Quotations by Joe Boyd

The five years I spent making records in London saw huge leaps in technology. From the four tracks I began with, we went to eight, then sixteen, each increase doubling the tape’s width. Just before I left for California came the beginning of the decline: some bright spark figured out how to squeeze twenty-four tracks on to the two-inch tape that previously held sixteen. The reduction in track width significantly degraded the sound quality. A few young engineers today realize how great two-inch sixteen-track recording sounds.

I have seen people enter pubs and bars where the Buena Vista Social Club CD is playing and look around for the source of the music; they seem startled to be entering a three-dimensional acoustic space. There were many recordings already on the market with similar Cuban singers and material when Buena Vista was released. Its success is usually ascribed to Cooder, the film or the brilliant marketing, all of which were certainly relevant. But I am convinced that the sound of the record was equally if not more important. Not only is it music from another era, magically preserved in the time capusule of Castro’s communism, but was recorded using equally outdated techniques and painstakingly transferred to a digital master so that it retained as much of its analogue warmth as possible. The old Egrem studio in Havana is huge, an excellent but unforgiving room. Jerry [Boys], [Ry] Cooder and [Nick] Gold experimented a great deal with microphone placement. The recording captures the full sound of the three-dimensional space in which the musicians performed — live. If it had been made at one of the new digital studios in Havana, trying so hard to be ‘modern’ with their tiny dead recording spaces and big control rooms, I doubt very much whether anyone beyond a few thousand Latin music enthusiasts would even know it existed.

I read an interview with Keith Richards once explaining how he and Mick Jagger had a single blues record between them when they met. It was one I knew well: a Stateside four-track EP licensed from the Excello label, with Slim Harpo on one side and Lazy Lester on the other. They played it until it was so worn they could barely hear the music through the scratches. One way of looking at the Stones’ sound is as a South-East London adaptation of the Excello style. If they had owned more records, their music might have been less distinctive.

The atmosphere in which music flourished then had a lot to do with economics. It was a time of unprecedented prosperity. People are supposedly wealthier now, yet most feel they haven’t enough money and time is at an even greater premium…. In the sixties, we had surpluses of both money and time.

Friends of mine lived comfortably in Greenwich Village, Harvard Square, Bayswater, Santa Monica and on the Left Bank and were, by current standards, broke. Yet they survived easily on occasional coffee-house gigs or part-time work. Today, urbanites must feverishly maximize their economic potential just to maintain a small flat in Hoboken, Somerville, Hackney, Korea Town or Belleville. The economy of the sixties cut us a lot of slack, leaving time to travel, take drugs, write songs and rethink the universe.

These days most engineers confronted with a displeasing sound reach for the knobs on the console and tweak the high, mid or low frequencies. When that process is inflicted on more and more tracks of a multi-channel recording the sound passes through dozens of transistors, resulting in a narrower, more confined sound. With the added limitations of digital sound, you end up with a bright and shiny, thin and two-dimensional recording. To my ears anyway.

When John [Wood] heard a sound he didn’t like, he would lift his bulky frame off the chair and lumber down the stairs, muttering all the way. I began to be able to predict whether he was going to try a different microphone, reposition the existing one or shift the offending musician to another part of the studio. When I listen to records we made together in the sixties, I can still hear the air in the studio and the full dimension of the sounds the musicians created for us. I can hear the depth of Nick Drake’s breath as well as his voice, the grit in the crude strings of Robin Williamson’s gimbri and Dave Mattacks’ drum technique spread out warmly in aural Technicolor across the stereo spectrum.

I listened in the studio control room as musicians’ modes of consciousness-alteration proceeded from grass, hash and acid to heroin and cocaine by the 1970s. All but the latter could, on occasion, provide benefits, at least to the music. I never knew cocaine to improve anything…. I suspect that the surge in cocaine’s popularity explains — at least in part — why so many great sixties artists made such bad records in the following decade.

Thirty years after Brighton, I walked sadly away from the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Fair. It was everything my twenty-one-year-old self might have dreamed of: 75,000 people packed into the Fairgrounds, with NPR-subscriber bags holding expertly marked programmes. America’s black musical heritage was on parade across two long weekends and eight stages. But the audience was almost entirely white. The performers had learned their lessons, dropping any modernizations or slick showbiz gestures and recreating the old-time styles the sophisticated audiences craved. On one level, it demonstrated respect for a deep culture and a rejection of shallow novelty. But removed from the soil in which it grew the music felt lifeless, like actors portraying characters who happened to be their younger selves. In two days wandering from stage to stage, I heard little I recognized as music.

Sitting in Princeteon listening to old records, we became obsessed with the past. We tried to pierce the veil of time and grasp what it sounded, felt, looked and smelled like. In Harvard Square and London I met many with similar preoccupations; they didn’t seem unusual at all. When old blues singers began to reappear, it delivered a rush of excitement and adrenalin. Meeting and traveling with Gary Davis and Lonnie Johnson — even Coleman Hawkins — armoured me against a host of disappointments.

History today seems more like a postmodern collage; we are surrounded by two-dimensional representations of our heritage. Access via amazon.com or iPod to all those boxed sets of old blues singers — or Nick Drake, for that matter — doesn’t equate with the sense of discovery and connection we experienced.

There are many accounts of what happened next. Dylan left the stage with a shrug as the crowd roared. Having heard only three songs, they wanted ‘moooooooooore’, and some, certainly, were booing. They had been taken by surprise by the volume and aggression of the music. Some loved it, some hated it, most were amazed, astonished and energized by it. It was something we take for granted now, but utterly novel then: non-linear lyrics, an attitude of total contempt for expectation and established values, accompanied by screaming blues guitar and a powerful rhythm section, played at ear-splitting volume by young kids. The Beatles were still singing love songs in 1965 while the Stones played a sexy brand of blues-rooted pop. This was different. This was the Birth of Rock. So many taste crimes have been committed in rock’s name since then that it might be questionable to count this moment as a triumph, but it certainly felt like one in July 1965.

Beneath the surface, the progressive sixties hid all manner of unpleasantness: sexism, reaction, racism and factionalism. It wasn’t surprising, really. The idea that drugs, sex and music could transform the world was always a pretty naïve dream. As the counter-culture’s effect on the mainstream grew, its own values and aesthetics decayed. The political setbacks of the coming years grabbed the headlines while the dilution of ideals happened more quietly, but nonetheless vividly for those who noticed.