Chinese White Bicycles' with Joe Boyd

Photos on Flickr by This Week In New York

Online review by Rolling Stone
“I’VE BEEN HAVIN’ a sweet dream,” Robyn Hitchcock sang, strumming a guitar and lying flat on his back, as if in a delighted trance. The British singer-songwriter was performing the Lovin’ Spoonful’s 1966 single “Daydream” on March 11th, at Le Poisson Rouge in New York City, right after the American producer Joe Boyd told a long and winding story about hanging out at the old Night Owl Café (“right down the street”), seeing a 16-year-old Stevie Winwood singing Leadbelly songs in England, stealing donuts from doorsteps in Toronto and trying to create a New York folk-rock supergroup – which ultimately became the Spoonful.

It was the stuff of dreams, based in fact, rendered by two men steeped in the adventure and happenstance of the 1960s: Boyd as a primary mover and eyewitness; Hitchcock as a living soundtrack. The two were on a short U.S. tour, alternating chatter and song in a kind of psychedelic talk show. Combining free association with formal reading from his incisive 2007 memoir, White Bicycles, Boyd reminisced about his time and record-making with Pink Floyd, the late Nick Drake, Fairport Convention and the Incredible String Band, among others. There were tales of Bob Dylan (singing “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” at a party in a Boston apartment in 1963); the Butterfield Blues Band (Boyd suggested adding guitarist Mike Bloomfield to the lineup); the ISB (the night Boyd inadvertently introduced them to Scientology) and the Floyd’s star-crossed founding guitarist Syd Barrett (before he flew off the rails).

Hitchcock illustrated the action with hymns from that history, including Dylan’s “All I Really Want to Do,” “Reynardine” from Fairport’s electric-folk milestone Liege and Lief and “The Yellow Snake” from the 1968 ISB double album, The Wee Tam and the Big Huge. “Joe is Frankenstein,” Hitchcock remarked early in the evening, referring to Boyd’s presence and effect at the creation of the Sixties counter-culture. “I am one of his monsters.” But Hitchcock, wearing a William Morris floral-patterned shirt and red-lensed spectacles, rendered the music with a spare, moving authority, tracing the roots of his own long pursuit of transformation through song. His version of Drake’s “River Man” was accurate without mimicry: at once gorgeous and spooky, like that era as we know it now, with all of its glories and dead ends.

There was an unavoidable melancholy at the end of the night – the sense that nothing has come, so far, to fully replace the hole left by those events and memories. But Hitchcock picked the right tune to punctuate Boyd’s flashbacks on Barrett, when the Floyd guitarist was of sound mind and provocative ambition: the boy-ish cheer of “Bike,” from the Floyd’s 1967 debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. “I know a room full of musical tunes/Some rhyme/Some ching/Most of them are clockwork/Let’s go into the other room and make them work,” Hitchcock sang in the last verse – a beautiful idea that never gets old.


Online review by This Week In New York
Since the mid-1970s, acerbic singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock has been regaling the world with philosophical, intellectual, and downright funny tales as a solo performer and with such bands as the Soft Boys, the Egyptians, and the Venus 3. His live shows, documented in Jonathan Demme’s 1998 documentary, Storefront Hitchcock, are always unusual and immensely entertaining, anchored by his often hysterically rambling between-song chatter in addition to his immense talent at writing a damn good tune. Always up to something different — in June he’ll team up with the Imaginary Band to play a one-off UK tribute to the recently deceased Captain Beefheart, performing the seminal album Clear Spot in its entirety — he’ll be at (le) poisson rouge on Friday night with longtime friend Joe Boyd, the legendary American producer who has worked with everyone from the Incredible String Band, Pink Floyd, Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, Bob Dylan, and Kate and Anna McGarrigle to Toots and the Maytals, Richard Thompson, Billy Bragg, R.E.M., and ¡Cubanismo! Hitchcock and Boyd are in the midst of a brief tour dubbed “Chinese White Bicycles: Live and Direct from 1967,” in which Boyd reads passages from his recently rereleased memoir, White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s (Serpent’s tail, December 2010, $14.95), Hitchcock plays songs by the groups mentioned in the book, the music that influenced him when he was growing up in London, and the two just talk about stuff. “Joe had a hand in creating a world that revolutionised mine,” Hitchcock notes on his website. “If he is Dr Frankenstein, then I’m his monster. Or one of them…” Get ready for what should be one very groovy night.

Update: It did indeed turn out to be one groovy night, as Joe Boyd told great stories about hanging out with such seminal figures as Zal Yanovsky and Joe Butler of the Lovin’ Spoonful, Robin Williamson and Clive Palmer of the Incredible String Band, Paul Butterfield (with Boyd suggesting he add Mike Bloomfield to the Blues Band), Nick Drake (not looking forward to his songs being overproduced), and Fairport Convention (as they decided to eschew American folk rock and turn to the English tradition after fearing they could never create something as special as the Band’s Music from Big Pink). He talked about putting together a Syd Barrett tribute that ultimately involved Pink Floyd, about losing out on a one-night stand to Bob Dylan, and about Maria Muldaur and Eric Muldaur falling in love. He gave the show a decidedly New York bent, mentioning many of the haunts they used to go to that were just around the corner from (le) poisson rouge; “This is the beating heart of the sixties,” he said of the city. He also apologized for convincing LPR that he and Robyn Hitchcock should perform in the round, resulting in their backs to much of the audience, which boasted Rufus Wainwright. After each tale, Hitchcock introduced and played a song by the respective musicians, including the ISB’s “Way Back in the 1960s,” Dylan’s “All I Really Want to Do,” the Spoonful’s “What a Day for a Daydream” (flat on his back), Fairport Convention’s “Reynardine,” Drake’s “River Man,” and the Floyd’s “Bike.” The encore was a riveting tale of Boyd being at the center of Dylan going electric at Newport, as the evening concluded with Hitchcock offering up Bob’s spiteful “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” followed by Boyd and Hitchcock signing books, CDs, and posters.