'60s music: He was there, and made his mark

AUSTIN, Texas - Dick Clark made him do it.

Before Joe Boyd became the preeminent producer of British folk-rock in the late '60s and early '70s - with credits that include Nick Drake, Fairport Convention, Pink Floyd, the Incredible String Band and Richard and Linda Thompson - he whetted his musical appetite watching Bandstand.

Bob Horn's Bandstand, that is. Growing up in Princeton in the 1950s, Boyd - who'll sign his enthralling new memoir, White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s, at two Philadelphia-area bookstores tomorrow and Friday - spent his afternoons in front of the TV, getting an education in African American R&B and doo-wop, not to mention developing a crush on a duck-tailed girl from South Philadelphia named Arlene.

But in 1956, the middle-aged and charisma-free Horn was implicated in a drunken-driving scandal. He was replaced by the slick, teen-friendly Clark, who took the Philadelphia show national. Boyd and his brother Warwick were "appalled."

"It was Dick Clark who pushed it in a way that ceased to be as interesting," recalled the dashing, 64-year-old record producer, in Austin this month for the South by Southwest Music Festival (SXSW), where he was busy promoting White Bicycles, having dinner with old chum Pete Townshend and sitting on a panel celebrating the late melancholy songwriter Drake, whom Boyd discovered in 1968.

When Clark took over, the Boyds were already burgeoning jazz buffs, and "prefab rockers like Fabian and Frankie Avalon" just wouldn't do. They needed to seek musical adventure elsewhere.

"So what else was there?" Boyd remembers wondering. "We had to go looking."

Since then, Boyd has been spending his life doing just that - and listening. Along with his brother and their friend Geoff Muldaur, Boyd - who'd later operate UFO, London's leading psychedelic ballroom - got his first taste of life as a music impresario in 1960 when he tracked down the great guitarist Lonnie Johnson in North Philadelphia, and booked him for a Princeton house party.

White Bicycles is a deftly turned, Zelig-like tale that brings a fresh eye to a romanticized era. It works both as an insightful social history and as a trove of captivating anecdotes.

Boyd is full of stories. His first real job out of college in 1964 was as road manager for a Blues and Gospel Caravan tour of Europe with Muddy Waters, Rev. Gary Davis, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. When Bob Dylan famously went electric at the Newport Folk Festival the next year, Boyd was the stage manager. White Bicycles' amusing account of the momentous occasion dispels the myth that Pete Seeger attempted to cut an electric cable with an ax.

Boyd was at Woodstock in 1969 with the Incredible String Band, the psychedelic-era outfit whose LP The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, produced by Boyd, was called the best album of 1968 by Paul McCartney. The band's reputation is on the rise thanks to its influence on nouveau freak-folk artists like Johanna Newsome and Philadelphia's Espers.

"I've had the idea for a while that I would write a book one day," says Boyd, who had a fruitful producing career through the '80s and '90s with his Hannibal Records label, focusing on world music, and producing R.E.M. and Kate and Anna McGarrigle. (Those years are not depicted in White Bicycles, which takes its name from the British psych band Tomorrow.)

Boyd, who is unmarried and lives in London, heard himself repeatedly telling the tales on BBC radio documentaries or "sitting around over dinner with a bottle of wine going into my riff about what happened on the Coleman Hawkins tour." So he decided it was time to write down the stories.

The White Bicycles book jacket, boasting blurbs from Brain Eno and Kate Bush, says Boyd "lived - and helped shape - the Sixties . . . and he remembers it." But, Boyd says, "I could feel that I was starting to remember telling about it, instead of remembering it. It starts to calcify."

The decision to become a memoirist was hastened after 2001. Then, as Boyd put it, "my career as a record producer came to a shuddering halt" from escalating legal conflicts between Hannibal and its parents, Rykodisc and Palm Pictures.

In addition, Boyd's recording strategy was seen as passe. In a digital age of perfection-seeking, computer-assisted recording, the strategy Boyd used on timeless albums like Fairport Convention's Liege & Lief, Drake's Bryter Layter and Richard and Linda Thompson's Shoot Out the Lights - "getting a bunch of guys in the studio and saying, 'Let's go, let's do it now' " - is out of style. If Boyd wasn't himself the subject of a SXSW panel, he surely would have attended another, at the same time, called "Why Does Today's Music Sound Like S-?"

What's so satisfying about White Bicycles is that for a first-time author, Boyd, who studied at Harvard in the 1960s, writes so well.

He's a worldly guy who offers quick, cogent analysis on the difference between British and American youth culture in the '60s, and is likely to share his never-dull opinions on Scottish artist Charles Rennie Mackintosh or why Brits seem to hate their own folk music while cherishing America's.

Of Dylan at Newport, he writes, "His former mentors could barely understand what [his new songs] were about. Like the Acmeist poets in Russia in the '20s, he confused and frightened the commissars with his opacity."

White Bicycles is filled with shrewd observations, not personal revelations. "The internal life of a record producer was not a very salable project," says Boyd, who cut the briskly paced book down to size with the help of his book-editor girlfriend. "I think people are more interested in what Bob Dylan was doing that I saw than what Joe Boyd was doing."

Throughout what he calls "this curious career as a record producer," Boyd tried to keep one question foremost in his mind: "Is what I'm doing right here and now fit to go on the shelf?

"I felt," he says, "that the only way to make a commercially viable record was to make a historically viable record. A record that wouldn't sound out of place, that people would still want to listen to in 40 years. The fact that I've made a few of those is the greatest satisfaction to me."

To hear part of "Wall of Death" and other songs produced by Joe Boyd,

go to http://go.philly.

com/albumsEndText