Tomorrow Never Knows

Joe Boyd, who's been around, has written what sounds like a very interesting book.

From today's New York Times:

"The 1960s had a single, precise climax, Joe Boyd says, and he was there.

In a new memoir, “White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s,” Mr. Boyd, a veteran record producer whose résumé includes Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, Fairport Convention and R.E.M., ignores the conventional high points of the decade — Woodstock, the moon landing — and instead asserts that a set by the psychedelic rock band Tomorrow at the UFO Club in London shortly before dawn on July 1, 1967, was the big moment, when drugs, political activism and far-out music had their purest convergence.
“On one level, obviously, that’s a self-satirizing statement; it’s ridiculous,” Mr. Boyd said on a recent visit to New York, where he was beginning work on a new record by a Cuban pianist, Adonis Gonzalez. “But then behind that there’s another level in which I’m secretly thinking: ‘Well, yeah, actually, that is when and where it all peaked, that’s where it all changed. That’s about the time that the wind shifted.’ ”

Boyd began his career in music by stage-managing the 1965 Newport Folk Festival -- yes, that one, when Dylan went electric. He later produced the Floyd's first hit single "Arnold Layne" (rock's first ode to transvestism) and lots of other gems, including Richard and Linda Thompson's "Shoot Out the Lights," widely considered one of the top 100 rock albums of all time.

The book is out next month, and is obviously a must read. Boyd told the Times there's a reason it's so full of lucid memories of an obviously heady era: "I cheated," he says. "I never got too stoned."

He's a terrific guy, by the way. Met him briefly when a then-girlfriend was doing art direction for albums by the Rumour and Joe "King" Carrasco on his Hannibal Records label (I wound up doing snarky jacket copy for both, which is another story altogether).

Update: I neglected to mention that Tomorrow's "My White Bicycle," along with scads of other fabulous English and European psychedelic pop hits, can be found on Rhino's indispensable four disc set NUGGETS II.