White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s: Serpent's Tail Classics

The simple brilliance of White Bicycles is that its author never overstates his own importance or exaggerates his failings, and still ends up telling an irresistible tale --New York Times

When Muddy Waters came to London at the start of the 1960s, a kid from Boston called Joe Boyd was his tour manager; when Dylan went electric at the Newport Festival, Boyd was plugging in his guitar; when the summer of love got going, Boyd was running the coolest club in London, the UFO; when a bunch of club regulars called Pink Floyd recorded their first single, Boyd was the producer; and when a young songwriter named Nick Drake wanted to give his demo tape to someone, he chose Joe Boyd.

More than any previous 1960s music autobiography, White Bicycles offers the real story of what it was like to be there at the time. Boyd's greatest coup is bringing to life the famously elusive figure of Nick Drake--the first time he's been written about by anyone who knew him well.

As well as the 1960s heavy hitters, this book also offers wonderfully vivid portraits of a whole host of other musicians: everyone from the great jazzman Coleman Hawkins to the folk diva Sandy Denny, Lonnie Johnson to Eric Clapton, and The Incredible String Band to Fairport Convention.

Joe Boyd was born in Boston in 1942. He went on to produce Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, REM, and many others. In 1980 he started Hannibal Records and ran it for twenty years.