304 pages, paperback. Serpent's Tail Classics edition, with a foreword by Hanif Kureishi. Originally published in 2006. The sixties began in the summer of 1956, ended in October 1973, and peaked just before dawn on 1 July 1967, during a set by Tomorrow at the UFO Club in London. That is Joe Boyd's thesis, delivered in the opening pages with a precision that is obviously a joke and obviously not. He was in the room. He built the room.

This is the sixties memoir that survives re-reading, and the reason is temperament. Boyd never inflates his own part and never performs modesty about it either, and the effect is a narrator you actually trust in a genre almost entirely composed of people who were not where they say they were. Brian Eno called it "the best book about music I've read in years", and the New York Times made much the same point about the balance between self-importance and self-deprecation that Boyd manages to avoid on both sides.

The CV is faintly ridiculous. A student job at Lester Koenig's Contemporary Records in Los Angeles. Working for George Wein in New York and meeting Thelonious Monk on the first morning. Tour-managing Muddy Waters, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Rev. Gary Davis around Britain in 1964. Running production at Newport in 1965, on the ground for the electric Bob Dylan set and for whatever it was that Pete Seeger actually did or did not do with an axe, which Boyd sorts out with more care than anyone before him. Then London: Elektra's man in Europe, a session with Eric Clapton, co-founding UFO, and producing Arnold Layne for a house band called Pink Floyd.

After UFO collapsed under police attention, drugs, debt and exhaustion, he founded Witchseason and made the records that are the actual reason to read this. Fairport Convention and Sandy Denny. The Incredible String Band. Vashti Bunyan. John and Beverley Martyn. Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath, which alone should tell you how wide his ears were. And Nick Drake, written about here for the first time by somebody who genuinely knew him, with no mythologising and no attempt to close the case. The Drake chapters remain the best thing anyone has written on him.

The title is not decoration. It comes from Tomorrow's 1967 single My White Bicycle, which was about the Amsterdam Provos leaving white-painted bicycles around the city for anyone to use, free. It worked beautifully until people started stealing them and painting them other colours. Boyd's whole book is organised around that shape: an idea that was completely serious, briefly real, and then gone. He is unsentimental about why, and part of his argument is technical rather than moral - what multitracking and bigger budgets did to the way records got made, and what was lost when a band stopped having to play the thing all the way through.

Boyd went on to found Hannibal Records, produce R.E.M., and more recently publish And the Roots of Rhythm Remain, his enormous survey of global music. This one stays the essential volume. Funny, exact, gossipy in the good way, and quietly devastating by the last chapter. If there is a single memoir to own from that decade, this is it. Cheap, in print, no excuse.