Joe Byrd
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Joseph Byrd (born Kentucky, raised Tucson, Arizona) was the leader of The United States of America, a notable rock band from the 1960s and 1970s. Byrd started his career playing in a series of high school pop and country bands. He later playing vibrophone in a jazz outfit as a student at the University of Arizona. Byrd won a fellowship to get an M.A. at Stanford, and relocated to New York in 1959, drawn by the avant-garde and Fluxus experiments that were emerging at that time. There, he began composing, and earned some international notoriety for his own compositions. He also worked as a conductor, arranger, associate producer and assistant to critic Virgil Thomson. It was in New York that he met and dated Dorothy Moskowitz.
Byrd eventually returned to the west coast, accepting an assistant teaching position at UCLA and moving into a beachfront commune populated by grad students, artists and Indian musicians. He then studied acoustics, psychology and Indian music, and these interests soon led to more composition and leaving the university in the summer of 1967 to write music full-time and produce "happenings." To perform his new songs, Byrd rang up Moskowitz and asked her to come out 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. The self-titled LP, produced by David Rubinson, was recorded for CBS in late 1967, and released to critical acclaim in early 1968.
Byrd went on to form Joe Byrd and the Field Hippies, who released an LP, The American Metaphysical Circus, in 1969. A complex and poorly understood record, it was 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.
In 1975, Byrd released Yankee Transcendoodle, an LP of synthesised music, and a record of synthesised 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 near the Oregon Border, and teaches musicology, theory, and songwriting at a local college.