White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s (Serpents Tail Classics)

Boyd produced and was instrumental in creating some of the most important recordings of the s (as well as the '70s and '80s). He is best known for his work.
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Joe Boyd's classic memoir of the 60s music scene reissued as a Serpent's Tail Classic, with a new foreword by Hanif Kureishi. When Muddy Waters came to London at the start of the '60s, a kid from Boston called Joe Boyd was his tour manager; when Dylan went electric at the Newport Festival, Joe Boyd was plugging in his guitar; when the summer of love got going, Joe Boyd was running the coolest club in London, the UFO; when a bunch of club regulars called Pink Floyd recorded their first single, Joe Boyd was the producer; when a young songwriter named Nick Drake wanted to give his demo tape to someone, he chose Joe Boyd.

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More than any previous '60s music autobiography, Joe Boyd's White Bicycles offers the real story of what it was like to be there at the time. His greatest coup is bringing to life the famously elusive figure of Nick Drake - the first time he's been written about by anyone who knew him well.

White Bicycles - Wikipedia

As well as the '60s heavy-hitters, this book also offers wonderfully vivid portraits of a whole host of other musicians: The simple brilliance of White Bicycles is that its author never overstates his own importance or exaggerates his failings, and still ends up telling an irresistible tale. But there's much to interest non-music fans as well. Web development by Firsty Group. Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1. Making Music in the s Serpent's Tail Classics.


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Joe Boyd, White Bicycles. (3/3)

Joe Boyd was an American who helped shape the careers of Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny, Nick Drake, The Incredible String Band, Pink Floyd and others by being a great producer and even greater manger with enough understanding about the music biz and the musicians under his Witchseason Productions company. I could go on but if your interested into what was happening in swinging London during the mid to late 60's than get this along with Boyd's book and you can have fun with a "six-degrees-of-separation" involving key players in the music business of the 's.

Very hip collection, especially after meeting Producer Joe Boyd. He made great record, another George Martin, this one a yank! One person found this helpful. I loved the book see my review here as well but I think Joe seriously overrates some of these artists; maybe because they were such good 'mates' way back when. Richard Thompson is an excellent guitarist, but this isn't his best stuff.

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Occasionally, Boyd's self-discipline robs us of incidental pleasures that a more rambling raconteur might have offered. Describing a trip through the Deep South in search of authentic blues, he crafts single-sentence summaries of experiences that other writers would have spent paragraphs on.

But there's more than enough vivid reminiscence to keep the book buoyant, and Boyd's prose can convey a lot in a few words. Recalling the Blues and Gospel Caravan tour he organised in , Boyd notes that legendary blues buddies Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee "cordially loathed" each other offstage. Meeting Pink Floyd's dandyish managers in , his first impression was that they "looked like monkeys dressed up for a PG Tips commercial". John Hopkins, his UFO Club confederate, is framed by a drug squad officer who, to clinch the bust, "reached, conjurer-like, behind his sofa and pulled out an evidentiary plum".

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The 16 pages of black and white photographs, like Boyd's text, capture evanescent history with remarkable clarity. Here is John Lee Hooker playing a blues all-nighter at Alexandra Palace, hunched in front of a crowd of solemn, nerdy white youngsters. Here is Nick Drake, hesitantly stroking a keyboard with one hand and sucking on a cigarette with the other.

Rock autobiographies usually rely on pre-existing devotion to the artists concerned. White Bicycles has, I think, enough of a grasp of larger issues - historical, philosophical, psychological - to be of interest to readers unfamiliar with the records Boyd produced.