3:AM Magazine

Joe Boyd, White Bicycles, Serpent’s Tail, 2007

“It was great that people fought about music in those days,” muses record producer Joe Boyd in his autobiographical account of the 1960s music scene, White Bicycles. The event that prompted this observation was the Ayler Brothers’ abstruse free jazz decimation of ‘La Marseillaise’ at a gig Boyd staged in Paris in 1965, which prompted a brawl led equally by patriots and jazz purists. Understated reflections such as this, and the author’s modest appraisal of his own role in events, contribute to an illuminating and worthwhile addition to the I-was-there canon of the sixties underground.

The preppy and slightly goofy Boyd could run perilously close to fellow Ivy League product Paul Gamabaccini, were his reminiscences of the music not punctuated by perceptive analysis of its wider social context. Watching free jazz powerhouse Sonny Rollins draw ever-diminishing crowds towards the end of the decade, Boyd nails the scene succinctly: “theirs was heroin and alcohol music, and the kids were now into acid and grass.” Boyd catered ably for those kids, running marathon light shows soundtracking Pink Floyd concerts at his club, the UFO; the breadth of his musical interests, however, prevents White Bicycles from dwelling overmuch on the groovy clichés of Sixties London. Billings for UFO shows, reproduced here, give an impression of how diverse the Boyd-curated scene was – sometimes bizarrely so; one can only imagine what one 1967 show, at which devastating improv collective AMM were followed by the ‘IT Girl Beauty Contest’, can have been like.

White Bicycles also drives home that issues of race and class were imperative in shaping the underground scene. Boyd engages fully with the problem of ‘authenticity’ that has directed white audiences’ relationship with black music since the days of John Lomax. He is scathing of the contemporary blues scene, but doesn’t shy away from his own role in creating a template of ‘authenticity’ by touring the likes of Muddy Waters around the world for the first time in 1964. Some of these issues are explored in the Boyd-produced Hendrix biopic Jimi Hendrix Story. As White Bicycles makes clear, the controversy surrounding the film sprung in part from the unexpected focus on Hendrix’s conflicted roots in Harlem, rather than a parade of testimonies from Greenwich Village luminaries.
White Bicycles covers a full spectrum of underground eccentrics, but one can’t resist the impression that they are overwhelmingly drawn from the upper classes. Chris Blackwell, the man who first imported reggae records to England and founded Island, was an old Harrovian of Jamaican planter stock; John Hopkins, co-founder of Notting Hill Carnival, was a Cambridge-trained nuclear physicist before discovering LSD. Boyd himself seems to have flourished in this environment; like Blackwell, he was able to bridge the intellectual London scene and business-first Hollywood world of the labels and, most of the time, keep both placated. Others, however, were left hopelessly lost between the two privileged extremes — the foremost example perhaps being songwriter Nick Drake, who is sensitively depicted in the book. Desperately awkward on stage, he nonetheless wanted both Warner’s money and the legitimacy of the romantic poets he had revered as a schoolboy at Marlborough.

Drake’s three Boyd-produced albums were to become canonical after his death in 1974. Boyd had by this time also produced The Incredible String Band’s peerless second and third albums, as well as releases by Pink Floyd, Nico and John Martyn. The quality and diversity of the music he discovered, recorded and released is quite exceptional, and the consistently perceptive White Bicycles is a valuable testament to his accomplishments.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Andrew Fleming is a recent graduate. He lives and works in London.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Wednesday, February 20th, 2008.