Swinging ’60s life with the Beatles and other ‘Icons’ inspired new book
If you’re going to write about “Icons of Rock — In Their Own Words,” it’s always a benefit to know the icons those words are coming from.
Jenny Boyd does, to a large extent.
The one-time British model, a retired psychologist now turned full-time writer, grew up in England during the swinging 1960s. Her sister Pattie was married to George Harrison from 1966-1977, then to Eric Clapton from 1979-1989. Jenny Boyd, meanwhile, inspired Donovan’s song “Jennifer Juniper,” worked at the Beatles’ Apple Boutique in London and traveled with them to study with the Maharishi Maresh Yogi in India.
Boyd was married, twice to Mick Fleetwood, and co-wrote a couple of songs for Fleetwood Mac. She was also married, briefly, to rock drummer Ian Wallace.
She knows her way around the “Icons” of her latest book. In other words, her conversations with a diverse array of artists — including Harrison, Clapton, Fleetwood, Ringo Starr, Joni Mitchell, Graham Nash, Don Henley and many more — are different than others might have.
“Well, I know and understand how musicians are,” Boyd, 76, says via Zoom from England, where she and husband David Levitt reside — though she returns to Los Angeles once a year to visit children and grandchildren. “Living with all of Fleetwood Mac in that kind of commune thing and the Beatles in India, you just know how they are. You know when to chime in and when to step back and let them be who they are. They can feel safe.
“And this didn’t come from thinking, ‘Oh, I came from this place’ with these musicians, or ‘I spent time with the Beatles or Fleetwood Mac or anything.’ I felt like it came from genuine interest. I wanted to know for myself — ‘what makes you tick?’”
“Icons of Rock” (Mango Publishing) came from an earlier project, the dissertation for her PH.D. from UCLA, which she turned into the book “Musicians in Tune: 75 Contemporary Musicians Discuss the Creative Process,” which she co-wrote with Holly George-warren and published in 1992. Where that tome was more academic and thematic, however, “Icons of Rock” focuses on the individual conversations, adding more material and including particular extensive interviews with Henley, Clapton, Starr, Nash, Mitchell, Ravi Shankar and Tony Williams from recordings she had never full transcribed.
“They were so powerful and just as inspiring as when I first interviewed them,” Boyd says. “So I took those and bits out of the original book and just put them all together.” She was particularly awed by the Mitchell interview — which, of course, comes out at a time when the singer-songwriter has returned to live performing after suffering a brain aneurysm rupture in 2015 and recently won a Grammy award.
“Her interview, she’s a storyteller and she couldn’t help herself,” Boyd recalls.” I couldn’t put the whole thing in ’cause there was so much, but she was the storyteller and that’s what she started the interview with — ‘I was the storyteller.’ It still inspired me. It still...like, ‘God, this is so amazing.’” She was similarly enamored with Henley.
“I’m really fond of Don,” she notes. “He’s a perfectionist, but I think he’s great. I think he’s a real sensitive soul, and he showed that when we spoke.”
She interviewed Clapton while he was “newly in recovery” from addiction, which allowed her to connect in a different way than when they were in-laws.
“He was so open and honest,” she says. “I used to go when he and Pattie were together and we’d all get drunk and listen to records together. And here he was; we were having our first great conversation that the two of us had had together, so listening to that again was very cool.”
Despite all her direct and personal connections to the artists, however, Boyd says she never steps back and marvels at the life she lived, particularly in her youth.
“People always say to me, ‘Oh, what was it like in the ’60s? I wish I was there.’ But I was still on my own journey as a young teen, and it was just, like, my life, you know?” she explains. “When I first met George, when (Pattie) said ‘Oh, I’d love you to come meet him,’ he was just so normal it wasn’t like you were meeting someone who was the Beatles. He was so normal and always like that, so I felt completely chilled about it all.
“We’d go to clubs with Pattie and George, or the rest of the Beatles and we were just listening to music, or sometimes you might want to dance. It wasn’t like, ‘Ooh, can I have your autograph?’”
Others felt differently, however. “I used to get lots of fan mail when I was probably 16 — ‘Oh, have you talked to George? Have you done this with George?’ Can you get me a lock of his hair?’” Boyd remembers with a laugh. “I’m getting fan mail and I’m still going to school! It was never too surprising when things like that happened. You just kind of accepted it. It was more exciting to see an American stamp on the envelope, I think.”