CLAPTON, DYLAN, JONI, DONOVAN AND ME
Sixties It girl Jenny Boyd tells Will Hodgkinson about marrying Mick Fleetwood twice, going on retreat with the Beatles and coaxing rock stars to confess all.
Jenny Boyd and I have just sat down outside a café by the Brunswick Centre in Bloomsbury, central London, to discuss her time with the Beatles, marrying Mick Fleetwood (twice) and her part in the Sixties at its most swinging when a group of excited schoolgirls start shrieking at the table next to us. I almost march up to them and say, “Do you mind? This is the woman Donovan wrote Jennifer Juniper about!” but I fear the reference may be lost on them. Instead Boyd, 75, tells them with polite authority that we are doing an interview, the girls apologise to the nice lady, and we get on with the story.
“I never felt I was creative,” says Boyd, who is slight and well spoken, with big eyes, an oval face and straight blonde hair with a fringe that evokes her Sixties model days. “Then, in 1984, on holiday in Maui with my second husband, the drummer Ian Wallace, we all had magic mushrooms. I went swimming and thought I could breathe underwater because I was one with the universe. Needless to say I started sputtering and panicking, got back to the shore, and Bonnie [of the rock-soul duo Delaney & Bonnie] gave me some Bach remedy. At that point I thought: I’m ready to get back into the world.”
Boyd is using a roundabout way of explaining how she came to write Icons of Rock, a collection of interviews with everyone from George Harrison (who was married to Boyd’s sister, Pattie) to Eric Clapton (who was married to Pattie too) and the 29-year- old multi-instrumentalist Jacob Collier (who wasn’t married to Pattie). The original version was published in 2013, but Boyd has updated the book to include interviews with a new generation of musicians. She does not take herself too seriously. Recounting one story, she asks herself: “Now, which husband was it?” (There have been three including her present one, the architect David Levitt. Or four, if you count Fleetwood twice.)
Perhaps because the interviews were not initially intended for publication but as research for a PhD, perhaps because she was already friendly with so many of the people involved, the results are remarkably unguarded. Joni Mitchell argues for the creative benefits of depression. Harrison admits that he spent an undue amount of time in front of the mirror asking: “Who am I?”
“It was Eric [Clapton] who said: ‘We never talk about this stuff,’” Boyd says on her delving into the psychological urge to make music and get on stage. “But they all experienced similar things, like hearing songs in their sleep. They all had an encouraging parent or teacher, someone to inspire them early on. And they all liked talking about it.”
The only one who said no was Bob Dylan. “Then my second husband, Ian, was playing a concert with him in Maui. Bob saw a copy of the book and took it away with him, and when he returned it the next day, loads of the pages had the corners folded. It proved he was interested.”
Boyd entered this world at the age of 16, when she went to Holland Park School in London (after years of being holed up in a series of convents) and met Fleetwood at a Notting Hill coffee shop in 1964. “At the time a friend of mine had a crush on him, so when I felt his foot go onto my foot I would be going: ‘Move it to the left!’ But we started going out, and by the time Pattie was with George [Harrison] we would go to the Scotch of St James and hang out with the Beatles, Keith Moon ... all of them.”
The artist John Dunbar once said of the Scotch, a Mayfair club beloved of rock stars, that unless you were very rich, very famous or wearing a very short miniskirt you were not getting in. “But it wasn’t ‘we’re famous’,” Boyd says of the scene. “It was ‘we’re cool’.”
Jenny with Mick Fleetwood in 2014
Boyd became a model for the designers Foale and Tuffin, for which she was taken out to New York for a catwalk show that almost ended in disaster. “I was so short-sighted that I couldn’t see the end of the runway and was very worried about falling off the end of it. As it happened, this great Motown music was playing, so I just danced about.”
What followed was a front row seat at Sixties rock’n’roll life: arriving in San Francisco in 1967 just as the Summer of Love was flowering, witnessing Ravi Shankar blow a few thousand hippies’ minds at the Monterey International Pop Festival, accompanying the Beatles to Rishikesh for their immersion in transcendental meditation. She remembers San Francisco as a short- lived utopia lasting only a few months before it all fell apart.
“I told George and Pattie that it was amazing and they had to come out. But they didn’t get there until August, by which point all the good hippies had left and the place was filled with people who had been told to turn on, tune in and drop out,” Boyd says. “We took acid, walked down Haight- Ashbury, and everyone started crowding around George. They were going: ‘Show us some chords, George!’ So he sat down on the pavement and played C, G and A on a guitar — the most basic ones. They thought they had been duped by their hero.”
As for the Rishikesh trip, Boyd says she loved the meditation the Maharishi espoused. It was the man himself she wasn’t so sure about. She was feeling extremely sick one morning and went to the Maharishi for help. “He said I was getting an ‘iceberg’, which is when you come out of meditation and still have unresolved karma. All I had to do was go back and meditate. The following morning the doctor came and told me I had dysentery.”
With Donovan in 1967
Plenty of songs emerged from the period. John Lennon wrote Dear Prudence after Mia Farrow’s sister went into a meditational trance and couldn’t get out, Paul McCartney came up with the old-time pastiche Rocky Raccoon, and Donovan fashioned Hurdy Gurdy Man as an encapsulation of the Maharishi’s teachings. Donovan also wrote Jennifer Juniper, a ballad of courtly love for Boyd, shortly before leaving for India.
“Donovan said to me, ‘Let’s get married,’ but that wasn’t the plan at all,” she says of being proposed to by the folky troubadour. “The thing is, I didn’t find him terribly attractive. He was like a child from the time of King Arthur.”
A less spiritual period came a few years later, when Boyd was with her husband Fleetwood as he led his band Fleetwood Mac through the chaotic, fractious sessions for their 1977 classic Rumours. “Stevie [Nicks] and Lindsey [Buckingham] came to our house, I really liked them, and as soon as they joined it was obvious: this was going to be huge. At the same time cocaine was everywhere. With Mick it was all about Fleetwood Mac. I was the only one with kids so it wasn’t easy. It was a rebirth for the band, but where is the father for our children? I went down to Sausalito, where they were recording, and Stevie was singing songs about Lindsey, Christine [McVie] was singing songs about John [McVie], someone was sobbing, someone was storming out, and it was like that all the time: intense but beautiful.”
After Boyd separated from Fleetwood she left Los Angeles and moved into a little cottage in Cranleigh, Surrey, with her two daughters, around the corner from her sister Pattie and her husband of the time, Clapton. “He was like an annoying older brother,” she says of the guitarist. “He would goad me and I would end up crying, but it was alcoholic behaviour.”
Why did she marry Fleetwood twice? Wasn’t once enough? “Well, one reason was me saying ‘I’m going to make this work’,” she replies. “It wasn’t easy, because there was so much coke around. The other reason was the band was taking off, and we needed green cards, so we needed to be married.”
That answer helps to explain why all these musicians must have opened up to her. Bar the odd magic mushroom- inspired revelation, Jenny Boyd was the most sensible person at the rock’n’roll table.