White Bicycles

by Joe Boyd

  RECORD AND FILM PRODUCER JOE BOYD was born in Boston in 1942 and graduated from Harvard in 1964. He went on to produce Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, Fairport Convention, REM and many others. He produced the documentary Jimi Hendrix and the film Scandal. In 1980 he started Hannibal Records and ran it for 20 years.

  Joe Boyd lives in London where he writes occasionally for the Guardian, Independent and opendemocracy.net. His website is located at www.joeboyd.co.uk. White Bicycles, an anthology of Joe Boyd’s record production in the 1960s, is available from Fledg’ling Records.

  praise for White Bicycles

  ‘As a memoir of the enchanted ’60s, White Bicycles is among the elite. It isn’t just that Boyd was among the era’s movers and shakers, he has a rare recall of events… and a fluid, engaging style. The book bristles with evocative anecdotes… exhilarating’ Observer Music Monthly ‘

  One of the most lucid and insightful music autobiographies I’ve read’ Michel Faber, Guardian ‘

  Terrific… This engaging and readable book is an important addition to the history of its time’ Hanif Kureishi, New Statesman ‘

  A rock memoir that shuns the usual ’60s clichés… while providing insightful character studies of Brit-folk’s future stars… refreshing and cleverly observed’ Uncut

  ‘Among the musical anecdotes are thoughtful observations on the era… Boyd remains a true believer, for whom it was a joy to have been alive in that permissive dawn. At 40 years’ distance, his prose still conveys the hues of the sunrise with startling vividness’ Nigel Williamson, The Times

  ‘Impossible to put down’ Q

  ‘Boyd is one of that select group of rock luminaries, like John Peel, or the American producer Rick Rubin, who didn’t have to pick up a guitar to shape the evolution of entire genres of music. And this book is the perfect literary echo of a lifetime’s subtle facilitation… Boyd’s pages abound with astute observations and fascinating personal detail… a transport of delight’ Independent on Sunday

  ‘A vivid eye-witness account… pulses with the mad enthusiasms of its period and its author’ Robert Sandall, Sunday Times

  ‘Boyd’s account far exceeds the breadth of most rose-tinted ruminations… detailed and lucid… A wise, thoughtful and engrossing account, White Bicycles is one of the best 1960s essays of recent years’ Scotsman

  ‘Boyd writes in a dry, assured style about remarkable times, and he achieves the goal of any music book: to make the reader want to check out the music he writes about’ Will Hodgkinson, Guardian Guide ‘Reading Boyd’s cracking account of the Sixties, you wonder if his life since hasn’t been one long disappointment… It’s a colourful story, beautifully told… You are left relieved that such a central figure wrote this exceptional memoir’ Mark Ellen, Observer

  ‘A fascinating book overflowing with entertaining and insightful musical anecdotes’ Morning Star

  ‘Compulsive quirky detail, rare sanity and razor sharp recall… puts it in the same bracket as Simon Napier Bell’s Black Vinyl White Powder or Julian Cope’s Head On. A delight’ The List

  ‘Packed full of funny, telling anecdotes and wry, insightful observation, it takes us on a fantastic musical adventure’ fRoots

  white

  bicycles

  making music in the 1960s

  Joe Boyd

  First published in Great Britain in 2006 by

  SERPENT’S TAIL

  an imprint of Profile Books Ltd

  3a Exmouth House

  Pine Street

  London EC1R 0JH

  www.serpentstail.com

  This eBook edition published in 2009

  Copyright © Joe Boyd, 2006, 2009

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  eISBN 978 1 84765 216 4

  Contents

  acknowledgements

  prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  acknowledgements

  MANY FRIENDS HAVE GIVEN ME support, encouragement and advice. I owe a huge debt in particular to Lucy Bailey, who edited the final drafts with unerring eye and whose unsparing critiques improved it immeasurably. The book’s shape and scope are largely the result of advice from Melissa North and Pierre Hodgson, for which I am very grateful. After some early setbacks, Deborah Rogers’ belief and support gave me the energy to stick with it. A thoughtful response to the first draft from Rose Simpson made it clear what I needed to improve in the second. The musicians and colleagues without whom there would be no story to tell will, I trust, find their acknowledgements in the text that follows.

  In memory of my grandmother, Mary Boxall Boyd, who taught me to listen.

  Saturday sun came early one morning

  In a sky so clear and blue

  Saturday sun came without warning So no one knew what to do.

  Saturday sun brought people and faces

  That didn’t seem much in their day

  But when I remembered those people and places

  They were really too good in their way.

  In their way

  In their way

  Saturday sun won’t come and see me today.

  Think about stories with reason and rhyme

  Circling through your brain.

  And think about people in their season and time

  Returning again and again

  And again

  And again

  And Saturday’s sun has turned to Sunday’s rain.

  So Sunday sat in the Saturday sun

  And wept for a day gone by.

  Nick Drake

  prologue

  THE SIXTIES BEGAN in the summer of 1956, ended in October of 1973 and peaked just before dawn on 1 July, 1967 during a set by Tomorrow at the UFO Club in London.

  John Hopkins and I had launched the weekly UFO events at an Irish dance hall in Tottenham Court Road just before Christmas 1966, and they had quickly become the hub of psychedelic London. By April, our resident attraction, Pink Floyd, had outgrown us, so I was always on the lookout for new groups. I saw Tomorrow at Blaises one night and thought they were pretty good. When they made their UFO debut on 19 May it was love at first sight between them and our audience. Steve Howe, later to make his name and fortune with Yes, played guitar, while Twink, a key figure in the genesis of punk, was the drummer. I don’t know what became of Junior, the bass player, but his mad-eyed, don’t-give-a-fuck pres
ence in a string vest was a key element in their appeal. Lead singer Keith West had a solo hit that summer with ‘Excerpt From A Teenage Opera, Part 1’ (‘Grocer Jack, Grocer Jack, please come back…’) and did his best to maintain a pop-star presence while around him the group was morphing into something quite different. ‘My White Bicycle’, a tribute to the free transport provided by Amsterdam’s revolutionary provos, was their new theme song, while Howe’s solos got longer and Twink’s drumming ever wilder.

  A month or two earlier, I would never have gone to Blaises and Tomorrow would barely have heard of UFO Everything was accelerating that spring: new drugs, clothes, music and clubs. The psychedelic underground and the pop scene were starting to overlap. UFO crowds were bigger each week, and it was getting hard to maintain the original atmosphere. It was also difficult to ignore the increased attention from the police: the longer the queues, the more customers were getting frisked and busted.

  Hoppy ran UFO’s light tower, playing records between shows, putting on Kurosawa samurai films at 3 a.m. and troubleshooting around the club while I stayed near the entrance and trousered the money. When plainclothes policemen asked to have a look around, I would state our policy: no search warrant, no entry. (There was nothing to prevent them from merging with the crowds and paying their way in, of course; UFO’s ads often touted a ‘spot the fuzz’ competition.) As for Mr Gannon, our landlord at the Blarney Club, he felt the case of whiskey delivered to Goodge Street police station every Christmas should take care of them well enough.

  A few weeks before Tomorrow’s return visit on 30 June, a uniformed bobby turned up, asking to be allowed in to collect clothes left behind by a man being held in custody. This made sense: half an hour earlier, a naked guy had bolted past me up the stairs and disappeared into the night. Hoppy and I agreed that an exception could be made, so I told the audience we were going to let the fuzz in to look for the clothes and turn on the overhead lights (murmurs and booing). As the crowd spread out in a wide circle, some garments could be seen scattered around the floor. The young bobby seemed to blush as he glanced at the crowd, a vivid cross-section of ‘London Freak’ circa May 1967: long hair on the boys, flowered dresses on the girls, Arabian or Indian shirts, a few kaftans, jeans, even a few white shirts and khaki slacks. Many were tripping; most were laughing or grinning.

  The laughter grew as it became clear that the bobby’s hastily gathered armful contained more than was required to make his prisoner decent: two or three pairs of underpants (gender undetermined), a couple of shirts, a bra, several socks, etc. As he made his way to the door, the working-class constable regarded us with amazement, not hatred. We, in turn, regretted that he could not grasp why we took drugs and danced in the lights, lived for the moment and regarded our fellow man with benign tolerance, even love. That was the theory, anyway. Tested, it would come undone in the ensuing years, even as the bobby’s mates donned kaftans, rolled joints and joined the crowds at festivals.

  The first man I knew to take hallucinogens was Eric Von Schmidt. (You can see Eric’s photo on one of the record jackets beside Sally Grossman on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home and hear Dylan blurt, ‘I learned this song from Ric Von Schmidt’ on his eponymous first LP.) Mail-order packages of peyote buds from Moore’s Orchid Farm in Texas arrived periodically at the Von Schmidt apartment near Harvard Square. He would cook them up in a pot and invite friends over to drink the soup. They would stack some LPs on the record player – Ali Akbar Khan, Lord Buckley, Chopin, the Swan Silvertones, Lightning Hopkins – then drink the potion and try not to be sick. If you couldn’t keep it down you weren’t, in Eric’s view, calm enough (‘centred’ had not yet been used in this context) to deserve the high. It was an experience meant for an intellectual and spiritual elite, not the masses (although he certainly would never have put it that way).

  The market is too efficient, of course, to limit transcendence to people who can stomach peyote. Down the street from Eric’s flat in 1962 was the laboratory of Professor Timothy Leary, who advertised in the Harvard Crimson for volunteers to take LSD at a dollar an hour and was determined to become the Johnny Appleseed of hallucinogens. By 1967, pure, powerful LSD tabs were still available while adulterated, amphetamine-laced concoctions were starting to be widely distributed. Few bothered about how elevated the experience might be.

  In June that year, a News of the World reporter tipped off Scotland Yard about a ‘drugs-and-sex orgy’ at Keith Richards’ place and was rewarded with a ringside seat at the raid. It has become the stuff of legend: Mars bars, threesomes, Marianne Faithfull naked under a fur rug, etc., a symbol of out-of-control decadence. The media stopped winking and grinning about ‘Swinging London’ and started wallowing in horror stories about teenagers being led astray. Sgt Pepper was the world’s soundtrack that month and powerful Establishment figures were horrified by the implications of influential pop stars’ open fondness for drugs.

  For the UFO audience, the Stones’ bust represented the sinister collusion of circulation-seeking editors, treacherous grasses and killjoy drug squads. Jagger and Richards may have been wealthy superstars, but they were counterculture heroes, too. Hoppy had also been busted that spring (after a plainclothes man reached, conjuror-like, behind his sofa and pulled out an evidentiary plum) and had just been sentenced to eight months in Wormwood Scrubs. Ads and editorials in the International Times, posters around UFO and graffiti in Notting Hill Gate reminded everyone of the injustice. A bucket was circulated at the club, the money going to a legal defence fund for drug busts.

  One Friday, just before Tomorrow took the stage, I found myself in conversation with Twink and a few others. Hoppy’s jailing outraged us and the behaviour of the News of the World seemed like the last straw. We decided to close the club after the first set and parade through the West End, finishing off with a protest in front of the News of the World building in Fleet Street. The West End at 1 a.m. on a Friday night was nothing like as busy as it is today, but there were quite a few ‘normals’ about, and they gaped as we rounded Piccadilly and headed for Leicester Square, then down through Covent Garden towards Fleet Street. Our destination was a letdown: the News of the World building was dark and silent. Firebrands among us started planning a blockade of the Sunday paper and an assault on their vans the next night.

  The long walk in the night air, the hostile stares from the ‘straights’ and the threats from the police had energized everyone, so the club was packed and buzzing when Tomorrow hit the stage about 4 a.m. The unity of spirit between audience and musicians was tremendous: Twink had been at the head of our two-hundred-strong column. Tearing into ‘White Bicycle’, they had never sounded tighter. At some point Skip from The Pretty Things took over on drums as Twink grabbed the microphone and plunged into the audience. Howe’s playing moved to another level of intensity, sending the dancers leaping into the cones of light as Twink crawled along the floor, hugging people and chanting ‘Revolution, revolution’. Everyone was high – on chemicals or adrenalin or both. You really did believe in that moment that ‘when the mode of music changes, the walls of the city shake’. The tide of history was with us and music was the key.

  The bill for this glorious moment was presented a month later. The News of the World may not have known who we were before that weekend, but they certainly did afterwards. The fruits of their plotting burst forth on the last Sunday in July: beneath a grainy, out-of-focus shot of a bare-breasted girl, the front page screamed that she was fifteen years old and that the photograph had been taken at the ‘hippy vice den’ known as UFO. Our normally stoic landlord buckled under police pressure and evicted us.

  A recording may preserve elements of a great musical moment, but bottling the energy of social and cultural forces is impossible. Without realizing it, we had started on a downhill slope that was mirrored in New York and San Francisco. The agape spirit of ’67 evaporated in the heat of ugly drugs, violence, commercialism and police pressure. In Amsterdam, people began stealing and repa
inting the white bicycles.

  There was music still to be made on the way down, of course; and on the way up, I had heard wonders.

  Chapter 1

  WHEN I WAS ELEVEN, we became the last family on our street in Princeton, New Jersey, to get a TV set: now we could watch Sid Caesar in Your Show of Shows, The Ed Sullivan Show and baseball games. A year later, in the autumn of 1954, my brother Warwick and I discovered the real reason we needed it: Bob Horn’s WFIL-TV Bandstand, beamed out of Philadelphia every afternoon after school.

  Horn was a large man with the false bonhomie of a used-car salesman. He wore amply cut suits with wide ties and swept his hair back from a high forehead. Like Alan Freed and other middle-aged hustlers in the early 1950s, he provided a link between rhythm and blues and the growing teenage audiences for rock’n’roll. Bandstand had a simple formula: students from local high schools dancing to records; a ritual reading of the charts; ‘roll-call’; groups lip-synching their latest record; and the occasional interview with a singer plugging a local appearance. The production was cheap: two static cameras, maybe three. The playlist was full of doo-wop by groups like the Cleftones, the Five Keys, the Flamingos, Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers, the Five Satins, etc., and up-tempo R&B by Fats Domino, Little Richard and Chuck Berry. Chuck Willis and ‘The Stroll’ became a favourite: the kids would line up across the studio – boys on one side, girls on the other – and take turns sashaying and spinning down the aisle.