Things I Didn’t Know About Woodstock…

Smokler on September 10, 2019

This last month was the 50th anniversary of Woodstock (1969, height/end of hippie generation, claimed-to-have-ended-Vietnam-War blah blah zzz) a subject that both fascinates me and I never need to hear another word about ever again. But thanks to Chris Molanphy and his fantastic podcast "Hit Parade" I now know a ton of stuff about it that I didn't before.

C-Molan is Slate magazine's pop critic and wisely framed the 3-day festival in his episode "We are Stardust: We are Gold-Certified" as a countdown of the acts whose careers saw the greatest chart benefit from appearing at Woodstock. In addition to all-of-this which I didn't know at all, I also learned…

Most acts who got a bump from playing Woodstock didn't reap the benefits until the next year. Billboard charts just didn't move that fast in 1969.

Woodstock's organizers were in debt for years afterward. The Woodstock Movie and Soundtrack Album were largely projects to dig them out of a hole.

Many of the tracks on the original soundtrack were recorded elsewhere as the sound quality for many of Woodstock's performances was too poor to include on the record.

The Who hated their performance at Woodstock even though it is considered one of the event's best. Because of the rain and other acts being stuck in traffic, the band had to wait hours before going on stage. When they did, they were tired, annoyed and wanted to go home.

Santana got to play Woodstock because of their mentor, San Francisco concert promoter Bill Graham. Woodstock's organizers had asked Graham for advice and he only agreed to give it on the condition Santana got to play the festival. Barely known outside of the Bay Area at the time, here's how Santana took advantage of the opportunity.

The band's first album came out the following week. The rest, as they say…

Thought of the Day: Say it Again

Smokler on September 9, 2019

"Everything worth saying has already been said. But since no one was listening, it must be said again"

— Andre Gide

A beautiful sentiment I heard today…

Smokler on July 12, 2017

"The adventure itself will create beautiful things…"

— Jon Anderson

The Smokler 50 (2016)

Smokler on January 9, 2017

Each year, I make a playlist of 50 songs I heard for the very first time that year (2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 editions). They don't have to be new songs, just new to me. Beginning around mid December, I listen over again to every song I discovered that year (usually between 400-500 although in 2016, it was 798) and whittle it down to 50 for your listening pleasure.

Idea is not to be a compendium of new releases or a greatest hits of my favorites but rather a musical mosaic of that year in music. If I have done my job, I can look at the list and see my year captured in song. If I have done my job, you look at this list and say "Wow! This is all over the place." If you love everything here or even hate most of it, I have had a timid, mediocre year as a student and explorer of music.

Listening: Start at the beginning. Give a song 20 seconds. If it ain't grabbing you, skip to the next one. You will not hurt my feelings in doing so. If you like where a song is going, keep listening. The goal is never for you to fall in love but to want a second date with new songs and artists.

Listen in good health, enjoy. And here's to a sonically rich 2017.

5 Great Movies Seen/Seen First in 2016

Smokler on January 9, 2017

5 Great Movies From/Seen First in 2016:

Sing Street

Group of Irish teenagers in 1980s Dublin start a band to impress girls. Think The Commitments in high school. If you think Stranger Things was the best use of the 1980s this year in pop culture, think again.

Off the Rails

Documentary about a 50 year-old New Yorker obsessed with trains and buses who keeps posing as an MTA driver and getting arrested for it. Big-hearted, sad, fascinating. One of the best documentaries I've seen in a very long time.

Sleeping with Other People

Alison Brie and Jason Sudeikis in a romantic comedy that miraculously transcends being about blandly attractive white people and their issues. Accepting that both Nora Ephron and Carrie Fisher are irreplaceable, this is the closest I've seen to a 21st century When Harry Met Sally.

Hidden Figures

True story of three black women working at NASA in the 1960s and were instrumental in first Apollo space of the1960s. No joke, this portrait of unknown, modern day heroism makes you proud to be an American. If there's justice, has Oscar written all over it.

Stop Making Sense

1984 concert documentary of the Talking Heads at the height of their fame on tour for their breakthrough "Speaking in Tongues" album. I can't claim to know this band or their music very well but their use of stagecraft and effects the way they make this not just a concert but a great show and a great movie, well you must see for yourself.

Directed by Johnathan Demme, just a few years before he won an Oscar for Silence of the Lambs.

11 Great Publisher Names and Where they Come From…

Smokler on June 21, 2016

A little list I put together for Book Riot.

Me on the Ferris Bueller Soundtrack that Never Was

Smokler on June 11, 2016

John Hughes didn’t think we’d want a “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” soundtrack, so we don’t have one. We can recreate, playlist or bootleg it, but we can’t possess something that never existed. Here’s the open secret of this movie and its soundtrack-that-never-was, three decades later: Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t waste time on something you never had, you won’t miss it.

Read the rest of my essay on Ferris Bueller's 30th birthday and the movie's missing soundtrack in Salon.

Pop! Hacks! Saving Playlists and Reading More

Smokler on January 14, 2016

Tips and tricks for how to love music, movies and book without feeling overwhelmed by them.

1. Download and save playlists. Those of us who used the now-departed RDIO music service were relieved that RDIO gave members their playlists in a little downloadable bundle before they turned off the lights. Not everyone is so nice. Pays to take 30 seconds and export a favorite playlist from iTunes (say a playlist given to you by friend or lover) then upload the file it creates to Google Drive or Dropbox.

2. Log movies you watch. I have a terrible time remembering movies I saw no matter how much I loved them. So I've taken to scrawling a few lines down about the movie I just saw on Letterbxd just so it's recorded somewhere and I can cycle back when someone asks "What's the best documentary you saw this year?" and the first words that come to mind are "Breakfast Burrito."

Not an endorsement for Letterbxd as I haven't explored any of its competitors. A notebook and pencil work just as well.

3. On that, unless you are a serial watcher of movies, once you've watched something on Netflix, Amazon, Itunes etc. delete it. Unless you are going to rewatch it, it's just taking up space. "I paid for it" isn't a good reason to keep it around. It's paying for the privilege of acting like a hoarder.

4. If one of your 2016 resolutions is to "read more", give yourself time to read 10 pages nightly before turning on the TV. Unless you are reading Proust, 10 pages goes by super fast and if you've chosen a good book, you'll probably want more that 10 pages before turning on the TV.

Pop! Hacks! are a feature of my newsletter The Smoke Signal, which comes out twice a month. Subscribe if ya like.

“We’re All Goonies in Astoria:” My Report from The Goondocks

Smokler on June 22, 2015

It is estimated that 10,000 fans will arrive for “The Goonies’” 30th anniversary celebration this weekend, effectively doubling the population of Astoria. No one quite remembers how Donner and executive producer Steven Spielberg chose the town as the film’s primary location — one story involves a childhood friend of Spielberg’s, another Donner’s co-producer, born and raised in the Pacific Northwest — but “no one remembers when it wasn’t going to be filmed here either,” Derek Hoffman, current vice president of Donners Company, told me.

Astoria is only mentioned once or twice in “The Goonies” and lives on-screen for about 20 minutes of a movie that takes place almost entirely in underground caves re-created on sound stages. Knowing Astoria = the Goondocks and coming here (the town is two hours from the nearest major airport in Portland) represent a kind of super merit badge of fandom.

I wrote about The Goonies 30th Anniversary for Salon. The movie was shot on location in Astoria, Oregon, a former fishing village at the mouth of the Columbia River, in November of 1984.

My Piece for 20×2…

Smokler on March 17, 2014

I was fortunate to be one of the speakers at 20×2 this year at SXSW Interactive. The question each of us had to answer in 2 minutes was "What Was The Last Thing You Remember?"

My answer…

What was the last thing you remember?

The Act of Remembering is a half-filled promise, an open loop, the brass ring falling to the ground as the carosuel whirls by. You may remember every detail, but you cannot retrieve it or live it again. Memory gifts you every sense, except touch.

Collective Rememering, we remembering is memory you can touch visit, live with, and wrestle to understand. Momuments, cemeteries, labrynths and sidewalk graffiti all say “We were once here and through, stone, paint and time we have reconciled the past and the future in the silent present.

Remembering can be glue, a golden rope, a circle of held hands. The sharing of memory pull us tighter together than the sharing of money, place, even blood. “We have been here” is the hydrogen of history. We have been here is the same as we have shared this, how we begin any understanding of who we are.

Remembering can be curse. Hyperthemesia is a neurological disorder of not being able to forget anything. Sufferers describe it as being a loud party where every past version of yourself. And you can never go home.

Remembering can also be a mistake. Some things are best left as memories. We keep them slung lighty over our backs so we may live looking ahead.

What if the last thing you remember is that there is no last thing? If our memories stand not in a line but at an intersection, arriving, departing, lingering, then circling back again? If our pasts were a library not a well? If to forget and to remember both meant to live, richly?