It’s enough for you to do it once for a few men to remember you. But if you do it year after year, then many people remember you and they tell it to their children, and their children and grandchildren remember and, if it concerns books, they can read them. And if it’s good enough, it will last as long as there are human beings. Ernest Hemingway, from ‘A Portrait of Mr. Papa,’ featured in Life magazine, January 10, 1949.
When I launched the Long Play Miami blog 12 years ago, I didn’t realize then that all of the hours I would invest researching the background and whereabouts of Miami’s homegrown musicians from the 1960s and then interviewing them and documenting their story publicly here, would bless me with many good experiences, including one of my favorites – the piece I wrote on Miami R&B guitar player Willie “Little Beaver” Hale, which just writing that two-part story would top my personal favorite list were it not for what happened later, when permission to use parts of the interview were requested (and later properly credited for) by a professor of journalism at the University of Tampa who published an award-winning anthology on Florida Soul music.
I have since written countless articles for Miami New Times and one for Rolling Stone, and continue to explore new stories to tell an old audience about the City of Miami (or retell old stories for a new audience). To know that my writings will exist electronically, discoverable through search engines, for my children and grandchildren to read brings me great joy.
In that spirit, I am happy to share that I started a podcast.
The episodes are thematically in line with my professional career and cover aspects of risk management, such as the potential effects of new laws and regulations on banking in Florida, government changes in Latin America and their impact on the region’s investment environment, or the emergence of financial technologies. The purpose is to share insights with listeners on how to do business and manage their risks the right way, i.e., more informed. I was hesitant when the podcast idea was first suggested to me by my firm’s marketing team. But they insisted and now we are rolling with one podcast per month since May 2023 with a list of invited guests secured for the coming months. And given my passion for music which readers of this blog can attest to, I’ve added my own twist at the end of each podcast episode, which is that I pose to the special guest, whether it’s the CEO of a local bank or a partner of a major law firm, an interesting question related to music. This has led to frank and personal discussions about Bruce Springsteen, Pitbull, Rush, and the Rolling Stones.
The podcast is called Integro Talks. It streams on Spotify and iTunes. Here is a link to the YouTube channel. Feel free to listen to an entire episode or fast forward to about 4-5 minutes remaining in any of the podcasts for the music discussion.
He’s never been afraid to take a chance. He’s never been afraid to take a risk. Elvis Costello is completely his own man when it comes to deciding what music he is going to make. – Elton John
In December 1977, on the heels of his critically acclaimed debut album, ‘My Aim is True,’ Elvis Costello was invited to perform on Saturday Night Live. The sketch comedy show was only in its third season then. During the show’s musical interlude, Elvis Costello & the Attractions began playing the song Less Than Zero but seven seconds into it, Costello went rogue. He waved at the band to stop playing, apologized to the audience in a polite English way, then launched into another track, Radio Radio.1
Since hearing that story some years ago, I began taking an interest in the artist. I listened and appreciated more than a handful of terrific songs that came my way organically either through their feature in a film or another outlet. So there was sufficient reason to jump at the chance to see him in concert when it was announced months ago that he would be playing at the Fillmore Miami Beach on January 12th.
As a casual fan of Costello’s music, I aimed to have zero expectations heading into the show. But in that effort, something strange started to happen. I began to actually have expectations, high expectations. After all, this was Elvis Costello, an icon, a genius, an inductee in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
On Friday night, as the audience settled into their seats, Costello appeared on stage, surprising some who thought there would be an opening act. Costello’s irreverence towards the conventional was on display from the outset. Sharing his first of many anecdotes, he said, “Someone asked me for a setlist. I said ‘fuck-off, just come see the show.’”
What followed, unexpectedly, was an uneven performance.
At times, Costello’s vocals seemed out of sync and off-key with his band, the Imposters and guest guitarist Charlie Sexton. On more obscure tracks, whether he was at the piano or playing one of several electric guitars, the arrangements appeared imbalanced and discordant.
But other moments I admit were beautiful. He tinkered around with the songs I knew. In Watching the Detectives, he took the ska-inspired hit into a moment of Phish-like, experimental jazz euphoria that was fascinating and a manifestation of his genius.
(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding was an absolute scorcher. The closer I Want You was stretched out for about fifteen minutes.
And yet, following any song, whether this fan approved or not, some in the crowd hollered and applauded. I wondered whether they were at a different event.
After the show, I asked a friend what she thought. “Four and a half stars [out of ten],” she grumbled.
The next day, I came across only laudable reviews from concertgoers on Ticketmaster’s website. “I loved it,” wrote one. “Elvis and the Imposters were awesome,” commented another.
Maybe in the end, it was simply Elvis being Elvis, threading through his performance on his many tangents, always daring and unafraid, and in the process, altering our expectations of what we thought we understood to be good and right.
Personal highlights from the setlist: My Baby Just Squeals (You Heal); I Don’t Want Your Lyndon Johnson; Like Licorice on Your Tongue; Watching the Detectives; Everyday I Write the Book; Blood & Hot Sauce; Alison; (What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding; I Want You.
“I didn’t really have anything against [Saturday Night Live]. I was more pissed off at being told what to play by the record company than I was at NBC, truthfully.” – Elvis Costello, January 2021 ↩︎
He was invited back in March 1989 and again in May 1991. ↩︎
“After all that time, you wonder; do I still have it? Am I still gifted? Can I really do it?”
The 73-year old Miami native is on the phone with me and talking about recording in a music studio for the first time in more than 40 years.
“By me singing in a church and by me singing around the house and that kind of thing, and everybody saying, yeah you still have it, it’s good. Come on, let’s do it”.
“It was a good experience,” she says.
Smith’s return to the studio is the subject of a new documentary, Sweet Soul, which had its premiere at the Miami Film Festival in March and is scheduled to play at festivals in Las Vegas and Sydney this year before heading for public television syndication.
After all that time, you wonder; do I still have it? Am I still gifted? Can I really do it?
Helene Smith
Smith was born in 1947. Her parents settled here from Alabama and had ten children. “I’m number four,” she says. The Smith family was a musical family. Some of her brothers played in bands and orchestras. Some of her sisters sang at the local Baptist church. As a youngster, Helene Smith demonstrated unique talent. At Brownsville Junior High, she was discovered by a teacher named Johnny Pearsall. “He would hear me sing and he asked me if I wanted to sing along with some other girls. But I guess the other girls had too much to do or whatever and I really wanted that, so I sort of hung in.” When Pearsall opened a record shop in Miami’s Liberty City neighborhood, Smith took a job there as a salesperson.
“In the afternoons, we met Clarence Reid. A few other people, they came. Clarence would write songs. Willie [Clarke] would write songs. My husband would write songs (Smith and Pearsall married in 1971). I would sing and rehearse. A lot of people came there, singing and rehearsing.”
Pearsall and Clarke, his former roommate from Florida A&M University, together with input from Reid, formed Deep City Records from the store. It was Florida’s first black-owned record company.
“Johnny had a big tape player and a piano,” says Smith. “We had a room back there. It was sectioned off. And we would practice till we get it – how do you say – down pat, as best we could.”
Deep City Records, along with related labels, Blue Star and Lloyd, became an incubator for Miami’s R&B talent. It was also Miami’s answer to Motown. Besides Smith, Deep City’s discography included artists such as Betty Wright, Frank Williams & the Rocketeers, Snoopy Dean, and The Moovers.
Smith’s 1964 recording, The Pot Can’t Talk about the Kettle, was the group’s first release, earning her the distinct honor of being Miami’s First Lady of Soul.
She followed up with other Miami soul classics including, Thrills and Chills, True Love Don’t Grow on Trees and Wrong or Right He’s My Baby. In the late 1960s, Deep City’s founders differed on the direction of the company and split. Pearsall took Smith to Philadelphia to record for the Phil-L.A. of Soul label under Jamie-Guyden Records which released her biggest commercial hit, A Woman Will Do Wrong, reaching #20 on Billboard’s R&B Charts in August 1967. (The track was written by Deep City’s Willie Clarke.)
Smith toured throughout the East Coast while her music played on Miami and Philadelphia radio stations. She then returned to Miami and recorded for Dash Records in 1971, a sub-label of TK Productions. TK Productions was owned and operated by the late Henry Stone, who produced smash hits for KC & the Sunshine Band, George McCrae, and Timmy Thomas.
In total, between 1964 and 1972, Smith recorded more than 25 songs.
But in the mid 1970s, after the birth of her only daughter, Smith was reluctant to continue along the same path.
She also became disenchanted with the music business.
“It didn’t work. It was just too hard,” says Smith. “Too many obstacles. I am going to leave like that. Too many obstacles. So I just left it alone.”
The wake left behind by promising black female artists from the 1960s is long and murky. One consequence is a hardened mistrust of others that cuts deep and can leave scars. Smith admits this is one of the reasons she exited the music business when she did.
Instead, she pursued a degree in education and became a public school teacher, which was a natural alternative for Smith. “I really wanted a lot of children. But that didn’t happen. So I wanted to be around children. I love children.”
She continued singing on Sundays at St. James African Methodist Episcopal Church in Miami.
The wake left behind by promising black female artists from the 1960s is long and murky.
In 2014, a trio of Miami filmmakers, Marlon Johnson, Chad Tingle, and Dennis Scholl, made a documentary film about Deep City Records and Miami’s early soul scene. Smith agreed to be interviewed for the film. During its premiere at Miami’s Olympia Theatre, Smith was nudged by one of the filmmakers to sing a few notes a cappella for the sold-out crowd. She obliged. Her vocals sounded as fresh and crisp as they did on the tracks she recorded in the sixties.
“Once seeing [the] Deep City [film], it really ignited her passion to go back to the studio,” says Johnson, who collaborated again with Tingle and Scholl on the new documentary. Johnson refers to the now legendary moment when Smith sang on stage and the audience’s enthusiastic response as “the beginning of the rebirth of her career.”
During the recording session, the filmmakers were impressed with Smith’s confidence after so many years away.
“I think that when she was working with Clarence [Reid], Johnny [Pearsall] and Willie [Clarke], back in the Deep City days, they would just tell her what to sing,” says Tingle. “Clarence would say: this is how I want you to sing it. They would rehearse, rehearse, rehearse it and it almost became robotic.”
This time, Smith took ownership of the song, he says, which was a welcomed sight. “It’s painful for a lot of them,” he adds. ”Having stardom and all of a sudden having nothing.”
From left to right: Chad Tingle, Dennis Scholl, Helene Smith, Marlon Johnson
At first, Smith says she was a little nervous but she embraced the journey. “Everybody was so nice and they just told me, listen, we are all going to do this together.”
The opportunity to revive one’s career and get another chance is a blessing. “I say to myself, in my lifetime – and I don’t plan to go anywhere, though it’s not up to me anyway.” She pauses and then begins again. “I have done this. I have done some of that, and I did some of this and I did that, and I think I made a circle here, which I’m happy about.”
Smith hopes that the film and her new song resonates with old and new audiences, particularly given our current times.
“The world has been through a lot and we’re still going through a lot. Once we get ourselves together, with the help of our master, which is God, whom I love, we can really enjoy each other and enjoy life. We got a new day. He’s granted us another day.”
“Let a new day begin,” she says, which happens to be the title of her new record.
About the Song
Let A New Day Begin was released in 2019 on Deep City Records and distributed by InnerCat Music Group, LLC. The song was written by Jason Joshua, produced by Andrew Yeomanson and WIllie J. Clarke, and recorded at Yeomanson’s City of Progress Studio in North Miami, Florida. The song is available for streaming here on Spotify.
It all started one month ago today. I received a text message from a friend. It read: Eddie Van Halen passes. Throat cancer. He was a genius. Instantly, all of these fresh memories came rushing back into my conscious mind and then, as if shoved into a moving vehicle, I found myself hurling down a one-lane path I can only describe as a Van Halen Super Highway, burning through Spotify streams and YouTube clips like an obsessive band groupie. The voyage has been a much needed cure to nurse my melancholy, which was far deeper than I expected. Maybe because Eddie’s death happened eight days before my 50th birthday. Maybe because the end of his life was a reminder of a part of mine that I don’t think about much anymore (my youth). Nevertheless, I embraced the experience as a blessing; a blessing to me, that is, but not necessarily to my wife.
Recent dinner
Wife: Can you please change the music? I don’t want to listen to Van Halen during dinner.
Me: Yes, dear.
Recent family road trip
Wife: Can you please change the music? I don’t want to listen to Van Halen the entire drive.
Me: Of course, dear.
Recent subsequent exchange
Wife: What’s with all this Van Halen stuff?
Me: What do you mean?
Wife: In all our years together, I never heard you once listen to their music.
Me: Let me explain.
Wife: Please do.
Me: I first learned of Van Halen around 1981. I was in the sixth grade. A classmate handed me a cassette tape of Van Halen’s debut album, which borrowed the band’s name as its title but anyone who’s anyone knows it as Van Halen I. The album was released in 1978 so I was a few years behind. At first, I was a little apprehensive. The bulk of my music knowledge until that point began and ended with whatever spun on local Top 40 FM radio. Hard rock music was the Devil’s music. In fact, the first track on Van Halen’s album was Runnin’ With The Devil and I was afraid I’d end up like that kid, Damian from The Omen. But Van Halen was vouched for by the generous friend mentioned above, so I played the cassette anyway. And sure as the Devil would have it, I was possessed. Michael Anthony’s power bass lines. Alex Van Halen’s loose drumming style. David Lee Roth’s raspy, high-pitched vocals. And then there was Eddie Van Halen’s maestro-like mysticism with the electric guitar. That would be the culprit to lure me to the dark side of rock music. The next morning, I sketched Van Halen’s famous logo on the brown paper bag covers of my school textbooks. (The logo, I would later learn, was a knock off from Jimi Hendrix, according to one of Van Halen’s former managers.) A year later, I bought Diver Down (1982), the band’s 5th album and while I didn’t dig it as much as the early Van Halen material, it still featured some amazing tracks. By the time 1984 was released, I was a veteran fan at the age of 13. I couldn’t wait to see the band’s performances on MTV and the campy videos for Jump and Hot for Teacher, but I relished in the album’s deeper cuts such as Drop Dead Legs and Top Jimmy.
Wife: Wow
Me: Yes. But then Dave left the band or he was kicked out, I don’t recall which one. It happened so fast. They brought in Sammy Hagar as a replacement and I was like, okay, lets see what this is going to be. I admit the Hagar years produced a more commercially viable sound for the band and it paid off for them. I enjoyed some elements of their first two albums, 5150 and OU812. Hagar gave the band a maturity that they couldn’t quite attain with David Lee Roth. But between you and me, I always thought the band had lost their edge. In the summer of 1988, I paid a large sum of money to see Hagar with Van Halen live at the Orange Bowl. But by 1991, after I turned 21, I stopped paying attention to Van Halen. Maybe I’d outgrown them now that I could legally drink at a bar and was a year further away from my teen years. My musical tastes evolved and I felt Van Halen was not part of that evolution. But ever since Eddie passed away, I have been listening to everything from the early material to the even most recent tracks with a rebooted version of the original band when they brought back David Lee Roth. I’ve also watched clips of interviews, short documentaries, and bootleg concert videos. And then, of course, there was that whole poster thing.
Wife: Yeah, what was that about? You almost spent $200 on it.
Me: Actually, it was $227.50.
Wife: My God.
Me: I know. I used to have posters in my bedroom as a kid, mostly of bands. There were only two individuals that ever graced the wall above my headboard: Earvin “Magic” Johnson and Eddie Van Halen. So after he passed away, I searched eBay for that Van Halen poster and guess what? Some guy in Pittsburgh was selling his original from 1983 for $50. I bid on it and felt good at $60 and then upped it to $65. But then I was outbid. I went back and forth with this one bidder for most of the day until we surpassed $200. At all times, I thought it was totally reasonable. After all, it was my birthday.
Wife: Uh-Huh
Me: I know it sounds cliché but when Eddie died, a part of my past was resurrected. An innocent time; no election anxiety, no global pandemic, no worrying about the future. It all came back to me and comforted me every minute I spent with Van Halen these last few weeks. And this poster was like my golden ticket to Wonka’s chocolate factory.
Wife: But you didn’t get the poster in the end.
Me: I decided to walk away. I made a strong effort but there was still someone out there who wanted it more than me with far more disposable income apparently. I wondered about that person’s story and thought, okay, fella, have at it. But then I found an original copy of Van Halen’s debut album, the one with the Devil track I mentioned earlier.
Wife: You mean, Van Halen I?
Me: Exactly, and the bidding was closing within an hour. I waited until the last minute and outbid everyone, and a small part of my own past arrived in the mail a week later.
Wife: Have you listened to it?
Me: Not yet but when I do, I will play it very, very loud.
One Friday evening in mid-January, after Arthur Baker finished his warm-up DJ set before New Order took the main stage, he found an old couch backstage at the Fillmore Miami Beach, opened a bottle of Malbec, and griped about the crowd for their aversion to dancing during his lively set.
“I should have played Planet Rock,” said Baker, as he poured wine into a cup.
Baker had every reason to gripe. A quick peek from my vantage point during his set showed an apathetic audience standing around like still life paintings on the venue floor.
Baker knows that if there is anything that could have zapped that Miami crowd and raise the historic roof off the place formerly known as the Jackie Gleason Theatre for the Performing Arts, it is Planet Rock, the defining hip hop track that he produced for Tommy Boy Records with Afrika Bambaataa and the Soul Sonic Force almost 40 years ago.
In 1981, Baker was a 26-year old DJ in Brooklyn, New York with a desire to break into music producing. He began exploring new technologies in sound including the Roland TR-808 drum machine, aka the 808, the first ever Japanese-manufactured electronic music machine to have a documentary film devoted entirely to it.
Baker met Tom Silverman while moonlighting as a writer for a music publication. Silverman was also a DJ and was starting his own dance music label. Baker came on board and produced the first track on Silverman’s Tommy Boy label: Jazzy Sensation with Bambaataa, the former Bronx street gang leader who became a hip-hop pioneer.
The record’s momentum and success (reportedly, 50,000 records were sold) prompted the team to return to the studio. This time, Bambaataa brought in DJ Jazzy Jay and a trio of rappers, Mr. Bigg, Pow Wow, and MC Globe, who called themselves the Soul Sonic Force. Baker managed the vocal hooks.
“We used a recording studio in the Upper East Side called Intergalactic Music Studio,” says Baker, during a recent phone interview. He says it was the same one used by the Beastie Boys (who would go on to record a track inspired by the studio’s name.)
Planet Rock contains futuristic sound elements, including lasers and robotic static, other-worldly analog synth tracks, laid over a hypnotic back beat. But the most iconic sound is the crushing boom of the bass, enhanced by the 808’s technology that Baker mastered.
Afrika Bambaataa backstage at the Vic Theater, Chicago, Illinois, August 17, 1982. (Photo by Paul Natkin/Getty Images)
When Planet Rock launched into 1982 America, it propelled hip hop into the stratosphere and caused a sonic boom that caught attention. The song peaked at #4 on Billboard’s R&B Charts in July 1982 and crossed over to the more mainstream Hot 100 pop charts, becoming the biggest rap song since Sugarhill Gang’s Rappers Delight three years earlier.
Baker recalls, “We were making a rap record, but we mixed it like a dance record. A lot of it became standard to this day that back then we did experimenting,” says Baker, who went on to work with New Order, Bruce Springsteen, Hall & Oates, Diana Ross, and Mick Jagger.
Arthur Baker (Photo by Patrik Andersson)
“We basically did a mash-up,” he says, referring to the inspirations he tapped into to mix Planet Rock. At the time, Baker was a fan of the early-techno sound of the German electronic group Kraftwerk. “When I heard Numbers, I thought it would be great to use that beat with the melody of Trans Europe Express.”
Baker says the German band came after the label and eventually got paid for writing and publishing rights.
“Kraftwerk couldn’t come after us for having sampled their record because we didn’t sample their record. None of this stuff was sampled, it was just replayed. We redid everything,” says Baker, who lives in Miami.
“We got away with it because I guess it was an early one. It wasn’t like we hid it,” admits Baker. “We made that record, which blew up.”
“Planet Rock was one of the first [12-inch records] that I bought,” recalls longtime Miami house DJ Oscar G. He says one Christmas his wish list to Santa included “a bunch of Arthur Baker records.”
Oscar G (Photo by Michael Campina)
“That was the beginning of my DJ record collection. Arthur’s stuff was the first stuff in my record box.”
And Planet Rock?
“That’s the one,” he says. “I would sit in my house and listen to this shit over and over and over. I was so blown away by it, not only the original mix, but I loved the dub, the bonus beats, the whole shit. It was so fucking cool.”
“There were definitely records that came out [before] that had that rap element,” says Oscar G, “but Planet Rock was the perfect representation of what I think was happening at that time in the Bronx and New York.”
It has been well-documented that Planet Rock energized an emerging street dancing scene that was breaking out of the abandoned buildings of the South Bronx in the early 80s.
“It’s the ultimate representation of that B-Boy culture that was happening in that moment,” says Oscar G.
“Arthur was able to bottle that movement, he says, “and Planet Rock is that bottle.”
“I remember the first rap music we heard on the radio was Rappers Delight,” says Andrew Yeomanson aka DJ Le Spam. “But that was more like disco rap. [Planet Rock] was the death of disco rap. It meant that from then on, hip hop could be made electronically, much more cheaply and much more available to different artists, because you didn’t need to have $5,000 to go into a studio and hire a band,” says Yeomanson, who founded the Spam All Stars.
Andrew Yeomanson (Photo courtesy of Andrew Yeomanson)
“If you didn’t have that range or scale, you can still make music,” he says. “People could create music on a budget, so it made it available to people who were on a street level and maybe only had a few hundred dollars and some verses in their head.”
Yeomanson says in Planet Rock, Baker demonstrates his skill with the different electronic drum machines, including the 808.
“Arthur was leading the charge with the gear. He got work and notoriety because he was the guy with these sounds”
So is Planet Rock that one record that blew up hip hop?
“Yeah, of course, it was,” responds Yeomanson.
‘That’s it. That changed everything.”
End Note: Efforts to reach Luther Campbell of Miami’s 2 Live Crew for his comments were unsuccessful.
If there was something you could count on between 1976 and 1986 as sure as the sky was blue was that at any time of the day on the radio, you could probably hear the voice of Michael McDonald.
Whether he was harmonizing in the background for Steely Dan, or singing lead for the Doobie Brothers, or performing any one of his top 40 solo hits, McDonald’s distinctly, husky voice was a staple on FM radio, a reminder that whatever angst existed during that decade, the soothing voice of Michael McDonald could be found by just turning the radio dial.
So when McDonald walked on stage on Friday night at the North Beach Bandshell during the 4th Annual GroundUP Music Festival, took a seat behind a Yamaha grand piano, greeted the audience briefly, and then vocally belted his first note, it was a comforting reminder that there are things from our past that are still intact.
Backed by members of the Grammy-award winning jazz collective Snarky Puppy including bassist Michael League and keyboardist Shaun Martin, as well as virtuoso guest-saxophonist Chris Potter, the Michael McDonald Quintet, as they billed themselves on Friday night in Miami, performed a remarkable 50-minute set that included Doobie classics like Takin’ it to the Streets and What a Fool Believes, his 1982 hit, I Keep Forgettin’, and his own version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, that at first made me cringe until I was swept up by the easy-listening vocal register of Michael McDonald.
Before the show I ran into a friend who admitted he was “kind of a Michael McDonald fan,” to which his wife quipped, “[My husband] used to be cool.”
And I get it: liking Michael McDonald isn’t really ‘cool’ and admitting that you are a Michael McDonald fan in public is really uncool. In fact, I would argue that the genre that McDonald’s music falls into, somewhere between “Easy Listening” and “Yacht Rock”, is the polar opposite of cool.
But I get the sense that Michael McDonald doesn’t seem to care about any of that.
Since 2013, the 68-year old has been gradually increasing his work load. He appeared at Coachella in 2017. Last year, he performed fifty shows including the Curaçao North Sea Jazz Festival.
This coming May, he will join the remaining members of the Doobie Brothers in Cleveland as they are inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Then the band will embark on a 50th anniversary tour that kicks off in South Florida at the Coral Sky Amphitheatre in June. That’s more than cool. In fact, given present day America’s fast-pace culture and hyper-ventilating news cycle, Michael McDonald might just be the easy listening we need right now.
p.s., Stay tuned for upcoming pieces including one about the ground-breaking hip hop record that remains a force nearly 40 years later (“It changed everything.”).
It was reported recently that actors Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter are reuniting to film “Bill & Ted Face the Music,” the third installment in the “Bill & Ted” series. The 1989 original film saw Reeves and Winter portray a couple of California high school slackers who dream of becoming rock stars. When the likelihood of flunking a final history exam most heinously threatens their lifestyle, they are visited by a futuristic character at a Circle K who stresses the importance of passing this particular test. Apparently the future of mankind depends on it (because Bill & Ted are, like, the Chosen Ones, dude.)
The pair travel through time in a telephone booth to prepare for the exam by meeting up with the likes of Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Freud, Mozart, and Lincoln and bringing these historical characters to present day San Dimas, California.
Cue the space-time continuum high jinks.
News of this upcoming film prompted me to think, not what I feel about Keanu Reeves using the term “bodacious” in 2018, but about time-travel and what-ifs, as in,
What if I could travel in a time machine?
Where would I go?
The answer is simple really.
At this very moment, I would go back to this very day, 50 years ago, May 18th, 1968.
Gulfstream Park, …
Hallandale, Florida, …
the site of The Miami Pop Festival.
The Miami Pop Festival was the first of its kind on the East Coast. Co-founder Michael Lang, a New Yorker who had settled in Coconut Grove and ran a head shop, and Ric O’Barry, a dolphin trainer at the Miami Seaquarium, decided to partner up and bring a music festival to Miami because – I don’t know – it was the 60s and it would be a groovy thing to do (?).
For Lang, the festival served as something of a test run; he would go on to co-produce Woodstock, in August 1969.
Now let me indulge some more in my time-travel fantasy ∼∼∼∼∼∼∼
Once I arrive at Gulfstream Park, I would take a seat near one of the two flatbed trucks that were rented to serve as a performance stage. Just after noon, I’d listen to the trippy musical rants of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, get my R&B fix with John Lee Hooker and Chuck Berry, then I’d persuade someone to save my spot, go for a snow cone, and come back for the headliner, The Jimi Hendrix Experience.
In the book, Woodstock Festival Remembered, Michael Lang remarked about the Miami Pops Festival:
It was going to be a two-day event; two shows a day, afternoon and evening. We rented out booths to sell head-shop gear and assorted psychedelia. We managed to get everything arranged and the crowds came. After the music began we realized somebody had forgotten to pick up [Jimi] Hendrix at the airport. I sent cars out to get him, but Jimi had gotten impatient and decided to rent a helicopter. This turned out to be beautiful. Just as Jimi was due to go on stage and we were going berserk, this helicopter came hovering over the stage…
Hendrix was fresh off his US festival debut performance at the Monterrey Pop Festival the year before and his debut LP, the masterful and incomparable Are You Experienced (1967). It’s fair to say he was the biggest rock star of the moment.
This electrifying performance would be one of Hendrix’s most memorable shows. The set list would include Hey Joe, Purple Haze, Foxey Lady, and Hear my Train a Comin’.
By the fifth song, I would pump my fist when Hendrix announces to the crowd that one of the amplifiers had blown out:
It’s really very bad trying to play on ashes. That’s all that’s left. Nothing but ashes.
The second day of the festival was canceled early by the organizers due to rain. Yet Hendrix wasn’t discouraged. He reportedly was inspired to write “Rainy Day Dream Away” which was featured on his third album Electric Ladyland (1968).
Look, I get it, Woodstock was and remains the mother of all music festivals, but it was the Miami Pop Festival that established the roots.
Or as Michael Lang once claimed:
This is where the seeds to Woodstock were sown.
Fortunately, you have a chance to time-travel too. Sort of. The HistoryMiami museum will launch a new exhibition this weekend titled “Miami Rocks” to honor the 50-year anniversary of the Miami Pop Festival. The exhibition will run until September 30, 2018.
(Photo credit for the above pictures belongs, with all due respect, to Ken Davidoff.)
Here is the virtuoso performing Foxey Lady 50 years ago today.
long play miami 