She has been a fly on the wall of the world of rock and roll since the Swinging 60s. Her older sister Pattie was married to one of The Beatles and she married Mick Fleetwood….twice.
They first met when Jenny was at school.
"He was probably 16 and I was the same age," she recalls, "and he was in a band called The Cheynes, and we were together for about a year or so," she said.
"Then I decided I needed to experience life more because I was modeling and going to Rome and going here and going there, and he was a little bit kind of nonchalant sometimes. And I mistook it for, 'oh, he doesn't really love me'. You know what you like when you're a teenager," said Boyd. "So then we'd split up, but we'd always stay in touch. And that's when I went to America. I went to San Francisco and then India. And then when I came back, he asked me if I would marry him," she said.
Former fashion model Boyd was the inspiration to Donovan’s song Jennifer Juniper and accompanied her sister and The Beatles on their famous trip to an ashram in India.
"I had a wonderful 60s time and I was in India for about almost two months," said Boyd of the trip.
"Every morning, The Beatles - well, George and John and Paul - would go on the roof tops and we'd sit on the roof tops as well, and you'd watch them make up songs," she recalled. "Whether John couldn't sleep that night or, if it was Dear Prudence...she just sort of lost the plot slightly," said Boyd. "We were all trying to go into her room. I went in with a flute. John went in with his guitar to get her out of this...kind of like she was just mesmerized."
Being around creative people, Boyd says she wanted to understand the process and was able to interview some of the biggest names in rock music - not just her brothers in law George Harrison and Eric Clapton, but also Keith Richards, BB King, Don Henley, Joni Mitchell and many more.
"What was interesting to me and was many years later when I was writing my book about creativity, watching them create just out of the daily things that happened at the ashram, they just couldn't stop. They were just so creative," she said.
"I interviewed 75 different musicians, starting off with Don Henley. And then, of course, I had all of Fleetwood Mac. And then Ian [Wallace, her second husband] was there with Crosby, Stills and Nash, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne. So I managed to have it all of those because I knew them all," she said.
"I loved doing the interviews, it just felt so inspiring. And I think why they really opened up to me was they knew I was part of the music scene through being a wife, and also because I was learning to be a therapist, got my degree in counseling psychology. I knew when to keep quiet rather than try and fill in all the holes. So when they'd say something and I'd wait there, then they would go deeper," said Boyd.
Those cassette tapes of hundreds of hours of rock and roll interviews were kept safe by Boyd for years as she divided her time between California and London. Until ten years ago.
"I thought I'd been carrying around these cassette tapes for so long, and I was terrified that somebody might steal them or anything could happen. And they had trusted me and I thought, I'm never going to need them again. So I destroyed the cassette tapes except for seven. So I thought, well, this is the safest thing," she said with a grimace.
Jenny Boyd will be talking about her book, Icons of Rock, on Thursday 18 July at 6pm at Chaucer’s Books in Santa Barbara.
