by Joe Boyd
Part of our strength came from our sense of connection with the past. I remember feeling in my teens that the past was so close I could touch it. I heard my grandmother talk about Vienna at the turn of the century and play Brahms in a long-forgotten style as I sat next to her on the piano bench, watching her long veiny fingers. She told me that as a teenager she could rest the heel of her left hand on a pane of glass, raise her fourth finger, bring it down and crack the glass. I could hear the sound of that violent impact in my mind, a feat of undistracted discipline almost impossible to imagine, yet as close as her mesmerizing hands.
Sitting in Princeton listening to old records, we became obsessed with the past. We tried to pierce the veil of time and grasp what it sounded, felt, looked and smelled like. In Harvard Square and London I met many with similar preoccupations; they didn’t seem unusual at all. When old blues singers began to reappear, it delivered a rush of excitement and adrenalin. Meeting and travelling with Gary Davis and Lonnie Johnson – even Coleman Hawkins – armoured me against a host of disappointments.
History today seems more like a postmodern collage; we are surrounded by two-dimensional representations of our heritage. Access via amazon.com or iPod to all those boxed sets of old blues singers – or Nick Drake, for that matter – doesn’t equate with the sense of discovery and connection we experienced. The very existence of such a wealth of information creates an overload that can drown out vivid moments of revelation.
We fuelled ourselves with inspiration from our cultural heritage, and in so doing helped turn it into smoke. The roots of today’s digitized and sampled culture lie in those years of genuine enquiry and enthusiasm. Much of the sixties is mirrored in that Sunday night at Newport, when Dylan sent Pete Seeger fleeing into the night with the jubilant aggression of his music – music originally inspired by Seeger himself.
What followed in the wake of that night swept up most of the potential young fans of Thelonious Monk or Skip James, propelled them into the Fillmores and blew their minds with the simplistic sounds of the Grateful Dead. Few took time to mourn, as we did backstage at Newport, for what was so heedlessly tossed aside.
Before the turn of the century – the nineteenth century, that is – there was an underground craze that swept through black America. Someone came up with a catchy AAB twelve-bar structure with melancholy melodic intervals which provided the perfect frame on which to hang lyrics about heartbreak, natural disasters, evil white bosses and every other aspect of life at the end of a century that had falsely promised a road to freedom. Blues itself was an innovative craze that swept away decades – perhaps centuries – of folk traditions. We hear echoes of what disappeared in the recordings of Henry Thomas and Charlie Patton, but it is like trying to reconstruct a Cherokee city from a few arrowheads and beads unearthed at a construction site in downtown Atlanta. The destructiveness that comes with innovation is a process as old as history.
The England that awaited me when I moved to London a few months after Newport was only just emerging from a long class-ridden slumber. In the ’80s, when I developed a film project with screenwriter Michael Thomas about Christine Keeler, Stephen Ward and the Profumo affair, I learned just how momentous had been the upheaval in the year prior to my arrival. Released as Scandal in 1988, our film helped England rewrite a bit of its own history: the movie’s success placed Ward and Keeler in the roles of victims of the Establishment rather than the irresponsible upstarts the press had made them out to be at the time. The story helped explain the sense of adventure and excitement I found in so many people in 1964; it was as if a great weight had been lifted off their shoulders. But the sense of delight at new possibilities lasted only a few years before the return of Conservative government and 1973’s three-day week put an end to it. But like the rest of the world, Britain would never return to its pre-sixties assumptions about life and society.
At the height of the decade, we remained optimistic in a way that today – as we watch our world being consumed from under us – is impossible to imagine. For me, the contrast between spring and autumn ’67 in London planted the first doubts. The violence at Altamont eroded optimism for many; Charles Manson and the descent of Haight–Ashbury into squalor relieved us of a lot more. The discovery – thanks to Michael Herr’s Dispatches – that American fighter pilots could machine-gun Vietnamese farmers for sport while listening to Dylan and Hendrix on cockpit headphones finished off what remained for me. As my time at Warner Brothers drew to a close, I stood on a hilltop in Laurel Canyon watching the smoke on the southern horizon as members of the Symbionese Liberation Army were incinerated by an LA SWAT team. By then, the ideals of the sixties were visible mostly in fun-house-mirror form. Today, when the mode of music changes, the walls of the city are covered in corporate ads sponsoring superficially subversive artists.
I limit my regrets to friends and peers whose lives were consumed by the intensity of the times. I think of Nick and Sandy, of Martin Lamble and Jeannie Taylor, of Bob Squire (who broke his own rule against heroin and died of it). I mourn Chris McGregor, Dudu Pukwana, Mongezi Feza and Johnny Dyani, who, lured by the false promise of our rhetoric, died so young and so far from home.
I think of Jimi Hendrix, whom I knew only on film but about whom I learned so much, a man whose dreams led him into a life surrounded by pressures and people who meant him little good. Devon Wilson haunts me: her charisma and intelligence flashed so brightly in the course of one taxi ride that I couldn’t forget her. Sentimentally, I wished he had made it back to her; perhaps they could have saved each other.
Roy Guest, who died a sad and lonely death in the ’90s, was, like Stephen Ward, someone for whom the sixties came too late to undo the damage inflicted by aristocratic snobbery and cruelty.
I mourn Don Simpson; the man I knew bore little resemblance to the bloated cartoon character found dead beside his pool in 1996, still pursuing the Hollywood dreams we shared for a time.
I miss the pre-Scientology Mike Heron and Robin Williamson and wish I had never left them alone with David Simon or let them duck for cover out of the Woodstock rain.
I wonder what might have happened had I stayed in London in 1971.
Tony Howard and Paul Rothchild were not casualties of the era but died far too soon, and I miss them; where would I have been without them? I think also of Hoppy, who, though he shines today as brightly as ever, left behind him in prison the optimism and confidence that were a beacon for so many of us.
But I think happily of those friends who continue to perform with the same spirit that delighted me when first I heard them more than thirty years ago – Norma Waterson, Richard Thompson, Geoff Muldaur and Danny Thompson foremost among them.
And as for me, I cheated. I never got too stoned. I became the éminence grise I aspired to be, and disproved at least one sixties myth: I was there, and I do remember.
joe boyd
productions and co-productions 1966–1974
This discography researched and ©2005 David Suff