Joe Boyd (1) (1942–)

After having read only the opening chapters I am so excited to find a book that UNDERSTANDS what lay behind the so-called sixties music phenomenon: the discovery of what black music had to say about the way we felt about living in a world ruled by the pathologically normal. And why we wanted to reclaim and transform that message.

As a teenager in Princeton, New Jersey, Joe Boyd started booking blues acts that he and his friends loved. After Harvard he became a tour manager and experienced the Newport Folk Festival where Bob Dylan went electric. He went to London, opened the UFO club, produced Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, Fairport Convention and The Incredible String Band.

Boyd’s love of music comes through here. He acknowledges his mistakes, mourns those fallen to drugs and misadventure, and celebrates good music and show more good friends made. Nick Drake's rise and fall is perhaps the most poignant story here. show less

A man who describes his ambition - from teenage years - as to be an 'eminence grise' is perhaps not driven as others are, but you can't argue with his success. Boyd was working at the Newport Folk Festival when Dylan went electric, founded the UFO club, produced Fairport Convention and Nick Drake (and that's just scratching the surface of the stories in the book).

This is a wonderful and well-written book about music and about the 1960s, written with insight and a self-deprecating sense of show more humour. As he puts it at the end, inverting the line about people who were really there in the 60s can't remember it: "I was there. And I do remember". show less

Joe Boyd was an American who became a big figure on the late-60s London music scene. Boyd was the man behind Hannibal Records, and was one of the movers & shakers during the early days of Island Records (he produced Fairport Convention, Incredible String Band, Nick Drake, Vashti Bunyan, Maria Muldaur & more). I've only read a few dozen pages so far, but looks to be an interesting one-man's-view of the folk-rock movement on both sides of the Atlantic.