WTF with Marc Maron Podcast - Episode 1582 - Joe Boyd

Episode Date: October 14, 2024

Joe Boyd is part of the music industry in so many ways, as a producer, label founder and more, that his new memoir And The Roots of Rhythm Remain also serves as a history of global music, a political roadmap of popular music trends, and an education in traditional music forms. Joe talks with Marc about music as a way of piercing the past, including his own place in moments like Dylan going electric at Newport, Woodstock, and the beginnings of artists like Pink Floyd and Nick Drake. Sign up here for WTF+ to get the full show archives and weekly bonus material! https://plus.acast.com/s/wtf-with-marc-maron-podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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out some audiobooks by our recent guests like I Curse You With Joy by Tiffany Hanisch or Sonic Life by Thurston Moore. There's more to imagine when you listen. Sign up for a free 30-day Audible trial and your first audiobook is free. Visit audible.ca. Lock the gates! Alright, let's do this. How are you, the fuckers? What the fuck buddies? What the fuck nicks? What's happening? This is me. I'm Mark Maron. This is my podcast WTF. Welcome to

it. Nice to have you. I can't imagine that you just got here but it's possible. It's possible, it's possible. I am a discoverable thing. Today, I talked to Joe Boyd. Now this is crazy, man. Joe Boyd was a music producer, a record label owner, a nightclub founder, a film soundtrack collaborator, a guy who's been deep in the music industry for almost 60 years. Very interesting life.

I mean, it's crazy. He was like the first guy to record Pink Floyd, Nick Drake. I mean, he... And then he just went on to create and raise awareness about world music. He was... He worked for SNL briefly, but not as a music guy. He actually ran Lawrence Company for a minute. I mean, it's like, I can't even tell you, you know, he had Fairport Convention, Soft Machine. He did, later he did an REM record.

He sort of brought, he did a Neko record. I mean, it's crazy how long he's been around and he was the head of soundtrack, movie soundtracks, I think at Warner. I mean, I'll talk to him about most of this stuff, but he is like a zealot, he's been there, Toots in the Maytels. He wrote a pretty popular memoir years ago about making music in the 1960s.

It was called White Bicycles. And it's a pretty, everybody loved that. Musicians love that, that memoir. But it's also just an insight into the business in that time and into his evolution as somebody who understood that there was some sort of global frequency, some sort of power to music of all different kinds. And he's like a guy that likes the real stuff,

the authentic stuff. He's not like an overproduced guy. It's all about the music. I mean, he brought, oh my God, the overproduced guy, it's all about the music. I mean, he brought, oh my God, this conversation, Afro-Cuban music, he sort of celebrated that. He brought a lot of this, his label, one of his labels was sort of dedicated

to bringing world music to the forefront. But we talk about a lot of stuff because he's written this book, this amazing book. It's called, And the Roots of Rhythm Remain. And it's just almost this kind of Proustian, I'd like to use that. I never got through Remembrance of Things Past, it's a big book.

But I get the idea. This is sort of a cultural, critical, personal, almost like 700 page or so meditation about where music comes from, what music does, how does certain music evolve, what does it have to do with colonialism, what does it have to do with colonialism? What does it have to do with the sort of attitudes of communities that turn on their music history?

I mean, it's a life's work, this book, and it's fucking beautiful. It's called, I'm gonna say it again, And the Roots of Rhythm Remain, Joe Boyd is the Guy. And you'll hear me talk to him in a minute. And I was, that wasn't that way, I was out of rhythm remain, Joe Boyd is the guy. And you'll hear me talk to him in a minute. And I was, that wasn't that way I was out of my league, but we were bouncing around a lot because this guy is like,

you know, he's like a zealot of the history of modern music. And he's all there and he's very interesting. But I would highly recommend that book because I just started getting into it and you realize it's dense, but it's very compelling and very readable. But it's one of these books where it's like, yeah, take your time, man.

But again, I can't say it enough, I guess, because people need to read. We don't really read. And this is one of those books you can have next to your bed and just kind of chip away. Because there's so much stuff in it. And the roots of rhythm remain is what it's called. You know, when a guy spends his life writing a book and he's a guy that's been places, done things, thinks about things,

thinks about things, has experience to back up what he's talking about. You should try to dip in, dip in. I was a little intimidated to talk to him, but we did it, we did it. I'll be a dynasty typewriter in Los Angeles on Saturday, October 26th. The rest of my tour dates are scheduled for next year. You can go to WTFpod.com slash tour to see all

of them. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. And our website WTFpod.com is also brought to you by Squarespace. It has been for years. And Squarespace makes it easy to make a beautiful website and get all the tools that will help you engage with your audience. They'll have a completely new design system called Squarespace blueprint it easy to make a beautiful website and get all the tools that'll help you engage with your audience. They'll have a completely new design system called Squarespace Blueprint, and that's where you'll get started. Build your online presence from the ground up

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WTF get started today So yeah, I'm starting this gig Whoo, yeah, I am starting this gig tomorrow this movie that I've told you about where I'm the lead and we're shooting it out in a month and I'm in every scene and I'm nervous and I don't feel like I can do it. And I don't think, uh, I'm a good actor and, uh, I don't know how to, to, you know, if my, you know, whatever craft I've cobbled together for myself is in place. I, you know, it's like, I want to have a good time.

You know? But this, you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna switch it, I'm gonna, I'm gonna turn it around by tomorrow. I'm excited. But like, you just, you don't know until you get on the fucking set. You know, we did a read through the other night. It was good. But it's the first time this stuff was coming out of my mouth. And I'm just going to do it the way I've been doing it,

but adding things that I think will challenge me as an actor. But look, I'm just, uh, I'm not freaking out, but there is a sort of current of fear and insecurity about it. Uh, but I found in my life that, you know, once you get out to the job, you kind of do the job. And I'm excited about it. I'm excited in trying to find the funny in this thing

because it's a dark bit of business, but I'm gonna be working with good people in this movie. I'm gonna be surrounded by these geniuses. So maybe they'll keep me above water. But I will tell you this as a heads up. There are episodes coming up, specifically with Al Pacino and Robert Patrick, where I get back into the sort of like,

kind of digging for some advice, digging for some advice. It was interesting. I read Pacino's book and it was very helpful. And Robert Patrick, that's coming up too, he was very helpful, just practical things, man. But yeah, so this is getting started. I'll be working over the next few weeks, so you'll probably be hearing about this.

But yeah, man, I don't know. I'm just... Can I just say I'm grateful? Can I just say I'm grateful for what I have, for what my life turned out to be at this point, to be able to do the things I wanted to do? And there was definitely a point where that was not going to happen, but I guess that's the same for everybody. I can't... It's not like a hero story But I'm grateful because I wanted to be part of this. I wanted to be part of this business

I wanted to do the things I'm doing Except for the podcast interesting. I never thought that this would be the vehicle that this would be the thing but man I was at an event the other night, and Owen Wilson was there, and many people that I've talked to on this podcast. But the weird thing was, is I saw him a year ago, Owen. And I remember seeing him, and I'd never met him before.

And I was like, I'm just, I don't, I'm not gonna go do the, hey, I'm Mark Maron thing. Do you know me? Or, you know, I don't want, you know, hey, I'm, you know, I just, like, I saw before and I was like, I'm not gonna go do the, hey, I'm Mark Maron thing. Do you know me? Or, you know, I don't want, you know, hey, I'm, you know, I just, like, I saw him and I'm like, I got, I got, I don't, I can't go up there. I can't go to that, up to that guy and introduce myself.

I'm happy to see him. He looks like Owen Wilson, because he is Owen Wilson. But that was a year ago. And I saw him the other night and I'm like, what's up, buddy? And this isn't like an exercise in name dropping. It's an exercise in gratitude in the sense that, you know, I never thought, you know, that I would work with that guy, you know?

Even with glow and everything else. It's just, I don't know if I can explain it to you, you know? I'm 61 years old and there are so many things that are just starting for me in terms of creative work and trying to express myself in a different way and to kind of manage my talent in a different way, to be professional, to show up for the job, to believe I have the skill set to do it after what?

Fucking 40 years of preparing? I don't know. It's a very interesting thing to see so many of the guys my age leveled off, especially if they got successful comics. They level off on a style, they level off on who they are. And because of, you know, my sort of special wilderness here where, you know, we started talking on this mic,

what, like 15 plus years ago, it was the wilderness, dude. It was the wild west before anyone got there. It was like building a cabin where nobody knew how to get there. And from that, you know, I'm here, it's fucking crazy. And I guess I just want to check myself in the way that I don't know that I experience gratitude and I have to consciously do it, but I wanna thank you, listeners, and also just register the fact that as crazy as I am,

as kind of neurotic or cynical or negative or insecure, I think some of that is my prep. But in light of that, I have to take this moment to thank everybody I think some of that is my prep. But in light of that, I have to take this moment to thank everybody and just express some gratitude. It's a rare thing to land on your feet several times over and have that not make a difference. And then all of a sudden something shifts and you're on

a trajectory that you never thought was really possible. And, you know, my... Aside from expressing this gratitude, I think maybe this month, I'm gonna decide to have a good time doing it. At 61. Big decision. I'm gonna decide to have a good time doing it. I talked to somebody last night said to optimism is a choice. I'm not gonna go crazy but you know I'm gonna try to have a fun time. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp.

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Rhythm Remain, is an important tome. It's available now wherever you get books. All right, this is me talking to Joe Boyd. Alright, this is me talking to Joe Boyd. There are millions of prizes, including a chance to win cash every minute in the app. Cash doesn't make any noise, but it's awesome! Get into the game with Monopoly DoublePlayer McDonald's. While supplies last, one in five chances to win GameCube prizes at outset, chances to win DoublePlay prizes based on time of code entry and draw prizes based on number of entries in each draw. See rules in app. This message comes from BetterHelp. Can you think of a time when you didn't feel like you could be yourself?

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That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P, dot com. We're in the midst of a global mental health crisis, and although awareness about mental health is growing, there are also significant public needs for care that are going unmet. That's why CAMH, the Center for Addiction to Mental Health, is rising to the challenge. As someone who struggled with addiction,

I know there's no way to get through it alone. CAMH is improving treatment and inspiring hope with life-saving research discoveries, building better mental health care for everyone to ensure no one is left behind. Visit camh.ca slash wtf to hear stories of hope and recovery. ["The Mythic"] Joe Boyd, the mythic. I'd heard about you for years, you know. I had the book, White Bicycles, and then I got this book a few weeks ago,

and it was unsolicited it was solicited But I didn't know you know I didn't put it together because I get a lot of books right and I get this giant book and the only other book I Had seen a like this or in an attempt to do this and the roots of Rhythm remain was that David Byrne book which I didn't really read right you know the sort of attempt at Bringing it all together. Right. But you as a person, turns out, you know, we have connections in Albuquerque. We do.

Yeah, your brother lives there and he's a law partner with a guy who was married to my one of my best friends' mothers. I know, he's David Friedman. Yeah, yeah. And then there's all kinds of connections. But entering this book, which is a large book, it operates as sort of a poetic memoir, but also sort of a fairly thorough history of global music, and the interconnections, and the politics,

and colonialism, and what political factions within certain movements in certain countries influence popular music and sort of pushed back the roots of the traditional music and how that kind of found its way, right? Yeah. Yeah. But the interesting thing is that you've been part of this thing for so long. And in such an important way, like, you know, I just started, as I told you in the house, like, I just discovered the incredible string band, you know, less than a year ago, maybe a year and a half ago.

And I became obsessed with it in terms of how did they record this stuff? Live, mostly. Oh, they had to be. Well, some of it. I mean, the first record was all live, and then little by little, they started getting into overdubbing and having fun in the studio. But you were producer on that for the first, what, five or so albums? The first seven, I think, yeah.

And then I got into, I sort of made some journey into The Soft Machine, Kevin Ayers, and Wyatt. I started getting into all this stuff within the last few years. And it's sort of mind blowing to me, and I think something, a testament of the book as well, that in terms of music, you never, certainly not with like historical music, but any music lives in a sort of eternal present as soon as you turn it on.

Well, thanks to the recording process ever since 1925. Yeah. And that you can always come to it, and especially now with technology and my own obsession with certain things, there's a constant sense of discovery and you can always sort of, you know, be amazed and have your mind blown by stuff that could be around for a century. Yeah. I mean, recorded music is one of the few ways we have of piercing the veil of the past. Of experiencing what something, a little slice of reality was like a hundred years ago, or fifty years ago. Yeah. And it's magic. Yeah.

Like, I mean, people always talk about, I do comedy and I also play music, but the difference between comedy and music is that music is always magic, and that a piece of music can represent something in your life that shifts and changes and evolves with you. Whereas comedy is just a turn of phrase, it's just a joke. No one's gonna go back to a joke over and over. of music can represent something in your life that shifts and changes and evolves with you. Whereas comedy is just a turn of phrase, it's just a joke.

No one's going to go back to a joke over and over. Well, they tell jokes. Well, they do. I mean, I listen to Lord Buckley over and over again. Well, that's musical. I mean, that was a pre-Beatnik poetic exploration of ideas, the NAS. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I had Taj Mahal in here once, in the old studio.

And he was with Kebmo. It was so funny, the two of them together because they were touring together and Kebmo just, Taj is Taj, you've worked with him. Yeah. But he picked up a guitar. I was talking about a Skip James. Right.

And you go in right at the beginning of the book, you really talk about that falsetto, you know, going back to Africa. But he picked up a shitty guitar I had just sort of as a thing in my garage, an old, what is it, an old K guitar, an old K guitar. And you know, he just, you know, instinctively picked it up to sort of riff on that Skip James thing and then kind of took it all the way back to sort of a Senegalese. You could hear the history of the beginning of music, you know, just in two notes. Yeah, yeah.

And what I want to know is, I think we've got to set up your life a little bit. You know, where did you start in music? I started as a kid who... I don't know, I had a grandmother, who was a concert pianist. Right. And I remember sitting under the piano, aged about three or four, while she played Chopin.

Yeah. And kind of getting that... pounded into my brain in a beautiful way. My mother had Edith Piaf, Marlene Dietrich, Carmen Miranda records that of course, by the age of nine or 10, I had broken accidentally. Yeah.

But I cried when I broke them. Right. Because I loved them. Yeah. But I cried when I broke them, you know, because I loved them. And then I had this twin track in my teens where I loved rock and roll. And I would dance to Chuck Berry and Little Richer. So you were a teen in the 50s? Yeah, in the 50s.

And then my brother and I and Jeff Moldor, the singer who later some people may know, who was the lead singer with Butterfield for a while and made a bunch of blues records. Wonderful singer. Yeah. The three of us would get together on weekends and we would listen to Skip James. Right.

And we would listen to Lonnie Johnson and we would listen to Johnny Dodds and Louis Armstrong and we felt it was a little nerdy, and we wouldn't tell the girls that this was what we did. You know, we were more focused on being a good dancer to the doo-wop stuff. But it's interesting about how those boys even got to guys like you. I mean, it was kind of a nerdy thing.

Like, you know, when Fahey went, then that crew went and dug up all the ones that were living. Yeah. And no one knew about it. Exactly. So you're doing this nerd thing with Moldar, and you're listening to these great old records. And the eureka moment was when I realized that they were the same thing.

I thought they were completely separate. And then I realized that it's a continuum. Yes. That one thing leads to the other. That Fats Domino is the inheritor of Jelly Roll Morton. Sure. In New Orleans. Right.

Keyboard. Right, yeah. With Professor Longhair somewhere in the middle. Sure. And that revelation at age 16. Yeah. When I was riding the bench for the baseball team and realizing that I wasn't going to be in the major leagues.

Yeah. That made me decide that I would be a record producer. At 16? Yeah. And you lived where? Princeton, New Jersey. Was your dad an academic? No, no. He was a kind of quixotic capitalist. He started one of the first, the first, main street credit cards. Oh, really? Main Street credit cards. Really? Yeah, eventually through various bankruptcies and takeovers and things became MasterCard.

Really? Well, you know, I mean, that's a bit of a stretch to call him the father, but he was really in a way the kind of stepfather, godfather of MasterCard. It's not a direct line. Were you involved with the college at all? Were there academics around? It seems like a very smart town. It was, and my mother ran the photography department at the university store.

Oh, really? And she used to sell film to Albert Einstein. I trick or treated Albert Einstein when I was eight. Come on. So this is the old Albert Einstein. He's through his... Yeah, yeah, the bushy white hair. And he gave us candy corn, I remember.

And I was at school with Oppenheimer's son. And so a lot of those people were... Not at Princeton, at Harvard? No, no, in Princeton, in Grayskull. Grayskull? Yeah, in Grayskull. With Oppenheimer's son? Yeah.

Was he a heavy cat? No, he was kind of tortured. And I think in the movie it shows that he shows that they didn't really pay him enough attention. And so... So you decide you're going to produce records at 16. Yeah. And then where does it go from there? Well then I got into Harvard.

On what? What were you studying there? English literature. Okay. But I got in on advanced placement and so I knew I could get through in three years so I had a year to play with in my mind. Advanced placement, that means you were smart and you were... Well I'd done some courses and I passed some exams and that meant that I didn't have to

take the general background courses that most freshmen take. So I took half a year off and came out here and worked for Contemporary Records as a kind of office boy. Knowing that you wanted to produce records. Yeah. So you were possessed with that. Yeah, this was my door in. And what was Contemporary Records?

What was that label? Jazz, Howard McGee, Sonny Rollins, a few good Sonny Rollins records. And Teddy Edwards. Oh, Shelley Mann. They had that jazz soundtrack, jazz version of My Fair Lady soundtrack that sold a million copies. Oh, yeah. And the guy who owned it was a blacklisted screenwriter.

Which one? Les Koenig was his name. Okay. And that's what owned it was a blacklisted screenwriter. Which one? Les Koenig was his name. Okay. And that's what he did to sort of after he never went back to writing, but he did contemporary records. Exactly. And what'd you learn there? I learned about the moment where, you know, it was just incredible.

He would say, okay, clear out the shipping room, move the piano up. So I'd roll the piano, take the cover off, the tuner would come in, and the doorbell would ring at the back door in the little alleys behind Melrose Place. That was where the office was. And somebody would ring the bell,

I'd open the door and be Philly Joe Jones. Oh my God, yeah. Or Phineas Newborn. Wow. Yeah. Somebody like that. They would just greet each other, and then they would just play together, play this incredible music.

So at that time, it's already beyond bebop, you're entering the beginning. Yeah, it's 61. Yeah. But they're also great engineers there, so kind of reverence for sound. Well, the interesting thing about jazz that I continue to notice is that the production was so honest that it defies time.

Yeah. It's not hinged to a production mode because it was capturing the instrument. That's what I always aspired to even when it wasn't jazz. Yeah. You know, was making rock or folk records. I always was formed by that experience in Melrose Place, how you make music and how you record it. And so you try to get that same feeling. I always hated, that's why I resisted,

always hated click tracks, Pro Tools, and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, well, there should be some sort of, there's a humanness to a botched note. Yeah, or a note that just is a little bit rushed or a little bit more intense because two guys locked eyes across the studio. Right. Because the singer just did something that

surprised them. Sure. And they just go, eh, let's pick it up a little bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, that won't happen if you mail the file to Seattle for the bass player to put the track on. That's right. Yeah, sure. Yeah. And that's what it became and is.

I mean, you know, people can do whole symphonies right here at their desk. Exactly. But so from there, you finished Harvard? I finished Harvard. I got a, because I brought some blues singers to Harvard to perform. Was this pre-Fahey? Yeah. Yeah.

And, uh... Who did you bring? Big Joe Williams and Sleepy John Estes. Oh, wow. And then I, because of that CV, if you will, coming out of Harvard, Big Joe Williams, Sleepy John Estes, I got a job with George Wein taking a blues tour to England.

Okay, but not that one, what was the one that they recorded in Germany? You know that one? That was the one before, the one that George was copying. That was crazy to watch that stuff. Yeah. I mean, it was bordering on insensitivity in a way with the sets.

You know, they're like, let's build a porch for them to sit on. Yeah. Well, we had the same thing, there's a famous clip that's on YouTube of our tour, which had Cistros at a Tharp and Muddy Waters. Oh my God. Was it the train station one?

Yeah, the train station. OK, yeah, yeah. That was my tour. Yeah. And I was a bit horrified to see the cotton bales. Yep. You know, they asked Brownie McGee and Sonny Terry to sit on the cotton bales.

And but, you know, but the thing was for those musicians in America in 1964, they were nowhere. Nobody was listening. The African American community had forgotten about them and rejected them in favor of soul. And you seem to focus a lot of that in the book, that sort of that the idea of progress or evolution

representing a community and the traditional things become pushed back because they indicate whatever it is, political things, racial things. Yeah, and it's a conundrum that I don't have a solution for or an answer for, but it's true that you can see it time and time again, that the minute the white audience started digging blues, the black audience said, okay, forget it, it's yours now. Yeah, yeah, take it.

We got something else to do here. Go make rock and roll. Yeah, and yeah, no, it's a thing that you see repeated again and again. In all cultures. In all cultures, yeah. And when you were with those guys, so you had Sonny Terry, Briony McGee, you had Sister Rosetta Tharp, who else was on the line? Reverend Gary Davis.

Wow. Muddy Waters, Oda Spann. Muddy Waters, acoustic? No, he was already electric. He was electric for sure. Yeah. And although we had- Oda Spann, you said? Oda Spann. We had, because we needed a bass player to, I wanted a bass player to play

with a number of different people. So we had an acoustic stand-up bass player. Willie? No, Ransom Knowling, who was my favorite Chicago bass player, and a drummer, Willie Smith, who was Muddy's drummer. Yeah. And these guys, the first night in Bristol in England, these are guys who can't get arrested in America. Yeah.

And there's a full house. And after the show, we're in the dressing room, and this commissioner, you know, in those uniforms they have in British concert halls, comes backstage and said, Oh, Mr. Waters, could you step outside? There's some people that would like to have your autograph. And he steps outside, and there's like a line down the whole block. And for these people, it was a revelation

that there was a huge audience of young people. And these were all, so many people like Clapton and Jeff Beck and all that. They were there. They were there. Yeah. They went to these shows. Yeah.

This was what was important to them. And that oddly is, so you were there at the beginning, almost like the seed of what became that British blues explosion. Yeah, although it was already going. Why, because Mick and Keith had found the records? Yeah, Mick and Keith and Alex Corner. John Mayall.

Yeah, all those people were a few years earlier. Okay, but they hadn't seen these guys. No, they hadn't. They saw the German tour that you said that came to London, but it never went outside of London. So we came to Britain and toured all over. Just blowing minds. Yeah.

Peter Green must have been around. Exactly. Did you know Peter? I never met him. Wow, what a guitar player. Yeah. Yeah. He's my favorite, man.

Heavy cat. Yeah. He's my favorite man. Heavy cat. Yeah, yeah. So at that time, when you were over there, I mean, you saw the impact of that, but so what does that make you do? Well, it made me go back to America, look up my friend Paul Rothschild, who I'd met in Harvard Square,

who was a salesman for the local distributor who'd started making records, folk records. Which label was that? Well, he made them for his own label, then he made them for Prestige, then he joined Electra. Paul, if you don't know the name, he's the guy who produced all the Doors records and Janice. And he's the one who made me and Bobby McGee.

Really, he went on from there, from Cambridge? Yeah. And he went to LA or where? To LA. And he was a great guy, died way too soon of cancer. And he's my mentor. He's a guy, he used to let me sit in on the sessions and keep the track listing and stuff like that.

And so I went back to him after, because I'd heard Stevie Wynwood in a pub in Birmingham singing a Lead Belly song with an electric guitar and drum kit and everything. And I went back to New York the winter of 64, 65. And I told Paul, yeah, yeah, yeah, there's all this great stuff happening, playing folk music with electric guitars.

And he said, yeah, it's starting to happen here too. And we put together a band that then escaped Paul and went to Kamasutra that became the Loving Spoonful. Uh-huh. We were the ones who assembled, you know, John Sebastian with a couple of these other guys. Yeah. And gave them a pep talk about how great this whole thing could be.

And then we... The electrified folk business? Exactly. And then when we lost Loving Spoonful, I heard about Paul Butterfield. And I told Paul about Paul Butterfield. And we went to Chicago together and got them signed to Electra and brought Mike Bloomfield in. And my reward, which was what I've been working for since I was 16, was, okay, Joe, you've done a great job here. We owe you. You know about England. We don't know about England.

You go to London and open an Electra office. So you were the guy for Electra Records. To open the Electra office in London. Now, I would assume that Paul Butterfield and that crew, that must have just blown your mind, because I don't think people really take to heart just the dudes those guys played, sitting with those old black dudes

and really learning how to do that music. I mean, it seems like that Butterfield Blues Band was about as true a white blues as you could get. Absolutely, and it was it was mixed and it was you know they weren't like John Hammond jr. You know they weren't East Coast prep school elite boys that guy can play though John Hammond Yeah, no, I'm not saying he's not good, but it's just a different slightly different thing There was a more working Elvin Bishop was from Oklahoma. Yeah Butterfield was, I can't remember if he grew up in Chicago.

He and Nick Gravanitis would hang out with Muddy. Yeah, exactly. James Cotton was his. He learned how to play harp with those guys. Yeah, exactly. And then they had a black drummer, bass player maybe. Yeah, Sam Lay and Jerome Arnold on bass, who had been with Howling Wolf for many years. Drummer? Yeah. And bass player maybe? Yeah, Sam Lay and Jerome Arnold on bass,

who had been with Howling Wolf for many years. And then because of that racial mix, the summer of 65, just before I went there, I was still working for George and I was production manager at Newport. And Peter Yarrow from Peter, Paul and Mary, who was on the board at Newport, he used the multiracial thing to force the Butterfield band onto the bill at Newport.

At the 65 Newport Festival. But wasn't it, was that the year that Muddy was there and everybody else? No, Muddy had been there the year before. Oh, so that was the big blues year, 64. Yeah. 65 was the Dylan year. When Dylan couldn't have done that electric moment if Butterfield hadn't already been there on the bill. Do you think it was a competitive instinct with Dylan?

No, no. He was, I mean, he, it's a long story. I mean, the Dylan story. I give lectures on the Dylan. Oh, you do? You know, but I mean, it was a moment, a cultural moment, where Dylan was escaping from the political songwriting of New York. And the progressive expectations of the folk audience.

Exactly. Yeah. Well, and the New York, as opposed to Boston. Boston was different. Boston was where everybody wanted to learn exactly how Doc Boggs picked the banjo. Exactly how Booker White played the slide. So those were the nerds. The nerds.

Yeah. But they were the authenticity nerds. Right. And Dylan had already had his mind blown by the Harry Smith anthology and was starting to veer away from the Seeger. Seeger vision was, let's play a song in a way that everybody can sing it around a campfire.

And the idea in Boston was let's play a song so nobody else can do it. Let's make it difficult. And Dylan went that way, and that led him to rock and roll, back to rock and roll, which he'd been as a kid. So after Newport, then you're in England. Well, I think the fascinating thing for me in talking to you about, you know, coming from this sort of somewhat traditional evolution of blues into rock and roll,

and then, you know, the authentic blues is that, you know, how does psychedelic music, you know, kind of like, you sort of found the crossover with folk, but I mean, you're there at the beginning of Floyd and at the beginning of, you know, soft machine and stuff. So, like, you know, it feels to me that that must have just exploded your brain to the sort of endless parameters of what music could be? Well, I feel as if I never really was interested in music by category.

Yeah. It's like there are a lot of blues singers that I would never listen to because I didn't think they were that great. Yeah. I wasn't interested in blues for the sake of being interested in blues. Yeah. And so when I heard, um,

Sid Barrett, you know, sing a song and play some weird shit on the guitar, it was great. Yeah. I didn't know where it came from. Never heard anything like it. Exactly. Yeah.

And so it's like, wow, that's great. And then it's only looking back that you say, oh, oh, that was sort of early psychedelic, you know, because I could see he was very influenced by a group called AMM, which were abstract, Cornelius Cardew kind of avant-garde stuff. Sure, sure. And I, oh, that's where he got that sort of weird shit from. And

Well, that's interesting because that's, you know, Cale brought that to the Velvets, right? Yeah, exactly. Well, that's interesting because that's, you know, Cale brought that to the Velvets, right? So there was this kind of like John Cage disciples of kind of noise music in a way. Well, Lamont Young and Terry Riley, John Cale. John Cale, you know, when I first moved here in the 70s to work for Warner Brothers, I shared a house with John Cale. And I write in the new book about the fact that he never, all the time we lived together,

we used to play a lot of ping pong, and we used to drink a lot of beer, and he would never talk about Lou and the Velvets. But he always loved talking about Lamont Young and Terry Riley. He loved them, and he loved talking about them and working with them. And, you know, and... I think there was a difference between, you know, He loved them and he loved talking about them and working with them.

I think there was a difference between the sort of Baudelaire approach to rock and poetry that Lou was sort of doing, the kind of like the vulnerability of a broken person and the poetry of Delmore Schwartz and stuff. And I think there's a limit to that edge of experimentation. And I think John Cale with Terry Riley and Lamont, there was no bounds to it. Well, it was musical rather than verbal. Personal. Or lyrical or whatever. Right, right, right.

Or based on image. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I loved learning that Lamont Young, when he grew up in Idaho in the woods. Yeah. And they had a long cabin, and he would hear the wind humming through the cracks. And then he would go out to the road,

and he would hear the wires. They used to hum. Right. And he just loved humming. And he didn't. And he just loved humming. And he didn't, and he was into bebop and stuff when he went to music school. But then he heard an Ali Akbar Khan record and he heard the Tambora drone. Yeah.

And he went, oh, that's what I like, drones. You know, and he had a name for it finally. And so he and Terry Riley with the cyclical rhythms that Terry Riley was into and Lamont Young, he just was a sucker for drones no matter what. It was interesting that, you know, the difference between that American sensibility of that, of those kind of art experimentation with music is so much different than the British, you know, because you come up with, I don't know who AMM is, but I certainly know who Syd Barrett is.

But then you get sort of Eno, who seems to be the guy to really embrace that and almost make it popular in a way. Well, I mean, Eno's had such an extraordinary career, and he's, it's so weird because he's my neighbor, we run into each other on the bicycles a lot. You do? Well, he did, you know, he was the host of my London book launch.

Okay, yeah, yeah. He and I were on stage together talking about it. And he gave me a quote for White Bicycles, which is set at the top of the front cover forever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And probably has been responsible for selling 30% of my... Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, because he gave me this great quote. And he's a remarkable guy.

I mean, you know, he runs little sings for the neighborhood people, as long as you can carry a tune now, every Tuesday night at his office. Really? Yeah, he just sits, they all stand around the table and sing. And he does, I don't know,

he just does so many things. And also I think that in terms of you kind of coming into, you know, what I think you coined the, the label of world music. Like it seemed like, you know, like, you know, in recording people like John Hassell, and people who were sort of incorporating rhythmic sensibilities from other places,

was also sort of along the same lines, wasn't he? Well, he was the first one, way, way back, to call the world's attention to the fact that Tony Allen was the best drummer in the world. And nobody really heard of, you know, they'd heard fellow cootie records, but a few people. Yeah.

But he said, wait a minute, Tony Allen is a fantastic people. But he said, wait a minute, Tony Allen is a fantastic drummer. And he told me that when he first met David Byrne and started talking about working on talking heads, first thing he did was sit them down in a room and play them a Fela Cuti record and say, listen to that drumming. And then you can hear it creep into the talking heads culminating and remain in light. Which is, you know, I mean it's not a copy, it's not an Afrobeat record. But it's very influenced. There's a thing that

I talk about in the book about the Brazilian, the Tropicalista movement, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil. Yeah. They talk about this movement in the 20s, which was about eating foreign cultures, the way that the local Indians ate the first bishop of Brazil. You know, they made a meal of him. Literally? Yeah.

Yeah. And the avant-garde in the 20s loved that story. And there's a famous painting of the man who eats a toopy Indian, you know, an abstract painting. And it became a thing that the tropical Easter said, we like the beetles, but we're not influenced by them. We ate them. Yeah.

And so I feel that, like, David and Brian and the talking heads ate Afrobeat, but didn't copy it exactly. Well, but that becomes this idea of, you know, I think that the sort of snarky, you know, judgmental label is appropriate, right? Right. And, but that's, but there's no music without that. So like, it becomes, you know, this idea that somebody stole this or stole that. I mean, you open the book, you know, talking about Paul Simon and talking about, you know, South Africa. And, you know, the tensions with the, you know, within the government and with the ANC and with the Zulu tribal culture,

that, you know, everybody was at odds. But ultimately, through Simon and through Graceland, you get the popularization of a music that was relatively unheard in a broad way by Americans or anybody. And helped release Mandela. Ironically, because a lot of the Zulus were against Mandela. But before I get to Paul Simon, the very first page of the book is about Malcolm McLaren, who did appropriate and did steal stuff and didn't pay.

And that's to me without paying. But also the appropriation goes two ways. Like Fela Kuti went to LA. I mean, he wouldn't be Fela Kuti as we know today, or Tony Allen if they hadn't come to Los Angeles. And heard James Brown and Fela Kuti had had an affair with this ex-black panther who taught him about the history of the movement.

Yes. And so they learned as much, they stole from James Brown. Yeah. As much as James Brown stole from Afro-Cuban and African music. But you can't call it stealing at that point. Exactly. So you go with eating. Yeah, eating.

And also just the way the whole world works like that, the way the Roma musicians migrated into the Balkans and into Central Europe, everywhere they went, they transformed music. Well, I mean, how about the Germans in Mexico? Yeah, exactly. Like you don't have- The accordion, where they brought the accordion. Yeah, and the horns, you don't have Conjunto music.

Yeah. You don't have that Mexican, without the polka. Exactly. I mean, that's an amazing example. When I learned about that and I put have that Mexican, without the polka. Exactly. I mean, that's an amazing example. When I learned about that and I put all that together, I was thrilled. Yeah. I mean, music is almost by definition mongrel. And the idea of some sort of, you know, these dictators in certain cultures that say, we

are pure whatever. Yeah. And we, you know, didn't borrow from anybody. Yeah. We never stole from anybody and this music is ours and anybody who uses it is stealing and blah, blah, blah. Right. It's like blood, it's like racial politics.

It's an adjunct of that and it's just as ridiculous. And in the same way where they forbid people from playing certain music. It's like forbidding poets from, you know, when they had the juice to change the culture's, you know, political ideas. Yeah. They did that with music as well. And music, I think, is very threatening to a lot of governments because, unlike a newspaper report

or a poem or a novel, it's kind of insidious. You can't exactly define it. How do you, you can ban a word or a phrase or something, but how do you ban a rhythm? How do you ban a melody line? How do you ban, you know? Yeah, because people can walk down the street humming it or playing it on a fence or whatever.

Yeah. Music places people beyond the control of the state. Right. And that's, and I guess the missionaries knew that. That's, yeah. And there's a history of religions and Christianity is as bad as Islam. Yeah. You know, in this regard, being totally threatened by drums, for Islam, you know, in this regard. Being totally threatened by drums, for example, anything rhythmic, anything that connects the body to sensuality. Well, that happened with rock and roll and with black music here. Exactly.

But it goes back as one of the things I tell in the book was, you know, the Pope invited the Visigoths into Spain on condition that they get rid of drums and pagan ceremonies, which drums were very much part of. Sure, sure. And so basically there was from 500 AD to 1500 AD, there were no drums in Europe. Oh, wow. But then, because of that you get, I imagine, a good portion of classical music. Yeah, yeah.

Which was very drum-free, you know. Yeah, yeah. Well, the Western European culture invented, got more and more complicated in harmony and melody, while African culture, Afro-Cuban in particular, got more and more complicated with layering of rhythms. So in the book, being that it is sort of a reflection of your life and your ideas within the history, what is it? Because when you say that to me, when you talk about, okay, no drums, so then we're

going to create this other music in the shadow of that, that's going to take us to this place. So is there a place that you're gunning for in this book that is almost sort of a universal truth that comes through a frequency that is music? Were you gunning for some sort of grail? No, I actually tried to avoid being too didactic or drawing too many conclusions. I wanted to, you know, I have shelves at home of books.

And many of them are music books. And you can walk down my hallway and see biographies of Miles and Dizzy and Elvis and Sam Cooke and beautifully new journalism, gonzo writers, brilliant stuff. Lester Bangs. Yeah. Yeah. Very little about music from over the horizon.

And so I wanted to redress that. Over the horizon meaning? Meaning outside of our culture. Okay. And to redress that to make it clear to everybody that the stories, the characters, the, I mean, you know, those great incidents like Elvis walking in to make cut his mother a demo for her birthday. To send records, yeah.

Yeah, those kinds of iconic moments. Sure. Exist everywhere. Yeah. And they're just as fascinating and just as interesting. And they often apply to the music that we know but don't know anything about, like Indian ragas or Graceland. Yeah, I can listen to that.

You know, those ragas records, like I started getting into those in a more serious way. There's, yeah, there's something about, and there's a drone to that too. Yeah, there's always a drone. It's a whole different way of thinking about melody and harmony. And also there seemed to be an integration of,

I guess it happened, I noticed it when I was in Queens back in probably the early 90s, when a kind of almost Baltic rhythm started to happen in pop music. But it was totally different. There were certain bands, like I started to realize something about U2 and that ties back to Eno, that if you're going to create a pop music that is global,

you have to somehow be aware and integrate those components that would speak to everybody. But I wouldn't be so sure that Eno had that as an idea. No, no, I don't think so. I think it's more subtle. It's more, he's an open-eared, open-minded guy that listens to all kinds of music. Sure. And certain things stick to the ribs.

Right, right. But at some point, they realized, maybe not Eno, but international acts, and somehow I felt it with you too at a certain point in mid-career, that they realized that, you know, we've got to make music that, you know, is familiar enough in its rhythm that everybody everywhere can kind of dance to. Yeah. But I think the world, I mean, I think the Beatles and the early, that sort of pop, there's an incident that I

describe, I mean, the power of that sort of, of that rhythm and that inventiveness that happened in Britain and America in the 60s. I knew a Russian guy who I met, you know, after the fall of the wall. He described being sunbathing on the banks of the Moscow River in 1974 when the Russians, due to popular insistence, included one Beatle track on a compilation cassette.

Yeah. And it was Girl. Girl, girl. Girl, yeah. And he was sitting like 15 feet away from some people on a blanket with a cassette player. And he heard the first notes, the first notes of Girl. And he said within the first eight bars of that song,

he decided that whatever this was, he didn't know what it was, but whatever it was, it was the truth. And that everything he had learned up to that point was a lie. He had that feeling within the first sort of- Really? Yeah, and a lot of this whole documentary about that

called When the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin, suggesting that it was the Beatles did more than Reagan's arms race or the Russian economy failing or whatever that brought down the wall. Yeah, interesting. It was the Beatles. Yeah. And the music has that power.

Yeah. It does. And I've been, like, and this is a side story, but maybe you can inform me. Like, you know, I heard this thing, and I don't know where it's documented, that when the Beatles were in Hamburg, you know, cutting their teeth and playing nine hours a day,

that the owner of that club had sort of procured a bunch of leftover Nazi amphetamine. And they were all jacked up. And I sort of like, I hold on to that idea in terms of what amphetamine does to the head and how those guys bonded. And that bond was so symbiotic, it was, you know, changed the world. Well, Lenin once was on record once as saying that they never were better than they were in Hamburg at the Star Club. No kidding.

He said that once, yeah. I mean, he was being facetious, I think, sort of anti-Paul. What did you think about that documentary, the Peter Jackson stuff with the Let it Be sessions? Fascinating. Wasn't it? Yeah. How gripping.

Gripping. But how connected they were? Yeah. Effortlessly? Yeah. I couldn't believe it. And it was really just four guys. And Billy Preston with instruments. And I had always been, much as I love his singing and lots of the songs that he was responsible for,

I was never, like I was more of a Lenin guy. You, I was too. But then McCartney in this film, he's so great. Oh, he was the most grounded. Yeah. You know what I mean? If it weren't for him, the whole thing would have just come unraveled.

Yeah. I had to interview Paul a few years ago, and it was so funny because I'm such a Lennon guy. I get offered Paul, a living beetle, the other part of that team, and I'm like, I don't know. I'm kind of... But you took it. Of course.

Yeah. So when you're recording in England, you know, because like the Nick Drake records that you did, you found that guy and you were there with Pink Floyd and Fairport and Richard and Linda. I didn't know that you produced Shoot Out the Lights, which is one of the greatest records ever. I love that record. And I love Richard and Linda. But the sort of, I mean, the spectrum of what was going on there with folk and with the psychedelic stuff, I mean, how did you kind of wrap your brain around that? Were you just working as a guy who was curious and wanted to bring whatever new music was happening?

Listen, as I said, I didn't think about music in categories. You know, I was actually, when I first came to Britain, I was, to me, Dylan, at the time, my view was that Dylan was the exception that proved the rule that white middle-class guys shouldn't write songs and sing them with a guitar. This was kind of a boring form. And so I was more interested in authentic. Whatever. And the incredible string band

because they were sort of way out in left field from there. I can't believe that record. It's not even, it's the 5,000 layers. Spirits are the layers of the onion. That record, like I can't, like every time I listen to it, I'm like, what is happening? Like the fire in that room must've been tangible.

It was, well, you know, to me, they were just these guys that I'd seen in Edinburgh, and Edinburgh in the early 60s was an incredible place. You had all these travelers. You'd go into a flat and there'd be lanterns that somebody brought back from Morocco and Tibetan things and Turkish things and Latin American things. And there were these travelers and there was a lot of acid and a lot of dope. The new acid, the real acid, the beginning, the Owsley acid. Yeah, the Owsley before the mass produced acid.

And so it was a very unique place. And so they were very open-minded and, you know, eager to experiment and just, I don't know, they were just unique talents and the way that they fit together, the way that they complemented each other, Mike and Robin. And it was so much fun. And I didn't think of them in a category. I was thinking about,

I was looking for exceptions to the rules. Well, they defied it, I think. They defied categorization, really. Yeah. And so I, you know, I mean, it was incredible. I had this idea to get them out of the folk clubs. So I got them to open for Pink Floyd. And then I thought, okay, how do we get them to America?

I picked up the phone and I cold called Bill Graham. Yeah. I said, can I come see you? And he said, yeah, okay, next week, next Wednesday, five o'clock or three o'clock. And so I got on a plane, I flew to San Francisco and I went to see him. And I said, can we have

the incredible string band open for the Jefferson Airplane? He said, okay. He was an incredible guy. And so they got established with a different audience, with that audience. And they started playing the Fillmore all the time. Really? They did one year, they did two solo concerts

at Fillmore West, two solo concerts at Fillmore East, and one at Lincoln Center. Wow. But then, after Woodstock, it all collapsed. That was somehow the fact that we, it's a tragedy. It's one of the very, I always sort of feel like don't look back. I take it from Dylan.

Sure. Don't regret anything. Yeah. But Friday night at Woodstock, the string band was supposed to be on coat headliners with Joan Baez. Yeah. Friday night atmosphere at Woodstock was unbelievable, as you can imagine. And then it started to rain.

And they started playing with electric instruments. And their girlfriends had electric bass and stuff like that. And they had everything amplified. Yeah. And there was no covering for the rain. And so they said, oh, shit, we can't play our set with the rain. And the promoter said, well, there's

a slot tomorrow afternoon. Weather report is it's going to be dry. And so they said, OK, yeah, let's wait and play tomorrow. So of course, Melanie stepped into that slot, you know, and magic moment. Everybody in uniform. On Friday? On Friday night.

And we had to sleep in a tent, because they couldn't get us out of the place. Yeah. We had to go on the next day right after canned heat. Oh, my God. When everybody was completely blasted on whatever they were taking and the sun was beating down. Canned heat showed up for work that day, that's for sure. Yeah. And so they were a flop, complete flop.

And so they didn't make it into the film, they didn't make it into the record, and their career just kind of drifted downwards. And at that moment of why I didn't sort of grab the amps, push them off stage, say, you, Robin and Mike, you just go on stage and do the double act the way you did two years ago. And just play your acoustic instruments and you'll kill.

You'll be in the movie and you'll be in the records. So that's your regret? That's my regret. But when you're dealing with artists like, and we'll move up to historically in a minute, when you're dealing with artists like Sid Barrett and I guess with Nick Drake in a different way, I mean you you must have realized they were fragile. Yeah. I mean Sid was very frustrating for me because I felt like I understood him and we got along well.

Yeah. Even though he didn't talk a great deal. And then, you know, the group, I produced the first single. Yeah. And then the group used that to get a deal with the management, used it to get a deal with EMI. And EMI had a rule then. Yeah.

You know, you use in-house producers, in-house engineers. Okay. So I got shown the door. Yeah. And then Sid fell apart and, you know, there are lots of different stories about how that happened and why, but he was never that happy. EMI was quite a corporate atmosphere. You know, you go into the studio, there's guys in white get coats, lab coats and stuff.

Well, freak anybody out. And I always felt like, I wonder what would have happened if, you know, he'd continue to make, they'd continue to make their records at Sound Techniques with me and all that kind of stuff, who knows. But it was tragic what happened to Sid. But I didn't have that much contact with him anymore. We'd see each other occasionally,

but he was out of my realm. And Nick clearly was fragile from the time I first met him. And I tried to be, and again, I can second guess it, I tried to be very protective when he said he didn't really want to play live gigs. He just wanted to make a record. And I had this, you know, Leonard Cohen had come out with his first record just before that. Yeah.

And sold like a hundred thousand copies. And, and it always said, I'm not performing. I'm not a performer, I'm a poet. Yeah. And sold a hundred thousand records. Yeah. I said, well, if he can do it, Nick can do it. Sure.

And, but it didn't work that way. Yeah. Because we didn't have FM radio. Right. In, but it didn't work that way. Yeah. Because we didn't have FM radio. Right. In England. Right. Same way that you did in America.

Right. And so it never really happened and it's so tragic that Nick died believing that nobody dug his music. Nobody, that he hadn't reached anyone. And now certainly. Of course, yeah. That song, Time Has Told Me, is one of the best songs I've ever heard. It's a great song.

And I think, isn't that Richard on guitar? Yeah, yeah, Richard on guitar. That guitar in that song is crazy. Yeah. Well, Nick's guitar playing was incredible too. Yeah. He's so clean, so precise. Yeah. We never even had to monitor it in the studio.

We'd switch him off so we could focus on everybody else, because he was just perfect every time. He did a lot of those Fairport records. But ultimately, I don't guess it's frustrated, but when do you decide that it's time to get artists from all around the world to on record here? Well, I think there was a moment for me

when I was running Hannibal Records. That was your label. That was my label. And we had a big success with that record you liked, the Shoot Out the Lights. But after that, you know, a lot of the records we put out, you know, everybody was putting out singer-songwriters, and there was an awful lot of records.

I mean, every week, there was like piles and piles of records. And my brother, who has a lawyer, who's a co-partner... In New Mexico....David Friedman, yeah, partner. And my brother, who has a lawyer, who's a co-partner. In New Mexico. David Friedman, yeah, partner. He came to see me in New York and we were sort of thought about trying to work together on the label and he said, you should put, realized this was 1982,

I think. Yeah. License a Ladysmith Black Mabazo record and a Mysterio de Valbulgare record. Yeah. Put those out as part of a global harmony series. Yeah. And I was trying to raise money to press more copies of Shoot Out the Lights. I said, get out of here.

Yeah. You know, you're wasting my time. And then, of course, a few years later, I had realized that a little label like me with no money couldn't really get a look in with singer-songwriters and stuff. Sure. And they're actually to be able to say, hey, I've got this record by Musichash, the best folk band in Hungary with the greatest singer of Hungarian music.

Yeah. Nobody's going to argue. There's no other label that's got, you know, another Hungarian band with another greatest Hungarian singer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. you know, another Hungarian band with another greatest Hungarian singer. That I've got a straight, you know, a solo track to whatever audience there is for that. And I think there was, by the 80s, there was a bit of a vac, not a vacuum, but a kind of low-pressure zone in our music, in West Anglo-American music. Punk and disco were something different from what every lot of people that I knew had bought

into music as a career or something to really be obsessed about, virtuosity, authenticity, energy. Punks hated virtuosity. Disco wasn't about virtuosity. Right. Disco wasn't about virtuosity. Right. But there was a groove there at least. There was a groove, but in a way it opened a door. So when the Bulgarian Women's Choir came in or when Graceland came in,

it was like, wow, look, there's a whole big wide world out there. And it really opened a door. And I mean, I'd always liked music from far away. And I sat in a traffic jam in LA one day in 1971 or two, and Tom Schnabel played a Carlos Gardel record on his radio show. And I went, wow, that's incredible.

And I became an obsessive Carlos Gardel Kuralak. He's the tango, great tango singer. And that in a way was one of the first beginnings of this book and the beginnings of some of the ideas and some of the direction. Well, what's interesting is also, like when you made these records with these artists, these international artists, whether or not they sold here to a specific audience,

were they popular, your records, in the countries that they came from? Only sometimes, not always. I mean, and sometimes, you know, because there's a, there was a, there was a moment in the 80s when the middle class, you know, guardian reading Tom Schnabel listening audience was buying the same stuff that was selling in the countries and the cultures that those people came from. But by the 90s, you had the drum machine.

And that changed everything. Because to most of those cultures who were, from what is called or used to be called, not anymore the developing world, modernity is great, whatever form it takes. And for the Tom Schnabel listeners and the Guardian readers and everybody,

modernity is not such a great idea. We want natural fabrics, we don't want petroleum byproduct, we don't want KFC, we want traditional home fried chicken. There's a kind of... We want, you know, traditional home fried chicken. We'd want, you know, there's a kind of... Authenticity. Yeah. And it's not just conceptual.

It's not just for the sake of authenticity. It actually is healthier and tastes better. And the natural fibers are better for your skin and better for the climate and the world to use those things. And whether you can stretch that point to say that real rhythms, non-machine generated rhythms, are better for the spirit than drum, than beat boxes, it's a stretch, I'm not going to say that, but I can think

it. I like it. I can think it. Sure. I don't know if it's a stretch, you know, given what, you know, digitalization, you know, zeros and ones, you know, what that sort of reaped on the world. I mean, you know, there is a technological rhythm to everything that's kind of consuming our brains right now. And there's also, when something is natural or authentic or comes from human hands, it's overwhelming in the way

it's supposed to be overwhelming now because it's almost alien to us in a way. Well, that's kind of what the book is about. Yeah. It's like that, the roots of all that stuff and how humans created these rhythms and humans listen to each other and humans learn from each other and spread across borders. And music is communication. Yeah.

Right? Music is communication. But, you know, it's also unavoidable to realize that some of the most influential music has been created by groups of people that our culture treats as trash. You know, that, you know, Roma, you know, are treated as, we don't want them here. You know, we like the music, but as soon as the music's over, get out. And the same thing with African American music,

and Afro-Cuban music, and Afro-Brazilian music, you know, everybody loves it. But when the music's over. They don't wanna deal with the people. Right, they don't wanna deal with the people. Yeah, and that's, and what is, yeah, outside of being an indicator of racism and colonialism,

what are the repercussions in your mind about what that does to music? I don't know, I haven't thought too deeply about that question, I mean, other than the injustice and the kind of... But what it... Well, maybe the fact, I mean, the one thing that does occur to me, there's a saying that I used to hear from lawyers

and people in the music business, no good deed ever goes unpunished. And it does occur to me that the power that music has over us, you know, the fact that it has this power, perhaps builds up a defensiveness or resentment of the people who have that power. That does occur to me, whether it actually might exacerbate the situation, the fact that beauty actually might exacerbate the situation, the fact that beauty is so, is created by people that we don't want to live next door with. But also, like, on the next tier down from a more progressive, Tom Schnabel, you know, fabric-oriented people, that what you get is a fetishization, which is, you know, just

shy of racism. Right? And so, you know, whatever their acceptance of it is, is limited. So the actual goal of what music could be, which is an integrating force of nature to you know, different types of people becomes obstructed by this wall of whether or not it's fetishization or outright racism or just fear of passion. Or we could mention the name Lee Atwater at this moment. The worst. And you know, who he booked for the victory party on the night of the inauguration. Of Reagan.

Yeah, he booked Percy Sledge and Bo Diddley because he loved black music. He was a guitar guy, yeah. He, and he's the guy who invented the, what's his name, the scary. Yeah, Karl Rove. Yeah, the, the, the invented the, what's his name, the scary... Yeah, Karl Rove? Yeah, the, the, the... Willie Horton.

Willie Horton. Yeah. Willie Horton. Yeah. That's Lee Atwater. Yeah, the guy who loves Bo Diddley. Yeah, the guy who loves Bo Diddley and Percy Sledge and all the Republicans came to dance on inauguration night at the ball to those guys.

But that's that same thing that you were talking about before. It's like, thank you, you can use the bathroom and back. Exactly. That just, it was an acceptance of segregation. Yeah. Yeah. So, ultimately, you know, it's like, I didn't even know that your career outside of music has been, you know been kind of phenomenal.

I mean, you did Hannibal Records, but then you end up at where Warner Brothers doing film music. Yeah. You end up doing REM records. And it just, do you feel like in a way this book, which is a very, it's a beautiful book that really kind of spans all of the countries that we can't even get to I mean and primarily a

lot of that came from Hannibal Records right well like well I mean how do you get to Bulgaria and Mali and you know well India obviously had been kind of pushing through for years yeah yeah but Indian pop hadn't. And now that's kind of a thing as well. Yeah, I mean, it's fascinating the way the digital world makes Nigerian pop music suddenly accessible to everybody and popular around the world, Spanish, Indian. It's great. Yeah, it's great.

But most of it is electronic beats. So it sort of goes, I mean, I have, I hear some stuff that's really interesting and really wonderful. But when I hear that machine pulse, it sort of goes into a different door than music. Yeah. It's great, but it's different. You know what it is? I think it might be the dopamine door.

Yeah. That, you know, as opposed to, you know, the kind of like, soul's a weird word, you know, but there is sort of this ceiling to, you know, pop music and techno rhythms, where it just goes to the same place as scrolling on your phone or whatever. It's sort of a, it's a buzz.

It doesn't make you want to cry or move you in a way. Some singers can do that. But I think that what pop music has become, which you, it doesn't seem like you got into the racket to make pop music. Yeah. No, I was lucky that I got into producing records at a time when some of the music that I liked sold a reasonable number of records. Right. But that was just a kind of coincidence.

Yeah. Most of the time, I just got nice reviews and very small royalty checks. Yeah. But I have no complaints. But it's interesting because when you talk about eating something, pop music on a global level is eating everything. And that appetite only creates what you're talking about, something that doesn't have the sort of emotional and kind of collective unconscious integrity of

real human music. I mean, when some people question me or younger people say, look at me like, what are you talking about? You know, what's your problem? I say, well, listen to the first verse of Try a Little Tenderness by Otis Redding. Yeah. Listen to the way it feels. It's completely the opposite of programmed music.

Yeah. It's like it starts like hesitatingly, the rhythm isn't quite settled, Otis doesn't quite know where to come in exactly, you know? And then the first notes on the guitar and the bass are kind of off slightly. And then it kind of congeals and comes together so that by the start of the second verse, it's

just this magical thing. And the progress from A to B is just this journey that is so moving. You know, you can... And you can feel the human You know, you can. And you can feel the human. Yeah, you can feel the humans. Yes.

And do they get it when you tell them that? They say, I'll go listen to that. And I hope they do. It's interesting what the brain and the ears is trained to take in now, you know. In those kind of songs where you can immediately hear it. Like there's so much of that music of that era, even stuff like you were talking about Janice

and even some of that music which became huge pop music was painfully human. Yeah, and I mean, me and Bobby McGee by Janice, there's actually a thing in a documentary about Chris Christofferson where he hadn't heard, you know, he wrote that song and he had, he didn't know and hadn't heard yet the Janice version. And somebody got a tape of the Janice version and heard it and went to Chris and said, you got to sit down. Yeah. And just the emotion of hearing what she did with that song.

And I, you know, it's like, what is it? 11 minutes long? No, not quite. It's like seven or eight minutes long. And it was a hit. That's a long hit. It breaks every rule for what Top 40 radio wanted. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

But in those days, it was, and it was, it speeded up like crazy over the course of the track. And it's exactly what some programming algorithm would never allow on the radio today. And like a Rolling Stone, another one. on the radio today, and Like a Rolling Stone, another one. And yet, how many lives did it illuminate, and kind of enliven and move? It seems to be there's some movement

in the last decade or so of singer-songwriters and people who appreciate what you're talking about and the tradition. It always seems to be there. Yeah, yeah. You know, and also sort of, you know, talents from her. I've been listening a lot to Modu Mokhtar, who is a Tarig guitarist and he's a rocker. And it's like that whole thing, that part of Africa, I guess it's Senegalese.

And I mean, that to me like takes me way back. It takes you right to the source. Yeah, well, it's one of the things I discovered as writing this book, which is so interesting, is the way the Spanish, because when they were starting to bring slaves into the New World, they didn't want any part of slaves who had had contact with Islam,

because they'd spent 800 years trying to get the Moors out of Andalusia. And so they subcontracted their slave trading to the Portuguese who had sailed around the horn, I mean around the bend, down to Congo and Angola. And that's where most of their slaves came from. Whereas the British kept buying slaves in Senegambia from the Tuareg area and the Alifaka-Turi area.

And bringing them to Virginia, Maryland, et cetera. And the Protestant, uptight Protestants who were running those plantations wouldn't allow any drums, wouldn't allow any languages, any local languages. They forced them into Protestantism, speaking English. And so singing was the main thing. Right.

Whereas, you know, Afro-Cuban music is all about these cultures that were preserved because the Spanish said they work better, eh? Yeah. They'll live longer. If they get to speak their own languages, have their own ceremonies, play their own drums, let them do it. Yeah. And so this music grew as a very rhythmic thing.

Whereas in America, it grew as song and these stringed instruments, which were in the Sahel, were very prevalent because you don't have any wood. There's no trees. There's no drums. Right. So the difference, and then New Orleans is like the drip valve. Yeah. Where the one meets the other.

Right. And where you get that Latin rhythm that turns into syncopation. Yes. In the 4-4, sort of Western, you know, European, Anglo-European kind of forms. Yeah. And we think, oh, it's syncopated. Well, it's just the way that rhythm moves, you know, European, Anglo-European kind of forms. Yeah. And we think, oh, it's syncopated. Well, it's just the way that rhythm moves, you know. Right.

In these complicated rhythms of Cuba. Yeah. That came into America in so many subtle ways, you know, including drill building producers like, you know, George Goldner and all those people. He always used to go to the Palladium when they got off work. Yeah. They used to go and dance Latin. Right. And so all those... Sing it like under the boardwalk.

Yeah. Yeah. To save the last dance for me. Yeah. You know, it's all like Latin music that was... Yeah. ...swirling around in their brains when they went back to the Brill Building... Yeah.

...to kind of figure out a hook. So this has been so exciting writing this book. It was. It took... Making all these connections. Exactly. And it was a lot of fun. Yeah.

And it was a lot of fun. Yeah. And it was a lot of fun. Yeah. And it was a lot of fun. their brains when they went back to the Brill building to kind of figure out a hook. So this has been so exciting writing this book. It was. Making all these connections. Exactly, yeah. It was full of eureka moments and fascinating things. One of the most fascinating was I discovered a quote in a book about Django Reinhardt,

the gypsy guitarist, Roman guitarist, who was a huge star in Europe and toured with Duke Ellington. With his two fingers. Yeah, well he lost two fingers in a fire. One of the greatest guitar players ever. Exactly. And I forgot this quote in there from an American, because he was so

influenced by it. He loved American music. He wanted to be black. He kept saying, you know, that Ellington Armstrong, Gillespie, Parker, those are his heroes. And there's this quote in the book from an American guitar player who says he discovered Django when he was just learning, exploring the guitar in 1947. He said, he was so, you know, he had the, I don't know, the way he explored the chords and speed of a sprinter, the imagination of a poet. It was so beautiful. I loved the joy in his music.

It inspired me. And that quote is from B.B. King. You know, so the whole thing comes back around. It loops back around. It inspired me and that quote is from B.B. King. So the whole thing comes back around, it loops back around. It's mind-blowing and I'm glad you wrote the book. Well, thank you. But before we go, I'm just curious, another side thing that you did seem to be involved with Lorne Michaels somehow.

Well, when I was living out here working for Warner Brothers Films in the early 70s, I shared a house in Carbon Beach with a guy called John Head, who was working on the Jimi Hendrix documentary with me. And he was from Toronto, and he was a friend of Lauren's from Toronto. And Lauren had become a big cheese in comedy in Canada. And was hustling to try and get some jobs in Hollywood. And he would fly. With his writing partner? With Pomerance?

No, just on his own. He would fly out and sleep on our sofa. And then go, and eventually he got a deal with the Lily Tomlin show and Richard Pryor and stuff like that. And eventually that led to Saturday Night Live. Yeah. And John Head and Gary Weiss, who'd worked on the Hendrix film with me, both got jobs with Lorne.

Yeah. And Lorne always kind of said, well, Joe, you know, one day, you know, you should come and do something with us. And I was living in England, back and forth from LA and trying to produce movies. And then finally he came to me, he got to do the deal with Warner Brothers with people I knew, John Calley, who I had worked with in the, in 1979, he had a production deal and for Broadway pictures, this was the beginning of Broadway pictures. Yeah.

So I came to New York to work for Lorne and open up Broadway pictures. And it didn't quite work. It was just after Saturday Night Live was going already? Yeah. Yeah. And also, very importantly, after Animal House. Okay. Yeah. So he thought I need a piece of this.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I wasn't really the guy to do that kind of thing. Yeah. You know, it was like, I don't know, it was a different world and I just realized how much I missed the music business. Yeah. And that's when I started Hannibal.

Yeah. Oh, so it was right there. That was- In a way, it was on the rebound. Yeah, yeah, yeah. From Broadway pictures that I started Hannibal. How a way it was on the rebound. Yeah, yeah, yeah. From Broadway Pictures. Okay. That I started Hannibal. How long did it take you to write this book?

Seventeen years. Wow. But on and off. I mean, I can't say I spent the whole time doing it, you know. Well, I'm excited to finish it. Good luck. Thanks for talking. No, no, no.

It's a, I'm sure you'll read it like a thriller. Yeah. It's like one of those things where the bits and pieces that I read, you really got to take it in and let your mind pull it all together and then keep going. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for talking, Joe. Thank you. There you go. Get that book, and The Roots of Rhythm Remain, available now. There you go.

Get that book. And The Roots of Rhythm Remain, available now. Hang out for a minute, folks. We're in the midst of a global mental health crisis, and although awareness about mental health is growing, there are also significant public needs for care that are going unmet. That's why CAMH, the Center for Addiction and Mental Health, is rising to the challenge. As someone who struggled with addiction,

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People, on Thursday, you'll hear my talk with Al Pacino. And if you're a full Marin subscriber, you can check out a bonus episode we did last year about Dog Day Afternoon. Pacino, out of all of that second generation method guys, is probably the best one. And also, he's the one that can still kind of do it when he wants to. Like he's willing to take risks with vulnerability. I talked to Jessica Chastain about this, I believe a little bit.

And, but to see him like that, you know, kind of raw and utterly, you know, vulnerable and emotionally erratic, you know, when you compare that to the Godfathers or to Serpico or anything that he was, you know, when you compare that to the Godfathers or to Serpico or anything that he was, you know, outside of Injustice for All, which I think he was in the same spectrum, but still more controlled.

Like this character is emotionally complicated and they never, and it's never overwrought, given the circumstance. That's a Mark On Movies bonus episode that's part of the Full Marin subscription. To sign up, go to the link in the episode description or go to WTFPod.com and click on WTF+. Once again, this show is sponsored

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