Past Imperfect

Sixties super-producer Joe Boyd says the best sound is straight to stereo.

by Sam Adams

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Published: Mar 27, 2007

BRIGHTER, LATER: Joe Boyd, who worked with Fairport Convention, the Incredible String Band and Nick Drake, compiled his memories for White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Joe Boyd's White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s (Serpent's Tail, $18) is many things: history, criticism, cultural polemic. It's even a companion CD, featuring tracks from Boyd-produced artists like Fairport Convention, the Incredible String Band and Nick Drake. What it's not, Boyd insists, is an autobiography.

"The subject matter is not my life," Boyd says. "It's a period of history. If the subject was me, I don't think it would be too interesting to people."

Perhaps the inner workings of Boyd's mind wouldn't excite the casual reader. But as an eyewitness to history, Boyd had an uncanny knack for being in the right place at the right time. As Bob Dylan went electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Boyd ran interference between the festival's old guard, who wanted the volume on that unholy racket lowered but quick, and the soundboard-manning cohort who thought Dylan sounded just fine. In 1967, he took an unknown Pink Floyd into the studio to record their first single, "Arnold Layne." And in 1968, a shuffling Nick Drake turned up on his doorstep with his first demo tape, his black wool overcoat speckled with cigarette ash.

Although Boyd isn't shy about dropping names or dishing about who slept with who while high on what, he's modest about his own role, to the extent that it almost sounds like a coincidence that the same person turned up in all these pivotal spots. But from his earliest days, Boyd had his ear to the ground. As a teenager in Princeton, N.J., he got wind that the blues guitarist Lonnie Johnson was working as a cook in a Philadelphia hotel. One nervous phone call later, Johnson was out of retirement and Boyd was a concert promoter, with a little help from his brother and their childhood friend, Geoff Muldaur.

Although Boyd is best-known as a producer (and later, the head of the Hannibal label), he devotes a good chunk of the book to his years as a tour promoter, squiring renascent American legends like Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Muddy Waters around Europe and enduring the wrath of a fearsome Coleman Hawkins. The space that Boyd devotes to a period in which his duties included bribing airline pilots to hold flights for tardy performers would seem to clash with the "making music" part of the book's subtitle. But it's clear that Boyd views the producer's role as primarily that of enabler, not unlike the functionary who speeds across Holland with a drum kit strapped to the roof of his car.

"I compare it to the guy with the broom in curling," Boyd says. "You can have an effect on whether the stone makes a really good score, but the stone has been thrown by somebody else. You're just there to get things out of the way that might steer it wrong."

There is no Joe Boyd sound as such, but there is a texture, a sense of space. Boyd prides himself on making "records that sound like they were made in a room all at once, even if they weren't." On Fairport Convention's "The Deserter," produced by Boyd for their 1969 album Liege & Lief and included on the White Bicycles CD, Dave Swarbrick's seesawing violin practically seems to be drawing breath. As a memoirist, Boyd prefers colorful anecdotes to technical details, but he devotes several pages to a passionate defense of analog recording. "The best sound of all," he writes, "is straight to stereo, no mixing, no overdubbing — and no digits." Not surprisingly, Boyd decries the use of ProTools to add atmosphere to tracks recorded in "dead rooms," and the constant barrage of music in public spaces (including, but not limited to, concert halls). "Every time you turn around, you've got music being broadcast at you," he says. "It becomes ubiquitous at a very low level of quality. And I think that contributes to the fact that people don't value it as much as they used to."

Lest Boyd sound like a complete Luddite, he does praise the ease that automation has brought to the studio process. But he points out that even audiences who don't know the difference between analog and digital still respond to it, as evidenced by the success of Buena Vista Social Club and Norah Jones' Come Away with Me, both recorded on vintage equipment. And there's a masochistic fondness to White Bicycles' account of engineer John Wood using the heel of his hand to control the speed of a reel-to-reel tape, spattering his shirt and the console with blood. The difficulty, Boyd clearly feels, is part of the charm.

"The trick with digital is the flexibility," Boyd says. "Artists have an image in their head of the way they want a song to sound. Given the chance, they will try and perfect it, and make something where everything's in place. And that is a very great shame, because imperfection is the essence of excitement in music."

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Joe Boyd reads Thu., March 29, 7 p.m., Robin's Bookstore, 108 S. 13th St., 215-735-9600 and Fri., March 30, 6 p.m., Siren Records, 22 S. Main St., Doylestown, 215-348-2323.

 

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