Joe Boyd on the Birth of Rock, World Music, and Being There for Everything

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Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com. 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. So he has worked with all kinds of groups and artists, including Pink Floyd, Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny, Richard Thomas, REM, the Fables of the Reconstruction album, Vashti Bunyan, Maria Moldauer, James Booker, Ten Thousand Maniacs, Toots and the Maytals. He ran the UFO Club in London, which was significant in the development of the British avant-garde, and had a role in the famous dueling banjos scene in Deliverance. Joe, welcome.

Good to be here.

World music. Izulu music, as Paul Simon borrowed from in the 1980s. Is that in fact reactionary in a South African context?

Well, I mean, I think a lot of people in South Africa considered, I mean, 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 collaborated, the musicians that Paul Simon collaborated with and the style in which Graceland was performed as both old-fashioned and tribal. And both were, from their point of view, contrary to what they liked and what they were, represented their struggle. So a lot of the controversy about Graceland was, oh, did Paul Simon break the boycott? You know, and in fact, in South Africa, the controversy about it was much different. It was because, I mean, and people felt that by buying Ladies, you know, people in the Northern Hemisphere felt that by buying Ladysmith Black Mombazo records and Mahlatini and the Mahotella Queens records that they were somehow supporting Nelson Mandela. Whereas in South Africa, Nelson Mandela's 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.

And the Zulus have long had more capitalist traditions, or what exactly were the differences then?

Well, I don't know about capitalist traditions. They had more cattle. I thought you were saying catalyst traditions.

Well, both.

Yeah. I mean, the difference is that the Zulus, you know, are very, you know, have a history of being very belligerent, being warlike, having an empire, having great kings like Shaka. And they always felt, you know, they defeated the British army at Isandlwana and massacred a whole battalion of British troops. And they responded to the white invasion of their land quite differently than the Xhosa, which is Nelson Mandela's ethnic background who kind of took to urban life pretty well and participated and liked democracy and liked the politics. And the struggle was something that they wanted to kind of spread to all the different groups in South Africa. Whereas the Zulus liked being apart. They liked being separate. They liked holding on to 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. And the Zulus sort of reluctantly gone along with the Rainbow Nation idea, but it hasn't been easy.

So I know I can still go hear Ladysmith Black Mombazo in concert, but are those Zulu musical traditions still alive and vital today, or are they just ossified?

Well, 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. And so traditions all around the world have taken a hit, but they still exist. And I think, I mean, I haven't I've been to South Africa a few times, but not for many, many years. And so I can't claim to be completely up to date on what's going on today in Zulu, 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. So I think the traditions seem to be alive, but I wouldn't claim perfect knowledge of that.

Now, some of my friends will argue that what is called world music, it's a bad name, right? 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?

Well, I would try and change the question a little bit. I mean, I think the time that you're talking about, 1960s through the '90s, was definitely a time when— well, you could go back to the 1930s, a time when urbanization happened in a lot of previously unurban countries. And 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. And so music became modernized when it became urbanized. And I would say that the so-called world music movement that began in the '80s, which was, in my view, a response to a kind of vacuum or a sort of decline in the kind of music that many music fans, music buffs, collectors, you know, had once loved about blues, about jazz, about folk music and about rock was no longer quite so available within the Western culture. And 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. And the term world music, I don't think it's such a bad term. I mean, it was a term applied not to the music, but to an audience in Western, you know, Northern Europe and North America that was looking for, you know, 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 Byrne's 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. And independent record labels just said, okay, let's put those records all together in a corner of the record store so people can find that stuff. And it turned into something that then had, you know, people, it was so successful. It was such a kind of 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. And you know, like anything that gets popular, you're gonna have pushback and people who don't like it. But I would say that to people who complain about the term, are you complaining about the term but you like the idea of a bunch of wealthy Western, 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. And then we can have two different discussions about following that choice.

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?

It obviously gets more and more difficult to be surprised, but I do get surprised. You know, I hear wonderful things that I've never heard before. There's a, I mentioned towards the end of the book, I mentioned there's a record label in Atlanta, Georgia called Dust to Digital. And they have, they do reissues of archival recordings from all around the world, including America. And 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, people, real people playing real music from every corner of the world. And I hear astonishing things on that feed every month. It's just a delight.

And also on Twitter as well.

Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I highly recommend it.

What do you and your wife find so interesting about living in Southern Albania?

Well, we don't live in Southern Albania. We have, let's not exaggerate our exotic living.

But part-time, right?

We, my wife does work on environmental projects, mostly in the Balkans. And so we have spent a lot of time in Albania, not in southern Albania, but in Tirana. And we have a little flat there. It's not very expensive. We get to keep it and we go to Albania now and then. She goes more often than I do. And for a time there, when one of her projects was based there, we spent a lot of time there. And and that's how we met actually, because I've always been fascinated by Albanian music. I'd never been there. I went to some Lucy Duran, who's a character in the book, who's the woman who discovered, who publicized, promoted the Chora and produced those great Tumani Diabate 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. So we ended up producing a record of a great sort of assemblage of traditional musicians from Southern Albania. But it's a great place. Albania is a lovely country. It's a, Tirana is a very livable city. And 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 5 years for sure that we go for the 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.

And if you were trying to explain how, say, Southern Albanian choral music is different from Bulgarian polyphony, what's the distinction?

Well, it's a comp— I mean, Albania is not Slavic. You know, it is completely itself. It's the roots of the language go right back to the origins of Indo-European language group, language family. And so it has no connection to Slavic culture. Some, obviously, there's been borrowings and influence across the border, but the harmonic sense that distinguish Bulgarian harmonies, that close second, you know, the impossibly close dissonances that you hear in the Mystère de Voix Bulgare and in traditional singing in villages. You know, the Albanian tradition is completely different. It's equally wonderful, but it's very, very, I wouldn't, it's more polyphonic in the sense there are, it's not so much about harmony as about cycles of a lead voice and what they call a cutter, someone who enters after fall echoing the line that the lead voice has. It's very complex and very, not just harmonically, but in terms of the way that the music unfolds.

What was the greatest achievement of Toots and the Maytals, in your opinion?

Well, Toots and the Maytals is really Toots, you know.

They varied over time, right?

Yeah, yeah. No, well, no, they, they, no, they, the, Toots and the Maytals is a vocal trio originally. Toots with two guys who sang harmonies. And over the years, I think Toots began doing most of the harmonies himself in the studio. And so it's really about Toots Hibbert. And as I say in the, in the book, to me, Toots is as great a songwriter as Bob Marley. And, and it's fascinating the difference between them. You know, Marley has these wonderful sense of sweeping statements. If you listen to so many of Marley's songs are didactic, you know, do this, get up, stand up, lively up yourself, you know, sort of 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. And I think he's a poet. He's a Balzac. He's a genius of the romance, or as they used to say about Osip Mandelstam, the Russian poet, the romance of the precise. He goes into just nuanced details of life, like 54-46, That's my number. That was his number in prison. And he built a whole song about his number on the back of his prison uniform. I just think he's, you know, and he's known, or his songs are known around the world. Everybody, you know, recognizes Pressure Drop and 5446 and Monkey Man and, you know.

Sweet and Dandy is great.

Sweet and Dandy. So many, so many.

And what was Toots like?

Toots, you know, I was so thrilled to be working. I was called in to finish off Reggae Got Soul, which the tracks had been done in Kingston and his producer, Warwick Lynn, a wonderful guy, brought the tapes to London and I worked with Warwick and Toots on finishing them off. Adding some overdubs and harmonies and Toots was great. He was very affable. He had ideas. He was insistent on certain things. Toots, you know, God bless him, smoked a lot of dope. And he was behind a cloud a lot of the time. And Warwick Lynn was the sort of messenger between us. You know, 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, you know, talk patois with Toots and then talk English to me.

Because Toots wouldn't be able to speak with you or he was needed as a diplomat?

No, he just, he, they had a way of communicating. And very often when Toots would say something, I wouldn't understand a word what he said. You know, he had a very thick patois when he spoke. It was, I listen, it's a long time ago. I'm trying to, you know, I'm trying to remember. I mean, I had a lot of exchanges with him, but my most, most of the time my dialogue was with Warwick Lynn and who was an extraordinary guy. Who's I say in the book looked a bit like, He had a striking resemblance to Jeff Chandler in Broken Arrow as Cochise. He had long black hair and gold teeth and half Chinese, half Afro-Jamaican.

Now for me, the dueling banjo scene in the movie Deliverance is one of the great moments in Hollywood cinema. What was your role in that?

John Boorman was the director and I was 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, you know, and I'd pick up the phone and call the agent, 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. And the cassette was of an instrumental bluegrass track called Dueling Banjos. And he said, I want to use this in a scene, so we have to pre-record it so that the actors can mime. But I also want to use the theme the melody, the sort of 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 and, you know, like that. So I said, I know just the guy, Bill Keith, who is, I don't know if you know Bill Keith, but he was one of the great, he played with Bill Monroe for many years, but he was an MIT graduate and a city guy who mastered the bluegrass banjo and could play Bach on the banjo and he could do anything. And so I tracked down Bill Keith. And he was in Ireland. He decided he had to learn how to play pedal steel guitar, and he was touring with Kathy Dalton. And I said, when are you gonna be back? I need you in Atlanta to do this session. He said, nah, I've met this girl. I think I'm gonna stay in Ireland for a while. Get Weissberg to do it. So I said, okay. I knew Eric, and I thought he was pretty good, not quite as good as Bill, but pretty good. So I called Weissberg and he came to Atlanta with his regular guitar player. And we did as Borman asked. John came, Borman came to the session for a bit. We played it upside down, backwards, to speed and everything. And 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. And I played them Dueling Banjos and I said, John Boorman thinks this should be a single. And they said, nah, come on, are you kidding? Bluegrass? What are you talking about? We're a proper, you know, we're releasing Doobie Brothers. Neil Young, we're not going to release this hayseed stuff. And so I had to go back across the street and explain to the film company and to Borman that the record company was not going to release it. They were furious. But at least I got them, the record company, to press up like 500 white label promos. And Borman took them with him when he started doing talk shows. And he did a talk show. In Minneapolis. The first, his first date on his promotional tour was Minneapolis. And the next morning I got a call from the warehouse, Warner Brothers Records warehouse, saying, do you know about this record number such and such? And I said, yeah, 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. And the record company said, okay, I guess we'll release it. And then they had this number one record.

When did you work with Stanley Kubrick?

Around the same time. And 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.

Did he ask you to do The Right Things?

Well, sure. I mean, you know, that, I mean, 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 Vangler recording from 1956 on Deutsche Grammophon of the Beethoven Symphony number whatever. And so I'd call Deutsche Grammophon and license it. And the funniest thing was Walter Carlos, who just at the time that he was recording the soundtrack, the electronic Beethoven, he was transitioning to being Wendy Carlos. So still as Walter, I think the credit is Walter. He did that great electronic version of Beethoven's Ninth. And 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 4 minutes or 4 and a half minutes. And I tried to play it to him over the phone, and every time I'd play it to him over the phone, it would, the phone would cut off. And it turned out that one of Walter Carlos's chords was exactly the same as this international digital signal for disconnect. And so 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.

And what was Kubrick like?

Well, 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 COVID and there were two Rossini tracks So the first time Rossini is mentioned, track 1, I put Giacomino Rossini, and I was trying to, it would cost me an extra line to spell out Giacomino, so I put G. Rossini the second time for The Thieving Magpie, and I got a call at 6 AM at my home in Los Angeles when Stanley saw the proofs of the COVID And he said, Joe, I want Giacomino spelled out in full both times. That was Stanley, you know.

Did you work with Syd Barrett at all?

I did.

What was he like?

Syd was great. I mean, I loved Syd. I unfortunately, you know, I mean, fortunately or unfortunately, when I worked with him, he was very clear and very, I mean, he was he wasn't talkative. He was, you know, when we were with, I just did with Pink Floyd, I just did the first single, Arnold Lane. But I worked with them at the UFO Club and, you know, I went to rehearsals and I knew them all very well. And Syd was, Syd was great. You know, Roger did most of the talking, but when some important decision would come, the other three would all look at Syd. And Syd would say, I think we should do this. And they'd say, okay, that's what we're going to do. So he was a quiet leader and the sweetest guy you can imagine. I was very fond of Syd and very, very sad about how it all ended.

Now, Fables of the Reconstruction is arguably REM'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?

You know, I don't think any— you know, I would never take responsibility for the way musicians play. I'm not a musician. I did not sort of push REM 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 that was, and we were teetering on the edge of insolvency constantly. And so I didn't feel I could go, you know, 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 and to do the record and they didn't have a great time there. They, they insisted on staying in the middle of London, and then every day it was like an hour's drive through traffic through North London. So they got to the studio a bit battered. I don't know, it was, there were tensions in the group that I was unaware of. You know, they, they are the mo— I mean, that 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. I mean, they were just so clear and together from my perspective as an outsider. I understand that there were tensions within the group and there were, there was, you know, the, the, the rainy weather and the hour-long drive to the studio did not help. But somehow, you know, my way of working with them captured that mood. And I did the tracks that I felt I could contribute something on, you know, Wendell Gee, you know, sounded like my kind of backyard, you know, it was a folky tune. And I got, you know, a horn section, 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. So that may have had some effect, but I mean, 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 while 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. And Peter Buck kept saying, bring that— bring the guitar back a little bit, you know, sort of, I don't want it to be too— stick out too much. I said, what are you guys— come on, what am I building this mix around here? I've got nothing left. And so I felt always that they were— the mixes were a little subtle compared to what I had imagined, you know. But 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. And I think I had wanted it a little different. I think they, when they heard it, felt, mm, is this really something better than what we had before? But over the years, they've— most all of them— well, 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.

It holds up very well. You know, 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.

Yeah, maybe. I mean, but if it is, it's not deliberate. It's subconscious.

Is there any artist who has really successfully integrated American and British folk traditions. Did Richard Thompson do that a bit or has anyone?

Well, I think, let me think. I mean, you know, Natalie Merchant was such a huge fan of Sandy Denny and Shirley Collins. And when I did that, the record I did right after Fables was The Wishing Chair, which nobody talks about today. I mean, that record has sort of 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. And of course, oh, what's her name? Cassidy? Joanna Cassidy? What's the name of the girl?

Joanna Cassidy, I think. Yeah.

Who sang, who had a very famous version of Who Knows Where the Time Goes, which is Sandy Denny, classic Sandy Denny song. And I think that she made that song, you know, very popular. Sam Amidon, you know, goes back and forth between collaborating with American traditional artists and collaborating with British traditional artists. There's a wonderful guy called Tim Erickson who He lives in Massachusetts and he's one of the leaders of the sacred harp shape note revival of that singing tradition. And he sings American folk music, but mostly from New England, mostly northeastern American folk music. And he comes to England and tours with Eliza Carthy and explores those connections. Between ballads, ancient British ballads, and the way that they arrive in North America. There's so many connections back and forth. And of course, in the modern day, you know, Richard Thompson, you know, has, 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 Oakes songs and Eric Anderson songs and Bob Dylan songs. And then, you know, when the tragedy happened and they wanted to change their repertoire, music from Big Pink came out and that kind of blew their mind. And they thought, we better not do any more American music because these guys just nailed it. You know, 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 that was the result of that was Legion Leaf. So I think that could qualify as a bridge of some kind between the two traditions.

They end up not putting the song Ballad of Easy Rider on Legion Leaf album. You must have been involved with that. So there's a demo cut of them doing the Byrds song Ballad of Easy Rider, and it's later on a Richard Thompson guitar album.

Yeah, but it wasn't for Legion Leaf. That was from the pre— I believe I'm— I think I'm correct in saying that that track has Ian Matthews on it. And so it's from the un-Halfbrickin' period of recordings. And I believe it was originally proposed either for What We Did on Our Holidays, I think more like for Unhalf-Bricking. I'm not— it never would have been considered for Legion Leaf because that was a high concept record that was going to be completely British. So there was never any question of putting— and I think I would support the idea of having that. I mean, I thought it was a— it's a good song and they do a very nice version of it. And there was talk of it being on on half-bricking, I think. But somehow they decided it didn't make the cut.

When you finished producing Richard and Linda Thompson's Shoot the Lights Out, did you just know at the end, well, this is one of the best records ever? Or did that take you by surprise?

It didn't take me by surprise. I mean, we cut the tracks in 2 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. And so 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 home, potential home run. And then I spent the next 6 months desperately struggling to get enough, press enough records to supply the demand that was out there following that tour. Because it's the old story of the little independent label. The worst thing that can happen to you is to have a hit because the distributors pay you in 90 days. And the pressing plants need to be paid in 30 days. And so you're always in this terrible squeeze. And the more records you sell, the worse the squeeze gets.

And how did you think about shaping the sound on that album?

You know, I don't, these terms like shaping the sound, I don't.

I had you there for some reason, right?

You've been involved in a lot of successful projects. Well, yeah, but you know, I mean, 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. And then I sat with the engineer and they weren't anywhere around and I mixed the record. And I just mix things to sound the way they, it feels like they should sound to me. It's not a kind of 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. And then you get the rhythm guitar to fit in with the drum kit. And 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.

Now, as I'm sure you know, there's a new Bob Dylan movie out called A Complete Unknown, and the climactic scene in the movie is all about the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, where quote-unquote, Dylan goes electric. You were the sound producer there, right?

No, I was the production manager. They've actually— there's a character in the film who is credited with playing the part of Joe Boyd, the sound engineer. And I think the character, 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. I was 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. And so I, the first thing I did when I got behind my desk in June of '65 in New York at George Wein's office was call up Paul Rothchild, the great producer, the guy who produced The Doors and Janis Joplin and you know, so many things. And I said, hey, Paul, why don't you come up to Newport and mix the sound? And he said, okay, can I have 3 kin passes, meaning for his family, you know, places to stay, passes to every event. I said, deal, you got it. And 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, 6 o'clock, between the afternoon show and the evening show, because Dylan wouldn't get up in the morning to be sound checked. So the guy on the board, the guy whose hands were on those mixers, was Paul Rothschild, not me. I've never been a sound engineer. I don't know how, 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.

But 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?

Well, I think the controversy, you could see it coming for a month, if not more. You know, you can see it actually, to me, you can see it Have you seen that film, The Other Side of the Mirror?

I don't think so.

It's basically Murray Lerner who shot that film Festival, which is about the Newport Festival and has all the footage from '63, '64, '65, '66. In The Other Side of the Mirror is all the Dylan footage from '63, '64, and '65. And it's fascinating. '63, he's the idealistic singing about a coal miner and everybody looking at him like he's Woody Guthrie. And then in '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. And you look at Seeger, looks kind of 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, you know, that's gonna move the youth to revolution. What is this? And that is the beginning of what happened in '65, is that Dylan was moving away in a different direction. And he'd already recorded half an album with an electric band in the studio. And 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, music, and very pure traditional or idealistic And somehow the, and everybody, Pete Seeger and Theodore Bickel 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. And I was totally on Dylan's side. Paul Rothschild and I were like, yeah. But in retrospect, I see Pete Seeger's point absolutely. And I would contest that the, I mean, of course I would, wouldn't I contest that the sound wasn't awful. It was just very loud. Nobody'd ever heard sound that loud. I think Rothschild, you know, pushed up the faders, but it had to be because, you know, it was the equation. 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. And 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. And 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. And 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. And that escalation of volume is kind of what shaped or defined the future of rock. And it became really loud music. And that was the first time anybody heard it. It was really shocking. And 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 2 years later. But, you know, that night it wasn't. And I think Newport and folk music and jazz never really recovered. Everybody who used to, every young person who used to become a folk or jazz fan became a rock fan.

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?

Well, I mean, it's not surprising in a way because he's become such a quirky performer. You know, you—

But they listen to the older records, you know, say '63 through Blood on the Tracks, and they're like, eh.

Well, I've just heard—

To me, it's a revelation, right?

Well, I've just heard the contrary. Somebody wrote, I can't remember if somebody wrote 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. So, and they're going back and listening to the early records. So I don't know. I mean, I don't, I can't say I go out there taking polls of young people. What do you think of Bob Dylan? So I don't really know what young people think of Bob Dylan, but you know, Music, 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.

What do you think was the Beatles' most successful integration with Indian music?

Oh, that's a tricky question. I mean, 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 Sgt. Pepper. But I would say that in a way, the most significant effect of Indian music on the Beatles was in the kind of much more abstract way that it affected Lennon and Harrison. It changed George Harrison's guitar playing. I mean, 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.

Even before the slide guitar work. So a solo on a song like Something, that to you is Indian influenced?

Yeah, I think so. Because, because I think it was one of the things that, 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, because Indian music has scales that are not found on a piano. You know, 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 5 notes. And that 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 7th major and the 7th flatted, and, or the 5th or the 5th flatted, and 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 straitjacket of do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do. And that was the thing that John Coltrane found fascinating about Indian music and Indian culture and what George Harrison found fascinating. And the slide allowed Mississippi Delta musicians going back to the 1920s to explore that world of you know, between the notes, the notes between the notes. And 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 kind of a master.

And you know the solo on Taxman is by Paul McCartney, not George.

So it's a funny way of solving it at first. I know, I corrected that in the second edition.

In the book?

Yeah.

Oh, great. How was a Bombay classical music concert different in the 1930s?

Well, my understanding, 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 Western audience wouldn't sit still for 6 hours the way an audience might in, in, I mean, I think 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. And they were mostly concerts in grand palaces and homes. And when they started coming into concert halls, they were very often as they had been in these grand homes. And there's a Satyajit Ray film called The Music Room, in which you see these people, you know, with food and water and wine, whatever, It will last them for hours because they have to sit around and they would play slow ragas for a long time, morning ragas in the morning, and then you'd hear an afternoon raga. And Ravi compressed everything so that within one sort of 40-minute passage, you heard slow and then medium and then fast, and you had a tabla solo. And that's what Western audiences grew to expect from an Indian music concert and Indian musicians delivered it. And 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.

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?

Listen, I wish I knew. I mean, 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 mean, 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. And I just used to sit in front of those guitars and just listen to the way that those 3 guitars all playing these complicated arpeggios, they just somehow buzzed and chimed together in a very particular and unique way. It just is, I don't know, it's just one of the great sounds. And there's a book by an American guy who went to Kinshasa to figure it out. And he writes a whole book, Rumba Rules, it's called, by Bob White, I think, Robert White. He never could get it.

I mean, 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.

Now, you're also a music collector, at least at one point. You had 6,000 vinyl LPs.

Still, I'm looking at them.

Yeah, probably more. 30,000 compact discs. What is your system for making sure you keep on listening to what you own?

It's very elaborate, but it works. I feel it's supremely rational, but could possibly some people might find it eccentric. But they're all organized by country. I mean, all the vinyl and then the I have CDs in drawers, custom-built drawers, and they're all organized by country, alphabetical within the country. And 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. And I've got a computer with an old-fashioned version of iTunes that has never been updated. So it's better. Exactly. And all of those digitized versions are WAV files. No MP3s allowed. And on that iTunes. I organize them by mostly, I mean, you can organize them any way you like, but I usually organize them by song title. And then I download a bunch of them in alphabetical order. Like 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, you know, with a big circle in the middle. Is you can fit at wave level, you know, you can fit, I don't know, 5,000 tunes on or something. And so what we've got, which covers from SA through SU, in my, you know, so I have like 5,000 titles between SA and SU in the title. And it means you can hear all different versions of the same song. You get, I've just, The other day I listened to like 12 versions of St. Louis Blues and 8 versions of St. James Infirmary. And it's fascinating. It's great. I really like that. And 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. But 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 well or very anally organized.

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, quote, profound and beyond. Joe worked on this book for 17 years, and in my opinion, it is the most substantive book on world music ever. So congratulations, Joe.

Thank you.

Last question is simply, what will you do next?

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've been, I spent 4 months doing the audiobook because my voice is not so great these days after I would, I mean, it sounds fine now, but that's, 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. And it's now up on Amazon in America and Britain. And I'm now focused on putting together playlists on my website for people reading the book. Because people obviously, it makes people want to, and people are having to look it up themselves. But I'm going to do playlists, make it easy for people, Spotify playlists, but also YouTube because, which will be much more elaborate, which will have a lot of clips, a lot of little mini documentaries about people and You know, just endless rabbit holes that you can go down and I'm putting that together. So that's a big project. But after that, I would like to figure out a way, I haven't really started exploring it. I know there's issues with copyright and I have to, you know, 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 to 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 to Z, 2-hour-long segments on, you know, things beginning with A.

Sounds great. Joe Boyd, thank you very much.

Pleasure.

Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm @TylerCowen, and the show is @cowandconvos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.