Joseph Byrd, leader of the pioneering psychedelic rock band the United States of America, died in November at the age of 87.
Byrd’s death on Nov. 2 went largely unreported until his family submitted a death notice to the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times reports. Byrd died suddenly at his home in Medford, Oregon, his family said. No cause of death was provided.
Born in Louisville, Kentucky and raised in Tucson, Arizona, Byrd studied music under avant-garde composers like John Cage and La Monte Young and was a participant in Cage’s Fluxus movement of experimental performances; Byrd’s first live performance, his family wrote in his death notice, was at Yoko Ono’s New York loft.
After moving to Los Angeles with fellow musicologist and then-girlfriend Dorothy Moskowitz, Byrd enrolled in UCLA’s musicology program, formed the New Music Workshop, and ultimately, with Moskowitz, founded the group the United States of America.
The band, which combined avant-garde elements with American folk music and the burgeoning psychedelic movement, released one self-titled album in 1968. Although the album wasn’t a success commercially — it peaked at Number 181 on the album charts — The United States of America is now regarded as one of the most adventurous and innovative LPs of the acid rock era.
Following the release of their debut album, the United States of America broke up, but Byrd continued to make music, including 1969’s The American Metaphysical Circus, featuring his early use of both the synthesizer and vocoder. He contributed to Phil Ochs’ “Crucifixion” on that singer-songwriter’s classic Pleasures of the Harbor, and became a professor of American music at Cal-State Fullerton.
During his time as a professor, Byrd released his 1976 album Yankee Transcendoodle, a reimagining of American patriotic music for the synthesizer; the album was later included on our list of 10 Weird Albums Rolling Stone Loved in the 1970s You’ve Never Heard.
“Byrd refashions everything from ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’ to ‘John Brown’s Body’ to ‘The Internationale’ (here disguised as ‘Grand Centennial Hymn’) into a warm and casually humorous texture very much like one of Garth Hudson’s long organ introductions to ‘Chest Fever’,” Greil Marcus wrote of the LP. “Like Hudson at his most inventive and witty, Byrd plays music that a lot of people have heard primarily on merry-go-rounds and at parades.”
Byrd would later co-produce Ry Cooder’s 1978 album Jazz, and contribute scores to films by Agnes Varda and Robert Altman (H.E.A.L.T.H.) He would also serve as a columnist and food critic for a northern California newspaper, teach music history at the College of the Redwoods, and created the robot sounds for the 1972 sci-fi film Silent Running; those robots reportedly inspired George Lucas’ Star Wars character R2-D2.
“Joseph was a unique and quintessentially American man,” Byrd’s friend and former wife Angela Blackthorne Biggs said in his death notice. “For good or ill, freedom was his creed, and he lived life entirely on his own terms. He was a brilliant musician, who could pick up any instrument he happened upon and play a lovely tune extemporaneously. He was capable of profound empathy and eloquence. He made his mark on the world, much as he intended from the beginning.”
