Joe Byrd

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This article is about the musician. For the Cherokee chief, please see Joe Byrd (Cherokee Chief)

Joseph Byrd (no one except Columbia Records ever called him "Joe") (born Kentucky, raised Tucson, Arizona) was the leader of The United States of America, a notable rock band from the 1960s.

As a teenager, Byrd played in a series of pop and country bands, later vibraphone in jazz ensembles, while a student at the University of Arizona. He won a fellowship to get an M.A. at Stanford, and relocated to New York in 1959, drawn by the avant-garde, becoming a significant part of the Fluxus experiments that were emerging at that time. There he continued composing, and earned some international interest for his use of vocal and instrumental sound in early "minimal" compositions. He also worked as arranger, record producer, and assistant to critic Virgil Thomson. It was in New York that he met Dorothy Moskowitz.

Byrd returned with Moskowitz to the West Coast, accepting a teaching assistant position at UCLA (moving into a beachfront commune populated by musicians, artists, and Indian musicians), where he studied music history, acoustics, psychology of music, and Indian music. At UCLA he formed the New Music Workshop, where the first West Coast experiments in what would come to be called "performance art" and "concept art." These interests led to more composition and his leaving the university in the summer of 1966 to create music full-time and produce "happenings."

It was at that point that Byrd broke with tradition, and determined to combine performance art, electronic sound, and radical politics into a single whole, together with rock music. To perform his new songs, Byrd recruited Moskowitz from New York (where she had moved following their separation) to sing and write for his new band, as he had brought on bassist Rand Forbes, electric violinist Gordon Marron, and drummer Craig Woodson to form The United States of America. Their self-titled LP, produced by David Rubinson, was recorded for Columbia Records in late 1967, was released to critical acclaim in early 1968.

Byrd went on to release, as Joe Byrd and the Field Hippies, an LP, The American Metaphysical Circus, in 1969. A complex and poorly understood record, it seemed a commercial failure as it was released on Columbia Masterworks - making it quite possibly the only rock album to ever be released on a classical music label. However, as a "classical" release, its relatively small sales were enough to keep it in the Masterworks catalog for the next two decades.

In 1975, Byrd released Yankee Transcendoodle, an LP of synthesized music, and a record of synthesized Christmas Carols, Christmas Yet to Come. He also arranged and produced Ry Cooder's 1978 Jazz album, He wrote commercially for TV, film productions and advertisements, but did research in the history of American popular music, culminating in LPs "Sentimental Songs of the MId-19th Century," and in 1984 the 6-sided LP set "Popular Music In Jacksonian America." He presently (2004) lives in northern California, where he teaches music history, theory, and songwriting at a local college.

Byrd's tiny fan base in the U.S. is dwarfed by his following in Europe, particularly the UK, where he has been cited as a spiritual mentor to such important contemporary British bands as Radiohead, Broadcast, and Portishead.