(upbeat music) - Hey listeners, this is Dallas, one of the producers of Conversations with Tyler. We'll be hosting our next listener meetup in Boston, Massachusetts on Sunday, February 9th. We can't think of a better way to pregame on Super Bowl Sunday. Please click the link in the show notes to learn more and register for the event. We're looking forward to seeing you there. Now onto the show. (upbeat music) - Conversations 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 mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtiler.com. (upbeat music) Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I'm speaking with Joe Boyd. 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. I 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, Vashty Bunyan, Maria Moldauer, James Booker, 10,000 Maniacs, Tutsun the MyTalls. He ran the UFO Club in London, which was significant in the development of the British avant-garde, and had a role in the famous dueling banjos seen in deliverance. Joe, welcome. - Good to be here. - World music. Is Zulu music as Paul Simon borrowed from in the 1980s? Is 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? You know, and in fact, in South Africa, the controversy about it was much different. It was because, I mean, people felt by, you know, buying ladies, you know, people in the Northern Hemisphere felt it by buying Lady Smith, Black Mombaso records and Makhlatini and the Maho Tela Queens records that they were somehow supporting Nelson Mandela. Whereas in South Africa, Nelson Mandela's supporters felt that music represented the Zulus who were the enemy of the ANC or at least the official Zulu hierarchy was the enemy of the ANC. - And the Zulus have long had more capitalist traditions? Or what exactly were the differences then? - Well, 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 Zulus, 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. It's on Wanna 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 Zulus liked being a part. They liked being separate. They liked holding on to their traditions. And the government played on that and would give them weapons and give them special privileges and try and get the Zulus 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 Zulus 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, ladiesmith, plock, mambozo and concert, but are those Zulu musical traditions still alive and vital today, or are they just ossified? - Well, 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, Kwazulu, Natau, culturally. But I've seen footage of classes in schools in Durban, who sing fantastic Zulu harmonies every morning before they start classes. So 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 mined out the sources of creativity and other countries. And that today is less interesting. Do you agree or disagree? - Well, I would try and change the question a little bit. I 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 Delta going to Chicago, from, you know, the Cuban cane fields going to Havana, from the countryside coming into Leopoldville, which became Kinshasa, the same thing happens. It's no different. This is not, you know, the so-called developing world as it was once called. It's no different from America or England or anywhere else. The same process happens. And so music became modernized when it became urbanized. And 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, you know, 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. And the term world music, I don't think it's such a bad term. I mean, 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 Nusrat Fata Ali Khan record, was a prime candidate to buy a Susanna Baca 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. And independent record labels just said, 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, there were all kinds of things. And, you know, like anything that gets popular, you're gonna 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? Or do you dislike that whole idea? Or do 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's 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. And they have, they do reissues of archival recordings from all 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. It's just a delight and-- - 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. We have, let's not exaggerate our exotic political-- - 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 a time there, when one of her projects was based there, we spent a lot of time there. And that's how we met actually, because I've always been fascinated by Albanian music. I'd never been there. I went to some Lucy Duran, who's a character in the book, who's the woman who publicized, promoted the chora and produced those great Timani Diabate records. She 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 Tirana is 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 Jiro Castro. They have this huge festival of musicians from all over Albania playing traditional styles. No 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, 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 distinguished Bulgarian harmonies that close second, you know, the impossibly close dissonances that you hear in the mister of the wobble gare and in traditional singing and villages. You 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 sense 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 that the lead voices. It's very complex and very not just harmonically, but in terms of the way that the music unfolds. - What was the greatest achievement of Tuts in the MyTals, in your opinion? - Well, Tuts in the MyTals is really Tuts, you know. - They varied over time, right? - No, no, Tuts in the MyTals is a vocal trio originally. Tuts with two guys who sang harmonies. And 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 Tuts is as great a songwriter as Bob Marley. And it's fascinating, the difference between them. Marley has these wonderful sense of sweeping statements. If you listen to so many Marley songs are didactic, do this, get up, stand up, lively up yourself. You take orders from Marley in the most wonderful way. - Tuts finds these little vignettes of daily life in Jamaica and makes a song out of them. And I think he's a poet. He's a balsack. He's, you know, he's a genius of the romance, or as I used to say about the Aset 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 his songs are known around the world. Everybody, you know, recognizes pressure drop and 54, 46 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. I was called in to finish off Regga Got Soul, which the tracks had been done in Kingston and his producer, Warwick Lin, a wonderful guy, brought the tapes to London and I worked with Warwick and Tuts on finishing them off, adding some overdubs and harmonies. 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 Lin 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 gonna play on this track or how we're gonna deal with this question, Warwick 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 really just a diplomat. - No, he just, 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, you know, 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 Lin and who was an extraordinary guy, who's I say in the book looked a bit like he had a striking resemblance to Jeff Chandler in Broken Arrow as co-cheese. He 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 Borman was the director and I was at that time, I had the title Director of 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 Borman came to see me and he had a cassette that he had recorded off the car radio while driving around Georgia looking for locations. And 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 mine. 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 could play Bach on the banjo and he could do anything. And 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 gonna be back? I need you in Atlanta to do this session. He said, nah, I bet this girl, I think I'm gonna stay in Ireland for a while. Get Weisberg to do it. So I said, okay. 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 Borman asked. John came, Borman came to the session for a bit. He 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 and get them excited about it. And I played them dueling banjos. And I said, John Borman thinks this should be a single. And they said, nah, come on, are you kidding? Bluegrass, what are you talking about? We're a proper, you know, we're releasing Doobie Brothers and Neil Young, we're not gonna release this. Hey, seed stuff. And so I had to go back across the street and explain to the rec film company and to Borman that the record company was not going to release it. They were furious, but at least I got them, the rec company to press up like 500 white label promos and Borman took them with him when he started doing talk shows and he did a talk show in Minneapolis. The first, 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? And 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 rec company said, 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 Clothwick Orange 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? Well, sure, 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 Vangler recording from 1956 on Deutsche Gramophone of the Beethoven Symphony number, whatever. And so I'd call Deutsche Gramophone and license it. 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 'cause we had to get it down to four minutes or four and a half minutes. And 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's chords was exactly the same as the 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 has mentioned track one, I put Giacomino Rossini. And it would cost me an extra line to spell out Giacomino. So I put G Rossini the second time for the thieving 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, unfortunately, 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 we were with, I just did with Pink Floyd, I just did the first single Arnold Lane. But I worked with him at the UFO Club and, you know, I went to rehearsals 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 would say, "I think we should do this." And they'd say, "Okay, that's what we're gonna do." So he was a quiet leader and a sweetest 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. Do 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 REM in a particular direction. They were looking to change things. And I persuaded them that the only way I could do the record, 'cause 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, you know, to America for an extended period to make a record. But 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, it was, there were tensions in the group that I was unaware of. I mean, 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. I understand that there were tensions within the group and 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, Wendell G, you know, sounded like my kind of backyard, you know, as a folky tune. And I got, you know, horn section, a British horn section to play on. Can't get there from here in 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. I think at the time, they were a bit disappointed in the album. I was a bit disappointed because I've, 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 that, 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, well, 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 if they were, the mixes were a little subtle compared to what I had imagined, you know, but Michael didn't want his voice too prominent or too strong. Peter didn't want his guitar too prominent or too strong. So 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 mmm, mmm, 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 folk traditions with just a tinge of British folk thrown in. - Maybe. I mean, but if it is, it's not deliberate. It's subconscious. - Is there any artist who is really successfully integrated American and British folk traditions? Did Richard Thompson do that a bit or has anyone? - Well, I think, I mean, 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 just sunk beneath the waves of history, but it had some lovely tracks on it, including just as the tide was a flowing, which is Natalie's American folk rock take on a classic British folk song. And of course, what's her name? Cassidy, Joanna Cassidy, what's the name of the girl? - Joanna Cassidy, I think. - Yeah, who sang, 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 Harp shape note revival of that singing tradition. And he sings American folk music, but mostly from New England, mostly Northeastern American folk music. And he comes to England and tours with Eliza Karthi and explores those connections between ballads, ancient British ballads, and the way that they arrive in North America. There's so many connections back and forth. And of course, in the modern day, you know, Richard Thompson, you know, has he and Simon Nickel and the other guys in Fairport, grew up listening to American music. They grew up listening to Jugband music. They grew up listening to, you know, singer songwriters. When I first met them, they were singing all kinds of philoque songs and Eric Anderson's songs and Bob Dylan's songs. And then, you know, when the tragedy happened and they wanted to change their repertoire, music from big pink came out. And that kind of blew their mind. And they thought, we better not do any more American music because these guys just nailed it. You know, you can't do anything better than this. But they took the spirit of music from big pink and applied it to British traditional music. And that was the result of that was Legion Leaf. So I think that could qualify as a bridge of some kind between the two traditions. - They end up not putting the song Ballad of Easy Rider on Legion Leaf album. You must have been involved with that. So there's a demo cut of them doing the bird song, Ballad of Easy Rider, and it's later on a Richard Thompson guitar album. - Yeah, but it wasn't for Legion Leaf. That was from the pre, I believe I'm, I think I'm correct in saying that that track has Ian Matthews on it. And so it's from the unhalf-breaking period of recordings. And I believe it was originally proposed either for what we did in our holidays. I think more like for unhalf-breaking. I'm not, it never would have been considered for Legion Leaf because that was a high concept record that was going to be completely British. So there was never any question of putting, and I think I was supported the idea of having that. I mean, I thought it was, it's a good song and they do a very nice version of it. And there was talk of it being on half-breaking, I think. But somehow they decided it didn't make the cut. - When you finished producing Richard and Linda Thompson shoot the lights out, did you just know at the end, well, this is one of the best records ever? Or did that take you by surprise? - It didn't take me by surprise. I mean, we cut the tracks in two days and it just jumped out of the speakers at us. Took a few more evenings to get Linda's vocals finished, but it was clearly a fantastic record. And so I pretty much mortgaged everything I had or everything Hannibal Records had to buy plane tickets for them to fly to America to do a tour. Because I knew that this was Hannibal Records' first real home potential, home run. And then I spent the next six months desperately struggling to get enough press enough records to supply the demand that was out there following that tour. Because it's the old story of the little independent label. The worst thing that can happen to you is to have a hit because the distributors pay you in 90 days and the pressing plants need to be paid in 30 days. And so you're always in this terrible squeeze and the more records you sell, the worse the squeeze gets. - And how did you think about shaping the sound on that album? - You know, I don't, these terms like shaping the sound, I don't... - I had you there for some reason, right? You've been in-- - Well, yeah, but you know, I mean, they had me there for sure because I brought them there. I paid them to come and I paid the studio and I hired the engineer and I sat there and told them when they'd got a great take. And then I sat with the engineer and they weren't anywhere around and I mixed the record. And I just mixed things to sound the way that it feels like they should sound to me. It's not a kind of conceptual intellectual process like I have some idea about a sound that I want to get on this record. You put the multi-track through the board and you put up one track at a time and you get the bass to sound the way you think a bass should sound and then you get the bass drum to fit with it and then you get the drum kit to fit around that and then you get the rhythm guitar to fit in with the drum kit. And in the end, you have a sound but it doesn't come from the concept down. It's not top down, it's bottom up. Build it up, track by track. - Now, as I'm sure you know, there's a new Bob Dylan movie out called A Complete Unknown and the climactic scene in the movie is all about the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 where quote, unquote, Dylan goes electric. You were the sound producer there, right? - No, I was the production manager. There's a character in the film who is credited with playing the part of Joe Boyd, a sound engineer. And I think the actor who's supposed to be playing me is at the sound controls. I haven't seen the picture yet, but I was the production manager. I was very concerned with the sound because I had been to the 63 Newport Festival and I thought it was a fantastic event. I was never to be forgotten seeing Mississippi John Hurt and Doc Watson through the fog coming in off Narragansett Bay and Dylan linking arms with Joni and Pete and singing We Shall Overcome. But the sound was terrible. All through this festival of 63, I felt the sound was really crap. You'd have a bluegrass band with a guy playing the fiddle and you couldn't hear the fiddle. And so the first thing I did when I bought behind my desk in June of '65, in New York at George Wayne's office, was call up Paul Rothschild, the great producer, the guy who produced the doors and Janice Choplin and, you know, so many things. And I said, "Hey, Paul, why don't you come up to Newport and mix the sound?" And he said, "Okay, can I have rekind passes?" Meaning for his family, you know, place it to stay passes to every event. I said, "Deal, you got it." And so Paul and I together sound checked everybody, every single artist that appeared at Newport, was sound checked in the morning by me and Paul, except for Dylan, who we sound checked in the evening, six o'clock between the afternoon show and the evening show, 'cause Dylan wouldn't get up in the morning to be sound checked. So the guy on the board, the guy whose hands were on those mixers was Paul Rothschild. Not me. I've never been a sound engineer. I don't know how many technical qualifications to be a sound engineer. Neither did Paul for that matter, but he was better at it than I was. - But the controversy at the time, was it really about Dylan playing electric? Was it just about the poor quality of the sound? Was it about Pete Seeger being upset? What actually happened at that time? - Well, I think the controversy, you could see it coming for a month. If not more, you know, you can see it actually. To me, you can see it. Have you seen that film, "The Other Side of the Mirror"? - I don't think so. - It's basically Murray Lerner, who shot that film Festival, which is about the Newport Festival, has all the footage from 63, 64, 65, 66. And the other side of the mirror is all the Dylan footage, from 63, 64, and 65. And it's fascinating. You know, 63, he's the idealistic, singing about a coal miner, and all Pete Seeger, everybody looking at him, like he's Woody Guthrie. And then in the 64, he does a workshop, and Pete Seeger introduces him as the voice of a generation. And he gets up to the microphone and he sings, "Mr. Tamborineman." And you look at Seeger looks kind of puzzled, slightly shocked. What is this? This isn't a protest song. This isn't a song you could sing at the barricades. This isn't a song, you know, that's gonna move the youth to revolution. What is this? And that is the beginning of what happened in '65, is that Dylan moves moving away in a different direction. And he'd already recorded half an album with an electric band in the studio. And just before, in the weeks leading up to the festival, we had the birds, Mr. Tamborineman, electric version on the top 40 radio. We had Dylan like a Rolling Stone with an electric band on the radio. It was top 40 big business, mainstream popular culture, moving into this delicate little idealistic corner called the Newport Folk Festival, which was based on mostly all acoustic music, music, and very pure traditional or idealistic. And somehow, and everybody, Pete Seeger and Theodore Bekel and Alan Lomax, and a lot of people in the audience, sensed that this was a bull in a china shop, that this was big time something, moving into this delicate little world. And I was totally on Dylan's side. Paul Rothschild and I were like, yeah. But in retrospect, I see Pete Seeger's point absolutely. And I would contest it, I mean, of course I would, wouldn't I? Contest that the sound wasn't awful. It was just very loud. Nobody'd ever heard sound that loud. I think Rothschild, you know, pushed up the faders, but it had to be because, you know, it was the equation. It was the first moment of rock. Nobody ever used the word rock before 1965. There was rock and roll, there was pop, there was rhythm and blues, but there wasn't rock. And this was rock because you had a drummer, Sam Lay, who was hitting the drums very hard, Mike Bloomfield. This was his moment. He cranked up the level on his guitar. And you didn't have direct connections from amps to the PA system in those days. You just had the sound coming straight out of the amp. And so with the sound of the drums, the sound of the bass, the sound of Bloomfield's guitar, you had to turn the vocal up so that it would be heard over the guitar. And that escalation of volume is kind of what shaped or defined the future of rock. And it became really loud music. And that was the first time anybody heard it. It was really shocking. And there was probably a little distortion because the speakers weren't used to it. But it was the kind of sound that would be normal two years later. But at that night, it wasn't. And I think Newport and folk music and jazz never really recovered. Everybody who used to, every young person who used to become a folk or a jazz fan became a rock fan. - I've noticed that younger people today, maybe say below 40, they just don't seem to get Bob Dylan. Do you have a similar impression? - Well, I mean, it's not surprising in a way because he's become such a quirky performer. - But they listen to the older records, say 63 through "Blood on the Tracks." And they're like, eh. - Well, I've just-- - To me, it's a revelation, right? - Well, I've just heard the contrary. Somebody wrote, I can't remember if somebody wrote or I heard this on a podcast or something, that the response to the film has been that young people are going, oh, now we get it. So, and they're going back and listening to the early records. So I don't know, I mean, I don't, I can't say I go out there taking polls of young people, what do you think of Bob Dylan? So I don't really know what young people think of Bob Dylan, but, you know, music, the nature of music, one of the most important things that music does is it gives young generations a chance to give the finger to their parents' generation and to reject things and to have their own thing. That's part of the regenerative process of music. - What do you think was the Beatles' most successful integration with Indian music? - Oh, that's a tricky question. I mean, in some ways, the most popular tune is Norwegian Wood, but there are lots of much more elaborate collaborations between George Harrison and Indian musicians in subsequent albums, in Revolver and Sergeant Pepper. But I would say that in a way, the most significant effect of Indian music on the Beatles was in the kind of much more abstract way that it affected Lennon and Harrison. It changed George Harrison's guitar playing. I mean, I think a lot of what you hear of George Harrison from the White Album and Abbey Road all the way through into his solo work is very different than what you heard before. He was exposed to those lessons with Ravi Shankar and his trips to India and his exposure to that culture. - Even before the slide guitar work, so a solo on a song like something. Back to you, is Indian influenced? - Yeah, I think so, because I think it was one of the things that appealed to George about slide guitar was the way that you could find the notes between the notes, which is the basis of Indian music, because Indian music has scales that are not found on a piano. You know, that's one of the revelations that I got from the research on this book was that so many cultures around the world outside of Europe have scales that are not divided mathematically that are mostly many times pentatonic, meaning five notes, and that blue notes that are such an integral part of American music are really an attempt by African-American musicians to find that note that is somewhere hidden between the seventh major and the seventh flathead, and or the fifth flathead, and that slide guitar, the bending of the guitar string, the slurring of the saxophone note, the slurring of the vocal, is an attempt to escape the straight jacket of Dober Imi Faso La Tito, and that was the thing that John Coltrane found fascinating about Indian music and Indian culture and what George Harrison found fascinating, and the slide allowed Mississippi Delta musicians going back to the 1920s to explore that world of, you know, between the notes, the notes between the notes, and I think George Harrison, his exposure to Indian music, led him to seize upon the slide as a way to express, once he realized that he was never gonna be a virtuoso on the sitar, he refocused himself on the guitar and became kind of a master. - And you know, the solo on "Taxman" is by Paul McCartney, not George, so it's a funny way to-- - I know, I corrected that, I corrected that in the second edition. - In the book? - Yeah. - Oh, great. (laughs) How was a Bombay classical music concert different in the 1930s? - Well, my understanding, I will obviously wasn't there, but my understanding is that Ravi Shankar's vision of how to present Indian music to a Western audience, he knew that Western audience wouldn't sit still for six hours the way an audience would write in. I mean, I think one of the things that was an interesting revelation for me was that Hindustani classical music in the 20s and 30s and the 19th century was very exclusive to the wealthy and they were mostly concerts in grand palaces and homes and when they started coming into concert halls, they were very often as they had been in these grand homes and there's a Satyajit Ray film called "The Music Room" and which you see these people with food and water and wine, whatever, it will last them for hours because they have to sit around and they would play slow ragas for a long time, a morning ragas and a morning and then you'd hear an afternoon raga and Ravi compressed everything so that within one sort of 40 minute passage, you heard slow and then medium and then fast and you had a tablet solo and that's what Western audiences grew to expect from an Indian music concert and Indian musicians delivered it and eventually that format became popular back in India but when it first came to the West, it was very different than the way it was in India. - The musical guitar sound from Kinshasa, why is it so hard to replicate? It sounds so simple, hardly anyone can do it. What's the trick? - Listen, I wish I knew. I mean, I'm not a guitar player so I can't even begin to say but I do know that for me, that's one of the most magical sounds in world music. I mean, I had the great pleasure of working with an artist called Kanda Bongo Man on Hannibal Records and we organized tours for him to Britain and North America and I just used to sit in front of those guitars and just listen to the way that those three guitars, all playing these complicated arpeggios, they just somehow buzzed and chimed together in a very particular and unique way. It just is, I don't know, it's just one of the great sounds and there's a book by an American guy who went to Kinshasa to figure it out and he writes a whole book, "Rumba Rules", it's called by Bob White, I think, Robert White. He never could get it. I mean, he did, he played with bands, he said he kind of passed. He just about got away with it but he never could really improvise the arpeggios that those guys do in Congolese Rumba. - Now, you're also a music collector and at least at one point, you had 6,000 vinyl LPs. - Still, I'm looking at them. - Yeah, probably more, 30,000 compact discs. What is your system for making sure you keep on listening to what you own? - It's very elaborate but it works. I feel it's supremely rational but possibly some people might find it eccentric but they're all organized by country. I mean, all the vinyl and then I have CDs and drawers, custom built drawers and they're all organized by country, alphabeticaled within the country. And basically over the years, I have loaded the CDs, digitized the vinyl, digitized cassettes, I've got tons of cassettes and I'm only, I don't know, a quarter of the way through but it's all now on a hard drive. And I've got a computer with an old fashioned version of iTunes that has never been updated. - So it's better. - Exactly. And all of those digitized versions are wave files. No MP3 is allowed. And on that iTunes, I organize them by mostly. I mean, you can organize them any way you like but I usually organize them by song title. And then I download a bunch of them in alphabetical order like at the moment, I'm listening to one of those big old iPods that actually my wife Andrea has, it's her iPod, this big one with a big circle in the middle. As you can fit at wave level, you can fit, I don't know, 5,000 tunes or something. And so we've got, which covers from SA through SU in my, so I have like 5,000 titles between SA and SU in the title. And it means you can hear all different versions of the same song, I've just, the other day, I listen to like 12 versions of St. Louis Blues and eight versions of St. James and Fermary. It's fascinating, it's great, I really like that. And then we just keep moving, keep going around and keep adding so every time around the alphabet, there's more different, it takes longer every time. But if I wanna listen to a specific thing, I can always look it up, pull it out and which I did write in the book quite a lot because it's all very well or very anally organized. - Before my last question, I'd just like to plug your book again. The title is, And the Roots of Rhythm Remain, A Journey Through Global Music, Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin blurbed it as quote, profound and beyond. Joe worked on this book for 17 years and in my opinion, it is the most substantive book on world music ever. So congratulations, Joe. - Thank you. - Last question is simply, what will you do next? - Well, I still have a lot of work to do on the book. You may think it's over now that it's out, but I've been, I spent four months doing the audio book because my voice is not so great these days after I would, I mean, it sounds fine now, but that's, I've been doing voice exercises. When I first started the audio book, after half an hour, 40 minutes of reading, I would start to sound like this. So it took me a long time, it's 41 hours, the audio book. And I produced it myself. And it's now up on Amazon, in America and Britain. And I'm now focused on putting together playlists on my website for people reading the book. Because people, obviously, it makes people wanna, and people are having to look it up themselves. But I'm gonna do playlists, make it easy for people, Spotify playlists, but also YouTube, because we should be much more elaborate, which will have a lot of clips, a lot of little mini documentaries about people and just endless rabbit holes that you can go down. And I'm putting that together. So that's a big project. But after that, I would like to figure out a way, I haven't really started exploring it. I know there's issues with copyright, and I'll have to, you know, but I wanna figure out a way that I can play my collection and tell stories about it that people can listen to. Whether that's a radio show or a podcast or whatever. I've done that before, is Joe Boyd's A to Z, which people can find on my website, which are like 10 minute long trips through my collection. But this is more ambitious. This would be Joe Boyd's big A to Z, two hour long segments on, you know, things beginning with A. - Sounds great, Joe Boyd, thank you very much. - Pleasure. - Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm @tylercowin, and the show is @cowinconvos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning. (gentle music) [BLANK_AUDIO]
