White Bicycles
RECORD AND FILM PRODUCER JOE BOYD was born in Boston in 1942 and graduated from Harvard in 1964. He went on to produce Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, Fairport Convention, REM and many others. He produced the documentary
Jimi Hendrix
and the film
Scandal
. In 1980 he started Hannibal Records and ran it for 20 years.
Joe Boyd lives in London where he writes occasionally for the
Guardian
,
Independent
and opendemocracy.net. His website is located at
www.joeboyd.co.uk
. White Bicycles, an anthology of Joe Boyd’s record production in the 1960s, is available from Fledg’ling Records.
praise for
White Bicycles
‘As a memoir of the enchanted ’60s,
White Bicycles
is among the elite. It isn’t just that Boyd was among the era’s movers and shakers, he has a rare recall of events… and a fluid, engaging style. The book bristles with evocative anecdotes… exhilarating’
Observer Music Monthly
‘
One of the most lucid and insightful music autobiographies I’ve read’ Michel Faber,
Guardian
‘
Terrific… This engaging and readable book is an important addition to the history of its time’ Hanif Kureishi,
New Statesman
‘
A rock memoir that shuns the usual ’60s clichés… while providing insightful character studies of Brit-folk’s future stars… refreshing and cleverly observed’
Uncut
‘Among the musical anecdotes are thoughtful observations on the era… Boyd remains a true believer, for whom it was a joy to have been alive in that permissive dawn. At 40 years’ distance, his prose still conveys the hues of the sunrise with startling vividness’ Nigel Williamson,
The Times
‘Impossible to put down’
Q
‘Boyd is one of that select group of rock luminaries, like John Peel, or the American producer Rick Rubin, who didn’t have to pick up a guitar to shape the evolution of entire genres of music. And this book is the perfect literary echo of a lifetime’s subtle facilitation… Boyd’s pages abound with astute observations and fascinating personal detail… a transport of delight’
Independent on Sunday
‘A vivid eye-witness account… pulses with the mad enthusiasms of its period and its author’ Robert Sandall,
Sunday Times
‘Boyd’s account far exceeds the breadth of most rose-tinted ruminations… detailed and lucid… A wise, thoughtful and engrossing account,
White Bicycles
is one of the best 1960s essays of recent years’
Scotsman
‘Boyd writes in a dry, assured style about remarkable times, and he achieves the goal of any music book: to make the reader want to check out the music he writes about’ Will Hodgkinson,
Guardian Guide
‘Reading Boyd’s cracking account of the Sixties, you wonder if his life since hasn’t been one long disappointment… It’s a colourful story, beautifully told… You are left relieved that such a central figure wrote this exceptional memoir’ Mark Ellen,
Observer
‘A fascinating book overflowing with entertaining and insightful musical anecdotes’
Morning Star
‘Compulsive quirky detail, rare sanity and razor sharp recall… puts it in the same bracket as Simon Napier Bell’s
Black Vinyl White Powder
or Julian Cope’s
Head On
. A delight’
The List
‘Packed full of funny, telling anecdotes and wry, insightful observation, it takes us on a fantastic musical adventure’
fRoots
white
bicycles
making music in the 1960s
Joe Boyd
First published in Great Britain in 2006 by
SERPENT’S TAIL
an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
3a Exmouth House
Pine Street
London EC1R 0JH
This eBook edition published in 2009
Copyright © Joe Boyd, 2006, 2009
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
eISBN 978 1 84765 216 4
Contents
MANY FRIENDS HAVE GIVEN ME support, encouragement and advice. I owe a huge debt in particular to Lucy Bailey, who edited the final drafts with unerring eye and whose unsparing critiques improved it immeasurably. The book’s shape and scope are largely the result of advice from Melissa North and Pierre Hodgson, for which I am very grateful. After some early setbacks, Deborah Rogers’ belief and support gave me the energy to stick with it. A thoughtful response to the first draft from Rose Simpson made it clear what I needed to improve in the second. The musicians and colleagues without whom there would be no story to tell will, I trust, find their acknowledgements in the text that follows.
In memory of my grandmother, Mary Boxall Boyd, who taught me to listen.
Saturday sun came early one morning
In a sky so clear and blue
Saturday sun came without warning
So no one knew what to do.
Saturday sun brought people and faces
That didn’t seem much in their day
But when I remembered those people and places
They were really too good in their way.
In their way
In their way
Saturday sun won’t come and see me today.
Think about stories with reason and rhyme
Circling through your brain.
And think about people in their season and time
Returning again and again
And again
And again
And Saturday’s sun has turned to Sunday’s rain.
So Sunday sat in the Saturday sun
And wept for a day gone by.
Nick Drake
THE SIXTIES BEGAN in the summer of 1956, ended in October of 1973 and peaked just before dawn on 1 July, 1967 during a set by Tomorrow at the UFO Club in London.
John Hopkins and I had launched the weekly UFO events at an Irish dance hall in Tottenham Court Road just before Christmas 1966, and they had quickly become the hub of psychedelic London. By April, our resident attraction, Pink Floyd, had outgrown us, so I was always on the lookout for new groups. I saw Tomorrow at Blaises one night and thought they were pretty good. When they made their UFO debut on 19 May it was love at first sight between them and our audience. Steve Howe, later to make his name and fortune with Yes, played guitar, while Twink, a key figure in the genesis of punk, was the drummer. I don’t know what became of Junior, the bass player, but his mad-eyed, don’t-give-a-fuck presence in a string vest was a key element in their appeal. Lead singer Keith West had a solo hit that summer with ‘Excerpt From A Teenage Opera, Part 1’ (‘Grocer Jack, Grocer Jack, please come back…’) and did his best to maintain a pop-star presence while around him the group was morphing into something quite different. ‘My White Bicycle’, a tribute to the free transport provided by Amsterdam’s revolutionary
provos
, was their new theme song, while Howe’s solos got longer and Twink’s drumming ever wilder.
A month or two earlier, I would never have gone to Blaises and Tomorrow would barely have heard of UFO Everything was accelerating that spring: new drugs, clothes, music and clubs. The psychedelic underground and the pop scene were starting to overlap. UFO crowds were bigger each week, and it was getting hard to maintain the original atmosphere. It was also difficult to ignore the increased attention from the police: the longer the queues, the more customers were getting frisked and busted.
Hoppy ran UFO’s light tower, playing records between shows, putting on Kurosawa samurai films at 3 a.m. and troubleshooting around the club while I stayed near the entrance and trousered the money. When plainclothes policemen asked to have a look around, I would state our policy: no search warrant, no entry. (There was nothing to prevent them from merging with the crowds and paying their way in, of course; UFO’s ads often touted a ‘spot the fuzz’ competition.) As for Mr Gannon, our landlord at the Blarney Club, he felt the case of whiskey delivered to Goodge Street police station every Christmas should take care of them well enough.
A few weeks before Tomorrow’s return visit on 30 June, a uniformed bobby turned up, asking to be allowed in to collect clothes left behind by a man being held in custody. This made sense: half an hour earlier, a naked guy had bolted past me up the stairs and disappeared into the night. Hoppy and I agreed that an exception could be made, so I told the audience we were going to let the fuzz in to look for the clothes and turn on the overhead lights (murmurs and booing). As the crowd spread out in a wide circle, some garments could be seen scattered around the floor. The young bobby seemed to blush as he glanced at the crowd, a vivid cross-section of ‘London Freak’
circa
May 1967: long hair on the boys, flowered dresses on the girls, Arabian or Indian shirts, a few kaftans, jeans, even a few white shirts and khaki slacks. Many were tripping; most were laughing or grinning.
The laughter grew as it became clear that the bobby’s hastily gathered armful contained more than was required to make his prisoner decent: two or three pairs of underpants (gender undetermined), a couple of shirts, a bra, several socks, etc. As he made his way to the door, the working-class constable regarded us with amazement, not hatred. We, in turn, regretted that he could not grasp why we took drugs and danced in the lights, lived for the moment and regarded our fellow man with benign tolerance, even love. That was the theory, anyway. Tested, it would come undone in the ensuing years, even as the bobby’s mates donned kaftans, rolled joints and joined the crowds at festivals.
The first man I knew to take hallucinogens was Eric Von Schmidt. (You can see Eric’s photo on one of the record jackets beside Sally Grossman on the cover of
Bringing It
All Back Home
and hear Dylan blurt, ‘I learned this song from Ric Von Schmidt’ on his eponymous first LP.) Mail-order packages of peyote buds from Moore’s Orchid Farm in Texas arrived periodically at the Von Schmidt apartment near Harvard Square. He would cook them up in a pot and invite friends over to drink the soup. They would stack some LPs on the record player – Ali Akbar Khan, Lord Buckley, Chopin, the Swan Silvertones, Lightning Hopkins – then drink the potion and try not to be sick. If you couldn’t keep it down you weren’t, in Eric’s view, calm enough (‘centred’ had not yet been used in this context) to deserve the high. It was an experience meant for an intellectual and spiritual elite, not the masses (although he certainly would never have put it that way).
The market is too efficient, of course, to limit transcendence to people who can stomach peyote. Down the street from Eric’s flat in 1962 was the laboratory of Professor Timothy Leary, who advertised in the Harvard Crimson for volunteers to take LSD at a dollar an hour and was determined to become the Johnny Appleseed of hallucinogens. By 1967, pure, powerful LSD tabs were still available while adulterated, amphetamine-laced concoctions were starting to be widely distributed. Few bothered about how elevated the experience might be.