Joe Boyd

30:51I just sort of realized, and I realized almost more after I finished the book and I've been touring and talking about it and doing Q &As and things like that. One of the things I realized is, and I mentioned in the book, but maybe I might have, if I went back and rewrote the book, I might make more of a theme of it, is the fact that going way back, certainly to the beginning of the 19th century, what defines modernity is how African it is or how Roma it is. By the late 19th century, Cakewalk, the Grizzly Bear, the Charleston, all that became the dominant force for young people to dance to. and if you weren't dancing to that sort of rhythm you were square and if you go back a little further to goethe and the romantics who was the big musical revolutionary list you know he was this matinee idol who toured across europe with fainting females and and he modeled his whole performance style on a roman musician that he saw that was famous in hungary when he was a kid and this flamboyance, this joy, this kind of taking the notes written on the page and decorating them and playing them with trills and playing them with accents and playing them in a crazy new way, that's Roma.

32:27It defined what was new and what was shiny and what was attractive to young people. That's one of the problems that European folk music has had you know in the more recent the last 50 years has been that it lacks any kind of african feeling rhythmically and therefore is consigned to being square you brought up english folk music in there's an example from your discography that kind of illustrates the way in which a group of people sometimes learn about themselves best from outsiders you know and Yeah. Outsiders can sort of reaffirm your sense of who you are. And there's sort of this example from the Fairport Convention.

33:15Yeah. Fairport Convention, it's not until 1969, and they discover a song, A Sailor's Life, that they really embrace English folk music. Prior to this, they sort of are working more from an American tradition. And maybe you can talk a bit about that, because I think it's kind of... When I first heard Fairport, I was very impressed with their musicianship. The upside was how good they were, and particularly Richard Thompson, on their instruments. The downside was they kept singing Richard Farina and Eric Anderson and Phil Oakes, and to be fair, some very good Bob Dylan songs. But I thought, why are these English kids so wrapped in this music that I kind of left America to get away from?

34:07I mean, I just was never that sold on the white middle-class singer-songwriter idea. And so then they added Sandy Denny to the group. And Sandy had been around the folk clubs for a few years, and she had never been a songwriter before. She had been a balladeer. She sang traditional Scottish, Irish, English ballads. And she would play these ballads to them in the van when they would go to gigs. And little by little, it kind of got through to them. And so then they did that track you mentioned, Sailor's Life. But they just still thought of it as one string to their bow, one thing that they did along with other things.

34:52Richard and Sandy were writing songs. that was a new aspect, new dimension of their music. And then they had this terrible crash, and the drummer, Martin Lambeau, was killed, and a girl, Jeannie the tailor, was killed as well. And they were devastated, and they thought they would break up, they would never play again. And then when they decided to reform, they wanted to do something completely new, So they would never play the songs that they played with Martin on drums with a new drummer. That was the idea. And right at that time, out came music from Big Pink. And everybody, all musicians in London, were just gobsmacked, as the English say, by music from Big Pink.

35:43And again, there's a little outsider element there because they're Canadians. But still, what they were doing was a fresh approach to a very American form of music. And building something unbelievably original, appealing, virtuosic, all this, you know, with that record. and in a way they were following on from Bob Dylan at Newport in 1965 more than Bob Dylan was. Yeah. And doing something really rich and interesting. And so in a way it hit the fairport like a rebuke. Like you English boys from Muswell Hill, you think you can play some American stuff? Is that how you want to reinvent yourself after the crash?

36:39Forget about it. This is defining that moment. And so they really went to try and do with British traditional music what the band was doing with American traditional music. And they were so lucky because they were clever. They found a drummer in Dave Mattox, who was not a rock drummer. He was a jazz drummer. He was a dance band drummer. And he found the dance rhythms in all the songs that they wanted to play. The record just comes alive because of that mix. And adding Dave Swarbrick, who was a very wonderful traditional fiddle player, into the band, made this record that changed everything in Britain, in the folk scene anyway, Legion of Leaf.

37:35Yeah. It really had a huge impact. And he brings in the rhythms that, you know, to your point, where English folk music could be seen as square, he sort of starts to bring in some rhythms that maybe help. Yeah. He does it with jazz chops. Yeah. At that time, I don't think Legion of Leaf was at the top of the list of the hippest records on the charts. But it was a lot hipper than any other folk record at that time. And it captured the imagination of a certain portion of the audience. It's just fascinating to me that this group that we think of as a consummate English folk group starts because they're sort of doing American folk music.

38:24in the process, we discover the English folk tradition, Canadian group does Americana better than any American possibly could, and then forces Fairport Convention to confront their own roots and who they are as people. And this process repeats and repeats. I mean, one of the things I talk about in the book is that back and forth with Fela and James Brown. You know, that somebody said about when James Brown's extended jams, you know, extended dance tracks began making inroads. There's a woman writer who I quoted the book saying, those records told us that we were really from somewhere else, that Africa was really over there.

39:21that there was something different about african-american culture and then fela you know who had been watching as james brown imitators spread all across west africa people imitating james brown very slavishly trying to sound exactly like james brown and then he came to la and somehow that exposure to Black Panthers, to the music, to the culture, he went back to Nigeria and created something that was a bit James Brown-ish, but very Nigerian. And so that back and forth happens, not just between the band and Fairport Convention. And by the way, there was a lovely footnote to the Fairport Convention story that many years later, an English singer who I know was playing at a festival, and he met the guys from Los Lobos.

40:23And they said, oh, do you know Richard Thompson and the Fairport Convention? And he said, yeah, I know those guys. They're friends of mine. He said, well, when you see them, tell them that if it hadn't been for Legion Leaf, we would have still been a heavy metal band from East LA. Whoa. that it was Legion Leaf which convinced Los Lobos to dig into their own cultural background. You would never listen to Los Lobos and hear Legion Leaf. But it's just a conceptual thing. It's like, oh, maybe that's what we should do instead of trying to sound like, you know, Def Leppard or something. That is amazing.

41:06Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's an additional wrinkle, really, in a way to the James Brown Fela interplay and if you think about it slave trade initiates from Africa in Cuba you get these African rhythms that start to form and influence you know the music of Cuba you get things like the habanera you talk about which is a Cuban rhythm Havana rhythm right it comes to America likely I'd imagine through New Orleans probably. And you get these rhythms that start to influence early R &B music, which would then of course influence James Brown, which would then influence Fela. Fela's also taking in Cuban music, happened to be a big fan of Cuban music, was taking in those records directly as well, comes to America, picks up the James Brown, goes back, and so you start to get this really bizarre Africa influence being Cuba going back to Africa through this James Brown connection and Fela.

42:15And it just becomes like, whoa, like there's no, there really are no boundaries. There's no borders. Yeah, yeah. The whole extended jams of those James Brown records from the late 60s, early 70s were inspired by the Montuno. You know, the scratch guitar parts, most of them are clave. One, two, one, two, three, one, two, one, two, three, one, two, one, two, three. So you have the influence of Latin, Afro-Cuban music into America, into Africa, meeting in the middle of the Atlantic. And, you know, you're never going to get a simple diagram. a linear explanation of anything to do with music or culture.

43:09It so whirls around in the wind. Were there histories of any countries or cultures you considered including but ultimately didn't get to? Not really, because basically the idea from the beginning was the music we all know, but we don't know about it. So I love Rombetico, I love Fado, I love Northern African music, Algerian, Moroccan, Egyptian. That would have made it a different book. You know, everything that's in this book is something so, oh yeah, I've got a couple of Ravi Shankar records. I'll read that. Or I took those Latin dance lessons when I was in college. I mean, everything in there is hopefully got some tangential relationship to people's listening experience with music.

44:20How has digital distribution in the modern age aided and or disrupted this global flow of music that you illustrate in the book? Well, in some levels, of course, it aided it. I mean, my wife and I put together two playlists of 100 tracks each on Spotify and Apple that we can send out. I'm preparing a newsletter that will send this out to everybody. And that's great. And in my research, I was able to dig things out on YouTube and Spotify and hear things that I never would have been able to hear until write about it in a way that probably I couldn't have in some cases. And I think that a lot of the changes that pulled music away from the sort of thing that I like listening to didn't happen because of digital distribution.

45:23I think the traditional record companies that made so many great records and pressed so much great vinyl and that whole ecosystem of vinyl records and jukeboxes, that was destroyed by the cassette, first and foremost. So on the one hand, technology gives with one hand, takes away with the other. And the same thing has happened with CDs and the death of vinyl, the rebirth of vinyl. The biggest change has been the rhythm machines. In terms of the music that I write about in this book, I write about music that's made by people in a room, in a moment, playing off each other. You know, rhythms that have been learned from elders to youngers that have been absorbed through culture.

46:31And now, you know, rhythms fly around the world very fast. and you can sit in Tokyo and hire somebody to give you a rhythm track in Marseille, send it to you digitally, and you can relay a Japanese rap track over it. It's just a different thing. It's a whole different thing. And people say, how far up to the present did you write the book? I said, really, I wrote from antiquity. up to the drum machine. Because that's where everything changes and it becomes a different subject and not one that I could really address and keep the book under 900 pages. There's another question I had. What do you make of hip-hop and sampling?

47:24You know, when I hear, even with a singer-songwriter, and from the first bar, I know that there's a click track. going on here. It's not that you can even hear the percussion. It's just you can hear the regularity. You can hear the absolute inflexible regularity of the rhythm. And sometimes I'll hear very nice singing and very nice words, but I don't feel I have to listen to it again. And to me, I don't know, this is just my crackpot theory. If music was made in a moment where nobody knew what was going to happen next, from beat to beat, minute to minute, that sense of danger, that sense of adventure, you're not just laying it down with your heads in earphones, with a click track somebody sent you, and you're adding a bass part to something that already has a keyboard.

48:27if you're doing it live in a room with musicians and nobody knows how it's going to turn out is it going to be a good take or a bad take it's a collective adventure that feeling passed through the technical process to the final product whether it's a streaming file or a CD or a cassette or a vinyl or whatever it is when the listener gets some of that sense of adventure, it translates. It feels more adventurous to listen to, for me anyway. One last break and we'll come back with Joe Boyd. When you own your own business, you own every decision. Now own the card that rewards you for it. The Chase Sapphire Reserve for Business card brings the best Sapphire Reserve benefits to business owners who expect hard-working rewards.

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52:19Everything from websites to sales to inventory to accounting, all linked and talking to each other. Check out Odoo at odoo.com. That's odoo.com. There was, you know, and Prince famously used the Lindrum in various rhythm machines and drum machines. But, you know, I forget which rap or hip-hop producer it was now. I won't say a name because I don't remember who it was, but a very famous hip-hop producer at some point had a conversation with Prince and Prince said, you know what? You're making these, like I know I use drum machines, but like you guys are only producing on the computer. At least with the drum machine, I would connect it to speaker.

53:04I was moving air still with my drum machine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I was moving air with it And then adding other things on top of it. You were only creating in a computer, so this isn't music. There's no air being moved at all. That is a great example of why Prince was really great with the drum machine and it sort of thought and spilled. No, I mean, he's an exception that kind of proves the rule or whatever. But I have to say, I went to see Prince one of the early times he came to London. It wasn't in an arena. It was in like a 3 ,000-seat hall. and I had a pretty good box seat overlooking the stage.

53:43I was kind of excited to see him. But there were light effects and there were things going on. Everybody had a little earbud. And so you knew that somewhere underneath the stage there was a hard drive with something cueing, like a pulse. and it got a little boring a little tiring after a while and then there was this moment where you could tell that he it switched off and prince just got out his guitar and he started playing purple rain i think or something and he was completely free of the click and it was just transcendent you know it was just really it was just fantastic i went to leo's later i went to see him at the o2 and i got so there's some weird connection my second cousin was playing keyboards in the opening act and so i got to go backstage and then we went to the after party which the after show which was in a small theater behind the o2 and some of the people in the backing in the in the opening band and some of prince's guys they all were out on stage like hooking up their instruments and prince walked out on stage and he went up to the microphone and he looked around at the band he looked around he said let's do stevie and so they did an hour-long set of stevie wonder covers just no click nothing rehearsed just these guys this great band and prince playing superstition and you know all this stuff and then they take a break and they say we'll be back and they come back like 15 minutes later and again everybody goes their instruments they're all sitting there waiting what's prince going to do and he goes up to the microphone he says sly and they did an hour of sly covers and it was just fantastic you know yeah and i did i have to say i loved it more than the show which was good oh then the o2 show yeah the o2 show yeah and i had a good seat and everything but it was you know you could feel it was very programmed everybody knew exactly when the cues were and the lights did this and the, you know, and even though the drummer was playing, but he, you know, everybody had a head, had earbuds.

56:23Yeah. And yeah, it was okay. It was a good show, but that after party was never to be forgotten. In hindsight, who knew the, the unfocused, the drummer you could never get to pay attention or focus would be our greatest asset all these years. It's like, you know, The drummer speeding up or changing to a new part. It's like that really... But sometimes, yes, of course, there are times when you, as a producer, you tear your hair out because the drummer can't keep time. But other times, it just picks up. The intensity sort of picks up in a nanosecond. Just because something has happened, somebody's done something on an instrument, but everything just gets that little more intense and everything just picks up a little bit.

57:16And also, I mean, there's some, you know, Al Jackson and some of those, you know, you can't define it. It's just he lays back. He plays at the last moment, the last nanosecond that can still be considered the beat. Yeah. And it's got a sensuality to it that a lot of modern records just are different. It's not the same thing. And it's also the way that he's playing behind the beat in relation to Duck Dunn or Duck Dunn playing bass. Or if you listen to Oye Como Va, the Tito Puente, or the Carlos, it's the way the piano player's unique sense of rhythm against the bass player's unique sense against Tito's.

58:06And it's just all working against each other. If anyone ever says, well, I don't know, I don't think you're right, everybody should play in time, I would say Exhibit A would be Try a Little Tenderness. the way it begins I think it's just a guitar and then just a piano comes in and it's very tentative rhythmically and everybody's just listening to Otis singing and then it grows and then it speeds up and it gets more it's like the difference between the feel at the end of that track and the feel at the beginning is a journey an unbelievable journey and and it's you could just feel the room these guys just looking at each other yeah should i do this now okay okay i'll try that okay oh wow otis just did something and let's answer that and you know and it's just so intense that track i feel like reading the book thinking about it i love i've always loved we talked about it a bit just the way cultures interact interplay that the great boogeyman around this conversation these days is the word cultural appropriation.

59:26On one hand, I understand the critique. On another hand, I hate that just the existence of the word could put an end to anyone thinking about borrowing this from that culture or this thing from that culture and then putting it together into their own thing and making it something completely unique. In the events that I do, Andrea is usually with me and she's running the Spotify streamer when we want to have illustrations. I said, okay, let's go to the heart of cultural appropriation. Here is the er moment of cultural appropriation. And we play The Lion Sleeps Tonight. And then we play Wim Away.

1:00:09And, you know, Pete Seeger is a heroic figure who always was for the underdog and he was, you know, for fairness. And, you know, but he was in an era when anything that you didn't have a composer credit was considered public domain or, you know, whatever. So he's getting money from Wim away. He's getting a little bit more, a bit of the money from The Lion's Sleep Tonight. And then I play Mbube, which is the original. and it's fascinating to see, to feel the audience because they know Lion's Flips Tonight by the tokens. Everybody knows that. They know Pete Seeger singing Wim away. That's familiar or at least it's not surprising.

1:00:58Then they hear Mbube. It's so intense and so profound and so rich and so individual, like this guy, Solomon Linda, who improvises the hook that has made millions and millions and millions of dollars for Disney. Now that, the fact that no money reached Solomon Linda, is cultural appropriation. That is cultural appropriation. There's a series now, I mean a film on Netflix, called The Lion's Share about the royalties of The Lion's Thief tonight. It's fascinating. It's depressing. It's shocking. But, you know, you understand in a way it was a time before anybody had lawyers and thought about all these kinds of things.

1:01:53but you know cultures all over the world african cultures african american cultures use the hawaiian guitar slide steel guitar that was invented by joseph kikuku on oahu island in 1887 yeah you know nobody's ever paid him anything yeah i mean and And to try and draw a border and say now, okay, whatever went before is one thing, but now we're going to put up a fence. You can't actually listen to this stuff and use that influence in your music because that's appropriation. I think it's kind of ridiculous because nothing is pure. There is no pure culture. And the story of the Roma is a perfect example.

1:02:51I mean, they went from South Asia all the way across the Middle East, up into the Balkans, up into Europe. They changed European music totally. And popular music all over the world wouldn't be what it is today if it wasn't for the African influence through Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Carolina, Virginia, Texas, Mississippi. Chicago, whatever. And it always mixed. The root of it all started with African slaves being forced to play for dances where the French did contredans and quadrilles. And it wasn't just African music they were playing. They were playing French music. But they were playing it mixed in with their own culture.

1:03:44and it's it's always been a mix all music is a mix so how you actually begin to parse out where the line can be drawn i don't know it's beyond me you we didn't talk about this but you spent a lot of time with some um early blues greats muddy waters willie dixon sister rosetta thar and on and on and on you also got spent a lot of time in england where do you in this particular era where do you land on the led zeppelin i mean i was never a big led zeppelin fan but not because i objected to what they did with you know any more than i object to eric clapton i mean who i object to because of some of his public positions but i don't have a problem with um eric clafton playing crossroads yeah and you know eventually when the legal world woke up to the values of copyrights and all these things robert johnson's sister i think made you know his family, long after he died, of course, got a pretty decent payday, a pretty good share of all those box sets that CBS issued of Robert Johnson.

1:05:11And even, I think, some covers by rock bands. And I know for a fact that Muddy Waters and Rosetta and people loved the fact that they found a white audience. Yeah. And the fact that they found people who ate up their music and loved their music. And part of that would be the simple fact of buying a ticket to go see Rosetta. But Chuck Berry stole from Rosetta. That's a good call. I mean, Chuck Berry is pure Rosetta. Yeah. And then everybody else stole from Chuck Berry. Chuck. Yeah. And so you can't, where do you draw the line? Should Chuck not have stolen from Rosetta? Yeah. Last question, and I'll let you go.

1:06:01You talked about the way music from Big Pink really changed everything. There were a lot of groups that then changed their style of music. Pete Townsend has said when he heard that, you know, it definitely inspired him to write in a particular way, other people as well. But, you know, six months earlier or so, it's a different record, but it's still, it's a return to Americana in a sense, in the middle of psychedelia and all this stuff. Bob Dylan released John Wesley Harding. Why did that not disrupt the sort of psychedelic thing and sort of reorient people the way music from Big Pink would six months later?

1:06:38I mean, I love that record. I think it's a very good record, but it's not in the top five Dylan records of all time. so it didn't have the same impact of blonde on blonde for example and also as dylan himself acknowledged i think in some interview or some something i think jimmy hendrix had something to do with the with the failure of john wesley harding uh record uh to have that impact because jimmy's cover of all along the watchtower blew it out of the water i mean dylan acknowledged that He said, I can't listen to my own recording of All on the Watchtower because I'd rather listen to Jimmy's.

1:07:20And Jimmy's take on that just was so immense and so extraordinary. And I think you can't go back to the culture, can't go back to the well that often. And, you know, Dylan had huge impact, like three, four times in a short space of time. You know, like whiplash, the whole Western culture suffered whiplash from Dylan. Like, wait a minute, he's done this? Oh, now he's doing this. Oh, my God. And I think, you know, at a certain point, particularly because it's sort of a subdued record, and that and Nashville Skyline and Self-Portrait are kind of curiosities, and I like them all. I mean, but particularly John Wesley Harding.

1:08:07It doesn't surprise me that they weren't course change. They didn't, like, spin the steering mechanism of the ship. Makes sense. Man, there's so much more I want to ask another time. Great speaking to you. Okay, all the best. In the episode description, you'll find a link to a seven-hour playlist Joe Boyd created to accompany his new book, In the Roots of Rhythm Remain, A Journey Through Global Music. Be sure to check out youtube.com slash brokenrecordpodcast to see all of our video interviews. And be sure to follow us on Instagram at thebrokenrecordpod. You can follow us on Twitter at brokenrecord.

1:08:45Broken Record is produced and edited by Leah Rose with marketing help from Eric Sandler and Jordan McMillan. Our engineer is Ben Talladeh. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and ad-free listening for$4.99 a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcast subscriptions. And if you like this show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app. Our theme music is by Kenny Beats. I'm Justin Richmond.

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1:09:57Cards issued by JPMorgan Chase Bank and a member FDIC. Subject to credit approval, terms apply. The more you learn about your favorite artists, the more you want to know. Claude helps you keep digging, finding new threads and rabbit holes to explore. Whether it's discovering deeper meaning behind a detail in an interview or figuring out the influence behind an artist's particular era. Claude thinks with you to find the next clue. If you can't get enough of the stories behind your favorite music and artists, Claude will help you discover new layers you didn't know existed. Try Claude for free at claude.ai slash brokenrecord.

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