November 4, 2025 • 60 mins
Joe Boyd has spent more than six decades as a producer, label executive, and writer whose influence extends far beyond the studio. From producing Nick Drake's luminous folk albums to working with Fairport Convention, Pink Floyd, and R.E.M., Boyd has shaped some of the most enduring recordings in modern music history.
But Joe Boyd isn't just a behind-the-scenes architect of sound—he's also a chronicler of the music he loves. In his 2007 memoir, White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s, he offered an insider's perspective on a transformative era, while his latest book, And the Roots of Rhythm Remain: A Journey Through Global Music, published in 2024, takes readers across continents in search of the traditions that continue to shape contemporary sound. From Cuba to Mali, from Brazil to Bulgaria, Boyd traces the connections that bind global music together and celebrates the artists who keep these traditions alive.
On today’s episode Justin Richmond talks to Joe Boyd about working with famed Warner Brothers CEO Mo Ostin in the ‘60s. He also talks about the exhaustive research he did in writing his latest book and why he decided to pinpoint three specific Global regions as the genesis for all popular music. And Joe recalls how he came to produce the seminal 1973 documentary on Jimi Hendrix.
You can hear a playlist of some of our favorite songs from Joe Boyd HERE.
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 (00:15):
Pushkin. Joe Boyd spent more than six decades as a producer,
label executive and writer whose influence extents far beyond the studio.
From producing Nick Drake's luminous folk albums to working with
Fairport Convention, Pink Floyd, and Ram, Boyd has shaped some
of the most enduring recordings in modern music history. But
(00:38):
Joe Boyd isn't just a behind the scenes architect of sound.
He's also a chronicler of the music he loves. In
a two thousand and seven memoir, White Bicycles Making Music
in the nineteen Sixties, he offered an insider's perspective on
that transformative era of nineteen sixties British music that was
so well received readers were clamoring for him to write
a follow up about the nineteen seventies. He wrestled with
(00:59):
that idea for a little bit, and then pivoted to
the voluminous new book and The Roots of Rhythm Remain,
a journey through global music, published just last year. This
tom takes across continents in search of the traditions that
continue to shape contemporary sound. From Cuba Tomali, from Brazil
to Bulgaria, Boyd traces the connections that bind global music
(01:20):
together and celebrates the artists who keep these traditions alive.
On today's episode, I talked to Joe Boyd about working
with famed Warner Brothers CEO Moostin in the sixties. He
also talks about the exhaustive research he did in writing
his latest book and why he decided to pinpoint three
specific global regions as the genesis for all popular music,
and Joe recalls how he came to produce the Seminole
(01:42):
nineteen seventy three documentary on Jimi Hendrix, one of my
personal favorite films of all time. This is broken record,
real musicians, real conversations. Here's my conversation with Joe Boyd.
(02:03):
There were a number of Americans to get out to
London in the sixties that you weren't alone in that,
but it does seem to one of the rare ones
that stayed as long as he did not seem to
come back. Did you ever move back to the States?
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Yeah, yeah, I lived in la for a few years
in the early seventies. I was back and forth La
to London for another few years, and then I was
back and forth to New York for a bit In
the nineties and the noughties. But I've always I mean,
basically except for a couple of years when I was
(02:38):
working for Warner Brothers in la in the early seventies.
I've always had a flat in London since nineteen sixty five.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
I want to kind of toggle between your career, not
as a writer, not as part of the book, also
the book. So the theme of the book, because you mentioned
Warner Brothers, can you tell me about that mo austin
early seventies, Warner Brothers culture and how you got involved.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
One day in nineteen sixty eight, I guess it was
early sixth on a kind of willful impulse, I called
up Bill Graham and I said I wanted to come
see him, and he said okay, and gave me a
time and a date, and I jumped on a plane,
went to San Francisco and booked the Incredible String Band
(03:27):
to open for the Jefferson Airplane because I thought they
shouldn't be in folk clubs, they should be opening for
the Jefferson Airplane. And while I was there, I met
a guy called Andy Wickham. And Andy Wickham was an
Englishman who had once worked for Andrew Luke Oldham I think,
and he'd somehow migrated to California around the time of
(03:51):
the Monterey Pop Festival, and he was now working at
Warner Brothers. And we hung out and we spent some
time together in San Francisco, and he said, you got
to come to Burbank and meet Moe. And so I
flew down to burber Bank. I met Mo and we
(04:13):
just got along great. And Joe Smith and and Andy Wickham,
who passed away recently, ended up being a questionable guy.
I mean, he was one of those people who revealed
him his sort of slightly racist and slightly aristocratic and
(04:34):
snobbish sides as he grew older. But at that time
he was the one who introduced Moe. And Moe and Joe,
you know, came from Sinatra, from Top forty Radio, from
these other worlds. And Andy introduced them to the Grateful Dead,
(04:55):
He introduced them to Joni Mitchell, he introduced them to
Van Morrison, and he opened those doors for them somehow.
Moe just, you know, the same charm that worked with
Natra's wise guys, worked with the Laurel Canyon guys. And
Moe was just a sweet guy. I mean, he was
(05:18):
tough and He didn't always reveal how tough he was
unless he was pushed. But his charm was such and
he had that wisdom to let you know. He surrounded
himself with Lenny Warrenker and Russ Titlement and you know,
all this this kind of a and R team Van
(05:40):
Dyke Parks, and he let them be the ones who
judged the music. The record company existed in a kind
of old warehouse across the street from the studio, and
they kept adding people and adding offices, and so it
was completely crowded. It was like you had three feet
(06:02):
and then there was the next office with a little
divider and you went to go have a pee, and
you're standing next to Moe or Joe or the head
of sales or the head of you know. And so
there was there was so much communication. Everybody talked to
everybody else all the time. And then of course, you know,
they ended up selling ten million Neil Young records and
(06:24):
ten million Joni Mitchell records and got so much money
that they said, oh, let's build a new headquarters. And
I think by seventy seven or seventy six or something
like that, they built that new building down the street
and everybody was like thirty yards from each other, with
(06:45):
padded carpets, deep pile carpets in between, and the atmosphere
was never the same, and the record company I don't
think was ever the same again. You know, I got
I started doing some stuff. I produced a Jeff and
Maria Muldor record I produced. I sold them of John
and Beverly Martin record, neither of which sold. But for
(07:06):
some reason they liked me, and I think there was
also it's a complicated story, but they didn't have a
European operation, and so they decided the way that they
would enter Europe was by buying Island Records. And I
helped introduce them to Chris Blackwell because I was working
with Chris in London, and Chris, in his inimitable casual
(07:31):
Caribbean way, kind of fucked them around. I mean, he
just didn't take it all very seriously, and they did,
and they went out on a limb to make him
a very serious offer, and he never really responded, and
so they got furious and they offered Chrysalis, who was
(07:57):
making records for Ireland. They offered them a label deal
to move to Warner Brothers, and they went out to
get revenge. This was most tough side and he went
out to get revenge to take stuff away from Blackwell
from Ireland, and later they became great friends again. So
(08:17):
this was a brief period of vengefulness and part of
that was to steal me. And so they offered me
the job of music director for the film company. And
I was burnt out, you know. I had been struggling
so much to keep Witch Season afloat, and we never
(08:39):
sold enough records, and I was just getting more and
more in debt. And they offered me a big salary.
And Chris may have sensed the edge in this offer,
but he couldn't have been nicer. He said, it's a
great opportunity. You'll kick yourself if you don't take it.
I'll pay off your debts and look after your artists
(09:02):
and all that, and so go with my blessings. And
so I went to California in nineteen sid one and
became the so called director of music services for Warner
Brothers Films.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
And so you was sort of in that role the
liaise between the music and the film, so Warner Brothers
music would end up in Warner Brothers films.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
That was one of the jobs. I discovered that my
main job, as far as most of the directors and
producers were concerned, they'd call me up and say get
me John Williams, and you know, so it got kind
of tedious, but I had some fun, you know, Stanley Kubrick.
I'd worked on Clockwork Orange, I worked on Deliverance, the
(09:51):
banjo saying with dueling banjo's that was me? And who
played that again?
Speaker 1 (09:58):
Who played that banjo part?
Speaker 2 (09:59):
Eric Weisberg, because it should have been Bill Keith. Bill
Keith was the guy. He was the city billy guy
who'd played with Bill Monroe. I knew him from Harvard
Square the best. And what John Boorman wanted was doling banjos,
(10:20):
but he wanted it slow, fast, minor key, major key
as a soundtrack, as a score, and Bill Keith would
have been perfect. But Keith was on tour. He'd met
a girl. He wanted to go hang out with her
in Ireland. He said, how much are you paying? I
said two thousand bucks. He said, get Weisberg, and so
(10:42):
I got Weisburg and Weisberg made a fortune, you know, basically,
and then But what happened then was that I sort
of maneuvered my way into producing a Jimmy Hendrix documentary
called Jimmy Hendrix, who came out in seventy three, And
when that began to be really a full time thing,
(11:03):
I said to Warner Brothers, I said, listen, let me
find you a successor. And I went on. I thought
that making the Jimi Hendrix film made me a film producer,
but that was delusional.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
I think any Hendrix fan, that's the thing that they
need to see. If there's anything that they need to see,
that is the thing that they should see.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
You know, it's not available online. You can't stream it.
I think there's secondhand DVDs available on Amazon, but nothing else.
And I've screened it during my last trip to America
to promote the book and the Roots of Them Remain,
I did an event up the Hudson River Valley and
(11:44):
Sagerates and the local cinema. The night before my event,
they showed the Jimi Hendrix film and it got me
to introduce it and that was great.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
It's amazing, by the way, how Fay I can't remember
her last name, but his friend face. She's like completely
just the same Faine prigeon Faine prigein Thank You she
passed recently.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
Yeah, she passed recently. She was fantastic.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
She is just so vibranting in that thing. It's it's unbelievable.
She's almost as charismatic as Jimmy in the movie, you know.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
Yeah, yeah, and you know she had I don't know enough.
I mean, somebody, it's really a shame. I don't know
what's happened to it, but somebody I heard of somebody
doing interviews with her to do a kind of biography.
And evidently she was, you know, a friend or a
girlfriend of like ten of the top musicians of the
(12:41):
seventies and eighties. You know, she knew everybody, and everybody
adored her because she never and she never jibed anybody.
She told it like it was she was. And no,
I mean, there's so much in her interview. There was
a moment, my fa One of my favorite moments in
the movie was her describing when she and Jimmy were
(13:05):
living in a cold water flat like fifth floor and
Harlem fit for a walk up and she gives him
some money to go out and get some groceries or something,
and he disappears and he comes back and he hadn't
got any groceries, he's got an LP and she tries
to get the LP and finally she grabs it and says,
(13:26):
Bob Dylan, Who the fuck is Bob Vilan?
Speaker 1 (13:32):
So good? What was the process of making that?
Speaker 2 (13:36):
It was so weird because basically, all during Jimmy's life,
over the last few years of his life when he
was famous, everybody wanted to film him, and people were
constantly coming up and wanting to film him. And Mike Jeffries,
who was his manager, who was kind of thuggish guy
from Newcastle, former club owner in Newcastle, he would say, yeah, sure,
(14:00):
here he wants some lights. Here's where you plug in
the sound. Here's you want an electrical extension corved you
know you want if all areas pass here work out.
And then they kept saying, well, you know, we have
this release form that we need you to sign. Oh,
we'll talk about that later. And then when they'd filmed Jimmy,
they would come to him and try to get him
to sign the release and he said, now I've got
(14:22):
my own form, and he would give him give them
the form which gave him fifty one percent ownership of
the film, and so nobody would sign it, and so
all this footage never got released during Jimmy's lifetime. After
his father appointed this wonderful guy called Leo Branton, who
(14:45):
was an attorney, LA attorney who represented Miles Davis, nat
Cole Dorothy Dandridge. You know, he was an African American,
but he was also civil rights attorney. He defended Angela Davis.
And in fact, we were making the film during the
trial of Angela Davis up in the Bay Area, and
(15:09):
they had every Friday off at the trial. The trial
would go Monday, Tuesday, munch a Thursday, and Leo would
fly back from Oakland to Burbank and would come straight
to Warner Brothers to see what we had done in
the previous seven days with the film, and we'd show
(15:30):
him a new scene or whatever, and he would he
wasn't that interested in Jimmy's music. He was a Miles
Davis guy. And he would then do his imitation of
the judge, the prosecutor Angela Davis in the trial. And
we spent the whole time just sitting there listening to
(15:51):
him to tell us the inside story of the trial.
And I went to Thanksgiving dinner at his house and
sat next to Angela Davis, and you know, that was
what was going on sort of the background, because because
what happened was that when he got the job to
(16:12):
represent the estate, he discovered there was all this footage
that had never been seen. And Jefferies was now powerless
because he'd represented Jimmy, who was deceased. Now was a
family the heirs could appoint wherever they wanted, and they
appointed Leo, and he came to see Mo because Jimmy
(16:35):
was signed to Warner Prize at the time in America.
And then Mo took and walked him across the street
to see me and Ted Ashley, who was the head
of the film company. And out of that meeting came
the idea, well, at the first originally, just Joe, why
don't you have a look at all this footage and
(16:57):
see what you think of it and see if you
think there's a film there?
Speaker 1 (17:00):
So he's asking you.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
Yeah, so he asked me. That was my job, you know,
I was the liaison between the two sides of the street.
And so I said, yeah, and we could film interviews
with this and this and this, and we could put
this together, and they okay, you do it.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Joe. Did Moe have much of a relationship with Hendrix.
I mean did I mean, I know they met backstage
at Monterey I believe right when.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
Yeah, I don't think there was much Jimmy, you know,
his relationship. I think Mike Jeffries worked very hard to
keep Jimmy away from MO. You know, he wanted everything
to go through him. And also initially the deal was
through Track Records in England, and so it was like
(17:49):
he signed to Track for the world and then Track
licensed it to and then at a certain point they paid
some money to get Track out of the middle.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
Yeah, and the roots of Rhythm remain is It's an
astounding book. I have to imagine this idea came to
you many decades ago.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
You know, I always liked to write. I mean I
always wrote the press releases for Hannibal Records, and I
wrote some articles, and then I started doing some book
reviews in the early two thousands, and I just thought, yeah,
I'll write a book. I started writing a biography, and
(18:34):
I thought, you know, like when I was born and
please stop. Oh no, no, that's not right. It can't
be about me. It's got to be about the sixties.
And so I wrote My Bicycles. You know, focused on
this decade because I felt I had something to say
(18:54):
about the decade. And you know, I've been around for
a lot of important moments in the decade, and I
enjoyed doing it a lot. And then, you know, I
started going out and doing interviews and book readings and stuff,
and people will come up to me and say, so,
when are you going to do the book about the seventies,
And I said, you must be joking. You know, the
(19:17):
seventies was not fun for me. I didn't have a
good seventies. I don't have anything interesting to say about it.
But I liked riding my bicycles, and I liked I
liked the fact that I was no longer was I
looking after the career of musicians who rarely did what
I wanted them to. But I was looking after somebody
(19:39):
who did everything I wanted him to me, you know.
And I thought, yeah, I'll write another book. That's what
I'll do. I'll write another book. And very quickly it
came to me what I would do. I guess there
were a couple of kernels of ideas that had been
festering in my brain a little bit, and I would say,
(20:03):
there's three that really pushed me off the edge of
that ski jump so that I had no choice but
to keep going. One was what I put in the
preface to the book, which is the realization of how
different Cuban and American rhythmic sensibilities are and try to
(20:27):
get to the bottom of that, because I knew enough
to know that it had something to do with history
and with slavery, but it was worth digging into. And
I had also read Ned Sublett's book by that time,
Cuba and Its Music, which is a great book, and
it really kind of opened my eyes to the depth
(20:51):
of what you could discover when you dug into a
musical culture like Cuba. And then also at the time,
I'm way back in the late eighties when Graceland was
so popular, everybody thought there was a controversy about Paul Simon,
you know, not respecting the boycott. And I know a
(21:13):
lot about South Africa. I've been there a couple of times.
I hadn't spent a lot of time there, but I'd
worked with a lot of South African musicians. I produced
to play a kind of anti apartape musical and so
I knew a lot about South Africa. I read a
lot about South Africa, and I knew that what people
thought was the controversy wasn't really the controversy. And I
(21:36):
saw all these Paul Simon fans buying Lady Smith Black
Mambaza records and buying Machlatini and the Machatella Queens records,
which was great. I mean, because it's great music, it's
worth those records are very much worth buying. But everybody
felt virtuous about buying them and that they were somehow
(21:58):
supporting Mandela by buying them. And I knew that they
were Zulus, and the Zulus were kind of the enemy
of Mandela, that supporting Zulu culture was not the same
as supporting the anc In fact, it was quite different
and even opposed. And I thought, well, that's something that
(22:22):
people don't know that I could tell them. And then
I also thought about my time working in Bulgaria, and
you know, I'd love those choir records, you know, the
Mysterio a bulgar and the Kutev Ensemble. And I was
always a bit head scratching, you know that those Bulgarian
(22:45):
national ensembles were so great, and the rest of the
Eastern European state ensembles were a kitsch and kind of
weird and boring and you know, like acrobatic and what's
that all about? And then I had I talked to
(23:05):
Philip Kutev's daughter, who told me how much the Russians
hated her father and why they hated him because of
he used the authentic peasant voice in the choir and
how Stalin was trying to get the you know, completely
obliterate pleasant culture. And I thought, well, that's interesting too.
(23:29):
So these three things, these three ideas, the Cuban rhythms,
South African Zulu versus a NC, and Russians hating Bulgarian choirs.
There's stories in here that I would have fun telling people.
(23:49):
And I figured if these stories exist in Eastern Europe
and Cuba and South Africa, they probably exist. And I
knew enough about other cultures to know that there was
probably some more fun stuff to dig up there. And
so I just got started. And that took me seventeen years,
and realize it's going to take that long.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
We'll be back with more from Joe Boyd. After the
break in the history of the nineteenth and twentieth century
kind of does seem to be region to region, this
sort of repression and this sort of cultural movement bubbling
up from people to to counter state repression with art,
(24:38):
and your book really wonderfully tells that story. I wasn't
expecting that to be narratively done so well in your book.
But then there's also the way in which these cultures
then shared. You know, all of the all of the
music moved around the globe and then back again. And
so music from Africa would go to the Caribbean and
(24:59):
then back to Africa and then come to the States.
And there's this cultural exchange happening amongst cultures and countries
and various forms of music that we don't often think about.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Yeah, everything, I mean the take one of the takeaways
I hope people would get from the book is there
is no pure culture. There is no pure musical culture.
For sure, it's all mixed. It's all a blend. As
you said, it bubbles up from underneath, and underneath in
(25:36):
a way are two groups, Africans and Roma. I just
sort of realized, and I've realized almost more after I
finished the book and I've been touring and talking about
it and doing Q and a's and things like that.
One of the things I've realized is and I mentioned
(25:58):
in the book, but maybe I might have if I
went back and rewrote the book, I might make more
of a theme of it is the fact that going
way back, certainly to the beginning of that night eighteenth century,
what defines modernity is how African it is or how
Roma it is. You know, by the late nineteenth century, Cakewalk,
(26:24):
the Grizzly Bear, you know, the Charleston all that became
the dominant force of young for young people to dance to.
And if you weren't dancing to that sort of rhythm,
you were square. And if you go back a little
(26:44):
further to Gerta and the Romantics, who was the big
musical revolutionary list, you know, he was this matinee Idol
who toured across Europe with fainting females, and he modeled
his whole performance style on a roma musician that he
saw that was famous in Hungary when he was a kid.
And this flamboyance, this joy, this kind of decorate, taking
(27:08):
the note written on the page and decorating them and
playing them with trills and playing them with accents and
playing them in a crazy new way. That's Roma. It
defined what was new and what was shiny and what
was attractive to young people. You know, that's one of
the problems that European folk music has had, you know,
(27:32):
in the more recent the last fifty years, has been
that it lacks any kind of African feeling rhythmically and
therefore is consigned to being square.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
You about it be English folk music in there's an
example for me discography that kind of illustrates the way
in which a group of people sometimes learn about themselves
best from outsiders. You know, outsiders can sort of reaffirm
your sense of who you are. And it's in this
sort of this example from the Fairport convention.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
Yeah, convention.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
It's not until nineteen sixty nine and they discover song
A Sailor's Life that they really embrace English folk music.
Prior to this they sort of are working more from
an American tradition. And maybe you can talk a bit
about that, because I think.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
It's Yeah, when I first heard Fairport, I was very
impressed with their musicianship. The upside was how good they
were in particularly Richard Thompson on their instruments. The downside
was they kept singing, you know, Richard Farina, Eric Anderson
and Phil Oakes and to be fair, Bob some very
(28:48):
good Bob Dylan songs. But I thought, why are these
English kids so wrapped in this music that I kind
of left America to get away from No, I mean,
I just would never that sold on the white middle
class singer songwriter idea, and so then they added Sandy
Denny to the group. And Sandy had been around the
(29:11):
folk clubs for a few years and she had never
been a songwriter. Before, she had been a balladeer. She
sang traditional Scottish Irish English ballads and she would play
these ballads to them in the van when they would
go to gigs, and little by little it kind of
got through to them. And so then they did that
(29:33):
track You mentioned Sailor's Life, but they just still thought
of it as one string to their bow. You know.
One thing that they did along with other things. Richard
and Sandy were writing songs that was a new aspect,
new dimension of their music. And then they had this
terrible crash and the drummer, Martin Lamble, was killed and
(29:58):
a girl, Jeanie the Taylor, was killed as well, and
they were devastated and they thought they would break up.
They would never play again, and then when they decided
to reform, they wanted to do something completely new, so
they would never play the songs that they played with
Martin on drums with a new drummer. That was the idea,
(30:21):
and right at that time out came music from Big Pink,
and everybody, all musicians in London were just gobsmacked, as
the English say, by music from Big Pink. And again
there's a little outsider element there because they're Canadians, but
still what they were doing was a fresh approach to
(30:46):
a very American form of music and building something unbelievably original,
appealing virtuasak all this, you know, with that record, And
in a way they were following on from Bob Dylan
at Newport in nineteen sixty five more than Bob Dylan was, yeah,
(31:11):
and doing something really rich and interesting. And so in
a way it hit the Fairport like a rebuke. Like
you English boys from Muswell Hill, you think you can
play some American stuff, you know, is how you want
to reinvent yourself after the crash, forget about it. This
(31:33):
is defining that moment. And so they really went to
try and do with British traditional music. What the band
was doing with American traditional music. And they were so
lucky because they found well a lot they were clever.
They found a drummer in Dave Masseox who was not
(31:57):
a rock drummer. He was a jazz drummer. He was
a dance band drummer, and he found the dance rhythms
in all the songs that they wanted to play. The
record is just comes alive, you know. Because of that
mix and adding Dave Swarbrick, who was a very wonderful
(32:18):
traditional fiddle player into the band, made this record that
changed everything in Britain in the folk scene anyway. Legion Leaf, Yeah,
he already had a huge.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
Impact, and he brings in the rhythms that you know,
to your point where English folk music could be seen
a square, he sort of starts to bring in some
rhythms that maybe help you.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
Yeah, he does it with jazz chops.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:44):
At that time, I don't think Legion and Leaf was
at the top of the list of the hippist records
on the charts, but it was a lot hipper than
any other folk record at that time, and it captured
the imagination of a certain portion of the audience.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
It's just fascinating to me that this group that we
think of as a consummate English folk group starts because
they're sort of doing American folk music. In the process,
we discover the English folk tradition. Canadian group does Americana
better than and the American possibly could, and then forces
(33:31):
Fairport Convention to confront who they you know, their own roots,
and who they are as people.
Speaker 2 (33:37):
And this process repeats and repeats. I mean, one of
the things I talk about in the book is that
back and forth was Fela and James Brown. Yeah, you
know that somebody said about when James Brown's extended jams,
you know, extended dance tracks began making inroads. There's a
(34:00):
woman writer who I quoted the book saying those records
told us that we were really from somewhere else, that
Africa was really over there, that there was something different
about African American culture. And then Fela, you know, who
(34:22):
had been watching as James Brown imitators spread all across
West Africa, people imitating James Brown, very slavishly, trying to
sound exactly like James Brown. And then he came to
La and somehow that exposure to black panthers to the
(34:43):
music to the culture. He went back to Nigeria and
created something that was a bit James brownish but very Nigerian. Yeah,
and so that back and forth happens, you know, not
just between the band and Pairful Convention. And by the way,
(35:03):
there was a lovely footnote to the Pairful Convention story
that many years later later, an English singer who I
know was playing at the festival and he met the
guys from Los Lobos and they said, oh, do you
know Richard Thompson in the Federal Convention. He said, yeah,
I know those guys. They're friends of mine. He said, well,
when you see them, tell them that if it hadn't
(35:27):
been for Legion Leif, we would have still been a
heavy metal band from East la whoa that it was
Legion Leif which convinced Los Lobos to dig into their
own cultural background.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
You would never listen to Los Lobos here, Legion Leaf
that is.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
But it's just a conceptual thing. It's like like that,
oh oh, maybe that's what we should do instead of
trying to sound like you know, def lepper.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's an additional wrinkle really in a
way to the James Brown Fela interplayed and if you
think about it, slave trade initiates from Africa in Cuba,
you get these African rhythms that start to form and influence,
(36:19):
you know, the music of Cuba. You get things like
the habanera you talk about, which is a Cuban rhythm,
Havana rhythm. Right, it comes to America likely i'd imagine
through New Orleans probably, yeah, and you get these these
(36:39):
rhythms that starts to influence early R and B music,
which would then of course influence James Brown, which would
then influence Fela fala Is also taking in Cuban music.
Happened to be a big fan of Cuban music, was
taken in those records directly as well. Comes to America,
picks up the James Brown goes back, you know, and
you sort of so you start to get this really
bizarre Africa influence being Cuba going back to Africa through
(37:05):
this James Brown connection in FLA, and it just becomes
like whoa, Like there's no there really are no boundaries,
there's no borders, there's yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:15):
Yeah. The whole extended jams of those James Brown records
from the late sixties early seventies were inspired by the
Montuno you know, the the scratch guitar parts are most
of them are clavi one two one two three, one
(37:37):
two one two three one two one two three. So
you have the the influence of Latin Africa, Cuban music
into America into Africa, meeting in the middle of the Atlantic.
And you know you're never going to get a simple diagram, no,
you know, a linear explanation of anything to do with
(38:00):
music culture. It's so whirls around in the wind. You know.
Speaker 1 (38:05):
It's yeah, whether history is of any trees or cultures
you considered including but ultimately didn't get didn't get to.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
Not really because basically the idea from the beginning was
the music we all know but we don't know about it.
So I love Rebetico, I love Fado, I love Northern
(38:38):
African music, Algerian, Moroccan, Egyptian. That would have made it
a different book. Okay, you know everything that's in this
book is suddenly said, oh yeah, I've got a couple
of Ravi Shankar records, I'll read that, or I took
those Latin dance lessons when I was in college. And
(39:00):
you know, I mean everything in there is hopefully got
some tangential relationship to people's ex experience, listening experience with music.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
How is digital distribution in the modern age aided and
or disrupted this global flow of music that you illustrate
in the book.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
Well, in some levels, of course, it aided it, you know.
I mean, my wife and I put together two playlists
of one hundred tracks each on Spotify and Apple. You
know that we can send out. I'm preparing a newsletter
that'll send this out to everybody. And that's great, you know.
(39:46):
And I can and in my research I was able
to dig things out on YouTube and Spotify and hear
things that I never would have been able to hear,
and to write about it in a way that probably
I couldn't have some in some cases. And I think
that a lot of the changes that have pulled music
(40:08):
away from the sort of thing that I like listening
to didn't happen because of digital distribution. I think, you know,
the traditional record companies that made so many great records
and pressed so much great vinyl, and that whole ecosystem
of vinyl records and jukeboxes, and you know that was
(40:33):
destroyed by the cassette first and foremost. So on the
one hand, you know, technology gives with one hand takes
away with the other, and the same thing has happened
with then happened with CDs and the death of vinyl,
the rebirth of vinyl. The biggest change has been the
(40:57):
rhythm machines. You know, in terms of the music that
I write about in this book, I write about music
that's made by people in a room in moment, playing
off each other. You know, rhythms that have been learned
from elders to youngers, that have been absorbed through culture.
(41:23):
And now you know, rhythms fly around the world very fast,
and you can, you know, you can, you know, sit
in Tokyo and hire somebody to give you a rhythm
track in Marseille, send it to you digitally and you
can relay a Japanese wrap track over it. It's just
(41:45):
a different thing. It's a whole different thing. And I
you know, people say, how far up to the present
did you write the book? I said, really, I wrote
from antiquity up to the drum machine, because that's where
everything changes and it becomes a different subject and not
one that I could really address and keep the book
(42:08):
under nine hundred pages.
Speaker 1 (42:09):
You know, there's another question I had, what do you
make of hip hop and sampling?
Speaker 2 (42:16):
You know, when I hear even with it like a
singer songwriter, and from the first bar, I know that
there's a clip track going on here. It's not that
you can even hear the percussion. It's just you can
hear the regularity. You can hear the absolute inflexible regularity
(42:40):
of the rhythm. And sometimes I'll hear very nice singing
and a very nice words. But I don't feel I
have to listen to it again. To me, I don't know.
This is just my crack pop theory. If music was
made in a moment where nobody knew what was going
to happen next, from beat to beat, minute to minute,
(43:03):
that sense of danger, that sense of adventure. You're not
just laying it down with your heads and earphones. You know,
with a click track somebody sent you and you're adding
a base part to something that already has a keyboard.
You know, if you're doing it live in a room
with musicians and nobody knows how it's going to turn out.
(43:24):
Is it going to be a good take or a
bad take. It's a collective adventure. Yeah, That feeling passed
through the technical process to the final product, whether it's
a streaming file or a CD or a cassette or
(43:45):
a vinyl or whatever it is, When the listener gets
some of that sense of adventure, it translates. It feels
more adventurous to listen to for me.
Speaker 1 (43:59):
Anyway, Well that's break and we'll come back with Joe Boyd.
There was a you know, and Prince famously used the
lind drum and various rhythm machines and drum machines. But
you know, he forgat which hip hop producer was now,
(44:22):
like we won't say a name because I don't remember
who it was, but a very famous hip hop producer.
At some point I had a conversation with Prince, and
Prince said, you know what you're making these Like, I know,
I used drum machines, but like you guys are only
producing on the computer. At least with the drum machine,
I would connect it to speaker. I was moving I
was moving air still with my drum machine. Yeah, you know,
(44:43):
I was moving air with it and then adding other
things on top of it. You're only creating in a computer,
and this is so this isn't music. There's no air
being moved at all. Yeah, that is a great example
of why Prince was great with the drum machine. And
it's sort of.
Speaker 2 (44:56):
Yeah, no, I mean, he's an exception that kind of
proves the role or whatever because he did. But I
have to say I went to see Prince one of
the early times she came to London. It wasn't in
an arena. It was in like a three thousand seat hall,
and I had a pretty good box seat overlooking the stage,
(45:17):
and I was kind of excited to see him, and
but you know, there were light effects and there was
things going on. Everybody had a little earbud and so
you knew that somewhere underneath the stage there was a
hard drive with something queueing, you know, like a pulse,
(45:39):
and it got a little boring, a little tiring after
a while, and then there was this moment where you
could tell that he it switched off and Prince just
got out his guitar and he started playing Purple Rain
I think or something, and he was completely free of
(46:00):
the click and it was just transcendent. You know, it's
just realiant. It was just fantastic. I went to Lee
years later. I went to see him at the O
two and I got so there's some weird connection. My
second cousin was playing keyboards in the opening act, and
so I got to go backstage. And then we went
(46:22):
to the after party, which the after show, which was
in a small theater behind the two and some of
the people in the back in the in the opening
band and some of Prince's guys. They all were out
on stage like hooking up their instruments, and Prince walked
out on stage and he went up to the microphone
(46:43):
and he looked around at the band. He looked around.
He said, let's do Stevie. And so they did an
hour long set of Stevie Wonder covers, just no click,
nothing rehearsed, just these guys, this great band and Prince
playing Superstition and you know, all this stuff. And then
(47:04):
they take a break and they said we'll be back,
and they come back like fifteen minutes later, and again
everybody goes their instruments. They're all sitting there waiting, what's
Prince is going to do? And he goes up to
the microphone. He says, Sly and they did an hour
of Sly covers and it was just fantastic, you know, yeah,
(47:30):
and I did I have to say, I loved it
more than the show, which was good.
Speaker 1 (47:37):
Oh than the two show, yeah, the O two show.
Speaker 2 (47:40):
Yeah, and I had a good seat and everything, but
it was you know, you could feel it was very programmed.
Everybody knew exactly when the cues were and the whites
did this, and the you know, and even though the
drummer was playing but he you know, everybody had had
had earbuds and you know, it was okay, it was
a good show, but that after party was never to
(48:04):
be forgotten.
Speaker 1 (48:06):
In hindsight. Who knew the unfocused the drummer you can
never get to pay attention or foot would be our
greatest asset all these years. But it's like, you know,
the drummer speeding up or change into it. It's like that, really,
you know.
Speaker 2 (48:23):
But you know, sometimes, yes, of course, there are times
when you as a producer, you tear your hair out
because the drummer can't keep time. But other times it
just picks up. The intensity sort of picks up in
a nanosecond just because something has happened, somebody's done something
(48:45):
on an instrument, and everything just gets that little more intense,
and everything just picks up a little bit. And also,
I mean and now there's some you know, Al Jackson
and some of those, you know, you can't define it.
It's just he lays back, he plays at the it's
the last moment that can the last nanosecond that can
(49:07):
still be considered the beat. Yeah, and it's and it's
got a sensuality to it that a lot of modern
references just are different. You know, it's not the same thing.
Speaker 1 (49:20):
And it's also the way that he's playing behind the
beat in relation to Duck Dunn or yeah, exactly on
playing bass or yeah, it's all or if you listen
to or the Carl it's it's the way, Yeah, the
piano players unique sense of rhythm against the bass player's
unique sense against Tito's against it's and it's just all
(49:42):
working against each other.
Speaker 2 (49:44):
If anyone ever says, well, I don't know, I don't
think you're I don't think you're right. I you know,
everybody should playing time, I would say Exhibit A would
be try a little tenderness. You know, the way it begins,
you know, it's just I think it's just a guitar
and then just a piano comes in and it's very
(50:07):
tenderative rhythmically, and everybody's just listening to Otis singing, and
then it grows and then it speeds up and it
gets more into you know, It's like the difference between
the feel at the end of that track and the
field at the beginning is a journey, unbelievable journey. And
(50:29):
it's you could just feel the room these guys just
looking at each other. Yeah, shall I do this now? Okay, Okay,
I'll try that. Okay. Oh wow, Otis just did something
and let's answer that. And you know, and it's just
so intense that track.
Speaker 1 (50:47):
I feel like reading the book thinking about that. I
love I've always loved to talk about it a bit,
just the way cultures interact, interplay that the great boogeyman
around this conversation these days is the word cultural appropriation.
On one head, I understand the critique. On another hand,
I hate that just the existence of the word could
(51:09):
put in to anyone thinking about borrowing this from that
culture or this thing from that culture, and then putting
it together into their own thing and making it something
completely unique.
Speaker 2 (51:20):
In the events that I do, Andrea County is usually
with me, and she's running the Spotify streamer. When we
want to have illustrations. I say, okay, let's go to
the heart of cultural appropriation. Here is the error moment
of cultural appropriation. And we play The Lions Sleeps Tonight,
(51:42):
and then we play wim Away. And you know, Pete
Seeger is a heroic figure who always was for the underdog,
and he was, you know, for fairness and you know,
but he was in an era when anything that you
didn't have a composer credit was considered public domain or
you know whatever. So he's getting money from wim Away.
(52:04):
He's getting a little bit more a bit of the
money from the Lions Tonight. And then I play boobe
which is the original. And it's fascinating to see to
feel the audience because they know Lions Sleeps Tonight by
the tokens that everybody knows that they know Pete Seeger
(52:28):
singing wom Away. That's familiar, or at least it's not surprising.
Then they hear him Boobey. It's so intense and so
profound and so rich and so individual, like this guy
Solomon Linda who improvises the hook that has made millions
(52:50):
and millions and millions of dollars for Disney. Now that
the fact that no money reached Solomon Linda is cultural appropriation.
That is cultural appropriation. There's a series now on in
a film on Netflix called The Lions Share about the
(53:11):
royalties of the Lions Sleep Tonight. It's fascinating, it's depressing,
it's shocking, but you know, you understand in a way.
It was a time before anybody had lawyers and thought
about all these kinds of things. But you know, cultures
(53:32):
all over the world, African cultures, African American cultures use
the Hawaiian guitar slide steel guitar. It was invented by
Joseph Kaikuku on Oahu Island in eighteen eighty seven. Yeah,
you know, nobody never paid him anything. I mean, and
(53:56):
to try and draw a border and say, now, okay,
whatever went before is one thing, but now we're going
to put up a fence. You can't actually listen to
this stuff and use that influence in your music because
that's appropriation. I think it's kind of ridiculous because nothing
(54:18):
is pure. There is no pure culture. And the story
of the Roma is some perfect example. I mean, they
went from South Asia all the way across the Middle East,
up into the Balkans, up into Europe. They changed European
music totally, and popular music all over the world wouldn't
(54:39):
be what it is today if it wasn't for the
African influence through Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Carolina, Virginia, Texas, Mississippi, Chicago,
you know whatever. And it always mixed. You know, the
root of it all started with African slaves being forced
(55:02):
to play for dances for the French did contra dance
and quadrilles. And you know, it wasn't just African music
they were playing. They were playing French music, but they're
playing it mixed in with their own culture. And it's
always been a mix. All music is a mix. So
(55:24):
how you actually begin to parse out where the line
can be drawn, I don't know. It's beyond me.
Speaker 1 (55:33):
We didn't talk about this, but you spend a lot
of time with some early blues Grates, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon,
Sisters at a Dar and on and on and on.
You also got to spend a lot of time in England.
Where do you in this particular era, where do you
land on the led Zeppelin?
Speaker 2 (55:53):
I mean I was never a big led Zeppelin fan,
but not because I objected to what they did with
no anymore than object to Eric Clapton. I mean who
I object to because of some of his public positions.
I don't have a problem with Eric Clapton playing Crossroads.
(56:14):
And you know, eventually, when the legal world woke up
to the values of copyrights and all these things, Robert
Johnson's sister, I think made you know, his family long
after he died. Of course, got a pretty decent payday,
(56:39):
a pretty good share of all those box sets that
CBS issued of Robert Johnson, and even I think some covers,
you know, by rock bands. And I know for a
fact that Muddy Waters and Rosetta and people loved the
fact that they found a white audience and the fact
(57:01):
that they found people who ate up their music and
loved their music. And you know, part of that would
be the simple fact of buying a ticket to go
see Rosetta. But you know, Chuck Berry stole from Rosetta.
Speaker 1 (57:17):
That's a good call, you.
Speaker 2 (57:18):
Know, I mean, Chuck Berry is pure Rosetta. Yeah, and
then everybody else stole from Chuck Berry. And so you
can't where do you draw the line, but you should
Chuck not have stolen from Rosetta.
Speaker 1 (57:33):
Yeah, last question and I'll let you go. You talked
about how the way music from Big Pink really changed everything.
There were a lot of groups that then changed their
style of music. Pete Townsend I said, when he heard that,
you know, it definitely inspired him to write in a
particular way. Other people as well. But you know, six
months earlier, so it's a different record, but it's still
(57:56):
it's a return to Americana in a sense. In the
middle of psychedelia and all this stuff, Bob Dylan released
John Leslie Hardy, and why did that not disrupt the
sort of psychedelic thing and sort of re orient people
the way music from Big PinkWood six months later.
Speaker 2 (58:14):
I mean, I love that record. I think it's a
very good record, but it's not in the top five
Dylan records of all time, so it didn't have the
same impact at Blonde on Blonde, for example. And also,
as Dylan himself acknowledged, I think in some interview or
some something, I think Jimmy Hendrix had something to do
(58:34):
with it, with the failure of John Wesley Harding record
to have that impact, because Jimmy's cover of All Along
the Watchtower blew it out of the water. I mean,
Dylan acknowledged that, he said, I can't listen to my
own recording of All on the watch Shower because I'd
rather listen to Jimmy's and Jimmy's take on that just
(58:58):
you know, it was so immense and so extraordinary, and
I think, you know, you can't go back to the culture,
can't go back to the well that often. You know,
Dylan had huge impact, like three four times in a
short space of time, you know, like whiplash. The whole
Western culture suffered whiplash from Dyla, like, wait a minute,
(59:22):
he done this, Oh now he's doing this. Oh my god.
And I think, you know, at a certain point, particularly
because it's sort of a subdued record, and that and
Natural Skyline are and Self Portrait are kind of curiosities.
And I like them all, I mean, but particularly John
Wesley Harding. It doesn't surprise me that they weren't course change,
(59:46):
they didn't like spin. The steering mechanism of the ship
makes sense.
Speaker 1 (59:52):
Man, there's so much more of One Happened another time,
Great speaking to.
Speaker 2 (59:55):
You, Okay, all of that.
Speaker 1 (59:59):
In episode description, you'll find a link to a seven
hour playlist Joe Boyd created to accompany his new book
and the Roots of Rhythm Remain a journey through global music.
Be sure to check out YouTube dot com slash Broken
Record Podcast to see all of our video interviews, and
be sure to follow us on Instagram at the Broken
Record Pod. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record.
(01:00:20):
Broken Record is produced and edited by Leah Rose, with
marketing help from Eric Sandler and Jordan McMillan. Our engineer
is Ben Holliday. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries.
If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider
subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription
that offers bonus content and ad free listening for four
ninety nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple
(01:00:41):
podcast subscriptions and if you like this show, please remember
to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app.
Our theme musics by Kenny Beats. I'm justin Richmond.
Pushkin. Joe Boyd spent more than six decades as a producer,
label executive and writer whose influence extents far beyond the studio.
From producing Nick Drake's luminous folk albums to working with
Fairport Convention, Pink Floyd, and Ram, Boyd has shaped some
of the most enduring recordings in modern music history. But
(00:38):
Joe Boyd isn't just a behind the scenes architect of sound.
He's also a chronicler of the music he loves. In
a two thousand and seven memoir, White Bicycles Making Music
in the nineteen Sixties, he offered an insider's perspective on
that transformative era of nineteen sixties British music that was
so well received readers were clamoring for him to write
a follow up about the nineteen seventies. He wrestled with
(00:59):
that idea for a little bit, and then pivoted to
the voluminous new book and The Roots of Rhythm Remain,
a journey through global music, published just last year. This
tom takes across continents in search of the traditions that
continue to shape contemporary sound. From Cuba Tomali, from Brazil
to Bulgaria, Boyd traces the connections that bind global music
(01:20):
together and celebrates the artists who keep these traditions alive.
On today's episode, I talked to Joe Boyd about working
with famed Warner Brothers CEO Moostin in the sixties. He
also talks about the exhaustive research he did in writing
his latest book and why he decided to pinpoint three
specific global regions as the genesis for all popular music,
and Joe recalls how he came to produce the Seminole
(01:42):
nineteen seventy three documentary on Jimi Hendrix, one of my
personal favorite films of all time. This is broken record,
real musicians, real conversations. Here's my conversation with Joe Boyd.
(02:03):
There were a number of Americans to get out to
London in the sixties that you weren't alone in that,
but it does seem to one of the rare ones
that stayed as long as he did not seem to
come back. Did you ever move back to the States?
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Yeah, yeah, I lived in la for a few years
in the early seventies. I was back and forth La
to London for another few years, and then I was
back and forth to New York for a bit In
the nineties and the noughties. But I've always I mean,
basically except for a couple of years when I was
(02:38):
working for Warner Brothers in la in the early seventies.
I've always had a flat in London since nineteen sixty five.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
I want to kind of toggle between your career, not
as a writer, not as part of the book, also
the book. So the theme of the book, because you mentioned
Warner Brothers, can you tell me about that mo austin
early seventies, Warner Brothers culture and how you got involved.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
One day in nineteen sixty eight, I guess it was
early sixth on a kind of willful impulse, I called
up Bill Graham and I said I wanted to come
see him, and he said okay, and gave me a
time and a date, and I jumped on a plane,
went to San Francisco and booked the Incredible String Band
(03:27):
to open for the Jefferson Airplane because I thought they
shouldn't be in folk clubs, they should be opening for
the Jefferson Airplane. And while I was there, I met
a guy called Andy Wickham. And Andy Wickham was an
Englishman who had once worked for Andrew Luke Oldham I think,
and he'd somehow migrated to California around the time of
(03:51):
the Monterey Pop Festival, and he was now working at
Warner Brothers. And we hung out and we spent some
time together in San Francisco, and he said, you got
to come to Burbank and meet Moe. And so I
flew down to burber Bank. I met Mo and we
(04:13):
just got along great. And Joe Smith and and Andy Wickham,
who passed away recently, ended up being a questionable guy.
I mean, he was one of those people who revealed
him his sort of slightly racist and slightly aristocratic and
(04:34):
snobbish sides as he grew older. But at that time
he was the one who introduced Moe. And Moe and Joe,
you know, came from Sinatra, from Top forty Radio, from
these other worlds. And Andy introduced them to the Grateful Dead,
(04:55):
He introduced them to Joni Mitchell, he introduced them to
Van Morrison, and he opened those doors for them somehow.
Moe just, you know, the same charm that worked with
Natra's wise guys, worked with the Laurel Canyon guys. And
Moe was just a sweet guy. I mean, he was
(05:18):
tough and He didn't always reveal how tough he was
unless he was pushed. But his charm was such and
he had that wisdom to let you know. He surrounded
himself with Lenny Warrenker and Russ Titlement and you know,
all this this kind of a and R team Van
(05:40):
Dyke Parks, and he let them be the ones who
judged the music. The record company existed in a kind
of old warehouse across the street from the studio, and
they kept adding people and adding offices, and so it
was completely crowded. It was like you had three feet
(06:02):
and then there was the next office with a little
divider and you went to go have a pee, and
you're standing next to Moe or Joe or the head
of sales or the head of you know. And so
there was there was so much communication. Everybody talked to
everybody else all the time. And then of course, you know,
they ended up selling ten million Neil Young records and
(06:24):
ten million Joni Mitchell records and got so much money
that they said, oh, let's build a new headquarters. And
I think by seventy seven or seventy six or something
like that, they built that new building down the street
and everybody was like thirty yards from each other, with
(06:45):
padded carpets, deep pile carpets in between, and the atmosphere
was never the same, and the record company I don't
think was ever the same again. You know, I got
I started doing some stuff. I produced a Jeff and
Maria Muldor record I produced. I sold them of John
and Beverly Martin record, neither of which sold. But for
(07:06):
some reason they liked me, and I think there was
also it's a complicated story, but they didn't have a
European operation, and so they decided the way that they
would enter Europe was by buying Island Records. And I
helped introduce them to Chris Blackwell because I was working
with Chris in London, and Chris, in his inimitable casual
(07:31):
Caribbean way, kind of fucked them around. I mean, he
just didn't take it all very seriously, and they did,
and they went out on a limb to make him
a very serious offer, and he never really responded, and
so they got furious and they offered Chrysalis, who was
(07:57):
making records for Ireland. They offered them a label deal
to move to Warner Brothers, and they went out to
get revenge. This was most tough side and he went
out to get revenge to take stuff away from Blackwell
from Ireland, and later they became great friends again. So
(08:17):
this was a brief period of vengefulness and part of
that was to steal me. And so they offered me
the job of music director for the film company. And
I was burnt out, you know. I had been struggling
so much to keep Witch Season afloat, and we never
(08:39):
sold enough records, and I was just getting more and
more in debt. And they offered me a big salary.
And Chris may have sensed the edge in this offer,
but he couldn't have been nicer. He said, it's a
great opportunity. You'll kick yourself if you don't take it.
I'll pay off your debts and look after your artists
(09:02):
and all that, and so go with my blessings. And
so I went to California in nineteen sid one and
became the so called director of music services for Warner
Brothers Films.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
And so you was sort of in that role the
liaise between the music and the film, so Warner Brothers
music would end up in Warner Brothers films.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
That was one of the jobs. I discovered that my
main job, as far as most of the directors and
producers were concerned, they'd call me up and say get
me John Williams, and you know, so it got kind
of tedious, but I had some fun, you know, Stanley Kubrick.
I'd worked on Clockwork Orange, I worked on Deliverance, the
(09:51):
banjo saying with dueling banjo's that was me? And who
played that again?
Speaker 1 (09:58):
Who played that banjo part?
Speaker 2 (09:59):
Eric Weisberg, because it should have been Bill Keith. Bill
Keith was the guy. He was the city billy guy
who'd played with Bill Monroe. I knew him from Harvard
Square the best. And what John Boorman wanted was doling banjos,
(10:20):
but he wanted it slow, fast, minor key, major key
as a soundtrack, as a score, and Bill Keith would
have been perfect. But Keith was on tour. He'd met
a girl. He wanted to go hang out with her
in Ireland. He said, how much are you paying? I
said two thousand bucks. He said, get Weisberg, and so
(10:42):
I got Weisburg and Weisberg made a fortune, you know, basically,
and then But what happened then was that I sort
of maneuvered my way into producing a Jimmy Hendrix documentary
called Jimmy Hendrix, who came out in seventy three, And
when that began to be really a full time thing,
(11:03):
I said to Warner Brothers, I said, listen, let me
find you a successor. And I went on. I thought
that making the Jimi Hendrix film made me a film producer,
but that was delusional.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
I think any Hendrix fan, that's the thing that they
need to see. If there's anything that they need to see,
that is the thing that they should see.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
You know, it's not available online. You can't stream it.
I think there's secondhand DVDs available on Amazon, but nothing else.
And I've screened it during my last trip to America
to promote the book and the Roots of Them Remain,
I did an event up the Hudson River Valley and
(11:44):
Sagerates and the local cinema. The night before my event,
they showed the Jimi Hendrix film and it got me
to introduce it and that was great.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
It's amazing, by the way, how Fay I can't remember
her last name, but his friend face. She's like completely
just the same Faine prigeon Faine prigein Thank You she
passed recently.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
Yeah, she passed recently. She was fantastic.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
She is just so vibranting in that thing. It's it's unbelievable.
She's almost as charismatic as Jimmy in the movie, you know.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
Yeah, yeah, and you know she had I don't know enough.
I mean, somebody, it's really a shame. I don't know
what's happened to it, but somebody I heard of somebody
doing interviews with her to do a kind of biography.
And evidently she was, you know, a friend or a
girlfriend of like ten of the top musicians of the
(12:41):
seventies and eighties. You know, she knew everybody, and everybody
adored her because she never and she never jibed anybody.
She told it like it was she was. And no,
I mean, there's so much in her interview. There was
a moment, my fa One of my favorite moments in
the movie was her describing when she and Jimmy were
(13:05):
living in a cold water flat like fifth floor and
Harlem fit for a walk up and she gives him
some money to go out and get some groceries or something,
and he disappears and he comes back and he hadn't
got any groceries, he's got an LP and she tries
to get the LP and finally she grabs it and says,
(13:26):
Bob Dylan, Who the fuck is Bob Vilan?
Speaker 1 (13:32):
So good? What was the process of making that?
Speaker 2 (13:36):
It was so weird because basically, all during Jimmy's life,
over the last few years of his life when he
was famous, everybody wanted to film him, and people were
constantly coming up and wanting to film him. And Mike Jeffries,
who was his manager, who was kind of thuggish guy
from Newcastle, former club owner in Newcastle, he would say, yeah, sure,
(14:00):
here he wants some lights. Here's where you plug in
the sound. Here's you want an electrical extension corved you
know you want if all areas pass here work out.
And then they kept saying, well, you know, we have
this release form that we need you to sign. Oh,
we'll talk about that later. And then when they'd filmed Jimmy,
they would come to him and try to get him
to sign the release and he said, now I've got
(14:22):
my own form, and he would give him give them
the form which gave him fifty one percent ownership of
the film, and so nobody would sign it, and so
all this footage never got released during Jimmy's lifetime. After
his father appointed this wonderful guy called Leo Branton, who
(14:45):
was an attorney, LA attorney who represented Miles Davis, nat
Cole Dorothy Dandridge. You know, he was an African American,
but he was also civil rights attorney. He defended Angela Davis.
And in fact, we were making the film during the
trial of Angela Davis up in the Bay Area, and
(15:09):
they had every Friday off at the trial. The trial
would go Monday, Tuesday, munch a Thursday, and Leo would
fly back from Oakland to Burbank and would come straight
to Warner Brothers to see what we had done in
the previous seven days with the film, and we'd show
(15:30):
him a new scene or whatever, and he would he
wasn't that interested in Jimmy's music. He was a Miles
Davis guy. And he would then do his imitation of
the judge, the prosecutor Angela Davis in the trial. And
we spent the whole time just sitting there listening to
(15:51):
him to tell us the inside story of the trial.
And I went to Thanksgiving dinner at his house and
sat next to Angela Davis, and you know, that was
what was going on sort of the background, because because
what happened was that when he got the job to
(16:12):
represent the estate, he discovered there was all this footage
that had never been seen. And Jefferies was now powerless
because he'd represented Jimmy, who was deceased. Now was a
family the heirs could appoint wherever they wanted, and they
appointed Leo, and he came to see Mo because Jimmy
(16:35):
was signed to Warner Prize at the time in America.
And then Mo took and walked him across the street
to see me and Ted Ashley, who was the head
of the film company. And out of that meeting came
the idea, well, at the first originally, just Joe, why
don't you have a look at all this footage and
(16:57):
see what you think of it and see if you
think there's a film there?
Speaker 1 (17:00):
So he's asking you.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
Yeah, so he asked me. That was my job, you know,
I was the liaison between the two sides of the street.
And so I said, yeah, and we could film interviews
with this and this and this, and we could put
this together, and they okay, you do it.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Joe. Did Moe have much of a relationship with Hendrix.
I mean did I mean, I know they met backstage
at Monterey I believe right when.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
Yeah, I don't think there was much Jimmy, you know,
his relationship. I think Mike Jeffries worked very hard to
keep Jimmy away from MO. You know, he wanted everything
to go through him. And also initially the deal was
through Track Records in England, and so it was like
(17:49):
he signed to Track for the world and then Track
licensed it to and then at a certain point they paid
some money to get Track out of the middle.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
Yeah, and the roots of Rhythm remain is It's an
astounding book. I have to imagine this idea came to
you many decades ago.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
You know, I always liked to write. I mean I
always wrote the press releases for Hannibal Records, and I
wrote some articles, and then I started doing some book
reviews in the early two thousands, and I just thought, yeah,
I'll write a book. I started writing a biography, and
(18:34):
I thought, you know, like when I was born and
please stop. Oh no, no, that's not right. It can't
be about me. It's got to be about the sixties.
And so I wrote My Bicycles. You know, focused on
this decade because I felt I had something to say
(18:54):
about the decade. And you know, I've been around for
a lot of important moments in the decade, and I
enjoyed doing it a lot. And then, you know, I
started going out and doing interviews and book readings and stuff,
and people will come up to me and say, so,
when are you going to do the book about the seventies,
And I said, you must be joking. You know, the
(19:17):
seventies was not fun for me. I didn't have a
good seventies. I don't have anything interesting to say about it.
But I liked riding my bicycles, and I liked I
liked the fact that I was no longer was I
looking after the career of musicians who rarely did what
I wanted them to. But I was looking after somebody
(19:39):
who did everything I wanted him to me, you know.
And I thought, yeah, I'll write another book. That's what
I'll do. I'll write another book. And very quickly it
came to me what I would do. I guess there
were a couple of kernels of ideas that had been
festering in my brain a little bit, and I would say,
(20:03):
there's three that really pushed me off the edge of
that ski jump so that I had no choice but
to keep going. One was what I put in the
preface to the book, which is the realization of how
different Cuban and American rhythmic sensibilities are and try to
(20:27):
get to the bottom of that, because I knew enough
to know that it had something to do with history
and with slavery, but it was worth digging into. And
I had also read Ned Sublett's book by that time,
Cuba and Its Music, which is a great book, and
it really kind of opened my eyes to the depth
(20:51):
of what you could discover when you dug into a
musical culture like Cuba. And then also at the time,
I'm way back in the late eighties when Graceland was
so popular, everybody thought there was a controversy about Paul Simon,
you know, not respecting the boycott. And I know a
(21:13):
lot about South Africa. I've been there a couple of times.
I hadn't spent a lot of time there, but I'd
worked with a lot of South African musicians. I produced
to play a kind of anti apartape musical and so
I knew a lot about South Africa. I read a
lot about South Africa, and I knew that what people
thought was the controversy wasn't really the controversy. And I
(21:36):
saw all these Paul Simon fans buying Lady Smith Black
Mambaza records and buying Machlatini and the Machatella Queens records,
which was great. I mean, because it's great music, it's
worth those records are very much worth buying. But everybody
felt virtuous about buying them and that they were somehow
(21:58):
supporting Mandela by buying them. And I knew that they
were Zulus, and the Zulus were kind of the enemy
of Mandela, that supporting Zulu culture was not the same
as supporting the anc In fact, it was quite different
and even opposed. And I thought, well, that's something that
(22:22):
people don't know that I could tell them. And then
I also thought about my time working in Bulgaria, and
you know, I'd love those choir records, you know, the
Mysterio a bulgar and the Kutev Ensemble. And I was
always a bit head scratching, you know that those Bulgarian
(22:45):
national ensembles were so great, and the rest of the
Eastern European state ensembles were a kitsch and kind of
weird and boring and you know, like acrobatic and what's
that all about? And then I had I talked to
(23:05):
Philip Kutev's daughter, who told me how much the Russians
hated her father and why they hated him because of
he used the authentic peasant voice in the choir and
how Stalin was trying to get the you know, completely
obliterate pleasant culture. And I thought, well, that's interesting too.
(23:29):
So these three things, these three ideas, the Cuban rhythms,
South African Zulu versus a NC, and Russians hating Bulgarian choirs.
There's stories in here that I would have fun telling people.
(23:49):
And I figured if these stories exist in Eastern Europe
and Cuba and South Africa, they probably exist. And I
knew enough about other cultures to know that there was
probably some more fun stuff to dig up there. And
so I just got started. And that took me seventeen years,
and realize it's going to take that long.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
We'll be back with more from Joe Boyd. After the
break in the history of the nineteenth and twentieth century
kind of does seem to be region to region, this
sort of repression and this sort of cultural movement bubbling
up from people to to counter state repression with art,
(24:38):
and your book really wonderfully tells that story. I wasn't
expecting that to be narratively done so well in your book.
But then there's also the way in which these cultures
then shared. You know, all of the all of the
music moved around the globe and then back again. And
so music from Africa would go to the Caribbean and
(24:59):
then back to Africa and then come to the States.
And there's this cultural exchange happening amongst cultures and countries
and various forms of music that we don't often think about.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Yeah, everything, I mean the take one of the takeaways
I hope people would get from the book is there
is no pure culture. There is no pure musical culture.
For sure, it's all mixed. It's all a blend. As
you said, it bubbles up from underneath, and underneath in
(25:36):
a way are two groups, Africans and Roma. I just
sort of realized, and I've realized almost more after I
finished the book and I've been touring and talking about
it and doing Q and a's and things like that.
One of the things I've realized is and I mentioned
(25:58):
in the book, but maybe I might have if I
went back and rewrote the book, I might make more
of a theme of it is the fact that going
way back, certainly to the beginning of that night eighteenth century,
what defines modernity is how African it is or how
Roma it is. You know, by the late nineteenth century, Cakewalk,
(26:24):
the Grizzly Bear, you know, the Charleston all that became
the dominant force of young for young people to dance to.
And if you weren't dancing to that sort of rhythm,
you were square. And if you go back a little
(26:44):
further to Gerta and the Romantics, who was the big
musical revolutionary list, you know, he was this matinee Idol
who toured across Europe with fainting females, and he modeled
his whole performance style on a roma musician that he
saw that was famous in Hungary when he was a kid.
And this flamboyance, this joy, this kind of decorate, taking
(27:08):
the note written on the page and decorating them and
playing them with trills and playing them with accents and
playing them in a crazy new way. That's Roma. It
defined what was new and what was shiny and what
was attractive to young people. You know, that's one of
the problems that European folk music has had, you know,
(27:32):
in the more recent the last fifty years, has been
that it lacks any kind of African feeling rhythmically and
therefore is consigned to being square.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
You about it be English folk music in there's an
example for me discography that kind of illustrates the way
in which a group of people sometimes learn about themselves
best from outsiders. You know, outsiders can sort of reaffirm
your sense of who you are. And it's in this
sort of this example from the Fairport convention.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
Yeah, convention.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
It's not until nineteen sixty nine and they discover song
A Sailor's Life that they really embrace English folk music.
Prior to this they sort of are working more from
an American tradition. And maybe you can talk a bit
about that, because I think.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
It's Yeah, when I first heard Fairport, I was very
impressed with their musicianship. The upside was how good they
were in particularly Richard Thompson on their instruments. The downside
was they kept singing, you know, Richard Farina, Eric Anderson
and Phil Oakes and to be fair, Bob some very
(28:48):
good Bob Dylan songs. But I thought, why are these
English kids so wrapped in this music that I kind
of left America to get away from No, I mean,
I just would never that sold on the white middle
class singer songwriter idea, and so then they added Sandy
Denny to the group. And Sandy had been around the
(29:11):
folk clubs for a few years and she had never
been a songwriter. Before, she had been a balladeer. She
sang traditional Scottish Irish English ballads and she would play
these ballads to them in the van when they would
go to gigs, and little by little it kind of
got through to them. And so then they did that
(29:33):
track You mentioned Sailor's Life, but they just still thought
of it as one string to their bow. You know.
One thing that they did along with other things. Richard
and Sandy were writing songs that was a new aspect,
new dimension of their music. And then they had this
terrible crash and the drummer, Martin Lamble, was killed and
(29:58):
a girl, Jeanie the Taylor, was killed as well, and
they were devastated and they thought they would break up.
They would never play again, and then when they decided
to reform, they wanted to do something completely new, so
they would never play the songs that they played with
Martin on drums with a new drummer. That was the idea,
(30:21):
and right at that time out came music from Big Pink,
and everybody, all musicians in London were just gobsmacked, as
the English say, by music from Big Pink. And again
there's a little outsider element there because they're Canadians, but
still what they were doing was a fresh approach to
(30:46):
a very American form of music and building something unbelievably original,
appealing virtuasak all this, you know, with that record, And
in a way they were following on from Bob Dylan
at Newport in nineteen sixty five more than Bob Dylan was, yeah,
(31:11):
and doing something really rich and interesting. And so in
a way it hit the Fairport like a rebuke. Like
you English boys from Muswell Hill, you think you can
play some American stuff, you know, is how you want
to reinvent yourself after the crash, forget about it. This
(31:33):
is defining that moment. And so they really went to
try and do with British traditional music. What the band
was doing with American traditional music. And they were so
lucky because they found well a lot they were clever.
They found a drummer in Dave Masseox who was not
(31:57):
a rock drummer. He was a jazz drummer. He was
a dance band drummer, and he found the dance rhythms
in all the songs that they wanted to play. The
record is just comes alive, you know. Because of that
mix and adding Dave Swarbrick, who was a very wonderful
(32:18):
traditional fiddle player into the band, made this record that
changed everything in Britain in the folk scene anyway. Legion Leaf, Yeah,
he already had a huge.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
Impact, and he brings in the rhythms that you know,
to your point where English folk music could be seen
a square, he sort of starts to bring in some
rhythms that maybe help you.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
Yeah, he does it with jazz chops.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:44):
At that time, I don't think Legion and Leaf was
at the top of the list of the hippist records
on the charts, but it was a lot hipper than
any other folk record at that time, and it captured
the imagination of a certain portion of the audience.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
It's just fascinating to me that this group that we
think of as a consummate English folk group starts because
they're sort of doing American folk music. In the process,
we discover the English folk tradition. Canadian group does Americana
better than and the American possibly could, and then forces
(33:31):
Fairport Convention to confront who they you know, their own roots,
and who they are as people.
Speaker 2 (33:37):
And this process repeats and repeats. I mean, one of
the things I talk about in the book is that
back and forth was Fela and James Brown. Yeah, you
know that somebody said about when James Brown's extended jams,
you know, extended dance tracks began making inroads. There's a
(34:00):
woman writer who I quoted the book saying those records
told us that we were really from somewhere else, that
Africa was really over there, that there was something different
about African American culture. And then Fela, you know, who
(34:22):
had been watching as James Brown imitators spread all across
West Africa, people imitating James Brown, very slavishly, trying to
sound exactly like James Brown. And then he came to
La and somehow that exposure to black panthers to the
(34:43):
music to the culture. He went back to Nigeria and
created something that was a bit James brownish but very Nigerian. Yeah,
and so that back and forth happens, you know, not
just between the band and Pairful Convention. And by the way,
(35:03):
there was a lovely footnote to the Pairful Convention story
that many years later later, an English singer who I
know was playing at the festival and he met the
guys from Los Lobos and they said, oh, do you
know Richard Thompson in the Federal Convention. He said, yeah,
I know those guys. They're friends of mine. He said, well,
when you see them, tell them that if it hadn't
(35:27):
been for Legion Leif, we would have still been a
heavy metal band from East la whoa that it was
Legion Leif which convinced Los Lobos to dig into their
own cultural background.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
You would never listen to Los Lobos here, Legion Leaf
that is.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
But it's just a conceptual thing. It's like like that,
oh oh, maybe that's what we should do instead of
trying to sound like you know, def lepper.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's an additional wrinkle really in a
way to the James Brown Fela interplayed and if you
think about it, slave trade initiates from Africa in Cuba,
you get these African rhythms that start to form and influence,
(36:19):
you know, the music of Cuba. You get things like
the habanera you talk about, which is a Cuban rhythm,
Havana rhythm. Right, it comes to America likely i'd imagine
through New Orleans probably, yeah, and you get these these
(36:39):
rhythms that starts to influence early R and B music,
which would then of course influence James Brown, which would
then influence Fela fala Is also taking in Cuban music.
Happened to be a big fan of Cuban music, was
taken in those records directly as well. Comes to America,
picks up the James Brown goes back, you know, and
you sort of so you start to get this really
bizarre Africa influence being Cuba going back to Africa through
(37:05):
this James Brown connection in FLA, and it just becomes
like whoa, Like there's no there really are no boundaries,
there's no borders, there's yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:15):
Yeah. The whole extended jams of those James Brown records
from the late sixties early seventies were inspired by the
Montuno you know, the the scratch guitar parts are most
of them are clavi one two one two three, one
(37:37):
two one two three one two one two three. So
you have the the influence of Latin Africa, Cuban music
into America into Africa, meeting in the middle of the Atlantic.
And you know you're never going to get a simple diagram, no,
you know, a linear explanation of anything to do with
(38:00):
music culture. It's so whirls around in the wind. You know.
Speaker 1 (38:05):
It's yeah, whether history is of any trees or cultures
you considered including but ultimately didn't get didn't get to.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
Not really because basically the idea from the beginning was
the music we all know but we don't know about it.
So I love Rebetico, I love Fado, I love Northern
(38:38):
African music, Algerian, Moroccan, Egyptian. That would have made it
a different book. Okay, you know everything that's in this
book is suddenly said, oh yeah, I've got a couple
of Ravi Shankar records, I'll read that, or I took
those Latin dance lessons when I was in college. And
(39:00):
you know, I mean everything in there is hopefully got
some tangential relationship to people's ex experience, listening experience with music.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
How is digital distribution in the modern age aided and
or disrupted this global flow of music that you illustrate
in the book.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
Well, in some levels, of course, it aided it, you know.
I mean, my wife and I put together two playlists
of one hundred tracks each on Spotify and Apple. You
know that we can send out. I'm preparing a newsletter
that'll send this out to everybody. And that's great, you know.
(39:46):
And I can and in my research I was able
to dig things out on YouTube and Spotify and hear
things that I never would have been able to hear,
and to write about it in a way that probably
I couldn't have some in some cases. And I think
that a lot of the changes that have pulled music
(40:08):
away from the sort of thing that I like listening
to didn't happen because of digital distribution. I think, you know,
the traditional record companies that made so many great records
and pressed so much great vinyl, and that whole ecosystem
of vinyl records and jukeboxes, and you know that was
(40:33):
destroyed by the cassette first and foremost. So on the
one hand, you know, technology gives with one hand takes
away with the other, and the same thing has happened
with then happened with CDs and the death of vinyl,
the rebirth of vinyl. The biggest change has been the
(40:57):
rhythm machines. You know, in terms of the music that
I write about in this book, I write about music
that's made by people in a room in moment, playing
off each other. You know, rhythms that have been learned
from elders to youngers, that have been absorbed through culture.
(41:23):
And now you know, rhythms fly around the world very fast,
and you can, you know, you can, you know, sit
in Tokyo and hire somebody to give you a rhythm
track in Marseille, send it to you digitally and you
can relay a Japanese wrap track over it. It's just
(41:45):
a different thing. It's a whole different thing. And I
you know, people say, how far up to the present
did you write the book? I said, really, I wrote
from antiquity up to the drum machine, because that's where
everything changes and it becomes a different subject and not
one that I could really address and keep the book
(42:08):
under nine hundred pages.
Speaker 1 (42:09):
You know, there's another question I had, what do you
make of hip hop and sampling?
Speaker 2 (42:16):
You know, when I hear even with it like a
singer songwriter, and from the first bar, I know that
there's a clip track going on here. It's not that
you can even hear the percussion. It's just you can
hear the regularity. You can hear the absolute inflexible regularity
(42:40):
of the rhythm. And sometimes I'll hear very nice singing
and a very nice words. But I don't feel I
have to listen to it again. To me, I don't know.
This is just my crack pop theory. If music was
made in a moment where nobody knew what was going
to happen next, from beat to beat, minute to minute,
(43:03):
that sense of danger, that sense of adventure. You're not
just laying it down with your heads and earphones. You know,
with a click track somebody sent you and you're adding
a base part to something that already has a keyboard.
You know, if you're doing it live in a room
with musicians and nobody knows how it's going to turn out.
(43:24):
Is it going to be a good take or a
bad take. It's a collective adventure. Yeah, That feeling passed
through the technical process to the final product, whether it's
a streaming file or a CD or a cassette or
(43:45):
a vinyl or whatever it is, When the listener gets
some of that sense of adventure, it translates. It feels
more adventurous to listen to for me.
Speaker 1 (43:59):
Anyway, Well that's break and we'll come back with Joe Boyd.
There was a you know, and Prince famously used the
lind drum and various rhythm machines and drum machines. But
you know, he forgat which hip hop producer was now,
(44:22):
like we won't say a name because I don't remember
who it was, but a very famous hip hop producer.
At some point I had a conversation with Prince, and
Prince said, you know what you're making these Like, I know,
I used drum machines, but like you guys are only
producing on the computer. At least with the drum machine,
I would connect it to speaker. I was moving I
was moving air still with my drum machine. Yeah, you know,
(44:43):
I was moving air with it and then adding other
things on top of it. You're only creating in a computer,
and this is so this isn't music. There's no air
being moved at all. Yeah, that is a great example
of why Prince was great with the drum machine. And
it's sort of.
Speaker 2 (44:56):
Yeah, no, I mean, he's an exception that kind of
proves the role or whatever because he did. But I
have to say I went to see Prince one of
the early times she came to London. It wasn't in
an arena. It was in like a three thousand seat hall,
and I had a pretty good box seat overlooking the stage,
(45:17):
and I was kind of excited to see him, and
but you know, there were light effects and there was
things going on. Everybody had a little earbud and so
you knew that somewhere underneath the stage there was a
hard drive with something queueing, you know, like a pulse,
(45:39):
and it got a little boring, a little tiring after
a while, and then there was this moment where you
could tell that he it switched off and Prince just
got out his guitar and he started playing Purple Rain
I think or something, and he was completely free of
(46:00):
the click and it was just transcendent. You know, it's
just realiant. It was just fantastic. I went to Lee
years later. I went to see him at the O
two and I got so there's some weird connection. My
second cousin was playing keyboards in the opening act, and
so I got to go backstage. And then we went
(46:22):
to the after party, which the after show, which was
in a small theater behind the two and some of
the people in the back in the in the opening
band and some of Prince's guys. They all were out
on stage like hooking up their instruments, and Prince walked
out on stage and he went up to the microphone
(46:43):
and he looked around at the band. He looked around.
He said, let's do Stevie. And so they did an
hour long set of Stevie Wonder covers, just no click,
nothing rehearsed, just these guys, this great band and Prince
playing Superstition and you know, all this stuff. And then
(47:04):
they take a break and they said we'll be back,
and they come back like fifteen minutes later, and again
everybody goes their instruments. They're all sitting there waiting, what's
Prince is going to do? And he goes up to
the microphone. He says, Sly and they did an hour
of Sly covers and it was just fantastic, you know, yeah,
(47:30):
and I did I have to say, I loved it
more than the show, which was good.
Speaker 1 (47:37):
Oh than the two show, yeah, the O two show.
Speaker 2 (47:40):
Yeah, and I had a good seat and everything, but
it was you know, you could feel it was very programmed.
Everybody knew exactly when the cues were and the whites
did this, and the you know, and even though the
drummer was playing but he you know, everybody had had
had earbuds and you know, it was okay, it was
a good show, but that after party was never to
(48:04):
be forgotten.
Speaker 1 (48:06):
In hindsight. Who knew the unfocused the drummer you can
never get to pay attention or foot would be our
greatest asset all these years. But it's like, you know,
the drummer speeding up or change into it. It's like that, really,
you know.
Speaker 2 (48:23):
But you know, sometimes, yes, of course, there are times
when you as a producer, you tear your hair out
because the drummer can't keep time. But other times it
just picks up. The intensity sort of picks up in
a nanosecond just because something has happened, somebody's done something
(48:45):
on an instrument, and everything just gets that little more intense,
and everything just picks up a little bit. And also,
I mean and now there's some you know, Al Jackson
and some of those, you know, you can't define it.
It's just he lays back, he plays at the it's
the last moment that can the last nanosecond that can
(49:07):
still be considered the beat. Yeah, and it's and it's
got a sensuality to it that a lot of modern
references just are different. You know, it's not the same thing.
Speaker 1 (49:20):
And it's also the way that he's playing behind the
beat in relation to Duck Dunn or yeah, exactly on
playing bass or yeah, it's all or if you listen
to or the Carl it's it's the way, Yeah, the
piano players unique sense of rhythm against the bass player's
unique sense against Tito's against it's and it's just all
(49:42):
working against each other.
Speaker 2 (49:44):
If anyone ever says, well, I don't know, I don't
think you're I don't think you're right. I you know,
everybody should playing time, I would say Exhibit A would
be try a little tenderness. You know, the way it begins,
you know, it's just I think it's just a guitar
and then just a piano comes in and it's very
(50:07):
tenderative rhythmically, and everybody's just listening to Otis singing, and
then it grows and then it speeds up and it
gets more into you know, It's like the difference between
the feel at the end of that track and the
field at the beginning is a journey, unbelievable journey. And
(50:29):
it's you could just feel the room these guys just
looking at each other. Yeah, shall I do this now? Okay, Okay,
I'll try that. Okay. Oh wow, Otis just did something
and let's answer that. And you know, and it's just
so intense that track.
Speaker 1 (50:47):
I feel like reading the book thinking about that. I
love I've always loved to talk about it a bit,
just the way cultures interact, interplay that the great boogeyman
around this conversation these days is the word cultural appropriation.
On one head, I understand the critique. On another hand,
I hate that just the existence of the word could
(51:09):
put in to anyone thinking about borrowing this from that
culture or this thing from that culture, and then putting
it together into their own thing and making it something
completely unique.
Speaker 2 (51:20):
In the events that I do, Andrea County is usually
with me, and she's running the Spotify streamer. When we
want to have illustrations. I say, okay, let's go to
the heart of cultural appropriation. Here is the error moment
of cultural appropriation. And we play The Lions Sleeps Tonight,
(51:42):
and then we play wim Away. And you know, Pete
Seeger is a heroic figure who always was for the underdog,
and he was, you know, for fairness and you know,
but he was in an era when anything that you
didn't have a composer credit was considered public domain or
you know whatever. So he's getting money from wim Away.
(52:04):
He's getting a little bit more a bit of the
money from the Lions Tonight. And then I play boobe
which is the original. And it's fascinating to see to
feel the audience because they know Lions Sleeps Tonight by
the tokens that everybody knows that they know Pete Seeger
(52:28):
singing wom Away. That's familiar, or at least it's not surprising.
Then they hear him Boobey. It's so intense and so
profound and so rich and so individual, like this guy
Solomon Linda who improvises the hook that has made millions
(52:50):
and millions and millions of dollars for Disney. Now that
the fact that no money reached Solomon Linda is cultural appropriation.
That is cultural appropriation. There's a series now on in
a film on Netflix called The Lions Share about the
(53:11):
royalties of the Lions Sleep Tonight. It's fascinating, it's depressing,
it's shocking, but you know, you understand in a way.
It was a time before anybody had lawyers and thought
about all these kinds of things. But you know, cultures
(53:32):
all over the world, African cultures, African American cultures use
the Hawaiian guitar slide steel guitar. It was invented by
Joseph Kaikuku on Oahu Island in eighteen eighty seven. Yeah,
you know, nobody never paid him anything. I mean, and
(53:56):
to try and draw a border and say, now, okay,
whatever went before is one thing, but now we're going
to put up a fence. You can't actually listen to
this stuff and use that influence in your music because
that's appropriation. I think it's kind of ridiculous because nothing
(54:18):
is pure. There is no pure culture. And the story
of the Roma is some perfect example. I mean, they
went from South Asia all the way across the Middle East,
up into the Balkans, up into Europe. They changed European
music totally, and popular music all over the world wouldn't
(54:39):
be what it is today if it wasn't for the
African influence through Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Carolina, Virginia, Texas, Mississippi, Chicago,
you know whatever. And it always mixed. You know, the
root of it all started with African slaves being forced
(55:02):
to play for dances for the French did contra dance
and quadrilles. And you know, it wasn't just African music
they were playing. They were playing French music, but they're
playing it mixed in with their own culture. And it's
always been a mix. All music is a mix. So
(55:24):
how you actually begin to parse out where the line
can be drawn, I don't know. It's beyond me.
Speaker 1 (55:33):
We didn't talk about this, but you spend a lot
of time with some early blues Grates, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon,
Sisters at a Dar and on and on and on.
You also got to spend a lot of time in England.
Where do you in this particular era, where do you
land on the led Zeppelin?
Speaker 2 (55:53):
I mean I was never a big led Zeppelin fan,
but not because I objected to what they did with
no anymore than object to Eric Clapton. I mean who
I object to because of some of his public positions.
I don't have a problem with Eric Clapton playing Crossroads.
(56:14):
And you know, eventually, when the legal world woke up
to the values of copyrights and all these things, Robert
Johnson's sister, I think made you know, his family long
after he died. Of course, got a pretty decent payday,
(56:39):
a pretty good share of all those box sets that
CBS issued of Robert Johnson, and even I think some covers,
you know, by rock bands. And I know for a
fact that Muddy Waters and Rosetta and people loved the
fact that they found a white audience and the fact
(57:01):
that they found people who ate up their music and
loved their music. And you know, part of that would
be the simple fact of buying a ticket to go
see Rosetta. But you know, Chuck Berry stole from Rosetta.
Speaker 1 (57:17):
That's a good call, you.
Speaker 2 (57:18):
Know, I mean, Chuck Berry is pure Rosetta. Yeah, and
then everybody else stole from Chuck Berry. And so you
can't where do you draw the line, but you should
Chuck not have stolen from Rosetta.
Speaker 1 (57:33):
Yeah, last question and I'll let you go. You talked
about how the way music from Big Pink really changed everything.
There were a lot of groups that then changed their
style of music. Pete Townsend I said, when he heard that,
you know, it definitely inspired him to write in a
particular way. Other people as well. But you know, six
months earlier, so it's a different record, but it's still
(57:56):
it's a return to Americana in a sense. In the
middle of psychedelia and all this stuff, Bob Dylan released
John Leslie Hardy, and why did that not disrupt the
sort of psychedelic thing and sort of re orient people
the way music from Big PinkWood six months later.
Speaker 2 (58:14):
I mean, I love that record. I think it's a
very good record, but it's not in the top five
Dylan records of all time, so it didn't have the
same impact at Blonde on Blonde, for example. And also,
as Dylan himself acknowledged, I think in some interview or
some something, I think Jimmy Hendrix had something to do
(58:34):
with it, with the failure of John Wesley Harding record
to have that impact, because Jimmy's cover of All Along
the Watchtower blew it out of the water. I mean,
Dylan acknowledged that, he said, I can't listen to my
own recording of All on the watch Shower because I'd
rather listen to Jimmy's and Jimmy's take on that just
(58:58):
you know, it was so immense and so extraordinary, and
I think, you know, you can't go back to the culture,
can't go back to the well that often. You know,
Dylan had huge impact, like three four times in a
short space of time, you know, like whiplash. The whole
Western culture suffered whiplash from Dyla, like, wait a minute,
(59:22):
he done this, Oh now he's doing this. Oh my god.
And I think, you know, at a certain point, particularly
because it's sort of a subdued record, and that and
Natural Skyline are and Self Portrait are kind of curiosities.
And I like them all, I mean, but particularly John
Wesley Harding. It doesn't surprise me that they weren't course change,
(59:46):
they didn't like spin. The steering mechanism of the ship
makes sense.
Speaker 1 (59:52):
Man, there's so much more of One Happened another time,
Great speaking to.
Speaker 2 (59:55):
You, Okay, all of that.
Speaker 1 (59:59):
In episode description, you'll find a link to a seven
hour playlist Joe Boyd created to accompany his new book
and the Roots of Rhythm Remain a journey through global music.
Be sure to check out YouTube dot com slash Broken
Record Podcast to see all of our video interviews, and
be sure to follow us on Instagram at the Broken
Record Pod. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record.
(01:00:20):
Broken Record is produced and edited by Leah Rose, with
marketing help from Eric Sandler and Jordan McMillan. Our engineer
is Ben Holliday. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries.
If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider
subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription
that offers bonus content and ad free listening for four
ninety nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple
(01:00:41):
podcast subscriptions and if you like this show, please remember
to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app.
Our theme musics by Kenny Beats. I'm justin Richmond.
Popular Podcasts
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.
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.