Song 178: “Who Knows Where The Time Goes?” by Fairport Convention, Part One, Going Electric
5/16/20250 min
For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted, songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first part of a two-episode look at the song “Who Knows Where The Time Goes?” by Fairport Convention, and the intertwining careers of Joe Boyd, Sandy Denny, and Richard Thompson. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.
Patreon backers also have a twenty-seven-minute bonus episode available, on “Baby It’s You” by Smith.
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Transcript
10 sentencesAndrew Hickey· Host0:00
[singing] A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs by Andrew Hickey. Song 178, Who Knows Where the Time Goes by Fairport Convention. Part one, going electric. Before we begin, this episode has some minor discussion of alcohol abuse and ends with a description of a fatal car crash. If you're likely to find those things upsetting, you may want to read the transcript or skip this one. Folk music went electric twice, and both times Joe Boyd was there when it happened. Boyd is someone who has turned up in the background of several previous episodes of the podcast in one capacity or another, but we've not really looked at him in great detail before. But he's someone who absolutely needs to be talked about because from the mid-'60s through the early '70s, Joe Boyd was one of the vital links between the US and UK versions of the counterculture and the musical underground, and his influence can be heard all over the music made both on the West Coast of America and by British folk rock, psychedelic, and progressive musicians of the period. Boyd grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, and his love of music really started when in 1954, when he was 11, his family got a TV set and he started watching Bandstand broadcast from Philadelphia, not yet American Bandstand, which at the time was almost entirely devoted to Black R&B and doo-wop acts, who Boyd started to idolize. In Boyd's telling of the story in his autobiography, Dick