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

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0:26Conversations 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 mercatis .org. For a full transcript of every conversation, enhanced with helpful links, visit ConversationsWithTiler .com. Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations With Tyler. Today I'm speaking with Joe Boyd. And 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.

1:09I enjoy it 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 R. E. M. the Fables of the Reconstruction album. Vashdi Bunyan, Maria Moldauer, James Booker, 10 ,000 Maniacs, Tutsen the My Talls, he ran the UFO Club in London which was significant and the development of the British avant -garde, and had a role in the famous dueling banjos seen in deliverance. Joe, welcome. There to be here. World music is Zulu music as Paul Simon borrowed from in the 1980s.

1:53Is that in fact reactionary in the 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 in 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?

2:47You know, and in fact in South Africa the controversy about it was much different. It was because, I mean, and people felt that by, you know, buying ladies, you know, people in the Northern Hemisphere, felt that by buying ladiesmith blackmobazo records and machlatini and the Maho Tele Queens records that they were somehow supporting Nelson Mandela. Whereas in South Africa, Nelson Mandela supporters felt that music represented the Zulu's who were the enemy of the ANC, or at least the official Zulu hierarchy was the enemy of the ANC. And the Zulu's have long had more capitalist traditions or what exactly were the differences then?

3:33Well, 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 Zulu's, 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 Isanwana and massacre the whole battalion of British troops. And they responded to the white invasion of their land quite differently than the Kosa, 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 You know the struggle was something that they wanted to kind of spread to all the different groups in South Africa Whereas the Zulu's like being a part.

4:37They like being separate. They like holding on to their traditions and the government played on that and and would give them weapons and give them special privileges and try and get the Zulu's 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 Zulu's sort of reluctantly gone along with the rainbow nation idea but you know it hasn't been easy. So I know I can still go here, ladies, Smith, Block, Mombazo, and Concert, but are those Zulu musical traditions still alive and vital today? Or are they just ossified?

5:20Well, I think like many places you have the, you know, the invasion of technology. You have the invasion of the drum machine. You have the invasion of, you know, people being able to listen to anything from anywhere in the world. And so traditions all around the world have taken a hit. But, you know, 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, Quazulu Natal culturally. But I've seen footage of classes in schools in urban who sing fantastic Zulu harmonies every morning before they start classes.

6:10So I think the traditions seem to be alive, but I wouldn't claim, you know, 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 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.

6:52I 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, you know, from the Mississippi be Delta going to Chicago from the Cuban cane fields going to Havana from the countryside coming into Leopoldville which became Kanchasa. The same thing happens. It's no different. This is not so -called developing world as it was once called. It's no different from America or England or anywhere else.

7:42The So 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 kind of vacuum or a sort of 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. 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.

8:35And the term world music, I don't think it's such a bad term. I mean, And 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 new strat -fot to Ali Khan record, was a prime candidate to buy a Susanne Bacca 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.

9:30and independent record labels just say, 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 and newspapers, papers, there were all kinds of things. And you know, like anything that gets popular, that you're going to 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?

10:25Or do you dislike like that whole idea or 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.

11:12And they have, they do reissues of archival recordings from more 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 is just a delight. 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.

12:03We have, let's not let's not exaggerate our exotic. But part time, right? 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 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've never been there. I went to some Lucy Durand, who's a character in the book, who's the woman who discovered who publicized, promoted the Korra and produced those great Tumani Diabate records.

12:56She 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 terrania, 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 five years for sure that we go for the festival in Giro Castro. They have this huge festival of musicians from all over Albania playing traditional styles.

13:41No 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 complex, 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 the distinguish Bulgarian harmonies that close second, you know, the impossibly close dissonances that you hear in the mysterious of Wabulgar and in traditional singing and villages.

14:36You 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 since 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 at the lead voices. It's very complex and very not just harmonically put in terms of the way that the music unfolds. What was the greatest achievement of Tuts and the Maytals in your opinion? Well, Tuts and the Maytiles is really Tuts. They varied over time. Yeah, no one knows. Tuts and the Maytiles is a vocal trio originally, Tuts with two guys who sang harmonies.

15:28And over the years, I think Tuts began doing most of the harmonies himself in the studio. And so it's really about Tuts Hibbert. And as I say in the book, to me, toots is as great a songwriter as Bob Marley. And it's fascinating the difference between them. You know, Marley has these wonderful sense of sweeping statements. If you listen to so many Marley 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.

16:21He's a, he's a Bollsack. He's a genius of the romance, as they used to say about the Asset 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 tuts like? Tuts, you know, I was so thrilled to be working.

17:15I was called in to finish off Reggie 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 Tut's on finishing them off, adding some overdubbs and harmonies and And Tuts was great. He was very affable. He had ideas. He was insistent on certain things. Tuts, 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 Tuts, 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.

18:11Warwick would, you know, talk Patois with Tuts and then talk English to me. Because Tuts wouldn't be able to speak with you or he was a diplomat. No, he just, he, they had a way of communicating. And very often when Tuts would say something, I wouldn't understand the 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 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 as I say in the book looked a bit like he had a striking resemblance to Jeff Chandler in Broken Arrow as Cochise.

19:00He 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 Bournemont was a director and I was at that time, I had the title director, 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 Bournemann came to see me and he had a cassette that he had recorded off -the -car radio while driving around Georgia looking for locations.

19:53And 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 mind. 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 what could play Bach on the banjo and he could do anything.

21:03And 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 going to be back? I need you in Atlanta to do this session. and he said, nah, I've met this girl. I think I'm going to stay in Ireland for a while. Get Weisberg to do it. So I said, OK. I knew Eric, and I thought he was pretty good, not quite as good as Bill, but pretty good. So I called Weisberg, and he came to Atlanta with his regular guitar player. And we did as Bourbon asked. John came, Bourbon came to the session for a bit.

21:45He 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. I said, John Bournemouth thinks this should be a single. And they said, nah, come on. Are you kidding? Bluegrass, what's the, what are you talking about?

22:29We're a proper, you know, we're releasing Dubie Brothers, Neil Young. We're not going to release this Hey Seed stuff. And so I had to go back across the street and explain to the rep film company into Boorman 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 Boorman took them with him when he started doing talk shows, and he did a talk show in Minneapolis. 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 of such and such?

23:18And 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. The record comes and says, 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 the club recording, 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?

24:02Well, 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 Van Gogh, according from 1956 on Deutsche Gramophone of the Beethoven symphony number, whatever. And so I'd call Deutsche Grafone and Licenset. And the funniest thing was the Walter Carlos, as 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 four minutes or four and a half minutes.

24:59And I tried to play it to him over the phone, and every time I'd play it to him over the phone, the phone would cut off. And it turned out that one of Walter Carlos' 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 cover and there were two Rossini tracks. So the first time Rossini is mentioned, track one, I put Giacomino Rossini and I was trying to, it would cost me an extra line to spell out Giacomino's.

25:58I put G Rossini the second time for the Theaving Magpie and I got a call at 6 a .m. at my home in Los Angeles when Stanley saw the proofs of the cover and he said, Joe, I want Giacomino spelled out in full both times. That was Stanley, you know. Did you work with Sid Barrett at all? I did. What was he like? Sid was great. I mean, I loved Sid. 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 when we were with, I just did with with Pink Floyd, I just did the first single Arnold Lane.

26:46But I worked with them at the UFO club and you know I went to rehearsal and I knew them all very well. And Sid was, Sid was great. You know Roger did most of the talking but when some important decision would come the other three would all look at Sid and Sid was saying, 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 of Swedish guy, you can imagine, I was very fond of Sid 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.

27:32Do you think you're a 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 our eminent, 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 to America for an extended period to make a record.

28:14But 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 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. There were tensions in the group that I was unaware of. They are the... 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.

29:03I understand that there were tensions within the group and they were, they were, you know, 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, Windal G, you know, sounded like my kind of backyard, you know, as a foaky tune. And I got, you know, horn section, a British horn section to play on. Can't get there from here on 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.

29:52I think at the time they were a bit disappointed in the album. I was a bit disappointed because I never felt I got to 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 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 to prominent or too strong Peter didn't want his guitar to prominent or too strong.

30:43So 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, hmm, hmm, is this really something we better than what we had before. But over the years, they've all, 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 fault traditions with just a tinge of British fault thrown in. Maybe.

31:22I mean, but if it is, it's not deliberate. It's subconscious. Is there any artist who is really successfully integrated American and British fault traditions? Did Richard Thompson do that a bit or has anyone? Well, I think, I mean, I 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's that record has sort of dis -sunk, but neither waves of history, but it had some lovely tracks on including, just as the tide was a flowing, which is Natalie's American folk rock take on a classic British folk song.

32:19And of course, what's her name? Cassidy? Joanna Cassidy? What's the name of the girl? I think. Yeah. Who's saying, 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 Amadon, 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 Heart Shape Note revival of that singing tradition.