Joe Boyd was there when Dylan went electric, when Pink Floyd was born, and when Paul Simon brought Graceland to the world. But far from being just another music industry insider, Boyd has spent decades exploring how the world’s musical traditions connect and transform each other. His new book And the Roots of Rhythm Remain, is seventeen years in the making, and is in Tyler’s words “the most substantive, complete, thorough, and well-informed book on world music ever written.” From producing Albanian folk recordings to discovering the hidden links between Mississippi Delta blues and Indian classical music, Boyd’s journey reveals how musical innovation often emerges when traditions collide.
He joins Tyler to discuss why Zulu music became politically charged in South Africa, what makes Albanian choral music distinct from Bulgarian polyphony, what it was like producing Toots and the Maytals, his role in the famous “Dueling Banjos” scene in Deliverance, his work with Stanley Kubrick on A Clockwork Orange, his experiences with Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd, how he shaped R.E.M.’s sound on Fables of the Reconstruction, what really happened when Dylan went electric at Newport, how the Beatles integrated Indian music, what makes the Kinshasa guitar sound impossible to replicate, and how he maintains his collection of 6,000 vinyl LPs and 30,000 CDs, what he’ll do next, and more.
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Recorded January 8th, 2025.
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TYLER COWEN: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today, I’m speaking with Joe Boyd. This is immediately prompted by the publication of Joe’s wonderful new book, And the Roots of Rhythm Remain, which is, I would say, the most substantive, complete, thorough, and well-informed book on world music ever written. I enjoyed every page and every moment.
Joe, more generally, is very well known as a music producer. He has worked with all kinds of groups and artists, including Pink Floyd, Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny, Richard Thompson, R.E.M.’s Fables of the Reconstruction album, Vashti Bunyan, Maria Muldaur, James Booker, 10,000 Maniacs, Toots and the Maytals. He ran the UFO Club in London, which was significant in the development of the British avant-garde, and he had a role in the famous “Dueling Banjos” scene in Deliverance. Joe, welcome.
JOE BOYD: Good to be here.
COWEN: World music — is Zulu music, as Paul Simon borrowed from in the 1980s — is that, in fact, reactionary in the South African context?
BOYD: I think a lot of people in South Africa considered . . . There are lots of different opinions about all kinds of music, but certainly, the youth in the ANC, who were supporting Nelson Mandela, I think, would probably have viewed the music that Paul Simon, the musicians that Paul Simon collaborated with, and the style in which Graceland was performed as both old fashioned and tribal. Both were, from their point of view, contrary to what they liked and what represented their struggle.
A lot of the controversy about Graceland was, “Oh, did Paul Simon break the boycott?” In fact, in South Africa, the controversy about it was much different. People in the Northern Hemisphere felt that by buying Ladysmith Black Mambazo records and Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens records that they were somehow supporting Nelson Mandela. Whereas in South Africa, Nelson Mandela supporters felt that music represented the Zulus who were the enemy of the ANC, or at least the official Zulu hierarchy was the enemy of the ANC.
COWEN: The Zulus have long had more capitalist traditions? Or what exactly were the differences then?
BOYD: I don’t know about capitalist traditions. They had more cattle. I thought you were saying catalyst traditions.
COWEN: Well, both.
BOYD: The difference is that the Zulus have a history of being very belligerent, being warlike, having an empire, having great kings like Shaka. They defeated the British army at Isandlwana and massacred a whole battalion of British troops. They responded to the white invasion of their land quite differently than the Xhosa, which is Nelson Mandela’s ethnic background, who took to urban life pretty well and participated and liked democracy and liked the politics. The struggle was something that they wanted to spread to all the different groups in South Africa.
Whereas the Zulus liked being apart. They liked being separate; they liked holding onto their traditions. And the government played on that and would give them weapons and give them special privileges and try and get the Zulus to support apartheid in return for having a privileged role within this imagined future of South Africa, which, of course, didn’t happen. The Zulus have reluctantly gone along with the Rainbow Nation idea, but it hasn’t been easy.
COWEN: I know I can still go hear Ladysmith Black Mambazo in concert, but are those Zulu musical traditions still alive and vital today, or are they just ossified?
BOYD: I think, like many places, you have the invasion of technology. You have the invasion of the drum machine, you have the invasion of people being able to listen to anything from anywhere in the world. So, traditions all around the world have taken a hit, but they still exist.
I’ve been to South Africa a few times, but not for many, many years. I can’t claim to be completely up-to-date on what’s going on today in KwaZulu-Natal culturally, but I’ve seen footage of classes in schools in Durban who sing fantastic Zulu harmonies every morning before they start classes. I think the traditions seem to be alive, but I wouldn’t claim perfect knowledge of that.
COWEN: Now, some of my friends will argue that what is called world music — it’s a bad name, but you know what I mean — that maybe it peaked between the 1960s and 1990s. That the initial impetus of commercialization gave a lot of people market access or the ability to buy a guitar, but at some point, it becomes over-commercialized, and we’ve exhausted or mined out the sources of creativity in other countries, and that today is less interesting. Do you agree or disagree?
BOYD: I would try and change the question a little bit. I think the time that you’re talking about — 1960s through the ’90s — was definitely a time when . . . You could go back to the 1930s, a time when urbanization happened in a lot of previously un-urban countries.
When urbanization happens anywhere in the world — from the Mississippi Delta going to Chicago, from the Cuban cane fields going to Havana, from the countryside coming into Leopoldville, which became Kinshasa — the same thing happens. It’s no different. This is not the so-called developing world as it was once called. It’s no different from America or England or anywhere else. The same process happens. Music became modernized when it became urbanized.
I would say that the so-called world music movement that began in the ’80s, which was, in my view, a response to a vacuum or a decline in the kind of music that many music fans, music buffs, collectors had once loved about blues, about jazz, about folk music, and about rock, was no longer quite so available within the Western culture. People began looking and realizing that a lot of those same qualities were available in African music, Latin music, Eastern European music, and people began discovering what great music there was out there.
The term world music — I don’t think it’s such a bad term. It was a term applied not to the music, but to an audience in Western, Northern Europe and North America that was looking for the same customer. A customer going into a record store looking for a Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan record was a prime candidate to buy a Susana Baca record, a Peruvian singer on David Burns label, or a Flamenco record, or a Scottish piping record.
These customers were more interested in what was going on outside the borders of Anglo-American culture than what was inside those borders. Independent record labels just said, “Let’s put those records all together in a corner of the record store so people can find that stuff.” It turned into something that then had people. . . It was such a startlingly successful marketing tactic that it became a thing. There were concert series. There were review sections in newspapers. There were all kinds of things.
Like anything that gets popular, you’re going to have pushback from people who don’t like it. But I would say to people who complain about the term, are you complaining about the term but you like the idea of a wealthy Western audience buying tickets and giving, essentially, money to the great artists from cultures from far away? Or do you dislike that whole idea? Or do you just dislike the term world music? Which do you dislike? That would be my question to anyone complaining about it. Then we can have two different discussions about following that choice.
COWEN: Now, you’ve heard more world music than just about anyone. Do you at current margins feel that you’re no longer very surprised? Or do you come across fresh styles all the time?
BOYD: It obviously gets more and more difficult to be surprised, but I do get surprised. I hear wonderful things that I’ve never heard before. Toward the end of the book, I mentioned there’s a record label in Atlanta, Georgia, called Dust-to-Digital. They do reissues of archival recordings from all around the world, including America. They have an Instagram feed that they put out once or twice a month. I’m not sure how often. It’s just fabulous. It’s just sensational. People send them clips of music — real people playing real music from every corner of the world. I hear astonishing things on that feed every month. It’s just a delight.
COWEN: Also on Twitter, as well.
BOYD: Yes. Anyway, I highly recommend it.
COWEN: What do you and your wife find so interesting about living in southern Albania?
BOYD: We don’t live in southern Albania. Let’s not exaggerate our exotic living arrangements.
COWEN: But part-time, right?
BOYD: My wife [Andrea Goertler] does work on environmental projects, mostly in the Balkans, so we have spent a lot of time in Albania — not in southern Albania, but in Tirana. We have a little flat there. It’s not very expensive. We get to keep it. We go to Albania now and then. She goes more often than I do. For a time, when one of her projects was based there, we spent a lot of time there.
That’s how we met actually. I’ve always been fascinated by Albanian music. I’d never been there, and I went to some Lucy Durán, who’s a character in the book, who’s the woman who promoted the kora and produced those great Toumani Diabaté records. She told me she was going to Albania, to a party on the beach with traditional Albanian music. I said, “Can I come?” And that’s how we met. We ended up producing a record of a great assemblage of traditional musicians from southern Albania.
It’s a great place. Albania is a lovely country. Tirana is a very livable city. It’s been a wonderful experience to spend a lot of time there and get to know the culture, get to know people. We go back every five years, for sure. We go for the festival in Gjirokastër. They have this huge festival of musicians from all over Albania playing traditional styles — no electric guitars, just the old-fashioned way.
COWEN: If you were trying to explain how, say, southern Albanian choral music is different from Bulgarian polyphony, what’s the distinction?
BOYD: Albania is not Slavic. It is completely itself. The roots of the language go right back to the origins of [the] Indo-European language family. It has no connection to Slavic culture. Some, obviously. There’s been borrowings and influence across the border, but the harmonic sense, the distinguished Bulgarian harmonies, that close second, the impossibly close dissonances that you hear in Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares and in traditional singing in villages — the Albanian tradition is completely different. It’s equally wonderful, but it’s more polyphonic. It’s not so much about harmony as about cycles of a lead voice, what they call a cutter, someone who enters after echoing the line of the lead voices. It’s very complex, not just harmonically, but in terms of the way that the music unfolds.
On Toots and the Maytals
COWEN: What was the greatest achievement of Toots and the Maytals in your opinion?
BOYD: Toots and the Maytals is really Toots.
COWEN: They varied over time.
BOYD: Yes. Toots and the Maytals is a vocal trio originally, Toots with two guys who sang harmonies. Over the years, I think Toots began doing most of the harmonies himself in the studio, so it’s really about Toots Hibbert. As I say in the book, to me, Toots is as great a songwriter as Bob Marley. It’s fascinating, the difference between them. Marley has this wonderful sense of sweeping statements. If you listen, so many of Marley’s songs are didactic. “Do this, get up, stand up, lively up yourself.” You take orders from Marley in the most wonderful way.
Toots finds these little vignettes of daily life in Jamaica and makes a song out of them. I think he’s a poet. He’s a Balzac. He’s a genius of the romance — as they used to say about Osip Mandelstam, the Russian poet — the romance of the precise. He goes into nuanced details of life, like “54–46 That’s My Number.” That was his number in prison. He built a whole song about his number on the back of his prison uniform. His songs are known around the world. Everybody recognizes “Pressure Drop” and “54–46” and “Monkey Man.”
COWEN: Sweet and Dandy is great.
BOYD: Sweet and Dandy. So many, so many.
COWEN: What was Toots like?
BOYD: Toots, I was so thrilled to be working . . . I was called in to finish off Reggae Got Soul. The tracks had been done in Kingston, and his producer, Warwick Lyn, wonderful guy, brought the tapes to London. I worked with Warwick and Toots on finishing them off, adding some overdubs and harmonies. Toots was great. He was very affable. He had ideas. He was insistent on certain things.
Toots, God bless him, smoked a lot of dope, and he was behind a cloud a lot of the time. Warwick Lyn was the messenger between us. I had a number of conversations with Toots, but if we had to make a decision about who was going to play on this track or how we’re going to deal with this question, Warwick would talk patois with Toots and then talk English to me.
COWEN: Because Toots wouldn’t be able to speak with you? Or he was needed as a diplomat?
BOYD: No, they had a way of communicating, and very often when Toots would say something, I wouldn’t understand a word of what he said. He had a very thick patois when he spoke. Listen, it’s a long time ago. I’m trying to remember. I had a lot of exchanges with him, but most of the time, my dialogue was with Warwick Lyn, who was an extraordinary guy, who, as I say in the book, had a striking resemblance to Jeff Chandler in Broken Arrow as Cochise. He had long black hair and gold teeth and [was] half Chinese, half Afro-Jamaican.
On Deliverance and Clockwork Orange
COWEN: Now, for me, the “Dueling Banjos” scene in the movie Deliverance is one of the great moments in Hollywood cinema. What was your role in that?
BOYD: John Boorman was the director. At that time, I had the title, director of music services for Warner Brothers films. I had a big office in the music bungalow on the lot, and directors and producers would come to see me and say what they wanted. “Get me John Williams.” And I’d pick up the phone and call the agent of John Williams. In this case, John Boorman came to see me, and he had a cassette that he had recorded off the car radio while driving around Georgia looking for locations.
The cassette was of an instrumental bluegrass track called “Dueling Banjos.” He said, “I want to use this in a scene, so we have to prerecord it so that the actors can mime, but I also want to use the theme, the melody, the ideas in that as the basis of the score for the whole movie. So, I need a banjo player who can play it straight, and play it slow, and play it in minor key and in major key, and play it upside down, and sideways, like that.”
I said, “I know just the guy, Bill Keith.” I don’t know if you know Bill Keith, but he was one of the greats. He played with Bill Monroe for many years, but he was an MIT graduate and a city guy who mastered the bluegrass banjo. He could play Bach on the banjo, and he could do anything. I tracked down Bill Keith, and he was in Ireland. He had decided he had to learn how to play pedal steel guitar, and he was touring with Kathie Dalton.
I said, “When are you going to be back? I need you in Atlanta to do this session.” He said, “Nah, I met this girl. I think I’m going to stay in Ireland for a while. Get [Eric] Weissberg to do it.” I said, “Okay.” I knew Eric, and I thought he was pretty good. Not quite as good as Bill, but pretty good. I called Weissberg, and he came to Atlanta with his regular guitar player, and we did as Boorman asked. Boorman came to the session for a bit. We played it upside down, backwards, to speed and everything.
Then we took it up to the location and did the playback with the strange-looking young boy and the city guy with the guitar and that whole scene. I was there when they shot it, but the funny part of it was that when the film was finished, one of my jobs was to go across the street to the record company and promote the film music to the record company to get them excited about it.
I played them “Dueling Banjos,” and I said, “John Boorman thinks this should be a single.” They said, “Nah, come on. Are you kidding? Bluegrass? What are you talking about? We’re releasing Doobie Brothers and Neil Young. We’re not going to release this hayseed stuff.”
I had to go back across the street and explain to the rec film company and to Boorman that the record company was not going to release it. They were furious, but at least I got the record company to press up 500 white label promos. Boorman took them with him when he started doing talk shows. He did a talk show in Minneapolis. His first date on his promotional tour was Minneapolis.
The next morning, I got a call from Warner Brothers Records warehouse, saying, “Do you know about this record, number such and such?” I said, “Yes, that’s a promotion single for Deliverance.” He said, “Do you know where I can get some more of them? I just had an order for 5,000 copies from Minneapolis.” The record company said, “Okay, I guess we’ll release it.” Then they had this number one record.
COWEN: When did you work with Stanley Kubrick?
BOYD: Around the same time. As I said before when you asked me about it, I said I was involved with this soundtrack to Clockwork Orange and I wasn’t at the same time. Basically, I did whatever Stanley Kubrick asked me to do. You don’t have creative input with Stanley. He was called —
COWEN: Did he ask you to do the right things?
BOYD: Well, sure. The music to that film is one of the great strengths of the film. He would call me up and say, “I need the Kurt Wangler recording from 1956 on Deutsche Grammophon of the Beethoven symphony number whatever.” I called Deutsche Grammophon and licensed it. The funniest thing was Walter Carlos — just at the time that he was recording the soundtrack, the electronic Beethoven, he was transitioning to being Wendy Carlos. Still is Walter — I think the credit is Walter. He did that great electronic version of Beethoven’s 9th.
That one, the record company was excited to release a single, but Stanley insisted on approving the edit because we had to get it down to four minutes or four-and-a-half minutes. I tried to play it to him over the phone, and every time I played it to him over the phone, the phone would cut off. It turned out that one of Walter Carlos’s chords was exactly the same as this international digital signal for disconnect. In the middle of each time I played it to him — we had to send a messenger to London to play it to Stanley so he could approve it.
COWEN: What was Kubrick like?
BOYD: He was very, very sure of what he wanted. Just before the album was released, I had tried to save space in the copy on the back of the cover, and there were two Rossini tracks. The first time Rossini is mentioned, track 1, I put Gioachino Rossini. It would cost me an extra line to spell out Gioachino, so I put G. Rossini the second time for The Thieving Magpie. I got a call at 6:00 am at my home in Los Angeles when Stanley saw the proofs of the cover. He said, “Joe, I want Gioachino spelled out in full both times.” That was Stanley.
On Syd Barrett and R.E.M
COWEN: Did you work with Syd Barrett at all?
BOYD: I did.
COWEN: What was he like?
BOYD: Syd was great. I loved Syd. Fortunately, or unfortunately, when I worked with him, he was very clear. He wasn’t talkative. With Pink Floyd, I just did the first single, “Arnold Layne,” but I worked with him at the UFO Club. I went to rehearsals, and I knew them all very well. Syd was great. Roger did most of the talking, but when some important decision would come, the other three would all look at Syd. Syd would say, “I think we should do this.” They’d say, “Okay, that’s what we’re going to do.” He was a quiet leader and the sweetest guy you can imagine. I was very fond of Syd, and very sad about how it all ended.
COWEN: Now, Fables of the Reconstruction is arguably R.E.M.’s most consistent album, and it has a quite different sound from the albums that came before. Do you think your background in British folk music influenced how that album sounds? Did that come from you?
BOYD: I would never take responsibility for the way musicians play. I’m not a musician. I did not push R.E.M. in a particular direction. They were looking to change things, and I persuaded them that the only way I could do the record — because I was still running my record label. I had an office in London, and we were teetering on the edge of insolvency constantly. I didn’t feel I could go to America for an extended period to make a record, but I could go up the road to North London, and so I persuaded them to come to England to do the record.
They didn’t have a great time there. They insisted on staying in the middle of London. Then every day, it was an hour’s drive through traffic through north London, so they got to the studio a bit battered. I don’t know. There were tensions in the group that I was unaware of when I was dealing with them, and I think, ever since then . . . I’ve stayed in touch with many of them. They’re the most well-organized, professional group of people I’ve ever encountered. They were just so clear and together, from my perspective as an outsider.
I understand that there were tensions within the group. The rainy weather and the hour-long drive to the studio did not help. But somehow, my way of working with them captured that mood. I did the tracks that I felt I could contribute something on. “Wendell Gee” sounded like my backyard, it’s a folky tune. I got a British horn section to play on “Can’t Get There from Here,” and a British string section to play on “Feeling Gravity’s Pull.”
That may have had some effect, but it’s a funny thing. I think at the time, they were a bit disappointed in the album. I was a bit disappointed because I never felt I got the sound quite right. Because when we were mixing it, Michael Stipe would say, “Bring the voice down. Keep the voice down. Don’t let the voice be too far out in front.” Peter Buck kept saying, “Bring the guitar back a little bit. I don’t want it to stick out too much.” I said, “Guys, come on, what am I building this mix around here? I’ve got nothing left.”
I felt always that the mixes were a little subtle compared to what I had imagined. Michael didn’t want his voice too prominent or too strong. Peter didn’t want his guitar too prominent or too strong, so that shaped the sound of the record. I think I had wanted it a little different. I think when they heard it, they felt, “Mm, mm, is this really something better than what we had before?” Over the years, all of them . . . I haven’t seen Bill, but the others have all come to me at various times and said, “You know, we really love that album now.”
COWEN: It holds up very well. It’s not Murmur, where everything’s always receding into the background, but it’s almost like the slight mix of American folk traditions with just a tinge of British folk thrown in.
BOYD: Maybe, but if it is, it’s not deliberate. It’s subconscious.
On artists who integrated American and British folk traditions
COWEN: Is there any artist who has really successfully integrated American and British folk traditions? Did Richard Thompson do that a bit or has anyone?
BOYD: Let me think. Natalie Merchant was such a huge fan of Sandy Denny and Shirley Collins. The record I did right after Fables was The Wishing Chair, which nobody talks about today. That record has just sunk beneath the waves of history, but it had some lovely tracks on it, including “Just as the Tide was a’Flowing,” which is Natalie’s American folk rock take on a classic British folk song. Of course, what’s her name? Cassidy, Joanna Cassidy. What’s the name of the girl?
COWEN: Eva Cassidy.
BOYD: Yes, who had a very famous version of “Who Knows Where the Time Goes,” which is classic Sandy Denny’s song. I think that she made that song very popular. Sam Amidon goes back and forth between collaborating with American traditional artists and collaborating with British traditional artists.
There’s a wonderful guy called Tim Eriksen. He lives in Massachusetts, and he’s one of the leaders of The Sacred Harp shape note revival of that singing tradition. He sings American folk music, but mostly from New England, mostly Northeastern American folk music. He comes to England and tours with Eliza Carthy and explores those connections between ancient British ballads and the way that they arrive in North America.
There are so many connections back and forth. Of course, in the modern day, Richard Thompson — he and Simon Nicol and the other guys in Fairport grew up listening to American music. They grew up listening to jug band music. They grew up listening to singer-songwriters. When I first met them, they were singing all kinds of Phil Ochs songs and Eric Andersen songs and Bob Dylan songs.
Then, when the tragedy happened, and they wanted to change their repertoire, Music from Big Pink came out, and that blew their mind. They thought, “We better not do any more American music because these guys just nailed it. You can’t do anything better than this.” But they took the spirit of music from Big Pink and applied it to British traditional music, and the result of that was Liege & Lief. So, I think that could qualify as a bridge of some kind between the two traditions.
COWEN: They end up not putting the song “Ballad of Easy Rider” on Liege & Lief album. You must have been involved with that? There’s a demo cut of them doing the Byrds song, “Ballad of Easy Rider,” and it’s later on the Richard Thompson Guitar album.
BOYD: Yes, but it wasn’t for Liege & Lief. I think I’m correct in saying that that track has Ian Matthews on it, so it’s from the Unhalfbricking period of recordings. I believe it was originally proposed either for What We Did on Our Holidays or more for Unhalfbricking.
It never would’ve been considered for Liege & Lief because that was a high-concept record that was going to be completely British, so there was never any question of putting it on. I think I would’ve supported the idea of having that. I thought it’s a good song, and they do a very nice version of it. There was talk of it being on Unhalfbricking, I think, but somehow, they decided it didn’t make the cut.
On Shoot the Lights Out
COWEN: When you finished producing Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot the Lights Out, did you just know at the end that this is one of the best records ever? Or did that take you by surprise?
BOYD: It didn’t take me by surprise. We cut the tracks in two days, and it just jumped out of the speakers at us. It took a few more evenings to get Linda’s vocals finished, but it was clearly a fantastic record. I pretty much mortgaged everything I had — or everything Hannibal Records had — to buy plane tickets for them to fly to America to do a tour because I knew that this was Hannibal Records’ first real potential home run.
Then I spent the next six months desperately struggling to press enough records to supply the demand that was out there following that tour. It’s the old story of the little independent label: The worst thing that can happen to you is to have a hit. The distributors pay you in 90 days, and the pressing plants need to be paid in 30 days, so you’re always in this terrible squeeze, and the more records you sell, the worse the squeeze gets.
COWEN: How did you think about shaping the sound on that album?
BOYD: Terms like shaping the sound, I never —
COWEN: They had you there for some reason, right? You’ve been involved in a lot of successful projects.
BOYD: They had me there, for sure, because I brought them there. I paid them to come, and I paid the studio, and I hired the engineer, and I sat there and told them when they’d got a great take. Then, I sat with the engineer, and they weren’t anywhere around, and I mixed the record. I just mixed things to sound the way that it feels like they should sound to me.
It’s not a conceptual, intellectual process like I have some idea about a sound that I want to get on this record. You put the multitrack through the board, and you put up one track at a time, and you get the bass to sound the way you think a bass should sound, and then you get the bass drum to fit with it, and then you get the drum kit to fit around that. Then you get the rhythm guitar to fit in with the drum kit. In the end, you have a sound, but it doesn’t come from the concept down. It’s not top-down; it’s bottom-up, building it up track by track.
On Dylan and the birth of rock
COWEN: Now, as I’m sure you know, there’s a new Bob Dylan movie out called A Complete Unknown. The climactic scene in the movie is all about the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 where “Dylan goes electric.” You were the sound producer there, right?
BOYD: No, I was a production manager. There’s a character in the film who is credited with playing the part of Joe Boyd, the sound engineer. I think the actor who’s supposed to be playing me is at the sound controls. I haven’t seen the picture yet. But I was the production manager.
I was very concerned with the sound because I had been to the ’63 Newport Festival, and I thought it was a fantastic event. It was a never-to-be-forgotten, seeing Mississippi John Hurt and Doc Watson through the fog coming in off Narragansett Bay and Dylan linking arms with Joni and Pete and singing “We Shall Overcome.” But the sound was terrible. All through this festival of ’63, I felt the sound was really crap. You’d have a bluegrass band with a guy playing the fiddle, and you couldn’t hear the fiddle!
The first thing I did when I got behind my desk in June of ’65 in New York at George Wayne’s office was call up Paul Rothchild, the great producer, the guy who produced The Doors and Janis Joplin and so many things. I said, “Hey, Paul, why don’t you come up to Newport and mix the sound?” He said, “Okay, can I have three kin passes?” Meaning for his family: places to stay, passes to every event. I said, “Deal. You got it.”
So, Paul and I together sound checked everybody. Every single artist that appeared at Newport was sound checked in the morning by me and Paul except for Dylan, who we sound checked in the evening, six o’clock, between the afternoon show and the evening show, because Dylan wouldn’t get up in the morning to be sound checked. The guy on the board, the guy whose hands were on those mixers was Paul Rothchild, not me. I’ve never been a sound engineer. I don’t have any technical qualification to be a sound engineer. Neither did Paul for that matter, but he was better at it than I was.
COWEN: The controversy at the time — was it really about Dylan playing electric? Was it just about the poor quality of the sound? Was it about Pete Seeger being upset? What actually happened at that time?
BOYD: I think the controversy — you could see it coming for a month, if not more. To me, you can see it. Have you seen that film, The Other Side of the Mirror?
COWEN: I don’t think so.
BOYD: It’s basically Murray Lerner who shot that film festival, which is about the Newport Festival, has all the footage from ’63, ’64, ’65, ’66. The Other Side of the Mirror is all the Dylan footage from ’63, ’64, and ’65, and it’s fascinating. In ’63, he’s the idealistic singing about a coal miner, and Pete, everybody looking at him like he’s Woody Guthrie.
Then in the ’64, he does a workshop, and Pete Seeger introduces him as the voice of a generation, and he gets up to the microphone, and he sings “Mr. Tambourine Man.” You look at Seeger, who looks puzzled, slightly shocked. What is this? This isn’t a protest song. This isn’t a song you could sing at the barricades. This isn’t a song that’s going to move the youth to revolution. What is this?
That is the beginning of what happened in ’65, is Dylan moving away in a different direction, and he’d already recorded half an album with an electric band in the studio. Just before, in the weeks leading up to the festival, we had The Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man,” electric version, on the Top 40 radio. We had Dylan, “Like A Rolling Stone” with an electric band on the radio.
It was Top 40 big business, mainstream popular culture moving into this delicate little idealistic corner called the Newport Folk Festival, which was based on mostly all-acoustic music and very pure, traditional, or idealistic. Everybody — Pete Seeger and Theodore Bikel and Alan Lomax, and a lot of people in the audience — sensed that this was a bull in a china shop, that this was big-time something moving into this delicate little world.
I was totally on Dylan’s side. Paul Rothchild and I were like, “Yes.” But in retrospect, I see Pete Seeger’s point, absolutely. I would contest — of course, I would, wouldn’t I — contest that the sound was awful. It was just very loud. Nobody had ever heard sound that loud. I think Rothchild pushed up the faders, but it had to be because it was the first moment of rock.
Nobody ever used the word “rock” before 1965. There was rock and roll, there was pop, there was rhythm and blues, but there wasn’t rock. This was rock because you had a drummer, Sam Lay, who was hitting the drums very hard. Mike Bloomfield — this was his moment. He cranked up the level on his guitar. You didn’t have direct connections from amps to the PA system in those days. You just had the sound coming straight out of the amp. So, with the sound of the drums, the sound of the bass, the sound of Bloomfield’s guitar, you had to turn the vocal up so that it would be heard over the guitar.
That escalation of volume is what shaped or defined the future of rock. It became really loud music. That was the first time anybody heard it. It was really shocking. There was probably a little distortion because the speakers weren’t used to it, but it was the kind of sound that would be normal two years later. But that night it wasn’t, and I think Newport and folk music and jazz never really recovered. Every young person who used to become a folk or a jazz fan became a rock fan.
COWEN: I’ve noticed that younger people today, maybe say below 40 — they just don’t seem to get Bob Dylan. Do you have a similar impression?
BOYD: It’s not surprising in a way because he’s become such a quirky performer —
COWEN: They listen to the older records, say ’63 through Blood on the Tracks, and they’re like, “Eh.” To me, it’s a revelation.
BOYD: I’ve just heard the contrary. I can’t remember if somebody wrote it, or I heard this on a podcast or something, that the response to the film has been that young people are going, “Oh, now we get it.” And they’re going back and listening to the early records. I don’t know. I can’t say I go out there taking polls of young people. “What do you think of Bob Dylan?”
I don’t really know what young people think of Bob Dylan, but the nature of music, one of the most important things that music does is, it gives young generations a chance to give the finger to their parents’ generation and to reject things and to have their own thing. That’s part of the regenerative process of music.
On Indian music’s influence on the Beatles
COWEN: What do you think was the Beatles’ most successful integration with Indian music?
BOYD: Oh, that’s a tricky question. In some ways, the most popular tune is “Norwegian Wood,” but there are lots of much more elaborate collaborations between George Harrison and Indian musicians in subsequent albums, in Revolver and Sergeant Pepper. But I would say that in a way, the most significant effect of Indian music on the Beatles was in the much more abstract way that it affected Lennon and Harrison.
It changed George Harrison’s guitar playing. I think a lot of what you hear of George Harrison from The White Album and Abbey Road all the way through into his solo work, is very different than what you heard before he was exposed to those lessons with Ravi Shankar and his trips to India and his exposure to that culture.
COWEN: Even before the slide guitar work, so a solo on a song like “Something” — that to you is Indian influenced?
BOYD: Yes, I think so. I think that was one of the things that appealed to George about slide guitar, was the way that you could find the notes between the notes, which is the basis of Indian music. Indian music has scales that are not found on a piano. That’s one of the revelations that I got from the research on this book, was that so many cultures around the world outside of Europe have scales that are not divided mathematically, that are mostly, many times, pentatonic, meaning five notes.
The blue notes that are such an integral part of American music, are really an attempt by African American musicians to find that note that is somewhere hidden between the seventh major and the seventh flatted, or the fifth flatted. That slide guitar, the bending of the guitar string, the slurring of the saxophone note, the slurring of the vocal, is an attempt to escape the straightjacket of do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do. That was the thing that John Coltrane found fascinating about Indian music and Indian culture, and what George Harrison found fascinating.
The slide allowed Mississippi Delta musicians going back to the 1920s to explore that world of between the notes, the notes between the notes. I think George Harrison — his exposure to Indian music led him to seize upon the slide as a way to express. Once he realized that he was never going to be a virtuoso on the sitar, he refocused himself on the guitar and became a master.
COWEN: You know the solo on Taxman is by Paul McCartney, not George.
BOYD: I know.
COWEN: In a funny way it’s Paul doing it first.
BOYD: I corrected that in the second edition.
COWEN: In the book?
BOYD: Yes.
COWEN: Oh great.
BOYD: [laughs]
COWEN: How was a Bombay classical music concert different in the 1930s?
BOYD: Well, I obviously wasn’t there, but my understanding is that Ravi Shankar’s vision of how to present Indian music to a Western audience — he knew that a Western audience wouldn’t sit still for six hours the way an audience might in . . . One of the things that was an interesting revelation for me was that Hindustani classical music in the ’20s and ’30s and the 19th century was very exclusive to the wealthy. They were mostly concerts in grand palaces and homes.
When they started coming into concert halls, they were very often as they had been in these grand homes. There’s a Satyajit Ray film called The Music Room in which you see these people with food and water and wine and whatever. It will last them for hours because they have to sit around. And they would play slow ragas for a long time, a morning raga in the morning, and then you’d hear an afternoon raga.
Ravi compressed everything so that within one 40-minute passage, you heard slow, and then medium, and then fast, and you had a tabla solo. That’s what Western audiences grew to expect from an Indian music concert, and Indian musicians delivered it. Eventually, that format became popular back in India, but when it first came to the West it was very different than the way it was in India.
COWEN: The musical guitar sound from Kinshasa. Why is it so hard to replicate? It sounds so simple, hardly anyone can do it. What’s the trick?
BOYD: Listen, I wish I knew. I’m not a guitar player so I can’t even begin to say, but I do know that, for me, that’s one of the most magical sounds in world music. I had the great pleasure of working with an artist called Kanda Bongo Man on Hannibal Records, and we organized tours for him to Britain and North America. I used to sit in front of those guitars and just listen to the way that those three guitars, all playing these complicated arpeggios — they just somehow buzzed and chimed together in a very particular and unique way. I don’t know. It’s just one of the great sounds.
There’s a book by an American guy who went to Kinshasa to figure it out. He writes a whole book, Rumba Rules, it’s called, by Bob White, I think is his name. He never could get it. He did, he played with bands. He said he kind of passed; he just about got away with it, but he never could really improvise the arpeggios that those guys do in Congolese rumba.
On maintaining a music collection
COWEN: Now you’re also a music collector. At least at one point, you had 6,000 vinyl LPs.
BOYD: Still. I’m looking at them.
COWEN: Yes, probably more — 30,000 compact discs. What is your system for making sure you keep on listening to what you own?
BOYD: It’s very elaborate, but it works. I feel it’s supremely rational. There could possibly be some people who might find it eccentric. But they’re all organized by country, all the vinyl, and then I have CDs in drawers, custom-built drawers, and they’re all organized by country, alphabetical within the country. Basically, over the years, I have loaded the CDs, digitized the vinyl, digitized cassettes. I’ve got tons of cassettes, and I’m only — I don’t know — a quarter of the way through, but it’s all now on a hard drive. I’ve got a computer with an old-fashioned version of iTunes that has never been updated.
COWEN: So, it’s better.
BOYD: Exactly. All of those digitized versions are wave files, no MP3s allowed. On that, iTunes, I organized them . . . Mostly, you can organize them any way you like, but I usually organize them by song title. Then I download a bunch of them in alphabetical order.
At the moment I’m listening to one of those big old iPods that actually my wife Andrea has. It’s her iPod, this big one with a big circle in the middle. At wave level, you can fit, I don’t know, 5,000 tunes on or something — what we’ve got, which covers from SA through SU. So, I have 5,000 titles between SA and SU, and it means you can hear all different versions of the same song. The other day, I listened to twelve versions of “St. Louis Blues” and eight versions of “St. James Infirmary.”
It’s fascinating. It’s great. I really like that. Then we just keep moving, keep going around, and keep adding, so every time around the alphabet, there’s more, different, takes longer every time. If I want to listen to a specific thing, I can always look it up, pull it out, which I did writing the book quite a lot because it’s all very anally organized.
COWEN: Before my last question, I’d just like to plug your book again. The title is And the Roots of Rhythm Remain: A Journey through Global Music. Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin blurbed it as “profound and beyond.” Joe worked on this book for 17 years. In my opinion, it is the most substantive book on world music ever. Congratulations, Joe.
BOYD: Thank you.
COWEN: Last question is simply, what will you do next?
BOYD: Well, I still have a lot of work to do on the book. You may think it’s over now that it’s out, but I spent four months doing the audiobook because my voice is not so great these days. It sounds fine now, but I’ve been doing voice exercises. When I first started the audiobook, after half an hour, 40 minutes of reading, I would start to sound like this, so it took me a long time.
It’s 41 hours, the audiobook, and I produced it myself. It’s now up on Amazon in America and Britain. I’m now focused on putting together playlists on my website for people reading the book — because it makes people have to look it up themselves. I’m going to do playlists, make it easy for people. Spotify playlists but also YouTube, which will be much more elaborate, which will have a lot of clips, a lot of little mini documentaries about people — just endless rabbit holes that you can go down. I’m putting that together. That’s a big project.
After that, I haven’t really started exploring it. I know there are issues with copyright, but I want to figure out a way that I can play my collection and tell stories about it that people can listen to, whether that’s a radio show or a podcast or whatever. I’ve done that before, that is Joe Boyd’s A–Z, which people can find on my website, which are like 10-minute-long trips through my collection. But this is more ambitious. This would be Joe Boyd’s Big A–Z, two-hour-long segments on things beginning with A.
COWEN: Sounds great. Joe Boyd, thank you very much.
BOYD: Pleasure.