Legendary Producer Reveals His Secrets

Joe Boyd ’64 understands that timing can be everything. Boyd, who produced the first single for Pink Floyd and has also produced albums for the likes of Nick Drake, R.E.M., and 10,000 Maniacs, may have been 20 minutes late for his “Learning from Performers” talk, but he entered the music industry at just the right moment. When he spoke to about a dozen undergraduates on April 4, Boyd recounted his experiences as a rock and roll producer working in the heady ’60s.

“I apologize, not for being late, but for being born when I was,” says Boyd, referring to the good fortune which allowed him to become a producer during a revolutionary musical era.

“People ask me, ‘How were you in the studio with Eric Clapton at 22?’” says Boyd. “It’s difficult to describe how different things were, how wide open things were. The music world was just being developed. The ’60s were a time that educated, middle-class people started to pick up the guitar and play from the roots. There was a huge sense that anything was possible. They could do anything and they’d be the first to do it.”

Boyd recounted the easygoing nature of society to the gathered students. “Nobody worried that they might miss out on something, or they might not get into grad school,” Boyd explains. “It was very loose.”

At a school like Harvard, it can be difficult to imagine such relaxed times, according to Boyd.

“The other thing that’s very hard to describe is the optimism,” he says. “We were delusional. We thought we were going to stop the war. We thought we were going to go into this big open room and we were going to make this great thing.”

“When I was a teenager, my brother, another friend of mine, and I used to listen to 78s, and we kind of kept it sacred,” Boyd says, speaking of his early affinity for rock. “Then we’d got to a dance, and they’d put on Little Richard and we’d dance. There wasn’t much of a connection between them.”

The moment when he did make the connection, though, was a pivotal moment in his life. At the age of 17, Boyd had ambitions to be a baseball player, but failed to make the cut as a starter for his high school team. Disappointed, he wandered off and by chance heard Fats Domino’s music coming through a window.

“It was the same thing that I listened to in my room, except newer,” Boyd says. In that moment, everything clicked, and he realized that he wanted to become a producer.

“The thing that I loved more than anything else was mixing,” says Boyd. “I still believe that the best records are the records that are made largely, not exclusively, live. And there are a lot of studios and producers that still work that way. It assumes that people are good, because otherwise you need a click track and Pro Tools, and you need to move things around. But if you are really good, then what comes across is the performance and the intensity of that performance.”

Besides producing dozens of popular albums, Boyd went on to become head of music for Warner Brothers Films, organizing the scoring of “Deliverance,” “A Clockwork Orange,” and “McCabe and Mrs. Miller.” His latest project is a book detailing the early days of his career, called “White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s,” which opens with Dick Clark taking the helm of a show called “American Bandstand.”

“We hated Dick Clark,” Boyd says. “That’s when I started listening to old jazz and blues, looking for wackier stuff.”

Boyd argues that music took a turn for the worse the day Clark was hired. “You can actually make an argument that American culture changed that day, because Dick Clark homogenized everything, and that’s what the blues and Bob Dylan were rebelling against.”

“A lot of this book is about failure,” says Boyd. “I didn’t make records that sold millions and millions of records. A lot more people are into my music now.”

Still, Boyd had a knack for forcefully marketing music, and luck wasn’t the only factor in his success. “I did always have an idea of how to do it, but it was a very sure idea that came between me and the group, not the marketing department,” says Boyd. “You have a concept for how your music should be marketed. You decide it.”