The Man Who Was There.(The Talk of the Town)(Joe Boyd)

Every year or so, the record producer Joe Boyd stops in at Caffe Dante, on MacDougal Street, for a pistachio gelato. It's a matter less of nostalgia than of taste. "I can only like what I like," he said the other day, during one of these visits. He was spooning up gelato but talking about music, which is his bailiwick, if it's anybody's. "I've always had the arrogance to feel that what I liked would still be around in thirty or forty or fifty years, and that what other people liked might not."

Boyd was occasionally wrong, but more often right. Trusting his ear, he earned a reputation as a producer's producer, and a sense of himself as a chronic near-misser. (He passed up a chance to sign Abba and produced Pink Floyd's first single, only to be cast aside when the band got a big record deal.) Boyd discovered, produced, and managed such highly regarded and intermittently overlooked British acts as Fairport Convention (and Richard Thompson), Nick Drake, and the Incredible String Band. He has worked with R.E.M., Maria Muldaur, John Martyn, and the McGarrigles, and was a world-music pioneer. He has also sprouted up, Waldo-like, in one watershed moment after another. When Bob Dylan went electric, at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, Boyd was the production manager; you can blame him (Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger, and Theo Bikel did, anyway) for Dylan's playing so loud.

Boyd, who is sixty-four, grew up in Princeton, a kid collector of old jazz and blues records. His first booking was the bluesman Lonnie Johnson, whom he and a friend found in the Philadelphia phone book. They drove him up to Princeton for a gig in a friend's living room. Boyd went to Harvard, where he got caught up in the Cambridge folk scene, a rival to New York's. (On one occasion, a girl with whom he expected to spend the night left a note in her apartment: "Dear Joe. Sorry, change of plans." He awoke on her couch to the smell of bacon and the presence, at the kitchen table, of his replacement. His consolation: a "monosyllabic breakfast" with Bob Dylan.) Before long, he was managing jazz and blues tours (Muddy Waters, the Reverend Gary Davis, Roland Kirk), running a psychedelic club (the U.F.O., in London), and starting a production company (Witchseason) and a record label (Hannibal).

He gave up producing music after losing control of Hannibal, in 2001, and began writing a memoir. "White Bicycles: Making Music in the Nineteen-Sixties" was ...