Joseph Byrd, an avant-garde musician and composer who emerged from the anti-art Fluxus movement to rattle the flower-power sound of the 1960s with the critically acclaimed, if challenging, experimental psychedelic band the United States of America, died on Nov. 2 in Medford, Ore. He was 87.
His death was announced in a paid death notice published in The Los Angeles Times.
The United States of America formed in Los Angeles during the peak of psychedelia, but, commercially speaking, the group never came close to acid-rock kingpins like Jefferson Airplane, or even lesser known groups like the Electric Prunes.
Lasting barely two years, the band both intrigued and flummoxed listeners with its early experiments in electronic music, dreamy ruminations on Che Guevara and jarring cross-genre forays that drew from influences as diverse as Country Joe and the Fish, Jelly Roll Morton, 19th-century marches and antebellum minstrel show numbers.
Its 1968 debut album, titled simply “The United States of America,” peaked at No. 181 on the Billboard 200 — and turned out to be the group’s last....
A former ethnomusicology instructor at the University of California, Los Angeles, he was an authority on Civil War-era and other early American music, and a former student of John Cage, the experimental music titan and a godfather of Fluxus, which emerged in New York City in the early 1960s.
Continue reading at The New York Times
Byrd's New World Records release is here.