Here’s an interview with my friend and colleague Barry Smolin, by Rip Rense. Barry is a high school English teacher, the host of KPFK’s The Music Never Stops, and a songwriter whose work I love.
Barry records and performs as Mr. Smolin, ’cause that’s how he is known to his students. His latest CD is The Crumbling Empire of White People.
A few of my favorite passages:
“Toll On You” functions as a kind of overture for the album. That’s why it’s the 1st track. It touches on all the themes to be explored. The lyrics to “Toll On You” were first inspired by John Donne’s “Meditation XVII,” which says, in part, “All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated . . . As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all . . . No man is an island, entire of itself . . . any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” In contemplating this passage I was struck by its profound statement of interconnectedness among all living beings (and the mortality we all share), and yet I was equally fascinated by the way this beautiful and necessary interconnectedness is also the very source of our sorrow and defeat. “Toll On You” therefore is a compendium of all the little failures and crumblings, all the little rejections and paralyses and betrayals that inevitably occur in the life of every human being in interaction with other human beings and take their little toll on one’s spirit. It’s a song about the slow erosion of the human capacity for bliss and fulfillment, a song for “every heart that feels defeated.”
I have been writing songs since I was 13 years old and have been drunk on music since my earliest conscious encounters with organized sound (and this includes the sounds of birds outside my bedroom window, the scraping of rakes on concrete, the Helms Truck horn, air raid sirens on Friday mornings, dogs howling along with ambulances as they’d pass, etc.). The Beatles were the first pop artists that I loved, and I was 3 years old in 1964, so they are embedded in my primeval memories. I literally grew up listening to The Beatles, not really understanding their social importance at all, hearing the albums my aunt would play when she babysat for me and my sisters.
The Beatles broke up when I was 9, but they remained my favorites for a long time thereafter. When dealing with The Beatles, though, there comes a point at which it’s sort of a waste of head-space to claim them as one’s ‘favorite’ because they are, in a way, beyond such a category. It’s like saying Shakespeare is your favorite writer. Well, duh. Nobody’s ever going to equal that, so create a separate echelon for genius and make room for all the other great artists who are also capable of illuminating you. The Beatles are The Beatles, and then there’s everybody else. All of my earliest songwriting lessons came from listening to Lennon’s and/or McCartney’s work. But, of course, I have had many many other mentors, including Stephen Foster, Hoagy Carmichael, Jerome Kern, Stephen Sondheim, Gilbert O’Sullivan, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and scads of others.
I write songs because it is simply one of the ways I respond to the world around me. I respond to the world in a variety of ways. I teach. I make radio. I write prose. I husband. I father. I love. I perform weddings occasionally. I contemplate the very impulse-energy of reality itself. And I also compose music. It’s all one impulse as far as I’m concerned. Creativity is as natural as breathing, dreaming, thinking, laughing, wishing, wanting that cute girl to like you . . . same difference.
As to my my goals as an artist? Those have changed over the years. My initial goal was to become the Jewish Tom Jones. Middle-aged women throwing their panties at me would have been my ideal destiny. Alas, I have neither the length nor the circumference to inspire that response. After that I aspired to become the Christian Sammy Davis, Jr., but, again, that length and circumference thing got in my way. And so now my goal, as a citizen in the crumbling empire of white people, is to report on life amid the impending ruins, whether psychological, political, romantic, absurd, whatever form the ruination takes, and where possible offer hope for the ultimate survival of our species once it comes to its senses. Of COURSE I would love it if lots of people turned onto my stuff and really dug it, but that’s not bloody likely and would really only be a sweet adjunct, not integral to serving the muse at all. I’ve been working in a vacuum for like 30 years. I’m very used to it. I create what I create because it’s involuntary. It’s one of my natural reflexes. An audience would be welcome but certainly isn’t required. I just keep doing what I do regardless.
There are those who teach literalist hogwash to young minds that are easily indoctrinated into the dogma of hatred. “Knee-jerk Literals” I call these manipulators. They are snake-oil salesmen, essentially, perpetuating an illusion.
Scriptural literalism robs us of possibility. I wish all the children of the world could be shown a bigger, truer, more nuanced version of reality’s complexities than what they learn about in their respective cultures. Ignorance is our worst enemy. Freedom of expression must never be surrendered. Here’s to a future that “needs not clergyman nor king,” to quote one of my own songs once again.
I think young people today are more connected to each other than ever before (due to electronic and online communication technology) yet on the other hand they are also fractured into a variety of niches when it comes to culture and the creative arts. They don’t have a spokesman because they’re all into these very narrow little scenes. There is no Beatles or Bob Dylan to come forward as the public conscience of a generation because there’s no way to reach everybody with one type of music anymore. You’d need 5 or 6 Dylans now, each playing in a different style. There’s no consensus icon. Harry Potter doesn’t quite cut it. They are also bombarded with shitloads of infotainment programs which utterly blur news, art, and commerce. It can be difficult to see one’s way past that haze and into enlightened awareness of what’s really going on out there.
Please read the interview with Mr. Smolin, and give a listen to The Crumbling Empire of White People, too.
