During the 1960s and 1970s, mustachioed reporter Howard Smith
worked at two New York media outlets then at their glorious prime. He
hosted an overnight weekend show on album-oriented FM rock station WPLJ
and wrote a regular column for alternative newsweekly The Village Voice.
Smith was thus perhaps the preeminent reporter on the counterculture
during the height of its hairy and somewhat hazy reign. As such he
conducted extensive interviews for print and broadcast media with many
of the most notable, entertaining, and outlandish political and musical
figures of the era.
These interviews were heavily edited and then selectively aired or published. But Smith kept the raw reel-to-reel tape recordings—hundreds of hours of unexpurgated, candid, and intimate conversations—in boxes in his Greenwich Village loft, with the aim of one day using them in his memoirs. Forty years later, his son Cass Calder Smith came upon them when he was helping his dad clear the place out for a move. Sourced, dated, indexed, and digitally re-mastered by researcher and documentarian Ezra Bookstein, these have become The Smith Tapes, an incredible historical treasure trove, the first aural Doubloons of which will be available for download on Amazon MP3 on Tuesday, November 20 and iTunes a week later on November 27.
These interviews were heavily edited and then selectively aired or published. But Smith kept the raw reel-to-reel tape recordings—hundreds of hours of unexpurgated, candid, and intimate conversations—in boxes in his Greenwich Village loft, with the aim of one day using them in his memoirs. Forty years later, his son Cass Calder Smith came upon them when he was helping his dad clear the place out for a move. Sourced, dated, indexed, and digitally re-mastered by researcher and documentarian Ezra Bookstein, these have become The Smith Tapes, an incredible historical treasure trove, the first aural Doubloons of which will be available for download on Amazon MP3 on Tuesday, November 20 and iTunes a week later on November 27.
“When I first heard about these tapes, I
thought this was the coolest thing,” Bookstein told us in an extensive
interview. “And then once I got to hear them, I realized I had no idea
how cool and special they are. I immediately felt privy—like, here I am
in a room alone with the most famous people of that generation.” He
explained, “There’s something about the immediacy of radio. If they were
filmed, there would be a distance. But the magic of radio is that it’s
so incredibly intimate—just you and their voice in your headphones.”
Smith had an odd prescience in his reportage:
he broadcast, live and around the clock, from Woodstock; he was the
only reporter to be inside the Stonewall Inn during the infamous riots
that set off the Gay Liberation movement. And this intuition carried
over to his interviews as well, allowing him to capture conversations at
key moments in an artist’s career. He spoke with Pete Townsend during
the two-night run of the Who’s rock opera Tommy at the
Metropolitan Opera, with Mick Jagger on tour a few weeks before the
tragic concert stabbings at Altamont, with Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper
at the Cannes Film Festival just before the release of Easy Rider, with Andy Warhol after he was shot, and—in her last ever interview—with Janis Joplin just days before she died.
With more than 100 recordings, ranging in
length from 20 minutes to four hours, this incredible storehouse will be
released piecemeal. Each month for about the next year, a Smith Tapes
“album” will be available for iTunes download, containing themed sets
of 7 to 10 interviews. The first set is called “Fillmore East,” after
the legendary East Village theater run by impresario Bill Graham, and
includes conversations with people who are on their way to perform or
just performed at the venue, including John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Frank
Zappa, Bill Graham, Eric Clapton, Lou Reed, and Andy Warhol and Paul
Morrissey. Future sets will include themes like “Things Aren’t Okay” or
“Woodstock” and include interviews with additional countercultural
luminaries like Jim Morrison, Jerry Garcia, James Taylor, Carole King,
Abbie Hoffman, Arlo Guthrie, Jane Fonda, Joe Cocker, Sly Stone, Dick
Gregory, Hair composers James Rado and Gerome Ragni, and many more.
“As someone who works in documentary,”
Bookstein told us, “these interviews are something I revere and cherish.
They’re time capsules, actual historical documents. This isn’t someone
telling you about 1972. This is 1972.”
In advance of the release of The Smith Tapes, VF.com
has acquired an exclusive and fascinating excerpt from Smith’s
interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono from February 5, 1972, in which
they discuss the breakup of the Beatles. Listen to it below, and then
head over to The Smith Tapes' Kickstarter page for
more opportunities to hear, download, and purchase these captivating
pieces of contemporary history—including a chance to own (or, Black
Friday alert, gift) a limited-edition, hand-numbered, 12-CD box set
containing 18 key interviews created by Grammy-winning designer Masaki
Koike.
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