeps Tonight, whim Away,

(01:41:15):
all of that and the story behind that. So it's
a good way to sort. That's very familiar, the most
familiar sort of piece of world music you can have.
So that's the way. The door in then chapter two
is Cuba, and the way that the incredible difference. This
island just a few miles off the Florida Coast has

(01:41:39):
a completely different rhythmic culture than America and why that
is and how that has over years shaped American music.
Chapter three is Jamaica, which is right next to Cuba
but couldn't be more different, completely isolated, weird, inward looking poor,

(01:42:04):
never prosperous, and suddenly bingo in nineteen seventy five, reggae
is equal to salsa as a kind of force in
the world. Chapter four is Indian music, the way it
influenced everybody from the Beatles to John Coltrane, and then

(01:42:30):
going back fifteen hundred years to the exodus west of
a whole caste of Indians that became known in the
Western Europe when they got there as Gypsies, and how
they completely transformed European music. Chapter five is Brazil, everything

(01:42:53):
leading up to Bosonova and how that had a huge
effect around the world. Chapter six Argentina and the tango
and one of you know, my favorite little anecdotes in
the book, the way the great tango singer Carlos Gardell
told this young thug who came to one of his

(01:43:15):
concerts in New York that he should straighten up and
focus on his music instead of getting in trouble with
the police and then grabbed a passing NBC executive and
asked if he could let the kid try out for
the Amateur Hour, and they did, and of of course
Frank Sinatra, and that's how Frank Sinatra was unleashed upon

(01:43:36):
the world. Chapter seven is Eastern Europe and all this
classical music and Bulgarian women's choirs and the politics of it,
and how threatening that was to Stalin, and the whole
way that the Communists responded to authenticity and music, and

(01:43:57):
how that shaped music that came out of that part
of the world. Chapter eight is the rest of Africa,
north of South Africa and people like Usundur and Fela
Kuti and the Ethiopics music of Ethiopia and Manudebango and

(01:44:21):
all these stories. There's so many great characters and the politics,
the way the politics mixes in. And then chapter nine.
You know, when I first started the book, I had
this vision of chapter nine in which I would talk
about each of the receiving countries. I've talked about all
the sending countries. I'd have big sections on the difference

(01:44:43):
between the way America and Britain and Germany and France,
all responded to music from abroad. But by the time
I got there, I had a publisher saying, come on,
are we ever going to put this book out? And
I was exhausted. And I'd also covered most of that
in each of the chapters, in the individual stories, and

(01:45:05):
I realized that my idea for that was kind of bogus,
or at least not going to work. And so I
did more of a kind of impressionistic scattershot through the
centuries of Western culture and how it absorbs and deals

(01:45:25):
with the arrival of music with a foreign accent on
its shores. And I tell the terrible, sad story of
the birth of auto tune and the birth of the
drum machine. And that's it. That's the book.

Speaker 1 (01:45:46):
So in writing the book, did you just write from
memory and r own experiences or did you have to
do research?

Speaker 2 (01:45:53):
I did a huge amount of research. If you see
the bibliography in the back of the book, there's pages
and pages and pages. And it was fun. I mean,
I read all these great books, many of them are
by academics, and they're quite dry in the way that
they lay everything out. And so in a way, I

(01:46:16):
felt my role became a digest, like a reader's digest.
You know, I was reading all these thick books about
tango and about Afro Cuban culture and about how to
tune the kora, and you know, these things and taking
the best bits, the most fun, the most character full,

(01:46:40):
you know, the most the easiest to connect to music
people might have heard, and writing them in them as
entertaining a way as I could.

Speaker 1 (01:46:51):
Okay, now the landscape is who change. It's certainly at
this late date we have these streaming services and close
to every country in the world. Two things have happened. One,
the share of the overall marketplace of both the UK
and the US has decreased. And you've also, specifically in

(01:47:13):
the US seen other genres that in the history had
a small footprint have become much larger, like Latin bad
money in the UK, I mean in the US. Do
you think this cross pollination will continue such that roots music,
world music will have a greater profile going forward.

Speaker 2 (01:47:38):
I think it will definitely continue. I think it's an
interesting and hopefully maybe positive thing. My caveat my asterisk
is the machine. You know, one of the things that
always really startled me was how in the world of rap,

(01:48:01):
for example, Jay z in the early days. You know,
I believe, I'm not. I don't have chapter and verse
on this, but my understanding is that most of his
beats were created by an English guy who was went

(01:48:23):
to I don't know, Marlborough or something public school, boy
private school, as we say in America, that somehow this
process of the modern way of recording is built around technology.
It is built around people who can create beats with

(01:48:44):
a computer and sampling and grabbing stuff from here and there.
And I mean, Burn, a boy from Nigeria, has become
much huger than any than CUTI ever was around the world.
But you know, most of his records I don't find

(01:49:06):
very interesting because to me, music lives in the rhythm,
and when the rhythm sounds mechanical, it doesn't sound as
interesting to me. But then I saw burna boy on
tiny desk concert and he was terrific, and he seemed
me playing just really like just playing with his band,

(01:49:26):
and that was great. Where this music goes, how much
it continues, I still have this prejudice or this belief
that rhythm is the heart and soul of music. And
so if all this fusion that came about in the

(01:49:52):
nineties and the naughties that out grew out of the
world music movement. Most of it, to me was uninteresting
because they took the exotic part was the melody, the
singing some great player on some instrument from some culture,
but they put it over a mid Atlantic pulse generated

(01:50:14):
often by a machine, and to me it's the other
way around. I'm much You know Evil papase Off the
Bulgarian wedding band that I recorded, He's an incredible musician.
He has an fantastic drummer. I don't care what kind
of melody he plays. He can play a Bulgarian melody,
he can play when the Saints go marching in. But
if he has that eleven eight weird ball can beat

(01:50:39):
being played by these incredible musicians he has. That's exciting.
That's the kind of fusion I like. And so when
I hear this popular music, I mean, it's great that
the world is getting smaller and in many ways, but
I do think that for me, music that is specific

(01:50:59):
to a vow or a town or a coastline is
always much more interesting than music that is homogenized, that
is a blend of lots of things, Which isn't to
say that any music is pure. No music is pure.
Everything is influenced by its neighbors, by sailors who come

(01:51:21):
into port, by things people hear over the radio, by
records they buy, and that process has just gotten speeded up.
But I do think that eccentricity and local difference is
still the most exciting thing for me about music. And
so when I hear beats that sound the same, whether

(01:51:42):
they come from Hong Kong or Cartagena or Baltimore or Hamburg,
when they're similar, rhythms, even if the language is being sung,
are different to me.

Speaker 1 (01:51:58):
You know, it's okay, okay, But everything you're saying is interesting.
But I got to ask question rhythm, viz A the
melody now more than ever. And you say you're not
following this closely, But I think you're aware, at least
from a thirty thousand foot perspective, a lot of the
hit music today has little melody.

Speaker 2 (01:52:21):
Okay, Well, I was very gratified. About six months ago
there was an article in the New York Times, and
I've been saying this. I've been boring people at dinner
parties for twenty years or ten years anyway, with my
rant about melody. You know, to me modern most melody

(01:52:44):
that you hear singer songwriters, pop tunes, you know, there's
so little what I there's a term that I just
seemed like a logical to the right term to use,
melodic amplitude. There was such narrow bands for the melodies.

(01:53:05):
Melodies would go up and down by a half tone,
maybe a full tone. Cactus Tree by Joni Mitchell, you know,
Cactus Tree. You know, octave leaps. Nobody does that anymore,
you know, it's like and to me it's who knows
what the real reason is. But you could imagine that

(01:53:28):
people are so I don't know, constrained and nervous that
they don't dare take an octave leap, like Jonny Mitchell,
you know that it's too much of an adventure to
leap more than one note or two notes at a time.

(01:53:48):
And so yes, I agree that melody in modern popular
music is very often startlingly flat somehow.

Speaker 1 (01:54:05):
Okay, we got a number of things. We got the melody,
we got the rhythm, we got electronic. But I think
we're gonna close it for here. We'll have to do
another podcast where we get into some of the well
worn successes with Nick Drake and Richard Thompson try to
get in some nook and crannies the other people haven't.
I could talk to you all day, Joe, but I

(01:54:26):
want to thank you so much for taking this time
with my audience.

Speaker 2 (01:54:30):
Well, thank you for tolerating my technological deficiencies occasionally. And
it's been a great pleasure. And I'm glad to see
the sun is shining in southern California out here window.

Speaker 3 (01:54:43):
Absolutely until next time.

Speaker 1 (01:54:45):
This is Bob Leftstats
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Bob Lefsetz

Bob Lefsetz

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