Listen to full interview with music here:

I’m very happy to be able to post this full one hour radio show recorded 7/19/2023 from 9 – 10p on WFUV. I’ve always been a huge fan of Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era 1965–1968 so it was a blast as well as an honor to have the man who created it, Lenny Kaye, come in and co-host an hour with me on-air. In addition to his adorable dog Sylvie, Lenny brought the 50th anniversary 5 LP set unleashed earlier this year for Record Store Day. We played some tunes from the original compilation as well as the planned but – until recently unreleased Vol. 2, and a bonus disc of songs that were considered for the original set but not included for one reason or another. Lenny spoke about the circumstances surrounding his curation, offered tidbits about a handful of songs and artists, and revealed details about the upcoming Golden Jubilee shows at City Winery.  

A tremendous lineup headed by Patti Smith and Iggy Pop has been unveiled for this year’s Tibet House benefit concert happening Thursday, March 16th at Carnegie Hall.  Laurie Anderson, Alabama Shakes, and Sufjan Stevens as well as Bernard Sumner, Phil Cunningham, and Tom Chapman of New Order will all perform along with Philip Glass who – besides being a brilliant composer – has been a pillar of Tibet House since its inception.  If you click on that last link you can see how many cool movies like The Hours, Kundun, Dracula and Hamburger Hill that Glass has written scores for as well as what’s brewing for his 80th birthday concert season. Among the offerings of the octogenary celebration is an appealing opportunity to see and hear members of the Philip Glass Ensemble offering a live interpretation of the music he composed for Jean Cocteau’s film La Belle et la Bête at Town Hall.

The beneficiary of the benefit concert, Tibet House US, is located at 22 West 15th Street and include… a gallery, exhibition space, and the spiffy room where Glass generously sat down with me last year to speak about the event and its reason for being.  As the interview with Glass took place not many weeks after the death of David Bowie, I’ve included a bonus video here as his remarks about him are worth sharing.  His relationship with Bowie was such that he based symphonies on two of the albums –Heroes and Low –that Bowie made with Brian Eno in the Berlin trilogy.  In addition, to which he alludes, he crossed paths with him quite a bit in the first few years of the century when Bowie recorded at Looking Glass Studios in Soho.  Glass reveals he may yet complete a symphony for Lodger to complete the trilogy with Heroes and Low…

A confession: I typically do not enjoy either memoirs by or biographies about musicians.  I read a lot of them – and man, there are a lot of ’em – but it’s generally a chore.  I would must rather listen to the music that’s being parsed.  I generally don’t care where people grew up and what jobs their parents did – boring!  However, I slog through in order to glean the odd tidbit that I can pass along in radio shows and every once in a while the subject matter and the writing rise to the level of the gateway music.  That brings us to the books I’ve displayed haphazardly atop a table normally used for cookbooks at the McNally Jackson bookstore in Soho who were kind enough to indulge me…

We’ve got books memoirs by Elvis Costello, Chrissy Hynde, and Carrie Brownstein (who will be in town next month with her band) and a biography about Sam Phillips by Peter Guralnick who is best known for his two volume examination of Elvis Presley.  We’ve also got a biography on Tom Petty penned by Warren Zanes who was in a dynamite rock band himself The Del Fuegos and these days works with Steven Van Zandt in the Rock n Roll Forever Foundation.  We’ve got cultural criticism from Richard Hell and a piece of work from Patti Smith that resists any of the traditional literary categories.

Yesterday I participated in the final broadcast of The Alternate Side radio station.  It was emotional!  After Russ Boris, Alisa Ali and I played New Order and Joy Division back to back, I recalled the once in a lifetime pairing of Iggy Pop and New Order performing a couple of Joy Division songs last Spring at the Tibet House Benefit Concert at Carnegie Hall.  I got a few queries about the video so here is the report from March of 2014 that includes interview bits with Bernard Sumner of Joy Division and New Order – as well as Matt Berninger with the Dessner brothers of The National, and Philip Glass as they were part of the event as well… as was Patti Smith, Lenny Kaye, and Sufjan Stevens. By the way, a new New Order album, their first proper one in a decade, will be out next month.

Plus here’s a special bonus minute of Iggy with New Order performing Joy Division’s Transmission with no voice over…

Patti Smith’s year end tradition of playing NYC shows to celebrate her birthday (her 68th in this case) along with the new year keeps getting better.  Her friend Michael Stipe opened the show in, a couple of one-offs aside, his solo debut!  I spoke with Patti in an expansive interview HERE in 2012 on the day her last album Banga came out.

Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, The National & New Order…

I recently traveled to the home of Columbia Records in the Sony Building on Madison avenue to visit with Patti Smith. The hallways there are filled with beautiful framed photographs of legendary Columbia artists like Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. Adjacent to the door of the room where we met was one of Ms. Smith herself. I had read somewhere that she was working on a crime novel, so I brought her a gift of a Jim Thompson paperback and, as time was tight, we jumped right into conversation. 

The occasion was the release of her first album in eight years, Banga, recorded at Electric Lady Studios where Patti had recorded her very first single and — years before that — was the place where she had a memorable meeting with Jimi Hendrix. I asked Patti to recall that meeting, which she generously did before offering some insights into her new songs and creative process.

Hear the interview here.