Jenny Boyd (Credit: Steve Bainbridge - used with permission)
We delve into the fascinating layers of Jenny Boyd’s life and the genesis of her book ‘Icons of Rock – In Their Own Words.’ From her roots in the 1960s London music scene alongside sister Pattie Boyd who was married to George Harrison, to her early marriage to Mick Fleetwood and the vibrant days of Fleetwood Mac. Jenny shares intimate moments from the Beatles’ ashram in India, the magic of Fleetwood Mac’s evolution, and the creative whirlwind of the 60s counterculture in San Francisco and London.
Jenny reveals candid conversations with over rock legends, including George Harrison, Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash. Central to her discussion with Jason Barnard is the enigma of creativity, exploring how iconic songs seemingly emerge from the subconscious. Jenny’s insights underscore the significance of nurturing one’s inner creativity and embracing the authentic inner voice.
I’m really pleased to talk to you because when I read ‘Icons of Rock’, it’s very different from many rock biographies. I’m assuming it comes from a different origin to the way that people speak to artists or how artists explain their story.
Well, the original interviews that I did were 1988 to 1990. It was for a PhD dissertation. I didn’t even think it was going to be a book when this all started off. Of course, we had George Harrison in the family, Eric Clapton and Mick Fleetwood – my ex, and all the band. I was then with drummer Ian Wallace, who was going out on the road with Bonnie Raitt and Crosby, Stills and Nash, Don Henley. So, there were a lot of musicians that I knew and knew well. So that’s how it started. It was only after about 40 interviews that I thought, maybe this could be a book.
It’s a fantastic overview of music and stories, but also in this new edition, you also have current artists.
Yes, we’ve got Jacob Collier and also Atticus Ross, who won many Grammys for films including The Social Network. He and Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails are doing more film music now. So I thought, well, that’s interesting. And then Eg White, who’s a terrific songwriter for Adele and many others. And then another musician called Sarah Warwick, who used to sing teenage, boppy kind of music, always on the road. She’s actually a three-time cancer survivor, and she changed the way she uses her music, and she gets people to write their own songs. I used to be in her singing group, so we have her too.
For twenty-something-years I carried the 75 cassette tapes of the original interviews with me wherever I went. I’d moved from LA back to England during that time, moving around from here to there but the responsibility of keeping them safe was getting too much. I didn’t want them to be changed into MP3 because I couldn’t trust anyone. It’s pretty dynamic stuff. So in the end, I started tearing them up, which is just awful. Then in my madness, I kept just eight cassettes, and thought, well, I can keep those, and I’ll have room to put them somewhere safe. A few years later the eight cassettes were transferred to MP3s through a friend, so I had my interview with George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Don Henley, Joni Mitchell, Ravi Shankar, Graham Nash, Ringo and jazz drummer, Tony Williams. So, for the first time, as well as pieces of the original interviews from all the other musicians from my first book, I have transcribed the whole of these eight interviews that have never been seen before. So this new book is quite different.
Music’s always been a real thread through your life, all back from the start, it seems.
Oh, yeah. We grew up in Africa. My first six years were there. When I came back to England, I was about eight or nine years old. My sister, Pattie, had bought some records, real rock and roll records. ‘See You Later, Alligator’, all these fifties songs. I just loved it. I wanted to dance and we would jive together. So I knew I loved that sort of rock and roll beat.
You met Mick Fleetwood at quite an early age.
We were both 16. I was still at school and I was in Notting Hill Gate. After school, I would go with my friends to a coffee bar. That was obviously where Mick had seen me and told himself, I heard later, that’s the girl I’m going to marry. He was in a band called The Cheynes, a local Notting Hill Gate band. So he would see me coming back from school. Then gradually he asked me if I’d like to watch The Cheynes play. It was in Brentwood. It was the first time I’d seen live music. And it was great. A lot of R&B.
Was it around that period that through your sister, Pattie, you met George and some of the Beatles?
Yeah. Pattie was in Hard Day’s Night. She was playing the part of a schoolgirl and she then asked me if I’d like to meet George. I remember she was living in Chelsea with friends. I must have been about 15 maybe. I went over and met George and I thought it was going to be an incredible moment, but it wasn’t. He was just a regular guy, quite small and not this larger than life image one had. He was lovely, very easy to be with. Then he’d come to our family Sunday lunches. It was very sweet.
It was an amazingly creative time for artists and musicians. You were around that London scene and going into the clubs and being around many creative people.
I’d left school because I then became a model and Pattie was also a model. It seemed to be that a lot of people we knew would go to clubs. To begin with, because I was going out with Mick, I’d go to the Flamingo in Soho while he’d do the all nighters. There’d be Eric Clapton on guitar and John Mayall, with his blues band. So I’d go to those clubs, but then we’d also go to clubs with Pattie and George and they were the Scotch of St. James’s and the Crazy Elephant. That’s where we’d see all the musicians of that time. There was no sense of hierarchy or fans or anything like that. It was just hanging out, dancing to great Motown music. It was wonderful.
So when did you become in the orbit of Donovan? He wrote ‘Jennifer Juniper’ for you. How did that happen?
What happened was that in 1967, I decided I wanted to find out more about life and a friend of mine who lived in San Francisco said she was opening up a shop. “Would I like to come and help her with it?” I had enough money for three months rent or a one-way ticket to San Francisco. So I decided to go off and it was amazing. I would go and listen to all those amazing San Francisco bands, like The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin. It was as if there was a subculture and it was very different. Then I remember telling Pattie and George about it and saying, “You have to come over. This is incredible.” But by the time they came over, it was August and all the good hippies, real hippies had left and gone to Marin County or Sausalito. Instead, all the kids had been told to turn on tune in and drop out right across America.
So they were all in Haight Ashbury. Pattie and George arrived and then they wanted to take some acid before they went for their walk to get the vibe. It was all fine for about two minutes. Then suddenly all these people realised it was George. They just started following us and it got quite frightening because we were pretty out of it anyway. I remember him sitting down in the Panhandle and someone said, “Oh, give him a guitar, give him a guitar.” And someone did. Everyone was shouting out, “Play us some chords. Come on, George, play us some chords.” So George then went C, D, E, and gave the guitar away. We started walking back to the limo because it wouldn’t drive down Haight Ashbury. As we walked closer and closer to it, the crowds just got bigger and bigger and it started getting a little bit hostile. Once we were in the car Pattie and George decided I’d been in San Francisco long enough, six months was long enough!
While I was staying with them Maharishi was giving a talk in the Hilton Hotel. We all went along to listen to him after which he wanted us to go to Bangor in Wales to get initiated. We started doing our transcendental meditation, but then Brian Epstein died so we all had to come back early. I remember driving back with Pattie and George. As they dropped me off in London, George said, “Would you like to come to India with us? We’re going to Maharishi’s ashram”. I said, “That’s amazing, how can I ever thank you?” And he said “Just be yourself.”
But there were two months we had to wait before we went to the ashram. They just were starting to open up the Apple shop and asked me if I would work there. While I was working there, Donovan came trotting down the stairs one day. I’d met him before. He wanted to know about San Francisco, meditation and all this kind of thing. Then he asked me to his manager’s house one day and he said he’d got a song for me. And he just started singing ‘Jennifer Juniper’. I was pretty shy in those days. So I didn’t know quite where to look because it was obviously a sort of declaration of love or he’d got a crush on me. But it’s a lovely song and I often hear it. I hear people who’ve called their kids Juniper. For some reason, it really touched people.
You mentioned the Maharishi, another theme of your book is sources of creativity. In Rishikesh you had Donovan, The Beatles, Mike Love. It was the spark of so many great songs. You were there watching this play out.
Yes, we had our own little bungalow set of rooms and everybody else further down the track had theirs. John, Paul and George would get up onto the roof of the bungalow and Cynthia, Pattie and I, would sit there too, listening to them playing.
I remember hearing John saying, “Well, I didn’t sleep very well last night”. Then they’d start playing their guitars and start turning it into a song. That happened a lot. It happened with Prudence, Mia Farrow’s sister too. She’d overdone the meditation and gone into a sort of trance and nobody could get her out of it. So I went in there with my flute from San Francisco. And John was in there with his guitar singing ‘Dear Prudence’. ‘Bungalow Bill’ was another song. Whatever was going on in the ashram, that’s what they made a song from. It was incredible, it’s like every day they’d be singing and creating more songs.
You also mentioned your former husband Ian Wallace. You’ve got interviews with members of Crosby, Stills Nash. One of the interesting aspects Graham was talking about was that it’s very hard to write simple songs like ‘Our House’.
Right, it seems so simple, but it’s more complicated. I suppose it’s like Picasso doing a painting, he doesn’t need to do one, but, he had to go a long way before he could do one line. Graham is actually one of the eight cassettes I saved. So his whole interview is in the book.
Graham spoke about how he was drifting apart from The Hollies and followed his own path. Maybe that’s another thread – where songs come from. For many of the artists, songs come to them, they just arrive.
That’s the bit I loved. There’s a psychologist called Abraham Maslow, and he was the one that termed it Peak Experience in the fifties. So I asked them all if they’d experienced this feeling when they’re writing a song, and songs, as you say, just come from nowhere. Or if they’re on stage singing together, there are often times when they all get tuned in with each other. I think it was Graham that said they would all start the wrong verse at the same time. They would get so connected.
It was interesting because a lot of musicians would say that they often got their lyrics at night. They would be in a dream or just in a half sleep when lyrics would come to them and if they didn’t write them down, they would disappear. At least one person said that if they didn’t write it down, they would actually hear the song somewhere else. It’s almost as if songs are all around us, but you just tune in and connect with them. It’s quite magical.
You’ve had your own moments of creativity with ‘Purple Dancer’. That was originally one of your poems, wasn’t it?
It was after Peter Green had left Fleetwood Mac, and they were a little bit desperate for lyrics. Danny Kirwan came up to me and said, “You write poems. Can I have a look at them?” So he saw that poem and made a song out of it. The other time was with Chris McVie. I think it was before she’d been asked to join the band, but they were still in need of songs. So she and I wrote one together while we were staying at Kiln House called ‘Jeweled Eyed Judy’.
Quite an interesting experience was the communal living of Fleetwood Mac, you were all sharing a house and again you’re there at a hub of creativity.
Yes. It was sort of crazy, but also inspiring at the same time, because at one point, while they were recording Bare Trees, and they had the Stones’ recording truck outside the front door. I was the only one with children after Jeremy Spencer left, he and his wife had a couple of little kids. But I think he was there for when the Stones had their truck. But after he left, I was the only one that had children. All the road crew would be there, there were three floors and they’d be running in and out of the house. A lot going on at times. But then you’d also hear beautiful music coming out of the rehearsal room, of Danny singing and everyone playing their instruments.
And you were there from the UK to the US and the permutations of the group as they evolved, band members came and went. They had struggles before eventually, Buckingham Nicks arrived and things lifted again.
And took off. I remember listening to them, when they were first together and they were rehearsing and seeing what came out of it. I knew immediately they were going to be huge. There was something about their harmonies and the songwriters and it was just like it was meant to happen. It’s like a jigsaw finding the missing piece. It happened pretty quickly.
In the book as well, it does seem to come across in the conversation you have with Stevie Nicks about the moments where she’s waiting tables and she’s still struggling, but she’s still got that incredible drive that eventually paid off.
That’s it, because the drive is definitely one of the questions that I asked all the musicians, what gives you the drive? It’s this thing where they just know this is what they have to do. So there was almost a sense of destiny there too. Of course, pretty much all of these are famous musicians. So they’re not just musicians, they are musicians who actually became very famous. I think a lot of that is the drive. It’s the drive and probably timing.
Don Henley as well. You first came across The Eagles when you came over with Fleetwood Mac, is that right?
Yeah, I’d heard The Eagles when we were living in Hampshire. I think we’d only just arrived in LA and they were playing in Santa Monica and so we went to see them. I think we were probably still jet lagged but they were great. For me, it was very exciting going to LA because we could listen live to many more musicians than we did when we were living in Benifold – that was the name of the house in Hampshire. It was very exciting. It felt very buzzy.
In the discussion you had with Don, he talks about moments of where those moments of inspiration come from, like ‘The Boys Of Summer’, and it seemed to come from his subconscious.
Yes, but that’s the thing. That’s that same thing as peak experience, it’s the same as synchronicity when everything come together. Joni Mitchell speaks a lot about synchronicity and what part that’s played in her singing life. Pretty much all the musicians talk about things that just sort of appear. Nowadays we call it being in the zone.
In terms of the conversation you had with Joni as well, there were aspects of where she’d sometimes use the more difficult elements of her life.
That’s one of the questions I asked, “Do you need to have the broken heart? Do you need to have unhappy events where you need to pour it out in a song?” Most of them said they had in the past. I think Don Henley says now he’s trying to change that, to be able to write without having the broken heart.
There’s a moment where Joni describes helping to craft ‘Goodbye, Pork Pie Hat’ and Charlie Mingus is dying. It’s interesting how the different sources of inspiration that artists tap into for songs. That’s another example.
Yes, I think she’s extraordinary. Obviously a lot of her interview is stories that she tells, and she tells it so beautifully, so eloquently. I think that’s probably like the songs that she sings too. The ‘Big Yellow Taxi’. She turns them into songs.
Given that you’ve got this new span in this new edition, you can also see the shifts in the music industry and the different ways that songs are created. But also the different ways that the media is spread out. It also impacts the artists.
That’s right. That’s why I wanted people from now, more current musicians, so that we can see how different the music world is now compared to when I did the first interviews in 1988 to 1990.
It’s so different. You have someone like Eg White and Atticus too, who talk about how we’ve got Spotify now. We’ve got social media, we’ve got all these different things and people don’t necessarily have to have record companies. So it was great having that so you can just see the difference and it’s huge. I think it might have been Atticus who said that, or Eg White, that if the Beatles were here now, I don’t know if they would be that famous. What’s their social media like? how many people are following them? It’s just the whole music world has turned upside down in that way.
You’ve also had a memoir out as well, which reflects your life.
That was called ‘Jennifer Juniper, A Journey Beyond the Muse’. It came out a little while ago. In fact, I’m giving a talk at the Beatles Fest in New York in January. I’m talking about both my books. They all kind of match up because in the Jennifer Juniper book, I’m talking about just being yourself, just learning to “just be yourself.” That’s the message. In this one, it’s more about getting in touch with your own creativity, listening to the voice within. We all have the potential to be creative, you just have to listen to that inner voice. So they’re linked in that way. They’re saying similar stuff.
Given your PhD you’re able to create the books that you have that are related to the music world, in a different way. For example, with ‘Icons Of Rock’, you asked artists questions that many people don’t usually say.
That’s right. I think pretty much all of them said, I’ve never had an interview like this before. Usually it’s like, what do you have for breakfast or something. But I think because I had just got my Masters in counselling psychology, I was in a position where they knew I’d been part of the music world, through being married to Mick for a long time, living all together with Fleetwood Mac and all of that. So they knew that, but also I think learning to be a therapist meant there were times when I’d ask a question to which you’d get an answer or a bit of an answer. Often you don’t want to have a silence, people get awkward in silence, but it was great because I knew when to be silent, which then often would take them deeper and get closer to what they’re really saying. There was a lot of support when the book came out. At the moment I’m sending the book off to many of the musicians. Mick’s got his copy and Ringo’s been given his copy. I’ve had a lot of great feedback. I just heard from Eg White today, who texted saying he’s just got the book and feels so honoured to be part of it. So it’s very cool.
Excellent. Jenny, it’s been amazing to talk to you. It’s been fantastic to read ‘Icons of Rock’, and I heartily recommend it.
Thank you very much. It has been fun.
Further information
‘Icons of Rock – In Their Own Words’ by Jenny Boyd is out now. Further details can be found at thejennyboyd.com
