Joe Boyd

Hallelujah; it’s Monday and there’s actually something of interest going on, I mean, aside from the 70-degree weather. Straight outta our March So Little Time section (I wrote this little ditty–it was a while back now–and don’t want to reinvent the wheel): Joe Boyd had his fingers in all sorts of music-history pies. While still in his early twenties and freshly graduated from Harvard, he served as Muddy Waters’ tour manager. Then, when Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963, it was a young Boyd who performed the fateful (and, some would claim, sacrilegious) task of plugging in the guitar. He later went on to produce records for, among others, Nick Drake, Eric Clapton, Pink Floyd, REM, 10,000 Maniacs, and Billy Bragg. He even produced soundtracks for films–most notably, for A Clockwork Orange. But it was the 1960s folk scene that left the deepest impression on Boyd’s character. In his recently released autobiography, White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s, Boyd not only captures his own experiences, but also paints portraits of many of the other key players of the era and ponders the consequences of white folks’ appropriation of black people’s music. 416 Cedar Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-338-2674; www.thecedar.org