Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Repsetts Podcast. My
Speaker 1: guest today is Joe Boy, who has a new comprehensive
Speaker 1: book on world music entitled In the Roots of Rhythm
Speaker 1: remained Joe, Why this book? Why now?
Speaker 2: Well? I wrote a book seventeen years ago called White
Speaker 2: Bicycles Making Music in the nineteen sixties, and people would
Speaker 2: ask me, so, when is the book on the nineteen
Speaker 2: seventies coming, And I said never. I really didn't enjoy
Speaker 2: the seventies. I have nothing really good to say about
Speaker 2: the seventies. And the thing they kept nagging at me
Speaker 2: was the fact that there's so many great books about
Speaker 2: the music popular music of America, Britain, the Anglo American
Speaker 2: whatever you know, from jazz to pop music to R
Speaker 2: and B to country Peter Garounick Nick Toosh's, you know,
Speaker 2: these great figures, but very little about all the music
Speaker 2: from far away that has had such a huge impact
Speaker 2: on our culture. And I just felt like, yeah, I
Speaker 2: love that stuff. I love those stories, I love those characters,
Speaker 2: and I had a vision. It was sort of there
Speaker 2: are a few things that it kind of nagged at me,
Speaker 2: all the misunderstandings that existed in America and Britain over Graceland,
Speaker 2: how little people understood about the South African culture that
Speaker 2: have produced that music. And I felt that was a
Speaker 2: good example of the kind of thing that would be
Speaker 2: fun to tell in the story. And then, you know, I,
Speaker 2: as I talk in the preface, I've been always fascinated
Speaker 2: by the way that Afro Cuban rhythms have crept into
Speaker 2: American popular music, whether it's Dizzy Gillespie or Save the
Speaker 2: Last Dance for Me, and what the backstory of that is,
Speaker 2: which is just so fascinating. And I just thought, Okay,
Speaker 2: those are two great hooks to start this book on.
Speaker 2: And I didn't realize it. We can take me seventeen years,
Speaker 2: but I got started and I just didn't stop until
Speaker 2: I finished.
Speaker 1: Okay, the book is very comprehensive in six hundred plus pages.
Speaker 1: At some point, did you say I'm writing the comprehensive,
Speaker 1: definitive book.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean it's not really comprehensive and definitive in
Speaker 2: the sense that it's quite a personal selection of what
Speaker 2: I like, stories, I like, music I like, and there's
Speaker 2: a lot of great music from around the world that
Speaker 2: I don't even mention, you know, there's not even a
Speaker 2: look in for Greek rebetico music, or Portuguese fato or
Speaker 2: Souse Islands music, or Peruvian Andean music. But my criteria
Speaker 2: was that I would stick to the hits, the music
Speaker 2: which had really had an impact in Western so called
Speaker 2: Western culture, meaning salsa, samba, reggae, so called gypsy music,
Speaker 2: you know, all that the stuff that people know but
Speaker 2: don't know the backstory.
Speaker 1: Well, the book is broken down by region, and you
Speaker 1: mentioned Graceland at first. You talk about Zulu and Graceland.
Speaker 1: Can you tell us some of the misconceptions people have
Speaker 1: about that.
Speaker 2: Well, there were a few. I think the biggest one
Speaker 2: to me was that when people embraced this record, which
Speaker 2: they was quite right that they should. It's such a
Speaker 2: wonderful record, and they felt this affection for this black
Speaker 2: South African culture, and in a way it was kind
Speaker 2: of in defiance of the white South Africans who were
Speaker 2: imposing this imparti system who had imprisoned Nelson Mandela. Everybody
Speaker 2: wanted Mandela freed from prison, and it became almost I
Speaker 2: felt at the time, there was almost a feeling that
Speaker 2: buying a Ladysmith Black Mombaso record was a way of
Speaker 2: showing solidarity with the ANC and with Nelson Mandela. But
Speaker 2: I knew a lot about South Africa and its politics,
Speaker 2: and I knew that it wasn't like that that. In fact,
Speaker 2: Ladysmith Black Mombaso is Zulu music, and the Zulus were
Speaker 2: very much at war with the A and C. They
Speaker 2: were being armed by the South African government to fight
Speaker 2: the ANC, and most young ANC comrades preferred funk and disco.
Speaker 2: They thought English lyrics were modern and progressive and Zulu
Speaker 2: lyrics were regressive and tribal. And so there was a
Speaker 2: kind of a disconnect between what we in the Northern
Speaker 2: hemisphere felt about this music and what was really happening.
Speaker 2: And you know, that was one thing, and then there were,
Speaker 2: you know, lots of other things, including all this fuss
Speaker 2: about the breaking of the boycott. Everybody was upset. A
Speaker 2: lot of people were upset with Paul Simon, but nobody
Speaker 2: ever said boo about Athol Fuguard and all the great
Speaker 2: plays that were running on Broadway and in the West End.
Speaker 2: There were productions from the Market Theater in Johannesburg with
Speaker 2: South African actors white and black, just like Graceland you know,
Speaker 2: and nobody ever criticized that. So anyway, those are a
Speaker 2: few of my little actses I had to grind as
Speaker 2: I embarked on this.
Speaker 1: Okay, we live in an era where they do a
Speaker 1: TV special and the past is looked at through new eyes,
Speaker 1: not only would TV series but other So now it's
Speaker 1: almost forty years after Graceland. Do you think this imprimature,
Speaker 1: This perception of Paul Simon going to South African ripping
Speaker 1: off the culture still persists or what is the decades
Speaker 1: that have ensued changed the perception of this record.
Speaker 2: Well, I was a bit shocked when I mean, we're
Speaker 2: not talking about twenty twenty four now, but if we
Speaker 2: talk about I think it was around twenty ten there
Speaker 2: was a documentary film about the making of Graceland. I
Speaker 2: think it was called Under African Skies or something and
Speaker 2: Paul actually the filmmaker got Paul to sit down with
Speaker 2: somebody from the ANC and talk about the boycott by
Speaker 2: you know, the whole thing, and the guy from the
Speaker 2: A and C all these years later was still very hostile,
Speaker 2: very bitter, very antagonistic towards Paul about what he had done.
Speaker 2: And I think, you know, there are still people who
Speaker 2: have that feeling about him. But I think, you know,
Speaker 2: the fact is that Graceland is a phenomenon. I write
Speaker 2: in the book about going to see the Reunion tour
Speaker 2: when it came to Hyde Park in London and two
Speaker 2: thousand and twelve was it? I think, and walking through
Speaker 2: this vast crowd, tens of thousands of people, hundreds of
Speaker 2: thousands of people, everybody mouthing or singing the words, twenty somethings,
Speaker 2: fifty somethings, teenagers, sixty somethings. You know, it just covered
Speaker 2: all shades. And I think it's a good lesson about
Speaker 2: the power of music that can is. That's why it
Speaker 2: makes a lot of dictators and a lot of governments nervous,
Speaker 2: because it transcends anything they can say against it. People
Speaker 2: either love it or they don't, you know, And people
Speaker 2: love that record.
Speaker 1: Okay, this theme you see in the book where people
Speaker 1: go to get a sound and like you say, you know,
Speaker 1: the Zulus were playing this music, but the anc is
Speaker 1: more than funk, etc. So what can you tell us
Speaker 1: around the world where there's an authentic sound, yet the
Speaker 1: people who are living there have moved into a more
Speaker 1: modern zone.
Speaker 2: Well, one of the best examples, in a way, is
Speaker 2: in our own backyard. I remember being very conscious as
Speaker 2: a teenager who was obsessed with blues. I started collecting
Speaker 2: blues records when I was about eleven or twelve, and
Speaker 2: it soon became clear that African American audiences had no
Speaker 2: use for blues. You know, right, radio stations in Chicago
Speaker 2: that in the late forties and the early fifties have
Speaker 2: been playing Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf were no longer
Speaker 2: playing Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf. And there was a
Speaker 2: feeling that it was old fashioned. And there's a sense
Speaker 2: that I get through much of the book. It's not
Speaker 2: always it's not a universal truism, but it's a trend.
Speaker 2: You can see that most cultures, particularly in poorer countries,
Speaker 2: developing parts of what used to be called developing countries
Speaker 2: in the world, love modernity. They want to be modern.
Speaker 2: Modernity is a way out of the poverty, the backwardness,
Speaker 2: the limitations on life that has been a hallmark of
Speaker 2: their cultures. Whereas the middle class in the West has
Speaker 2: seen enough of the future, they don't really necessarily like
Speaker 2: the future so much. They're worried about social media, they're
Speaker 2: worried about pollution. They're worried about, you know, all these
Speaker 2: things that the modern world has brought. And they seek
Speaker 2: out natural fibers, they seek out organic food, they seek
Speaker 2: out authenticity wherever they can find it, and they seek
Speaker 2: out roots music. And there's a disconnect sometimes between the
Speaker 2: cultures that are seeking to modernize. There's a there's an
Speaker 2: there's a moment I talk about in the Africa chapter
Speaker 2: where this guy that I know who's a wonderful guy
Speaker 2: who teaches music at the University of Akra and Ghana
Speaker 2: and he specializes in highlight. He's written wonderful books about
Speaker 2: high life music. And by the late eighties, none of
Speaker 2: his students, none of the youth of Ghana had any
Speaker 2: time for high life. And there was a kind of
Speaker 2: big concert in the main square and they had before
Speaker 2: the hip hop started, before the rap started. They had
Speaker 2: a kind of oldies group of high life stars and
Speaker 2: people through rocks, people through stuff and got them off stage.
Speaker 2: The crowd was very hostile, and he went to one
Speaker 2: of his students and he asked him to explain this,
Speaker 2: and the students said, what has high life ever given us?
Speaker 2: What is that tradition, that old way of this society.
Speaker 2: The way it was, we end up with no job
Speaker 2: prospects were very poor. As a country. Tradition just stifles us.
Speaker 2: So why should we like traditional music? They loved the
Speaker 2: cheapest Casio drum machine, hip hop and because it sounded
Speaker 2: modern and it was implicitly rejecting the past.
Speaker 1: Okay, I want to do a little cleanup work. You say,
Speaker 1: essentially you have no time for the seventies, although some
Speaker 1: of your greatest success producing records were in the seventies.
Speaker 1: Shoot Out the Lights Nick.
Speaker 2: Drake album eighties. That was eighties shoot Out the Lights eighties,
Speaker 2: Nick Drake sixties.
Speaker 1: Okay, well, let me instead of instead of you correcting
Speaker 1: me where I'm wrong, sorry, which I know which I am,
Speaker 1: let me just make it simple. Why do you have
Speaker 1: no time for the seventies?
Speaker 2: I guess in terms of writing, I mean, obviously I
Speaker 2: had a lot of good times in the seventies. I
Speaker 2: made some records that I'm very proud of, Midnight at
Speaker 2: the Oasis, the McGarrigle sisters took some of the may towles.
Speaker 2: But I struggled the whole time. I was sort of
Speaker 2: my own life was torn between trying to be a
Speaker 2: film producer. I've made a documentary about Jimmy Hendrix in
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy two, and I thought that made me a
Speaker 2: film producer, and I started developing projects, real dramas, you know,
Speaker 2: and it was totally frustrating, and I never got anywhere
Speaker 2: with any of them. And look is standing back and
Speaker 2: looking at the arc of our culture, musical culture, and
Speaker 2: the way music and culture interacted. I h the thing
Speaker 2: that stands out for me about the seventies, particularly the
Speaker 2: late the end of the seventies, the climax of that
Speaker 2: decade was disco and punk, which were kind of implicit
Speaker 2: in their nature or in many of the spokesmen for
Speaker 2: those types of music was a rebuke to the hippie
Speaker 2: music that I had been part of. You know, they
Speaker 2: were sort of against psychedelia. They were against the kind
Speaker 2: of virtuosity of you know, all the great groups from
Speaker 2: the late sixties, early seventies, you know people. You know,
Speaker 2: there was a kind of fetish for the machine beat
Speaker 2: of disco, for the anonymous sex that it kind of
Speaker 2: was a soundtrack for. And punk was you know, they
Speaker 2: hated anything to do with you know, kind of great
Speaker 2: long guitar solos, or great saxophone solos, or delving into
Speaker 2: the roots of rhythm and blues and writing songs around that.
Speaker 2: So I didn't feel that I had a connection that
Speaker 2: would lead to a nice book. You know, I didn't
Speaker 2: have a story to tell in the sixties. You know,
Speaker 2: my story in the sixties of being a fan of
Speaker 2: folk music and blues and jazz, and then getting to
Speaker 2: work at Newport and being there when Dylan went electric,
Speaker 2: and then producing Pink Floyd and running the UFOL Club.
Speaker 2: This was all part of the story of the era.
Speaker 2: So my story had a kind of resonance. But I
Speaker 2: thought in the seventies my story was completely out of
Speaker 2: tune with what was happening.
Speaker 1: Okay, you're highly educated, you went to Harvard. Just speaking
Speaker 1: with you, you're an intellectual. I'm going to be point
Speaker 1: blank here. This tends to be a dumb business. They're
Speaker 1: more smart people actually who are making records. But there
Speaker 1: are a lot of people uneducated who are just sort
Speaker 1: of channeling God. As they say, you have all these theories.
Speaker 1: Who do you talk to that can talk on this level?
Speaker 2: Well, hopefully everybody who reads the book.
Speaker 1: I'm telling you about your everyday life. Yes, you've done
Speaker 1: a great thing with the book.
Speaker 2: Come on, every so many people that I've worked with,
Speaker 2: most people I worked with, I can have great conversations with.
Speaker 2: I mean, I can't tell you.
Speaker 1: I used to.
Speaker 2: Spend hours on the phone in the late seventies and
Speaker 2: the early eighties and even in the nineties with Kate McGarrigle.
Speaker 2: You know who's Rufus Wainwright's mom. She and I both
Speaker 2: loved reading history, and she was a huge fan of
Speaker 2: books of history, and you know she I'm particularly Canadian history,
Speaker 2: you know, and she turned me on to great writers
Speaker 2: of history about the missionaries heading west across the Great Lakes,
Speaker 2: and the fur trappers and the discovery of the Mississippi Basin,
Speaker 2: which I use in this book. You know, some of
Speaker 2: those things started in those conversations with Kate McGarrigle. Richard Thompson,
Speaker 2: you know, he's a very thoughtful guy. He's a very
Speaker 2: uh you know he he you know, he's pursued a
Speaker 2: lot of spiritual quests in his life through Sufi'sism and
Speaker 2: things like this, and he can talk to you about
Speaker 2: Duke Ellington and Django rein Hart and what it all means.
Speaker 2: And I don't know. I mean, I think, uh, I've
Speaker 2: always found musicians to be very thoughtful people, and I
Speaker 2: think particularly I mean one musician who I have huge
Speaker 2: admiration for that I'm the one musician that I ever
Speaker 2: felt frustrated because we could never get a real conversation
Speaker 2: going was Tutz Hibbert. When I worked with him and
Speaker 2: I went to see him in live performances in years afterwards,
Speaker 2: I'd go back backstage and you know, he he I
Speaker 2: don't know what it was. I mean, I think he's
Speaker 2: smoked a lot, but his lyrics demonstrate such an extraordinary
Speaker 2: intelligence and emotional intelligence and sort of sensitivity to nuance
Speaker 2: and personal relationships. But I could never reach him on
Speaker 2: that level in a kind of one to one conversation.
Speaker 2: But you know Haesus Alamanni who was the leader of Cubanesemo,
Speaker 2: or taj Mahal or Toumani Diabate, or you know people
Speaker 2: like that, or you know that those artists were people
Speaker 2: that I could sit down and have a drink with
Speaker 2: and talk to endlessly about music, and not just in
Speaker 2: the kind of limited or surface kind of way. I
Speaker 2: would say, all of them are intelligent people.
Speaker 1: Okay, let me do another clean up you talk about
Speaker 1: collecting blues records at age eleven and twelve. You know,
Speaker 1: there's the blues revival when you're in college and people
Speaker 1: talk about looking up the old blues men in the
Speaker 1: phone book who might be doing something other than playing music.
Speaker 1: Eleven and twelve. How did you get turned on to
Speaker 1: blues music?
Speaker 2: Well, it was an extraordinary event, one of those lucky
Speaker 2: moments in my life. I had two grandmothers, obviously, like everybody.
Speaker 2: One grandmother, my father's mother, had been a concert pianist
Speaker 2: when she was young, and then taught concert pianists later
Speaker 2: on in her life, and had studied in Europe and
Speaker 2: lived in Berlin and Vienna and all this. And she
Speaker 2: was very musical, but she had no interest in anything
Speaker 2: but classical music. I could never talk to her about
Speaker 2: jazz or popular music. My other grandmother, my mother's mother,
Speaker 2: knew nothing about music, didn't care, didn't listen, but she
Speaker 2: was aware that I, or I think my mother had
Speaker 2: told her how much I loved music, and that I
Speaker 2: was sort of listening to my mother's record She had
Speaker 2: Carmen Miranda and Edith Paff records and stuff HM and
Speaker 2: so one birthday or Christmas, I can't remember which. My
Speaker 2: mother's mother went into a record store and said, I
Speaker 2: have a grandson who likes music. I think it's kind
Speaker 2: of jazz or something like that that he likes. What
Speaker 2: have you got? And so he handed her this record
Speaker 2: called the RCA Encyclopedia of Classic Jazz. It was one
Speaker 2: single disc. She packed it up, said it to me,
Speaker 2: it's an unbelievable record. It has Sugarfoot stomps Fletcher Henderson,
Speaker 2: it has Black and Tan Fantasy by Duke Ellington, it
Speaker 2: has a great Armstrong track, it has a great Sydney
Speaker 2: Beschet track. And in the middle of all these great
Speaker 2: jazz tracks, as I played through the second side, like
Speaker 2: track three or track four, all of a sudden, it's
Speaker 2: sleepy John Estes working Man Blues. And I was just staggered.
Speaker 2: I'd never heard of anything like it. I played it
Speaker 2: over and over again, and you know, I started listening
Speaker 2: to Led Belly and I started listening to you know,
Speaker 2: there were not that many records around, but there was
Speaker 2: Led Belly was around, and I don't know Barbara Dane
Speaker 2: and I don't know there were people like that in
Speaker 2: the mid fifties that where you could pierce the you know,
Speaker 2: pull back the curtain a little bit into blues. And
Speaker 2: then it just expanded as I went along, you know,
Speaker 2: the ripples spread out, and I got more and more
Speaker 2: understanding of what this music represented. And when I was sixteen,
Speaker 2: I discovered a book. I don't know how, I think,
Speaker 2: I'm not sure how I even heard about it, but
Speaker 2: I went in I ordered it. It was a book
Speaker 2: by Samuel Charters. It was called The Country Blues, and
Speaker 2: it had stories about Sleepy John Esty's and the Memphis
Speaker 2: Drug Band and all these people. But the central character,
Speaker 2: or a character whose story ran through the whole book,
Speaker 2: was a guy called Ralph Peer, who was a record
Speaker 2: producer working for Victor Records and going through the South
Speaker 2: and renting hotel rooms and setting up a recording gear
Speaker 2: and recording blues singers and country singers. And I remember
Speaker 2: thinking to myself, now that's what I'd like to do.
Speaker 1: Okay, when you get to Harvard, are you the progenitor
Speaker 1: of the blues revival? Or do you get there and
Speaker 1: find like minded people.
Speaker 2: I got there and found like minded people. Before I
Speaker 2: got there, my brother, who's two years younger, but he
Speaker 2: his interest wasn't two years behind mine, He was right
Speaker 2: neck and neck with me all the way, collecting records
Speaker 2: more avidly than I did. And he met some kid
Speaker 2: who was halfway between. It was in one year older
Speaker 2: than him, one year younger than me, called Jeff Muldor,
Speaker 2: and we all lived in Princeton, New Jersey, and Jeff
Speaker 2: Muldor later went on to be the vocalist for Paul
Speaker 2: Butterfield Blues Band and for the Question Jug Band and
Speaker 2: doing lots of great solo stuff. The three of us
Speaker 2: used to spend weekends saying, Okay, this Saturday, we're going
Speaker 2: to listen to nothing but Lonnie Johnson records, or we're
Speaker 2: going to listen to nothing but Book of White records
Speaker 2: or jazz, or we're going to listen to nothing but
Speaker 2: Fletcher Henderson. And so we had a very intense sort
Speaker 2: of self education. But then we got to when I
Speaker 2: got to Harvard, I discovered the Club forty seven, which
Speaker 2: was the where Joan Baez used to sing twice a week.
Speaker 2: But on the nights when she wasn't singing, there were
Speaker 2: people like Eric von Schmidt and Rolf Kahan were singing,
Speaker 2: who were you know, local bohemians who loved blues and
Speaker 2: weird music from different parts of the world and sang
Speaker 2: it and had collections. So I was like a kid
Speaker 2: in a candy store, you know. I was like, Wow,
Speaker 2: can I come and hear your collection? So it wasn't
Speaker 2: I wasn't really a pioneer. I ended up bringing Sleepy
Speaker 2: John Estys and Big Joe Williams to Harvard for concerts
Speaker 2: and that was sort of what started my career in
Speaker 2: a way, you know, was that step into the world
Speaker 2: of professional events.
Speaker 1: Okay, Eric Fonschmidt, the other people Club forty seven were
Speaker 1: folkies really, and you're talking Sleepy John ASTs etc. As
Speaker 1: a blues guy, you bring them to Harvard? Are they
Speaker 1: playing music when you bring them to Harvard? And is
Speaker 1: anybody else looking for these old bluesmen? Yeah?
Speaker 2: There was a guy called Dick Waterman who ended up
Speaker 2: managing Son House. He was around Harvard Square in those days.
Speaker 2: There was a lot of it going on. You know.
Speaker 2: There were and people I would later discover were doing
Speaker 2: things that I wasn't aware of, Dick Spotswood and Tom
Speaker 2: Costner and I'm not Tom Costner anyway. There was a
Speaker 2: rapidly expanding community and one of the things that, as
Speaker 2: you say, they were folkys. But what I discussed and
Speaker 2: when I went to Harvard, I had a very negative
Speaker 2: attitude about folk music. I loved Lead Belly records, but
Speaker 2: I didn't really like Cisco Houston and Pete Seeger and
Speaker 2: people like that much. And I didn't like the Weavers.
Speaker 2: I didn't like Ronnie Gilbert's voice. The whole idea of
Speaker 2: sort of middle class white people strumming guitars and singing
Speaker 2: folk music seemed a bit silly to me. And but
Speaker 2: when I first heard Eric von Schmidt and Rolf Khan,
Speaker 2: I realized that there was a whole different esthetic going
Speaker 2: on here. That the people that I didn't like were
Speaker 2: the New York people, where folk music was a political thing.
Speaker 2: It was music of the people. And the way you
Speaker 2: communicated music of the people was by finding like Spanish
Speaker 2: Civil War song, a miners song from Yorkshire, a cowboys song,
Speaker 2: a South African song, and singing them all in the
Speaker 2: same kind of strum, the same kind of way to
Speaker 2: unify and make it accessible. You know. Pete Seeger had this,
Speaker 2: which is a bit ironic because Pete Seger was a
Speaker 2: brilliant musician, a fantastic virtuoso, but he wanted to simplify
Speaker 2: music and make every song singable around a campfire or
Speaker 2: at a picket line. What I found, which is an
Speaker 2: attitude that I sort of didn't feel connected to. But
Speaker 2: when I went to Harvard Square, I found these people
Speaker 2: who had the opposite idea, which was, let's not make
Speaker 2: it accessible, Let's make it hard. Let's find out exactly
Speaker 2: how Doc Bogs picked his banjo. Very complicated, weird tunings,
Speaker 2: weird fingerings, let's decode that. Let's figure it out and
Speaker 2: spend six months locked in our rooms smoking a joint
Speaker 2: figuring out how Doc Bogs did that, and then dazzle
Speaker 2: people by going on stage at the Club forty seven
Speaker 2: and playing that way or book a White with his
Speaker 2: slide guitar. And that attitude, which I found prevalent in Boston,
Speaker 2: was much more empathetic. I was much more empathetic with
Speaker 2: that point of view. And I discovered the Harry Smith anthologies,
Speaker 2: which everybody in Boston had, and which Bob Dylan writes
Speaker 2: about in his book Chronicles about how that changed his life.
Speaker 2: Hearing Harry Smith's anthology of American folk Music, he suddenly
Speaker 2: dove in the deep end of authenticity and discovered a
Speaker 2: whole different aesthetic from the esthetic that he originally embraced
Speaker 2: as a folk singer of protest song and the kind
Speaker 2: of folk coffee house folk movement. So yeah, I mean
Speaker 2: it was very interesting sociological divide and musicological divide.
Speaker 3: Political okay, jumping across the pond.
Speaker 1: You have the people in Liverpool, it's support the import
Speaker 1: American records. They're influenced by blues records. Since you spent
Speaker 1: so much time in England, this may be a little
Speaker 1: out of your purview. Are they going through the same
Speaker 1: process as you or are they just listening to certain
Speaker 1: acts and being inspired by them.
Speaker 2: The process in Britain was a bit different. In America,
Speaker 2: it all got caught up in these politics that came
Speaker 2: to a head in nineteen sixty five at Newport acoustic
Speaker 2: music versus electric music, and people in America were very
Speaker 2: conflicted about Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf because they were
Speaker 2: on the same label as Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley.
Speaker 2: They played electric guitars the same way, and so people
Speaker 2: had much more time. The Newport Folk Festival crowd revered Mississippi,
Speaker 2: John hurt Son House, Robert Pete Williams. You know all
Speaker 2: that in Britain that split never happened, at least with blues.
Speaker 2: People loved Big Bill Brumsey, they loved Muddy Waters, they
Speaker 2: loved Lead Belly, they loved Howling Wolf, mostly from records
Speaker 2: occasional visits. And that was one of the reasons that
Speaker 2: I ended up staying in Britain was that when I
Speaker 2: arrived there in the spring of sixty four as a
Speaker 2: tour manager with Muddy Waters and Cis Rosetta Tharp and
Speaker 2: Brownie McGinn Sunny Terry, nobody made any distinction between Brownie
Speaker 2: and Sonny, who were acoustic blues men, and Muddy who
Speaker 2: had his electric guitar in his electric band. And the
Speaker 2: first night in nineteen sixty four Spring of sixty four
Speaker 2: Bristol Colston Hall packed almost two thousand people queuing outside
Speaker 2: the dressing room after the show for Muddy Water's autograph.
Speaker 2: And this was such a revelation to me. You know
Speaker 2: that these people just loved this music. They didn't have
Speaker 2: any of the issues that people had in America about
Speaker 2: being conflicted about whether it was authentic or acoustic or electric,
Speaker 2: or commercial or uncommercial. They just loved it. And I
Speaker 2: think that was the process that has been chronicled endlessly
Speaker 2: of Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger and John Mayle and
Speaker 2: all these people absorbing American blues, bringing it across the
Speaker 2: Atlantic to America and then saint you American's listen, this
Speaker 2: is yours and triggering an explosion of interest in America
Speaker 2: in the blues. But we had to be led there
Speaker 2: by the British.
Speaker 1: How do you get that gig? As tour manager?
Speaker 2: The concerts I put on with Sleepy John, Esty's Brann
Speaker 2: and Big Joe Williams.
Speaker 1: I mean, just one second, was that with your money
Speaker 1: or the college's money?
Speaker 2: My money? Because what happened was I went long story short,
Speaker 2: I got into Harvard on an advanced placement, so I
Speaker 2: only had three years I had to do for my
Speaker 2: bachelor's and I thought they gave me an edge, and
Speaker 2: I took a year half year off and I worked
Speaker 2: for a record company in California contemporary good time jazz,
Speaker 2: and on the way back East, I convinced a label
Speaker 2: in Chicago and another label in New York to let
Speaker 2: me distribute them in Boston, and so I became a
Speaker 2: distributor and I had a warehouse. The warehouse was under
Speaker 2: the bed in my dorm and I would go out
Speaker 2: to the Harvard Coop and a couple of other shops
Speaker 2: around Harvard Square and more in downtown Boston and sell
Speaker 2: these records and made a little money. And I was
Speaker 2: completely I was completely over optimistic. But I would take
Speaker 2: whatever money I had and I would say, Okay, that'll
Speaker 2: buy me the bus ticket to get Big Joe Williams
Speaker 2: from Chicago to Boston, and then I'll sell a bunch
Speaker 2: of tickets and I'll be able to pay him. And
Speaker 2: I just about did. But it was a very close
Speaker 2: front thing. But it was all kind of speculative and crazy,
Speaker 2: and but I did pull it off. And Manny Greenhill,
Speaker 2: who was the big concert promoter in Boston, manager of
Speaker 2: Joan Biaz and the kind of gonzamacher of folk music
Speaker 2: in Boston, he noticed and he was bringing Jesse Fuller
Speaker 2: to Boston to play a folk festival, do a gig
Speaker 2: at a coffee house, and do a record for prestige.
Speaker 2: And he called me up and offered me twenty five
Speaker 2: bucks to look after Jesse Fuller for a weekend. So
Speaker 2: I did, and I think he thought I did a
Speaker 2: good job. So when he then booked Brandon McGinn's Sonny Terry,
Speaker 2: who he also managed on to join George Ween's blues
Speaker 2: gospel caravan going to England in the spring of sixty four.
Speaker 2: And I asked Manny if he had any ideas about it,
Speaker 2: what I could do to keep my body and soul
Speaker 2: together if I went to Europe. He picked up the
Speaker 2: phone called George. He said, if you found a tour
Speaker 2: manager for that show yet? And then he said to me,
Speaker 2: can you be in New York tomorrow morning at ten o'clock?
Speaker 2: And I said yeah, And I talked to George for
Speaker 2: half an hour and he said, there's a telephone and
Speaker 2: a chair. Go get on the phone to Chicago and
Speaker 2: hire a bass player. And I had a job.
Speaker 1: Okay, fake it till you make it, but there are
Speaker 1: some skills in being a tour manager. So how was
Speaker 1: your experience?
Speaker 2: It was great. The first day we had a day off.
Speaker 2: The first day the musicians arrived and I assembled. I
Speaker 2: persuaded the tour agency in England to get us a
Speaker 2: rehearsal room. I got everybody there and I said, okay,
Speaker 2: I got some ideas for this show. How we're going
Speaker 2: to do this show? I want Otis. You can play
Speaker 2: gospel piano. Otis Span You'll play with Sister Rosetta and
Speaker 2: Brownie McGhee. You're a great guitar player. You'll play with
Speaker 2: cousin Joe. That'll work great, and you know, and they
Speaker 2: all looked at me like, white boy, get out of here.
Speaker 2: You know, we're trying. This is a day off. Just
Speaker 2: don't don't bust our ass for all this shit. And
Speaker 2: so I was kind of humiliated. But then over the
Speaker 2: course of a two and a half week tour, little
Speaker 2: by little, they started doing all the things I had suggested.
Speaker 2: And the last concert was one of the greatest nights
Speaker 2: of my life because they did everything that I'd originally
Speaker 2: proposed to them to do, and it was fantastic and
Speaker 2: they all loved each other by the end. What I
Speaker 2: did I didn't realize that first night was that they didn't
Speaker 2: know each other. I had that sort of naive outsiders
Speaker 2: thing of well, they're all blues singers, they must know
Speaker 2: each other, you know. But Money was from South side
Speaker 2: of Chicago, One World, Brownie and Sonny were from Coffee
Speaker 2: House Circuit, East Coast. Sister Rosetta was from the gospel scene,
Speaker 2: cousin Joe was like a fixture on Bourbon Street in
Speaker 2: New Orleans. They were all from different worlds. They'd never
Speaker 2: met many of them, some of them had, but by
Speaker 2: the end they just adored each other. There were tears
Speaker 2: at the airport when the tour ended.
Speaker 1: And.
Speaker 2: It was one of the great I mean, I sometimes
Speaker 2: choke or sort of joke that if I look at
Speaker 2: my life in my career, that was the peak and
Speaker 2: it's kind of been downhill from there. You know that
Speaker 2: last night in Brighton, Okay.
Speaker 1: Many of these people did not achieve commercial success due
Speaker 1: to the degree they did at all. Until this point
Speaker 1: in the middle sixties. Did you find that these people
Speaker 1: were bitter as a result of their experience or they
Speaker 1: were so experienced you know, I've had this experience with
Speaker 1: some musicians even had fame in their youth. They're going
Speaker 1: through the motions, you know, this is a payday, next city.
Speaker 1: What were they like?
Speaker 2: There was so much difference differentiation among them. I think
Speaker 2: Brownie McGhee, who had a very bad limp and he'd
Speaker 2: somehow been put in this duo with Sonny Terry, who
Speaker 2: was blind, and so he had to kind of look
Speaker 2: after Sonny and he had this limp made it hard
Speaker 2: for him to get around. He was overweight, and I
Speaker 2: think he spent a lot of time with chuckun and
Speaker 2: jiving white promoters and folk people, and he was kind
Speaker 2: of bitter. Muddy Waters had been a star in Chicago.
Speaker 2: He was a very dignified, very accomplished man who really
Speaker 2: appreciated the adulation he got in Britain and was in
Speaker 2: a kind of quiet, dignified way enjoying it. Sister Ozetta
Speaker 2: had been a star three or four times in her life,
Speaker 2: up and down in the thirties with Lucky Millinder, then
Speaker 2: in the gospel scene. Then she toured France a bunch
Speaker 2: of times in the fifties. And she had high heels.
Speaker 2: She had a very expensive red wig. She had a
Speaker 2: fur collar on her coat. She lorded it over everybody
Speaker 2: until she got to know them and then realized how
Speaker 2: wonderful they were, And you know, couldn't have been sweeter
Speaker 2: to everybody. But she had a kind of persona that
Speaker 2: she projected as a woman of the world and loved
Speaker 2: the adulation the Audience's cousin Joe Pleasant, was such a character.
Speaker 2: I used to buy the International Herald Tribune every morning,
Speaker 2: and he used to grab it from me and read
Speaker 2: it and then walk up and down the aisle of
Speaker 2: the bus as we were traveling from Bristol to Lester
Speaker 2: or whatever, telling everybody in the whole tour what had
Speaker 2: been happening in the world that day, and then quizzing
Speaker 2: them about it. And he just was an ebulliant, terrific
Speaker 2: who everybody adored. And so it was a it was
Speaker 2: a mixture, you know of and Reverend Gary Davis, of course,
Speaker 2: was a fantastic character who blind old, didn't look after himself,
Speaker 2: didn't have you know. He was you know, ash from cigarettes,
Speaker 2: you know, or from pipe tobacco, all up and down
Speaker 2: his shirt, eating eggs at breakfast with his hand and
Speaker 2: dripping yoke onto his shirt front. But he was so
Speaker 2: witty and so funny. And one day somebody gave us
Speaker 2: some dope in Liverpool and somebody you know, me and
Speaker 2: the other there was. I had a guy who was
Speaker 2: supposed to be there with one of the Blue singers
Speaker 2: who actually got sick and didn't come. But this guy
Speaker 2: Tom what's his name, Tom something rather, who had helped
Speaker 2: find Mississippi on her he came as my helper and
Speaker 2: he'd loved. You know, we were sitting in the back
Speaker 2: with Otis Van, you know, smoking a joint. Gary you know,
Speaker 2: started yelling from his seat, give me some of that,
Speaker 2: Give me some of that. And so he would he
Speaker 2: would have, you know, make sure that Tom would stuff
Speaker 2: dope into his pipe. And he was just a character.
Speaker 2: And so it was every everything was different, everybody was different.
Speaker 2: It was a cross section of a wonderful slice of humanity.
Speaker 2: And that you can't make generalities.
Speaker 1: Really, what did your parents do for a living?
Speaker 2: My father went to Harvard but never graduated, was convinced
Speaker 2: that he had he'd been fascinated by He studied economics
Speaker 2: at Harvard as well as being on the heart Crimson,
Speaker 2: and he ended up starting local newspapers and then local
Speaker 2: he started the first local credit card in America in
Speaker 2: the Delaware Valley, and he went bankrupt, and eventually that
Speaker 2: led by some circuitous route to MasterCard. Not that he
Speaker 2: owned a piece of it, but he kind of inspired it,
Speaker 2: and he ended up putting out local telephone directories. He
Speaker 2: was very frustrated because he had big ideas about how
Speaker 2: to reshape the world's economy through local circular feedback of money.
Speaker 2: That stayed in local communities and ways to accomplish that,
Speaker 2: but he never really got to do it. And my mother,
Speaker 2: because my father went bankrupt and couldn't didn't make much money.
Speaker 2: She had go to work and she ended up running
Speaker 2: the photography department at the Princeton University store. And so
Speaker 2: she sold cameras and film to Robert Oppenheimer and Albert
Speaker 2: Einstein and you know, David Wigner and some of these
Speaker 2: brilliant people who were at the Institute for Advanced Study.
Speaker 2: They all loved her and came and bought film and
Speaker 2: cameras from her. And she was a wonderful a stalwart
Speaker 2: of the Democratic Party in Princeton, New Jersey. And that's it.
Speaker 2: They were. I had one brother, and you know, we
Speaker 2: we My parents divorced. They didn't have a great marriage,
Speaker 2: but they stayed very friendly. And my brother went to
Speaker 2: Columbia and went to law school, became a lawyer in Albuquerque,
Speaker 2: New Mexico. And he went three thousand miles one way.
Speaker 2: I went three thousand miles the other way.
Speaker 1: So what do your parents think about an Ivy league
Speaker 1: educated son who is pursuing, you know, this parapatetic life
Speaker 1: in music?
Speaker 2: When I graduated from high school, which was actually a
Speaker 2: boarding school, my father wanted me desperately to get into Harvard,
Speaker 2: and he somehow managed between a scholarship and borrowing money
Speaker 2: from a wealthy friend of ours, got me through this
Speaker 2: boarding school, which I didn't really like, but anyway. He
Speaker 2: came to pick me up after graduation and we were
Speaker 2: driving back to Princeton and he asked me what I
Speaker 2: was my idea about Harvard and what I was going
Speaker 2: to do, and what my aim was what I wanted
Speaker 2: to become. And I told him I wanted to be
Speaker 2: a record producer. And he said he had no idea
Speaker 2: what that was. And he said, okay. Well I tried
Speaker 2: to explain it to him. He said, no, no, forget that.
Speaker 2: Just tell me how many people in the world today
Speaker 2: are doing this job in the way that you imagine
Speaker 2: yourself doing it. And I said I didn't really know much.
Speaker 2: I said, well, probably fifteen or twenty. And he said, okay,
Speaker 2: So that's the target you're aiming for. That, that small
Speaker 2: bullseye is what you're aiming for. And I said yeah,
Speaker 2: and he said, and you're comfortable with that? I said yeah.
Speaker 2: He said okay, and he was cool. He was relaxed,
Speaker 2: and my mother never stopped being supportive anything I did.
Speaker 2: She was very supportive. And you know, I brought the
Speaker 2: Incredible String Band to play a new in Princeton at
Speaker 2: a concert, and my mother and my father came to
Speaker 2: the concert and I remember looking over. It was a
Speaker 2: kind of get together after the show. And I remember
Speaker 2: looking at Robin Williamson from the Incredible String Band. Who
Speaker 2: was this, you know, complete William Blake, psychedelic William Blake
Speaker 2: character from Edinburgh. I looked over and he and my
Speaker 2: father are deep in conversation in the corner, and I thought, cool.
Speaker 1: Okay, once you graduate from college, are you self sustaining
Speaker 1: or do you have to call your parents from money?
Speaker 2: I had to call my parents for money twice in
Speaker 2: my life, A little bit of money, I you know.
Speaker 2: I went, I got a job. We're opening the Electra
Speaker 2: office in London, and then I got fired a year later.
Speaker 1: Ooh, I'm interested. Why did you get fired?
Speaker 2: I think it was a combination of reasons. I think
Speaker 2: Jack Holtzman was the owner of Electra, the guy who
Speaker 2: started as his label. He had hired Paul Rothschild, who
Speaker 2: was my friend who had come I had invited up
Speaker 2: to Newport, who did the sound for sixty five when
Speaker 2: Dylan went electric. I was the stage manager, he was
Speaker 2: the sound guy, and I'd helped him sign the Butterfield band.
Speaker 2: I'd helped him find the Butterfield band. So he had
Speaker 2: this agenda that he owed me one or he wanted
Speaker 2: me to come into the to Electra, and he and
Speaker 2: I had been to England a couple of times, and
Speaker 2: I told Holtzman when I met him that Electra had
Speaker 2: a very low profile and nobody knew much about the
Speaker 2: label blah blah blah, and so Rothschild was able to
Speaker 2: convince Holtsman to hire me to go to London to
Speaker 2: open the London office with it just a little desk
Speaker 2: in the corner of the distributor's office, and m I
Speaker 2: think the two of them had different ideas about what
Speaker 2: I was doing. Holtsman's idea was that I was going
Speaker 2: to promote phil Oaks, Tom Paxston, Judy Collins and then Butterfield.
Speaker 2: I My idea, encouraged by Paul Rothschild, was that I
Speaker 2: was going to find talent. And so I think at
Speaker 2: a certain point Holtsman got very nervous with this crazed
Speaker 2: kid with the Electra checkbook and walking around London offering
Speaker 2: people deals even though he loved he did he I mean,
Speaker 2: the Incredible String Band. I had to play him a
Speaker 2: track and I remember him saying, yeah, Okay, they're pretty good.
Speaker 2: You can sign them, but don't spend more than fifty pounds,
Speaker 2: and then I had to. Then some other label offered
Speaker 2: them seventy five pounds, and I went back and offered
Speaker 2: them one hundred pounds without asking Holtzman and that sort
Speaker 2: of thing got up his nose. And I think he
Speaker 2: also hated the mess that I had on my desk.
Speaker 2: Whenever he come to London, he always walk in and
Speaker 2: give me this scathing look because of all the clutter
Speaker 2: that was on the top of my desk, and I
Speaker 2: think it just got too much for him.
Speaker 1: Okay, A, were you surprised when you're fired? B how'd
Speaker 1: you handle it? See? What did you then do?
Speaker 2: I guess I wasn't entirely surprised. I was a little disappointed,
Speaker 2: but I think tension had been building the first thing
Speaker 2: I did. I'd already recorded the first Incredible String Band album,
Speaker 2: but it hadn't been released. Yet, but I knew it
Speaker 2: was coming out shortly, and I really knew. I felt
Speaker 2: it's going to do well. So I went to see
Speaker 2: Robin and Mike and I said, I'm leaving Electra. I
Speaker 2: want to stay in London. If I stay in London,
Speaker 2: can I manage you guys? And they said sure. And
Speaker 2: then I called George Ween. I said, do you need
Speaker 2: somebody on your autumn jazz tour of Europe? He said, yeah,
Speaker 2: you know, meet me in Paris on October tenth. And
Speaker 2: so I went back on George's payroll, which was by
Speaker 2: the standards. I was living in London well. I was
Speaker 2: sleeping on a friend's couch supported me pretty well for
Speaker 2: a month month and a half, and then my friend
Speaker 2: Hoppy Hopkins, who was a great photographer, decided to throw
Speaker 2: it all over and start the International Times, which is
Speaker 2: the first underground newspaper in London, and suddenly he had
Speaker 2: no income, I had no income. We went out for
Speaker 2: a cheap curry one night and came up with the
Speaker 2: idea to under National Times. That had a great launch
Speaker 2: party with Pink Floyd and Soft Machine, who were both
Speaker 2: unknown at the time, playing and psychedelic lights everywhere and
Speaker 2: great crowd, and we said, let's do something like that
Speaker 2: but charge admission, and so we started the UFO Club
Speaker 2: and that's how we paid our rent.
Speaker 1: To start a club takes money. Where'd you get the money?
Speaker 2: No, didn't we We didn't actually rent a premises. We
Speaker 2: knocked on the door of an Irish dance hall in
Speaker 2: Tottencourt Road and we noticed that they were dark on Fridays.
Speaker 2: They had events Katie dances on Thursdays and Saturdays, and
Speaker 2: so we said, we'll pay fifteen pounds for Friday and
Speaker 2: he said if he got the concession to sell soft drinks.
Speaker 2: It was a deal. So all we needed was fifteen
Speaker 2: pounds to pay and we didn't even have to pay
Speaker 2: them in advance, so we just printed some leaflets handed
Speaker 2: them out on Portobello Road. The place was full the
Speaker 2: first night. Pink Floyd was the group and Hoppey had
Speaker 2: some friends with psychedelic lights and people ca You know,
Speaker 2: it wasn't absolutely packed, but a lot of people came
Speaker 2: and all the freaks looked around and went wow. We
Speaker 2: never realized there were many of us.
Speaker 1: Let's go back. You're steeped in this blues world. That's
Speaker 1: it its own people don't understand that the record business
Speaker 1: was a much smaller business at the time. So you
Speaker 1: had the Top forty business, which I'm sure you were
Speaker 1: aware of but had no interest in.
Speaker 2: Oh I was very interested. I loved it when I
Speaker 2: was When Jeff Muldor and my brother and I would
Speaker 2: play obscure blues records every Saturday afternoon for six hours.
Speaker 2: We then get our good trousers on and go to
Speaker 2: a party and dance to Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley
Speaker 2: and dance to do Wop and dance to Ray Charles,
Speaker 2: and we love that stuff. We were You know, that
Speaker 2: was a great time for Top forty.
Speaker 1: Let me put it differently. Prior to the Beatles, we
Speaker 1: had the Four Seasons in the Beach Ways to survived
Speaker 1: the Beatles, almost nobody else did. There were a lot
Speaker 1: of acts that even at the time, didn't get that
Speaker 1: much respect. Be in Bobby Rydell. There were people who
Speaker 1: are now looked fondly upon Bobby Darren. To get to
Speaker 1: my ultimate question, the Beatles come along and they break
Speaker 1: a year earlier in the UK, but they break in America.
Speaker 1: In the Beinia sixty four, there's a whole British invasion
Speaker 1: are you thumbs up or thumbs down?
Speaker 2: Totally thumbs up. I was. I loved the Beatles. I
Speaker 2: thought they were incredible, And you know, that was, in
Speaker 2: a way one of the another part of that divide
Speaker 2: that I talked about opening up in the folk scene
Speaker 2: in Boston. I would go to parties after the Club
Speaker 2: forty seven closed in somebody's apartment and you'd have a
Speaker 2: bunch of folkies banjo's, mandolin's guitars playing She's a Woman.
Speaker 2: People loved the Beatles, but you know, I think Alan
Speaker 2: Omax and Theodore Bicquel and the establishment figures that ran
Speaker 2: the New York scene didn't love the Beatles.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's just go to Newport for a second. History
Speaker 1: keeps being rewritten. First, the big story was Dylan was booed.
Speaker 1: Then they say, no, he really wasn't bowed. What really happened.
Speaker 2: It was pretty straightforward. It was half and half, you know.
Speaker 2: I at the end of Maggie's Farm, I was standing
Speaker 2: in the little press enclosure right in front of the stage,
Speaker 2: and you heard this waft of sound that was absolutely
Speaker 2: a mixture. Some people were definitely booing, some people were cheering,
Speaker 2: and at the end, after the three songs, the only
Speaker 2: three songs he had rehearsed with the band, and he
Speaker 2: left the stage more and they are a very similar sound,
Speaker 2: and you had that wave of sound. You can hear
Speaker 2: it on the recordings. I don't think there's any real
Speaker 2: debate about it. It was a very you know, the
Speaker 2: whole event was a schismatic event, and everybody knew it beforehand,
Speaker 2: the whole weekend before Sunday night. If you just overheard
Speaker 2: conversations passing, it was like, what about Dylan, What do
Speaker 2: you think he's gonna do? Would he dare? No, he
Speaker 2: wouldn't dare? Would he That was a kind of talk
Speaker 2: that was going around, not just backstage, but among the audience.
Speaker 2: People were intrigued. But Dylan was on the top forty
Speaker 2: radio like a rolling stone, playing electric guitar with a
Speaker 2: drum kit. Would he bring that to Newport? Would he dare?
Speaker 2: That was the big question on everybody's mind. And so
Speaker 2: it was one of those moments that was not just
Speaker 2: a ground you know, a kind of world shaking moment
Speaker 2: in retrospect. It was at the time we knew that
Speaker 2: things would never be the same.
Speaker 1: Okay. The Incredible String Band late sixties have a moment.
Speaker 1: I can't speak to England. In the UK, this is
Speaker 1: a I mean, the US is a very fertile era
Speaker 1: where we have FM, underground rock burgeoning. People are seeking
Speaker 1: out records and they have a presence in the scene.
Speaker 1: We talk about Dylan, we talk about Richard Thompson. They
Speaker 1: have continued to reinvent themselves, more Dylan than Thompson, but
Speaker 1: Thompson has survived. The Incredible String Band. I think you
Speaker 1: probably find two people under the age of forty, you know,
Speaker 1: Robin Williamson. Is My question is, with these acts and
Speaker 1: your experience, why do they tend to have a period
Speaker 1: of fertile creation which ends and usually almost never can
Speaker 1: regain it.
Speaker 2: Well, that's certainly true of the Incredible Strength Band, but
Speaker 2: I'm not sure who else it's true of. I mean,
Speaker 2: I mean, I think, well, I think it's it's certainly
Speaker 2: true of an awful lot of bands or groups or
Speaker 2: artists that I wasn't involved in.
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, I'm talking in general, not just the action.
Speaker 2: In general, I think the output the creation of somebody
Speaker 2: who's writing songs, singing to a microphone for the first
Speaker 2: time just because they can, and writing songs about the
Speaker 2: real life, you know, life that they've had as teenagers,
Speaker 2: young young people is a lot less self conscious than
Speaker 2: once you've had a hit record or a successful LP
Speaker 2: or done a big tour and can draw thousands of people.
Speaker 2: It's much more difficult to find subject matter for songs.
Speaker 2: It's much more difficult you start being aware self aware.
Speaker 2: Self awareness is a trap, you know, it's a very
Speaker 2: difficult thing to overcome, and some people are are are
Speaker 2: great at it, and some people aren't. But you know,
Speaker 2: the Beatles, even the Beatles, you know, they the magic
Speaker 2: of a certain era was hard to replicate in many ways.
Speaker 2: And the Incredible String Band are an extreme example of
Speaker 2: a group that had an incredible output. I mean, in fact,
Speaker 2: you know, it's on my mind these days because Rough
Speaker 2: Trade Records in Britain has just concluded a deal to
Speaker 2: reissue the first five Incredible String Band albums and they're
Speaker 2: going to try and overcome this fact that you so
Speaker 2: aptly said that nobody under forty knows who Robin Williamson is.
Speaker 2: And there what happened with them happened very quickly from
Speaker 2: a height of I think in nineteen sixty nine we
Speaker 2: did we filled the filmore East twice, Fillmore West twice,
Speaker 2: the Lincoln Center once, but then we played at Woodstock
Speaker 2: and it was a disaster and they didn't make the
Speaker 2: cut for the film. They didn't make the cut for
Speaker 2: the record. Suddenly everything just went in another direction and
Speaker 2: passed them by their spot that Friday night because it rained,
Speaker 2: because they were using electric pickups, they didn't want to
Speaker 2: play acoustically. Melanie stepped into their slot, you know, and
Speaker 2: became a star, and they became scientologists, and I think it,
Speaker 2: you know, had an effect on the quality of their songwriting.
Speaker 2: Maybe I don't know who knows.
Speaker 1: But.
Speaker 2: It happened very quickly, and I think still for me
Speaker 2: and for many people, those first five albums are fantastic
Speaker 2: records and there's incredible songs, wonderful songs on there. And thankfully,
Speaker 2: you know, the big bosses of Beggars Banquet and Rough
Speaker 2: Trade grew up with incredible string band and are determined
Speaker 2: to try and show everybody what they're missing. And I
Speaker 2: think that would be fantastic what happened. But with a
Speaker 2: lot of artists, there's just a moment you know that
Speaker 2: the comes and it goes, you know, and you try
Speaker 2: the more the harder you try to recapture a certain
Speaker 2: moment in your life, you know, the more difficult it
Speaker 2: can be. I'm trying to think of I don't know
Speaker 2: what would your I mean solved.
Speaker 1: I have a take on it, just to mean this
Speaker 1: is a value. My personal take is most of these people,
Speaker 1: you know, as we say, there's so many acts, there's
Speaker 1: always going to be exceptions. A lot of these people
Speaker 1: are alienated people whose lives don't work, and they have
Speaker 1: a fantasy that if they have the success, their lives
Speaker 1: will work. And even though they may make money, they
Speaker 1: may have some sex, may have some drugs, they still
Speaker 1: end up finding the same people and then I find
Speaker 1: they can't do it again because they don't have that drive.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I think it's Yeah, that's another I
Speaker 2: think it's similar, a slightly different angle on that self awareness.
Speaker 2: The thing that it's easier to write songs about your
Speaker 2: real life, it's like other people's real lives. Once you
Speaker 2: become somebody who's touring all the time and has a
Speaker 2: record label saying come on, you've got to have ten
Speaker 2: new songs written by next in two months for this session,
Speaker 2: it's a whole different circumstance. Of creation, of creation, you're
Speaker 2: creating watching yourself do it instead of just having it
Speaker 2: pour out of you. But I have huge admiration for
Speaker 2: people who can continue to reinvent themselves. And it's obviously
Speaker 2: it's different for people who are musicians or singers versus
Speaker 2: people who are songwriters. You know, that's a kind of
Speaker 2: a different challenge, you know, to be to have a
Speaker 2: to come up with truly original song compositions.
Speaker 1: Okay, you're a record producer. It's one thing to have
Speaker 1: a debut album. You've worked with acts different times. How
Speaker 1: do you produce a record such that you get the
Speaker 1: act over their self awareness?
Speaker 2: I think, I mean, as I have banged on about
Speaker 2: probably more than I this is wise. I'm a great
Speaker 2: believer in recording as much live as possible, of putting
Speaker 2: a bunch of musicians in a room, getting them all
Speaker 2: to play together, and putting it all and you know,
Speaker 2: maybe doing overdubs later, fixing things, adding harmonies, adding a
Speaker 2: saxophone solo. But the core track is live, and so
Speaker 2: it's all about what happens in that moment. I think,
Speaker 2: if you know the advent of pro tools and the
Speaker 2: way a lot of people make records these days. You know,
Speaker 2: you have a click track, you put a guitarist from down,
Speaker 2: you sing a guide vocal, you send it to Seattle
Speaker 2: for somebody to put a bass part on, and then
Speaker 2: they send it to Boston for somebody to add a
Speaker 2: drum part. You're never going to get over that self awareness.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's it's just rhythmically to me, plotting somehow.
Speaker 2: It doesn't have the life, the sense of adventure that
Speaker 2: a great recording has. But how to get them if
Speaker 2: you do once you do establish the fact that you're
Speaker 2: and record live in a moment, and you get a
Speaker 2: bunch of and I think getting other musicians around a
Speaker 2: singer songwriter or a musician or a central figure is
Speaker 2: a key thing because I think the interaction between people
Speaker 2: is central.
Speaker 1: Tell us about the faithful meeting where you and others
Speaker 1: came up with the term world music.
Speaker 2: Nineteen eighty seven. It was, you know, it was kind
Speaker 2: of an exciting time in the record business. I mean,
Speaker 2: you know, I in looking back on that period, I
Speaker 2: have conceptual it quite a lot. You know, I have
Speaker 2: a lot of theories about what was going on. I think,
Speaker 2: as I mentioned when we talked about the seventies, that
Speaker 2: punk and disco were Although there were some great things
Speaker 2: that came out of punk and disco, overall, they weren't
Speaker 2: what I would call positive developments in the history of music.
Speaker 2: But you know, they are what they are. They happened,
Speaker 2: they're real. But I think it deprived a lot of
Speaker 2: people listeners of the sort of music that they had
Speaker 2: learned to love and the way they'd gotten into music.
Speaker 2: They've gotten a lot of people came in to music
Speaker 2: through great pop music, through blues, through jazz, through country music,
Speaker 2: all this music that people are virtuosic they play. There's
Speaker 2: a feeling of roots, there's a feeling of flamboyant in
Speaker 2: the moment, whether it's Bill Monroe or whether it's you know,
Speaker 2: I don't know, Miles Davis in some of his electric stuff.
Speaker 2: I mean, all that stuff brought lot. You know, there
Speaker 2: was a huge audience for music that was sort of
Speaker 2: oriented around great playing, and then suddenly in the late
Speaker 2: seventies early eighties, there wasn't so much of that coming
Speaker 2: out anymore. And I think it's like a weather system.
Speaker 2: There was a low pressure system and it sucked in
Speaker 2: things from over the horizon, African music, Latin music, you
Speaker 2: suddenly had DJs starting to make Latin tracks in with
Speaker 2: disco tracks. You had people fell a kooti, you had
Speaker 2: African music, you had you know, and and and it,
Speaker 2: and the ripples just spread wider and wider into and
Speaker 2: people realized how much music was out there in the world.
Speaker 2: And another thing that people that I certainly realized because
Speaker 2: I was still signing, you know, I put out Shootout
Speaker 2: the Lights in nineteen eighty two. I was still making
Speaker 2: records with the likes of Richard and Linda Thompson, and
Speaker 2: but I began to realize that every week there were
Speaker 2: hundreds of singer songwriters records being released into the into
Speaker 2: the English and American markets, and and if you had
Speaker 2: a great singer songwriter, it was a struggle if you
Speaker 2: were a little label with no money. And whereas if
Speaker 2: you put out a record of music cash Hungary's greatest
Speaker 2: traditional band, nobody else is putting out Hungary's greatest traditional
Speaker 2: band or anything like it. And so if you find
Speaker 2: an audience for that sort of music, you've you're going
Speaker 2: to sell a few thousand. And and so more and
Speaker 2: more labels were exploring this kind of territory, and we
Speaker 2: were getting frustrated because the record stores didn't know how
Speaker 2: to deal with it. They had a they some some
Speaker 2: record stores had a little divider saying ethnic some record
Speaker 2: stores had a divider saying international folk. And you'd end
Speaker 2: up behind those kinds of dividers, and so some one, somebody,
Speaker 2: one of the record label guys said, let's all get
Speaker 2: together and talk about this, and so we did, and
Speaker 2: we had this idea. The idea came together to make
Speaker 2: like five hundred dividers that we would give out free
Speaker 2: to record stores, and on the back of the divider
Speaker 2: would be a checklist of all the records in small
Speaker 2: type that they should stock to go behind this divider,
Speaker 2: and all the labels would pay fifty pounds for each
Speaker 2: record they wanted on that list. So we ended up
Speaker 2: with a budget of like four thousand pounds three eight
Speaker 2: hundred pounds or something, and we voted for Okay, what
Speaker 2: are we going to put on this divider? World music
Speaker 2: seemed obvious, good idea, and it wasn't a new invention,
Speaker 2: and people had pointed out like Wesleyan University had a
Speaker 2: world music department starting in the fifties, and there's a
Speaker 2: world music building in Middletown, Connecticut and Wesleyan College. But anyway,
Speaker 2: it was new, and we just thought, hey, it's just
Speaker 2: a divide or to help us get records into stores.
Speaker 2: And people have criticized it and later as a kind
Speaker 2: of way of categorizing and other othering music from other cultures,
Speaker 2: and but my view is we were just categorizing the audience.
Speaker 2: You know, we knew that somebody who was interested in
Speaker 2: neust Fata Ali Khan was probably our best bet for
Speaker 2: somebody who might buy an Orchestra Baobab record or of
Speaker 2: Susannah Baka records. And and that those categories, you know,
Speaker 2: you wouldn't get You wouldn't get very far by putting
Speaker 2: everybody in a separate country or a separate category. But
Speaker 2: if you had, you know, this one category that was
Speaker 2: like this kind of music that people seem to like.
Speaker 2: Now it's a category defined by its audience. And and
Speaker 2: it worked like crazy, so so much so that we
Speaker 2: were caught unawares. And within a year of that meeting,
Speaker 2: there were world music seasons at art centers from you know,
Speaker 2: Berkeley to Belgrade, not Belgrade and then but but you know,
Speaker 2: but Berkeley to Athens, and there were World music radio shows,
Speaker 2: and there were music World music labels, and there were
Speaker 2: Music World music review columns in newspapers once a week
Speaker 2: or once a month. It just, you know, expanded. It
Speaker 2: was just like and we spent like sixteen hundred pounds
Speaker 2: on PR for the thing, and it was like the
Speaker 2: most high leveraged PR campaign in history.
Speaker 1: I would say, you talk about this period the late
Speaker 1: seventies for eighties. Of course, then the business is revolutionized
Speaker 1: by MTV. What's your assessment of the music landscape today.
Speaker 2: I'm not a good person to ask for it, because
Speaker 2: I've been so closeted trying to finish this gigantic opus
Speaker 2: of mine that I don't do a lot of listening
Speaker 2: to what's going on today. That's one excuse. The other
Speaker 2: excuse is that I don't you really hear that much
Speaker 2: that I really like. Although there's some great stuff. You
Speaker 2: do hear some terrific stuff. But the way that it works,
Speaker 2: and the how tiny the share of proceeds is that
Speaker 2: goes to musicians, and how little financing there is for
Speaker 2: for recording projects, it's just such a completely different landscape
Speaker 2: than the one that I am familiar with that I
Speaker 2: hardly know where to start in trying to think about
Speaker 2: it or what it is. It's just very, very different,
Speaker 2: and I'm glad I'm not starting a record label today,
Speaker 2: you know. I think it's a very difficult world. On
Speaker 2: the other hand, so much is available, you can hear
Speaker 2: so much stuff. But again that's a little bit of
Speaker 2: a double edged sword.
Speaker 1: I think, Okay, I'll buy your excuses, so let's move on.
Speaker 1: The blue is ever going to come back?
Speaker 2: I don't think. I mean, I don't think it'll come
Speaker 2: back except in a I mean, there are young you know,
Speaker 2: there's lots of interesting things around. For example, I just
Speaker 2: saw a headline the other day Rhanna and Giddens is
Speaker 2: reforming the Carolina Chocolate Drops and they're gonna play at
Speaker 2: her festival in Carolina in April next year. And but
Speaker 2: I think that's something else, you know, blues. I think,
Speaker 2: you know, so much of the music that I have collected,
Speaker 2: written about, recorded, that I talk about in the book
Speaker 2: doesn't any longer grow from the soil easily. It has
Speaker 2: to be. It's become self aware, like what we're talking
Speaker 2: about earlier, with say or songwriters. It's and yet there's
Speaker 2: always great music, and there's always great musicians, and there's
Speaker 2: always you know. I have a little sidebar to my
Speaker 2: work on the book was that during the course of
Speaker 2: writing the book ten years ago, I went someplace I'd
Speaker 2: always wanted to go, which was Albania, and heard some
Speaker 2: music there, and I met a German woman who was
Speaker 2: working in environmental projects there but knew all the dances
Speaker 2: from all the regions of Albania, knew everything about Albanian music. Anyway,
Speaker 2: she's now, that's Andrea. You just met her, my wife,
Speaker 2: And over these years we made a few records together
Speaker 2: in the Balkans, which is an area that she really likes,
Speaker 2: and we put together a kind of buena vista, a club,
Speaker 2: kind of team of sase musicians from southern Albania. I
Speaker 2: made an album called Saziso Tat by the group called
Speaker 2: Saziso at least wave your handkerchief at me. And at
Speaker 2: first when it came out like six seven, seven years ago,
Speaker 2: I think, and it got very nice reviews. They did
Speaker 2: concerts in Germany and Scandinavia and around Britain. Nobody in
Speaker 2: Albania paid it any more. But over the years that
Speaker 2: has changed, and one of the fascinating things that's happened.
Speaker 2: You know that Kosovo is a separate country. It's a
Speaker 2: new country, part of the old Yugoslavia, and its identity
Speaker 2: is that they all speak Albanian. It's Albanian, and they
Speaker 2: would love to be a part of an ou Gradio,
Speaker 2: a greater Albania, but that's not going to happen in
Speaker 2: the European UN and Europe won't let them. And there's
Speaker 2: this whole generation of young people in Kosovo who have
Speaker 2: discovered Saziso and who love them like the way, almost
Speaker 2: the way people in Boston love the Blues sixty years ago.
Speaker 2: They've just done a huge concert there last weekend, and
Speaker 2: there's a gro and even within Albania itself now you
Speaker 2: walk down the streets and suddenly you start to hear
Speaker 2: traditional acoustic music which you would never hear five years ago.
Speaker 2: And so whether that's going to lead to great players
Speaker 2: and people who are of the stature musically of some
Speaker 2: of these great people that we have on these on
Speaker 2: this record, I don't know, but it is wonderful that
Speaker 2: it's become a way of you know, it's all a
Speaker 2: bit mixed up with some of this nationalism and like
Speaker 2: pride in your country and you know, it's a complicated business.
Speaker 2: But I'm very encouraged by that, and I'm very encouraged
Speaker 2: when I go to some place like New Orleans, because
Speaker 2: I remember once I went to a Second Line march
Speaker 2: uptown in New Orleans and I was just following along.
Speaker 2: There was this great brass band and people dancing, and
Speaker 2: one guy was just incredible dancing and I was watching him.
Speaker 2: And then all of a sudden, there was a side street.
Speaker 2: A car pulled into parks on a side street just
Speaker 2: next to where the band was going, and it was
Speaker 2: blaring out rap on a sound system with a huge
Speaker 2: base uh speaker, and it almost drowned out the Second
Speaker 2: Line band, and I was like, oh, damn, you know,
Speaker 2: why don't you shut up and have some respect. The
Speaker 2: car stopped, they turned the key off, the sound disappeared.
Speaker 2: Two guys got out of the front seat of the car,
Speaker 2: went around to the trunk of the car, opened the trunk,
Speaker 2: and these were two guys who had been, you know,
Speaker 2: bouncing along to this rap music in the trunk of
Speaker 2: the car. One of them had a saxophone case and
Speaker 2: one of my had to trumbone case, and they pained
Speaker 2: with their instruments and they joined the second line band
Speaker 2: playing this music, and so it can live side by side,
Speaker 2: you know, the two things. It doesn't It doesn't happen everywhere.
Speaker 2: It happens in Havana and Matanzas. It happens in Salvador,
Speaker 2: Dubaia in Brazil, where people go back and forth from
Speaker 2: digital beats to the tradition, which seems in those contexts
Speaker 2: to be alive. And so, you know, I get depressed sometimes,
Speaker 2: but then I also get very encouraged by places like
Speaker 2: that and by that kind of thing. And you know,
Speaker 2: there's have you ever heard of dust to Digital the
Speaker 2: label there's a label anyway. It's a great label of
Speaker 2: reissue obscure stuff old seventy eight And they have an
Speaker 2: Instagram feed once a month and it's people send them
Speaker 2: clips of live music from around the world and it's
Speaker 2: just fabulous. And it's hardly a drum machine in sight.
Speaker 2: It's all live and real and it's just fabulous. So
Speaker 2: you know, I think music is music will live.
Speaker 1: Okay, leaveless to say business changed. The Beatles blow up
Speaker 1: the business much bigger. We have FM underground radio. People
Speaker 1: have a wider palette of what they're listening to where
Speaker 1: I'm ultimately going. And today it's you know, it's just
Speaker 1: a s mortgage board if anybody can play. To what
Speaker 1: degree when you make a record in the more modern era,
Speaker 1: do you say I have a need to get this
Speaker 1: on wax, so to speak, or do you consider commercial
Speaker 1: impact or reach irrelevant of the dollars?
Speaker 2: Well, this has to be divided into two parts. I mean,
Speaker 2: there was a time for twenty years I ran Hannibal Records.
Speaker 2: For ten years. I ran it on my own, and
Speaker 2: I really I'm not a great business man, you know.
Speaker 2: I struggled. I had some successes, but I didn't budget well.
Speaker 2: I was over optimistic, you know. I tried to think
Speaker 2: like balance, create, you know, the artistic side and the
Speaker 2: commercial side, and make it work because I had to.
Speaker 2: I had to pay salaries every Monday morning. That was
Speaker 2: what I thought of. How do I meet the payroll
Speaker 2: on Friday? So I had to think commercially and eventually
Speaker 2: I had to sell the company to a Rikodisc. But
Speaker 2: even within riko Disc, I was expected to deliver records
Speaker 2: that sold, and I was very fortunate. I struck lucky
Speaker 2: a few times, you know, with TOUMANI diabate with Cubanismo,
Speaker 2: with you know, a number of things. But I had
Speaker 2: to have that thought always in mind. And then by
Speaker 2: two thousand, you know, the label had been sold to
Speaker 2: a hedge fund and the whole thing was just too
Speaker 2: I decided to hell with this, I'll write a book instead.
Speaker 2: And so ever since then, so last twenty five years,
Speaker 2: I have made very few records, and the records that
Speaker 2: I do make, I make for the first reason you
Speaker 2: said that, I got to get this down on disk.
Speaker 2: This is important. I want this to be done. I
Speaker 2: don't know whether it's going to sell. I think it
Speaker 2: probably won't. But let's figure out if I can raise
Speaker 2: the money to finance making it, and let's try and
Speaker 2: get it to critics, and let's try and get some
Speaker 2: live events going and at least make some people hear
Speaker 2: this music. But I'm not trying to do it as
Speaker 2: a first step and starting another record label.
Speaker 1: Okay, Switching gears a little bit. Talked about your wife.
Speaker 1: How many times have you married, and how many children?
Speaker 1: And what are they up to if you have them?
Speaker 2: Once marriage? No children?
Speaker 1: How old were you when you got.
Speaker 2: Married seventy five or seventy four.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, when you were in your mid thirties.
Speaker 2: No, no, so no, no not you wait wait, I
Speaker 2: was seventy five years old, That's.
Speaker 1: What I thought.
Speaker 3: And then I absolutely so seventy five years old.
Speaker 1: Right, So you just hadn't met the right person, or
Speaker 1: you were too invested in work.
Speaker 2: Mixture of all those things. You know, talk to my shrink.
Speaker 1: Do you go to the shrink I used to.
Speaker 2: I mean that helped me a lot. I mean, but no,
Speaker 2: I mean I had relationships, I had came close to
Speaker 2: getting married a couple of times. But I don't know.
Speaker 2: There's all you know, as I said, you're getting into
Speaker 2: psychological things now that I can't talk about with the
Speaker 2: same authority that I talk about musical.
Speaker 1: Well, you know they were, as depeche Mode said, people
Speaker 1: are people. So you know, it always astounds me. You
Speaker 1: have these musicians that are very successful on the road
Speaker 1: almost all the time. They have wives, they have children.
Speaker 1: I have never had that drive and do whatever success
Speaker 1: I've had has taken all my effort. So I'm more
Speaker 1: interested with you is that you're just so just talking
Speaker 1: about the children aspect, irrelevant of the marriage aspect. Has
Speaker 1: it been well, this is my passion. I don't want
Speaker 1: to get off the path.
Speaker 2: I always thought that I would like to have children,
Speaker 2: but I didn't really do much about it. And and
Speaker 2: I m I think I probably if I was honest,
Speaker 2: I mean, I would never have said it quite as
Speaker 2: bluntly as you said it about yourself. But it's probably true,
Speaker 2: you know that I was. And that's my way. That's
Speaker 2: the way my father was, you know. He he got married,
Speaker 2: and he always felt that this was, you know, a
Speaker 2: great thing that he did. To make a mistake of
Speaker 2: getting married and having two kids, he always felt was
Speaker 2: the best thing you'd ever done. And he always used
Speaker 2: to hector me, No, you don't have to get married,
Speaker 2: just have kids, you know. And hmm. He he felt
Speaker 2: that I was missing out. But he lived his life
Speaker 2: basically oriented around following his quest. And I think probably
Speaker 2: I have, you know, but I've been very fortunate to
Speaker 2: meet somebody who shares so much of my quest and
Speaker 2: who tolerates.
Speaker 1: Okay, you've had some landmark work with great respect critical response.
Speaker 1: Have you done financially.
Speaker 2: Not particularly well? I'm okay, I mean I was, but largely,
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, in a way, if you look
Speaker 2: at where I am now, which is okay. I own
Speaker 2: my flat in London, you know, but I there's a
Speaker 2: mortgage on it. But I'm you know, and I get royalties,
Speaker 2: but not enough to live, you know, like a king.
Speaker 2: Nick Drake. Royalties just keep going up and up and up,
Speaker 2: white bicycle. Audiobook royalties go up and up and out. Yeah,
Speaker 2: well lately, particularly since the new book came out, but
Speaker 2: also steadily over the years a little bit of an increase.
Speaker 2: And but you know, mixed in with that have been
Speaker 2: some lucky strikes with property and some a little bit
Speaker 2: of inheritance from my parents. So it's a mixture of
Speaker 2: earned fair and square in the music business. Plus bought
Speaker 2: and sold an apartment in downtown New York a good time,
Speaker 2: bought and sold an apartment in Nottinghill Gate ad a
Speaker 2: good time. And ah, and you know, bought the right
Speaker 2: stocks at the right time.
Speaker 1: Okay, you live in London. What do Americans just don't
Speaker 1: understand about London or the UK in general?
Speaker 2: Oh, I'm not sure about that. I don't know what
Speaker 2: to say about that question. I think I'm a bit
Speaker 2: I used to be intrigued or kind of scratch my head,
Speaker 2: like what is this about these letters in the articles
Speaker 2: think pieces in the New York Times from Americans living
Speaker 2: in London who say English people are so unfriendly. I
Speaker 2: never get invited to somebody's house, you know, are they?
Speaker 2: And I don't know. I just wherever I've gone, including Britain,
Speaker 2: I've never I guess I grew up my grandmother, who
Speaker 2: you know, spent all that time in Austria and Germany,
Speaker 2: and she had this sort of attitude that America was
Speaker 2: kind of a barbaric place and that real civilization was
Speaker 2: over there. And I think that, you know, came into
Speaker 2: my head. But from the minute I arrived at Heathrow Airport,
Speaker 2: or Orly Airport in Paris or wherever, I never perceived
Speaker 2: myself as a foreigner. I just deal with I don't know,
Speaker 2: I feel I'm somehow, I've got a quirk. That's very fortunate.
Speaker 2: The first day I was ever in France, I was
Speaker 2: with the Muddy Water since cince Rosetta. We were doing
Speaker 2: a show for French television, and I'd been speaking my
Speaker 2: kind of bad schoolboy French to the promoter promoter by
Speaker 2: the telephone about hotel rooms and playing arrival times and
Speaker 2: things like that. And we're driving in from the airport
Speaker 2: to Paris, and so I said, I'd need to talk
Speaker 2: to whoever's announcing the show tonight, because everybody has a
Speaker 2: certain way they like to be introduced. And they said, oh,
Speaker 2: may sa Ou, it's you. What do you mean me,
Speaker 2: I don't speak French. He said, no, no, no, you're
Speaker 2: obviously the announcer. You're going to announce it. So my
Speaker 2: first day in France, I was on French television speaking
Speaker 2: French badly. But as he said, hey, it's cute. We
Speaker 2: appreciate people who try, and so I had never stopped.
Speaker 2: I just kept speaking French badly, and eventually I spoke
Speaker 2: French pretty well. And the same thing in Britain. I just,
Speaker 2: I don't know. I fell in with John Hopkins and
Speaker 2: a few other people from all different tie of worlds.
Speaker 2: In Britain. They weren't all upper class, they weren't all
Speaker 2: lower class, they weren't all middle class. They were all different,
Speaker 2: and I just, I don't know, I just I never
Speaker 2: thought of myself. I you know, I have a season
Speaker 2: ticket at Queen's Park Rangers. I sit, you know, in
Speaker 2: the in the stands, surrounded by working class British people,
Speaker 2: and we argue.
Speaker 1: About what sport do they play there?
Speaker 2: Football?
Speaker 1: Okay, what we call or what I want to make
Speaker 1: sure it's not cricket.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, no, I never. I mean I I
Speaker 2: enjoy I love explaining baseball to an Englishman and cricket
Speaker 2: to an American. That's a real bliss for me if
Speaker 2: I get that opportunity. Somebody says, please explain. Oh great, okay,
Speaker 2: sit down. How long have you got.
Speaker 1: Okay forgetting the personal? What do we know? England left
Speaker 1: the EU the health system, although national is struggling. United States,
Speaker 1: everybody who lives here says, greatest country in the world.
Speaker 1: So many people don't have passports, haven't been anywhere. Okay,
Speaker 1: certain things we take for granted. I mean, landline's not
Speaker 1: really a thing anymore, but it used to be. You
Speaker 1: can get a landline right away in America. You might
Speaker 1: have to wait weeks in London. What can you tell
Speaker 1: us about the difference of the countries in the American
Speaker 1: perception of England relative to what it's really like.
Speaker 2: Well, it's much less different than it used to be.
Speaker 2: I mean, in the sixties, I was startled by so
Speaker 2: many things. The biggest thing I was startled by was
Speaker 2: how little possessions people had. Nobody had a car, very
Speaker 2: few people had a car, very few people had refrigerators,
Speaker 2: you know. I remember I, you know, one day in
Speaker 2: my early in my first day in England, I spent
Speaker 2: the night in a young lady's apartment and in the morning,
Speaker 2: she said, you want a cup of tea and she
Speaker 2: boiled the water with an electric kettle that she plugged
Speaker 2: into the wall, and then she opened the window. It
Speaker 2: was wintertime, and she took the milk bottle off the
Speaker 2: window ledge because she didn't have a fridge. And I
Speaker 2: was kind of amazed, you know. And people would get together.
Speaker 2: One person had a television set. We all got together
Speaker 2: to watch something that was important, to watch, some television.
Speaker 2: But it seemed that it didn't actually make people less happy,
Speaker 2: and quite the contrary, and in fact, there was a
Speaker 2: there was a sort of you know, I was kind
Speaker 2: of judged mental about the way a lot of British
Speaker 2: people accepted their lot in those days, back in the
Speaker 2: sixties or the seventies. If you were working class, if
Speaker 2: you had working class parents, you were going to be
Speaker 2: working class. That's it. That was a deal. No movement
Speaker 2: up or down, and I thought that wasn't very good.
Speaker 2: But when I would fly to California from London and
Speaker 2: run into a lot of people in California who were
Speaker 2: bitterly disappointed with their failure to become stars, you know,
Speaker 2: I would think to myself, huh, actually, those Brits seem
Speaker 2: a bit happened in these people.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's go back to the book for a second.
Speaker 1: You break it down basically by countries slash regions. Can
Speaker 1: you tell my audience what those varying countries are.
Speaker 2: Well, I start with South Africa because of Graceland, because
Speaker 2: of all that. You know, there's so much not just Graceland.
Speaker 2: As I say in the book, Graceland is not the
Speaker 2: biggest Zulu related record of the twentieth century. The biggest
Speaker 2: Zulu related record is A Lion Sleeps Tonight, whim Away,
Speaker 2: all of that and the story behind that. So it's
Speaker 2: a good way to sort. That's very familiar, the most
Speaker 2: familiar sort of piece of world music you can have.
Speaker 2: So that's the way. The door in then chapter two
Speaker 2: is Cuba, and the way that the incredible difference. This
Speaker 2: island just a few miles off the Florida Coast has
Speaker 2: a completely different rhythmic culture than America and why that
Speaker 2: is and how that has over years shaped American music.
Speaker 2: Chapter three is Jamaica, which is right next to Cuba
Speaker 2: but couldn't be more different, completely isolated, weird, inward looking poor,
Speaker 2: never prosperous, and suddenly bingo in nineteen seventy five, reggae
Speaker 2: is equal to salsa as a kind of force in
Speaker 2: the world. Chapter four is Indian music, the way it
Speaker 2: influenced everybody from the Beatles to John Coltrane, and then
Speaker 2: going back fifteen hundred years to the exodus west of
Speaker 2: a whole caste of Indians that became known in the
Speaker 2: Western Europe when they got there as Gypsies, and how
Speaker 2: they completely transformed European music. Chapter five is Brazil, everything
Speaker 2: leading up to Bosonova and how that had a huge
Speaker 2: effect around the world. Chapter six Argentina and the tango
Speaker 2: and one of you know, my favorite little anecdotes in
Speaker 2: the book, the way the great tango singer Carlos Gardell
Speaker 2: told this young thug who came to one of his
Speaker 2: concerts in New York that he should straighten up and
Speaker 2: focus on his music instead of getting in trouble with
Speaker 2: the police and then grabbed a passing NBC executive and
Speaker 2: asked if he could let the kid try out for
Speaker 2: the Amateur Hour, and they did, and of of course
Speaker 2: Frank Sinatra, and that's how Frank Sinatra was unleashed upon
Speaker 2: the world. Chapter seven is Eastern Europe and all this
Speaker 2: classical music and Bulgarian women's choirs and the politics of it,
Speaker 2: and how threatening that was to Stalin, and the whole
Speaker 2: way that the Communists responded to authenticity and music, and
Speaker 2: how that shaped music that came out of that part
Speaker 2: of the world. Chapter eight is the rest of Africa,
Speaker 2: north of South Africa and people like Usundur and Fela
Speaker 2: Kuti and the Ethiopics music of Ethiopia and Manudebango and
Speaker 2: all these stories. There's so many great characters and the politics,
Speaker 2: the way the politics mixes in. And then chapter nine.
Speaker 2: You know, when I first started the book, I had
Speaker 2: this vision of chapter nine in which I would talk
Speaker 2: about each of the receiving countries. I've talked about all
Speaker 2: the sending countries. I'd have big sections on the difference
Speaker 2: between the way America and Britain and Germany and France,
Speaker 2: all responded to music from abroad. But by the time
Speaker 2: I got there, I had a publisher saying, come on,
Speaker 2: are we ever going to put this book out? And
Speaker 2: I was exhausted. And I'd also covered most of that
Speaker 2: in each of the chapters, in the individual stories, and
Speaker 2: I realized that my idea for that was kind of bogus,
Speaker 2: or at least not going to work. And so I
Speaker 2: did more of a kind of impressionistic scattershot through the
Speaker 2: centuries of Western culture and how it absorbs and deals
Speaker 2: with the arrival of music with a foreign accent on
Speaker 2: its shores. And I tell the terrible, sad story of
Speaker 2: the birth of auto tune and the birth of the
Speaker 2: drum machine. And that's it. That's the book.
Speaker 1: So in writing the book, did you just write from
Speaker 1: memory and r own experiences or did you have to
Speaker 1: do research?
Speaker 2: I did a huge amount of research. If you see
Speaker 2: the bibliography in the back of the book, there's pages
Speaker 2: and pages and pages. And it was fun. I mean,
Speaker 2: I read all these great books, many of them are
Speaker 2: by academics, and they're quite dry in the way that
Speaker 2: they lay everything out. And so in a way, I
Speaker 2: felt my role became a digest, like a reader's digest.
Speaker 2: You know, I was reading all these thick books about
Speaker 2: tango and about Afro Cuban culture and about how to
Speaker 2: tune the kora, and you know, these things and taking
Speaker 2: the best bits, the most fun, the most character full,
Speaker 2: you know, the most the easiest to connect to music
Speaker 2: people might have heard, and writing them in them as
Speaker 2: entertaining a way as I could.
Speaker 1: Okay, now the landscape is who change. It's certainly at
Speaker 1: this late date we have these streaming services and close
Speaker 1: to every country in the world. Two things have happened. One,
Speaker 1: the share of the overall marketplace of both the UK
Speaker 1: and the US has decreased. And you've also, specifically in
Speaker 1: the US seen other genres that in the history had
Speaker 1: a small footprint have become much larger, like Latin bad
Speaker 1: money in the UK, I mean in the US. Do
Speaker 1: you think this cross pollination will continue such that roots music,
Speaker 1: world music will have a greater profile going forward.
Speaker 2: I think it will definitely continue. I think it's an
Speaker 2: interesting and hopefully maybe positive thing. My caveat my asterisk
Speaker 2: is the machine. You know, one of the things that
Speaker 2: always really startled me was how in the world of rap,
Speaker 2: for example, Jay z in the early days. You know,
Speaker 2: I believe, I'm not. I don't have chapter and verse
Speaker 2: on this, but my understanding is that most of his
Speaker 2: beats were created by an English guy who was went
Speaker 2: to I don't know, Marlborough or something public school, boy
Speaker 2: private school, as we say in America, that somehow this
Speaker 2: process of the modern way of recording is built around technology.
Speaker 2: It is built around people who can create beats with
Speaker 2: a computer and sampling and grabbing stuff from here and there.
Speaker 2: And I mean, Burn, a boy from Nigeria, has become
Speaker 2: much huger than any than CUTI ever was around the world.
Speaker 2: But you know, most of his records I don't find
Speaker 2: very interesting because to me, music lives in the rhythm,
Speaker 2: and when the rhythm sounds mechanical, it doesn't sound as
Speaker 2: interesting to me. But then I saw burna boy on
Speaker 2: tiny desk concert and he was terrific, and he seemed
Speaker 2: me playing just really like just playing with his band,
Speaker 2: and that was great. Where this music goes, how much
Speaker 2: it continues, I still have this prejudice or this belief
Speaker 2: that rhythm is the heart and soul of music. And
Speaker 2: so if all this fusion that came about in the
Speaker 2: nineties and the naughties that out grew out of the
Speaker 2: world music movement. Most of it, to me was uninteresting
Speaker 2: because they took the exotic part was the melody, the
Speaker 2: singing some great player on some instrument from some culture,
Speaker 2: but they put it over a mid Atlantic pulse generated
Speaker 2: often by a machine, and to me it's the other
Speaker 2: way around. I'm much You know Evil papase Off the
Speaker 2: Bulgarian wedding band that I recorded, He's an incredible musician.
Speaker 2: He has an fantastic drummer. I don't care what kind
Speaker 2: of melody he plays. He can play a Bulgarian melody,
Speaker 2: he can play when the Saints go marching in. But
Speaker 2: if he has that eleven eight weird ball can beat
Speaker 2: being played by these incredible musicians he has. That's exciting.
Speaker 2: That's the kind of fusion I like. And so when
Speaker 2: I hear this popular music, I mean, it's great that
Speaker 2: the world is getting smaller and in many ways, but
Speaker 2: I do think that for me, music that is specific
Speaker 2: to a vow or a town or a coastline is
Speaker 2: always much more interesting than music that is homogenized, that
Speaker 2: is a blend of lots of things, Which isn't to
Speaker 2: say that any music is pure. No music is pure.
Speaker 2: Everything is influenced by its neighbors, by sailors who come
Speaker 2: into port, by things people hear over the radio, by
Speaker 2: records they buy, and that process has just gotten speeded up.
Speaker 2: But I do think that eccentricity and local difference is
Speaker 2: still the most exciting thing for me about music. And
Speaker 2: so when I hear beats that sound the same, whether
Speaker 2: they come from Hong Kong or Cartagena or Baltimore or Hamburg,
Speaker 2: when they're similar, rhythms, even if the language is being sung,
Speaker 2: are different to me.
Speaker 1: You know, it's okay, okay, But everything you're saying is interesting.
Speaker 1: But I got to ask question rhythm, viz A the
Speaker 1: melody now more than ever. And you say you're not
Speaker 1: following this closely, But I think you're aware, at least
Speaker 1: from a thirty thousand foot perspective, a lot of the
Speaker 1: hit music today has little melody.
Speaker 2: Okay, Well, I was very gratified. About six months ago
Speaker 2: there was an article in the New York Times, and
Speaker 2: I've been saying this. I've been boring people at dinner
Speaker 2: parties for twenty years or ten years anyway, with my
Speaker 2: rant about melody. You know, to me modern most melody
Speaker 2: that you hear singer songwriters, pop tunes, you know, there's
Speaker 2: so little what I there's a term that I just
Speaker 2: seemed like a logical to the right term to use,
Speaker 2: melodic amplitude. There was such narrow bands for the melodies.
Speaker 2: Melodies would go up and down by a half tone,
Speaker 2: maybe a full tone. Cactus Tree by Joni Mitchell, you know,
Speaker 2: Cactus Tree. You know, octave leaps. Nobody does that anymore,
Speaker 2: you know, it's like and to me it's who knows
Speaker 2: what the real reason is. But you could imagine that
Speaker 2: people are so I don't know, constrained and nervous that
Speaker 2: they don't dare take an octave leap, like Jonny Mitchell,
Speaker 2: you know that it's too much of an adventure to
Speaker 2: leap more than one note or two notes at a time.
Speaker 2: And so yes, I agree that melody in modern popular
Speaker 2: music is very often startlingly flat somehow.
Speaker 1: Okay, we got a number of things. We got the melody,
Speaker 1: we got the rhythm, we got electronic. But I think
Speaker 1: we're gonna close it for here. We'll have to do
Speaker 1: another podcast where we get into some of the well
Speaker 1: worn successes with Nick Drake and Richard Thompson try to
Speaker 1: get in some nook and crannies the other people haven't.
Speaker 1: I could talk to you all day, Joe, but I
Speaker 1: want to thank you so much for taking this time
Speaker 1: with my audience.
Speaker 2: Well, thank you for tolerating my technological deficiencies occasionally. And
Speaker 2: it's been a great pleasure. And I'm glad to see
Speaker 2: the sun is shining in southern California out here window.
Speaker 3: Absolutely until next time.
Speaker 1: This is Bob Leftstats