A knack for the musical niche

Who even knew Amoeba Music had a sea shanties section?

But that’s where Joe Boyd heads upon entering the cavernous Hollywood music store, right to that rack in the folk compilations bin, seeking out last year’s “Rogue’s Gallery” project of pirate and seafaring tunes put together by eclectic producer Hal Willner.

“My taste is fundamentally arcane,” he’s already explained while sitting in a coffeehouse across the street a few minutes earlier.

No kidding. Almost immediately, he’s distracted by a rack of CDs by the ‘90s Havana all-star group Cubanismo in the Latin music section. Minutes later, back in the jazz room, he stops at a display of new reissues of ‘70s albums by an African/big band/free jazz hybrid led by Scottish-African pianist Chris McGregor.

These were not of mere musical interest to Boyd. He produced them. And throughout the store there’s plenty more of his handiwork: influential albums by innovative English folk-rock group Fairport Convention and its most famous alums, Richard Thompson and the late Sandy Denny; the idiosyncratic work of Scottish psychedelic-folk avatars the Incredible String Band; and the singular sounds from the too-brief life of singer-songwriter Nick Drake.

Although that music stands on its own merits, the value is even more evident in the presence here of many younger acts claiming influence from Boyd’s catalog, from R.E.M. (which recruited him to produce the 1985 “Fables of the Reconstruction” album) to the currently acclaimed crop of “freak-folk” figures such as Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsome, who talk of music associated with Boyd in hushed, reverent tones.

“What I managed to get with my arcane tastes, with good production and sound and studios and management and marketing,” he says, “was that music of my taste was moved closer to the mainstream than [it] ever would be.”

With that mainstream, or at least niches of it, moving closer to his tastes of late, the timing couldn’t be better for Boyd to tell his story, which is exactly what he’s done with the book “White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s.”

The memoir is a colorful collection of anecdotes from that era, alternately hilarious and tragic tales of characters, icons, drugs, sex, revolution, gangsters, egos, religious conversions, breakdowns and deaths -- all experienced without robbing him of the passion for music that originally led him into that world. A British-released companion CD compiling some of his key productions illustrates a distinct musical sensibility that very much transcends the era.

Boyd -- blond and dapper in a beige linen suit, looking at 65 much as he did in the mid-’60s photo on the book’s cover -- says the book grew out of his failure to keep control of Hannibal Records, the label he’d started in the 1980s, when the music business seemed increasingly inhospitable to his sensibilities.

“It was losing my job at Hannibal,” he says. “I had an impulse to start another label ... but 2001 wasn’t a great time for that. So I thought, ‘I’ll write that book I always wanted to write.’ ”

He certainly had no lack of stories to tell, even limiting the focus largely to the period in question. He was a fresh-faced 21, a Princeton, N.J.-raised, Harvard-educated son of privilege when he jumped into the job of road manager for such grizzled blues and jazz veterans as Muddy Waters, Miles Davis, Coleman Hawkins and Roland Kirk -- quite the crash course in the music business.

He was production manager at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when Bob Dylan notoriously “went electric” and had to run interference to stop more conservative members of the event’s board from pulling the plug. Then in Swingin’ London circa ‘67, he owned the UFO club, ground zero for youth culture; he installed then-unknown Pink Floyd as the house band. From there he became a prime mover behind the English folk-rock boom, finding such enduring presences as Drake, Denny and Thompson.

At one point in the book, however, he pauses for a parenthetical aside listing some of the more notable ones-that-got-away: Eric Clapton and Cream, Steve Winwood, Procol Harum and, of course, Pink Floyd among them. He even lost a chance to grab Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus, the to-be masterminds of ABBA, well before they became an international sensation, when he headed to California to take a job as head of film music for Warner Bros.

And his biggest lingering regret is that he wasn’t able to do more for Drake, the singular, soft-spoken performer who made three albums of haunting beauty and inventiveness but experienced little fame before dying at age 26 from a prescription-medicine overdose in 1974 after suffering from mental illness. Only when Volkswagen used the song “Pink Moon” in a 2000 TV commercial did Drake reach beyond a cult following. That, he says, is key to the book.

“If writing the book had a reflective effect, it was most of all a sort of guilt,” he says. “I thought more profoundly of how I failed to come up with a way to get Nick’s music across while he was alive. I saw a pattern there.”

It’s a pattern that he says in part marks the difference between his more-or-less cult-figure status and the titanic presences of, say, Chris Blackwell, who founded Island Records and brought Bob Marley, U2 and many others to global fame, and Richard Branson, whose vast empire started with the oddball English label Virgin Records.

Today, though, Boyd feels dislocated from the music world, even amid acclaim that has led to the rediscovery of even some of his most obscure work, such as an early-’70s album by English singer Vashti Bunyan, reissued two years ago and making her a cause celebre with Banhart and the other neo-freak-folkers.

He appreciates the recognition -- “The royalties checks have increased a little,” he says -- but has little interest in the young artists and finds little connection beyond surface elements to the ones he’s heard.

“To be honest, I haven’t listened very closely to any of them,” he admits. “I don’t make a point to keep up. I’m more likely to put on a record from 40 years ago -- or 80.”

As he said: arcane.

“People still seem to be finding a lot of things to listen to from the ‘50s and ‘60s,” he says, with some relish. “That’s what I always felt making a record. I want to be able to listen to this in 15 years and put it on a shelf next to the records from 50 years ago that I was listening to.”