Music: Joe Boyd has a life story to tell, and Robyn Hitchcock to play it

RAY DAVIES got the whole "music and conversation" show-concept going a few years back, spinning a night of tunes and tales off his "X-Ray" autobiography and deep catalog of Kinks Klassics.

In the next few weeks, Philadelphians will be privy to several more of such mixed-media concert treats.

Rodney Crowell has a songs-and-stories showcase - tied to his artfully spun new hard-luck-life autobiography, "Chinaberry Sidewalks" - coming next Friday to the Sellersville Theatre.

Peter Asher will regale us with tales and tunes (as half of Peter and Gordon, and as hit producer for the likes of Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor) at the same Sellersville showcase on May 1.

And kicking off the chat-'n-chew concept in highly promising fashion is a matchup of record producer turned raconteur Joe Boyd with the singularly special British singer/guitarist Robyn Hitchcock, holding forth at World Cafe Live Monday night.

While hardly a household name, Boyd made vital contributions that are noted in the fine print on many an important British rock, folk and world-music recording from the late '60s forward.

He was producer of Pink Floyd's first single ("Arnold Layne"), as well as the early and best albums by psychedelic folk/world innovators the Incredible String Band and neo-traditionalists Fairport Convention.

Boyd ran the legendary and revolutionary London rock club UFO, from whence sprang Floyd, the Move and the Crazy World of Arthur Brown.

He also was nurturer/father confessor to the intimate, velvet-fogged balladeer Nick Drake - who had to die first to win acclaim under a "Pink Moon" - and produced a couple of huge novelty hits for Warner Bros.: "Dueling Banjos" and "Midnight at the Oasis."

Boyd kick-started the world-music scene, too, with the Hannibal label. And even produced some dandy films, most successfully "Scandal."

You might be surprised to learn, as was I, that Boyd is one of us. While long London-based, this "British luminary" is actually a Yank who grew up in Princeton, N.J. and got his first taste of the biz as a teenage promoter, luring Philadelphia-based bluesman Lonnie Johnson out of oblivion to do a house concert.

All this and more may come out on Monday, as the now 68-year-old Boyd reads from his autobiography, "White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s," and the 10-years-younger Hitchcock plays songs from the acts and tracks that Boyd nurtured. These were records that "sank deeply into and helped form my teenage consciousness, like a vampire transforms their prey into one of their own," Hitchcock has said.

Fortunately, Boyd deigned not to sink his fangs in when we chatted recently about the show and, ultimately, his life.

Q: What are the origins of your collaboration with Robyn?

A: It all started at the South By Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, three years ago. I was launching "White Bicycles" there. He was doing a show and a webcast. He invited me to come by the latter and said if I did, he might do "Arnold Layne" and have me introduce it with a couple paragraphs from my book. There was an encore, too, and I read a little about [Bob] Dylan or the Incredible String Band, and he sang a complementary song, and it was great fun.

Q: Dylan loomed large in your young life. I love the story of him stealing the affections of a girl you were interested in and the three of you having breakfast the morning after. And how about at the '65 Newport Folk Festival, where you were the stage manager running between two camps of festival producers: the ones backstage, furious with Dylan going electric; the others at the sound board, refusing your relayed message to turn down the band's volume. This became the stuff of legends, but did it also seem monumental at the time?

A: Absolutely. It was tectonic plates shifting in the culture, and you were there straddling the fissure. I knew it was coming when I was driving back and forth to the festival office and on Top 40 radio you heard Sonny and Cher singing "I Got You, Babe," with Sonny imitating Dylan, and Dylan's song "Mr. Tambourine Man" performed by the Byrds, and Dylan's own, six-minute rocking "Like a Rolling Stone."

There was clearly a cultural and political conflict headed our way, and the atmosphere during Dylan's rock set was fueled with tension. And pot - also debuting that summer at Newport.

Q: In the book, you deal with "the acts that got away" in amusing fashion, like those manager goons who severed your ties to Pink Floyd, your lack of follow-through with Eric Clapton and the contract you decided not to sign with Benny and Bjorn (from ABBA fame). Any others?

A: (Laughing) I also turned down Kate Bush and Bruce Springsteen. Springsteen had already done two albums, and John Hammond was looking for a new producer for what turned out to be "Born To Run." But at the time, I decided I didn't want to be in the record business anymore. I wanted to be a film producer.

And I have to say, Jon Landau did such an incredible job. I might have destroyed Bruce's life. Or I could have wound up that very unhappy, shallow rich guy surrounded by bloodsucking friends who dies an early death and never gets to be outside, producing movies. So it all turned out for the best.

Q: At the bottom of your website home page, you write of having "no interest in receiving demo recordings from white people singing in English." Is that for real?

A: I'm slightly overstating the case but it is true. And this isn't something new. When I came to Harvard Square as a freshman in 1960, I was strongly prejudiced against the middle-class folk noodlers imitating the true originals like Lonnie Johnson. Part of my success - if you can call it that - as an A&R man or producer is that if somebody got through to me, like a Nick Drake, they had to be special.

And if I never listen to another generic, long-blonde-haired girl playing guitar and sounding like Joni Mitchell, that'll be OK. I'd much rather hear a band imitating [Trinidad calypso star] the Mighty Sparrow.

Q: You've been called the "'Zelig of the music business." What do you think of that description?

A: I can understand it, but I hate it. The thing is, the Zelig character in the movie [of the same name] is just hovering on the scene when important events were happening. I was there, actually doing things!

World Cafe Live, 3025 Walnut St., 7:30 p.m. Monday, $33-$45, 215-222-1400, www.worldcafelive.com.