Free White Bicycles by Joe Boyd

pushing the swings for them and holding their hands as we crossed the streets. Twenty years later, they would marry their father’s clear diction and nasal delivery to a reggae rhythm section and sell millions of records as UB40. (Around this time, I also met nine-year-old Chris, son of cockney singer John Foreman and later guitar player for Madness.)
    Ian introduced me to a local TV producer who invited me to a pub in the middle of the architectural horror known as the Bullring to hear a local band. My initial exposure to British blues had come when a friend took me to the Central School of Art to hear The Pretty Things a few weeks earlier. I was impressed, not so much by the derivative music, but by the show. Lead singer Phil May had glossy hair reaching to his waist, pranced around the stage Jagger-style and seemed obviously queer (no one said ‘gay’ in those days). My friend laughed at my American naiveté and we watched as he was surrounded after the gig by girl fans. Time has given me two footnotes for this event: one, that Phil’s other talent was tennis (we became friends and in the ’80s he helped improve my backhand); and two, that he was always, in fact, bisexual. The Pretty Things still tour regularly and Phil’s hair is a good deal shorter.
    I had also visited a Soho blues club with some of my charges on a day off from the Blues and Gospel Caravan. I noticed a strange creature listening from the doorway. He had extraordinary hair, all puffed up and fluffed about and dyed blond. His trench coat was gathered mincingly at the waist and he was wearing some very odd boots. I had yet to grasp that, unlike in America where rebels all wore jeans and everyone was too uptight to play games with gender, English kids rebelled by investing a great deal of effort in eccentric fashion. I asked about the stylish listener and was told he was quite a good blues singer with an easy name to remember: Rod Stewart.
    In Birmingham that night I saw a standard four-piece, with a lead singer who played keyboard and guitar. The repertoire mixed folk songs, blues, skiffle tunes and some West Indian material. The singer was about fifteen and had the most convincing white blues voice I had ever heard. This was child prodigy Steve Winwood and the Spencer Davis Group and they were the first folk-rock band I ever heard. I left the pub resolved to put together a similar outfit in America.
    When I arrived back in New York that autumn after the jazz tour, I sought out Paul Rothchild. Things had changed dramatically for him since the Jesse Fuller session a year earlier. Jac Holzman of Elektra, upset at falling behind Prestige and Vanguard in the ‘hip folk label’ stakes, lured Paul with a higher salary and bigger budgets. Now he had a corner office in Elektra’s mid-town headquarters and was wheeling and dealing, meeting Brill Building record pluggers and going to sales conventions to talk up the new records he was producing for his rapidly expanding employers. More significantly, he was also becoming a great producer. Paul’s productions with the Doors and Janis Joplin would stand among the best recordings of the era.
    Over beers in an East Village bar, I recounted how teenage English girls had waited outside Muddy Waters’ dressing room for an autograph; about Melody Maker , the paper with articles about pop, folk, jazz and blues all mixed together; and about white blues singers of ambiguous sexuality queuing up to follow the Stones into the Top Ten. And I told him about the Spencer Davis Group.
    His response was to lead me across the Village to the Night Owl Café on West Third Street. From the doorway we heard the sound of Richie Havens and a bongo player echoing out into the street. There weren’t many in the audience, but Paul told me that every night you could find singers there like Havens, Fred Neil or Jesse Colin Young, ‘folk’ artists with a pop sensibility and an electric bass or a percussionist.
    Over the next few days