Joseph Hunter Byrd, Jr. (born December 19, 1937) is an American composer, musician and academic. After first becoming known as an experimental composer in New York City and Los Angeles in the early and mid-1960s, he became the leader of The United States of America, an innovative but short-lived band that integrated electronic sound and radical political ideas into rock music. In 1968 he recorded the album The American Metaphysical Circus, credited to Joe Byrd and the Field Hippies. After working as a record producer, arranger, and soundtrack composer, he became a university teacher in music history and theory. Early life and career Byrd was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and was raised in Tucson, Arizona after his father purchased a mine near the Mexican border. His sister, Elizabeth would become a notable writer. As a teenager, Byrd played accordion and vibraphone in a series of pop and country bands, started writing his own arrangements, and performed on some local TV shows. He formed his first jazz quartet while a student at the University of Arizona, where he studied composition with Barney Childs (B.M., 1959). He began his graduate studies in composition on a Sollnit Fellowship at Stanford University, where he first met La Monte Young, then a graduate student at the nearby University of California, Berkeley, as well as Terry Riley and Steve Reich. New York, 1960–63 After receiving his M.A. from Stanford in 1960, he relocated to New York City to study with avant garde composers Morton Feldman and John Cage; according to Byrd, he became Cage's last student. Byrd became a part of the proto-Fluxus experiments that were emerging at that time in conjunction with Young, Charlotte Moorman (Byrd's girlfriend at one point), Yoko Ono, Jackson Mac Low (he participated in An Anthology of Chance Operations) and others. Byrd took an eclectic approach in his compositions. He continued to work with La Monte Young, who organised the first concert of Byrd's music in Yoko Ono's loft in March 1961. Byrd said: In New York, we were all subsumed into a protean energy - less a school of composition than an attitude: we were redefining art itself... My time in NY was central to my development.... Cage's influence had spread from music to dance and finally to a kind of art that had no name, and was produced by artists of every kind... These events were called "happenings."... I