"Between 1969–1972, Howard Smith recorded interviews with scores of rock stars and cultural icons. As a Village Voice columnist and radio personality on WPLJ FM, Smith sat down for revealing, personal conversations with Eric Clapton, Andy Warhol, Jim Morrison, Buckminster Fuller, Janis Joplin, Jerry Garcia and Hugh Hefner, to name just a few. He interviewed John Lennon and Yoko Ono no less than five times, and called in live dispatches from his Winnebago parked stage-side at Woodstock. Smith was at the center of culture during an era of extraordinary transformation.

Smith kept the original interview reels, hundreds of them, buried in a crate in the back of his New York City loft, and they haven’t seen the light of day in over 40 years.

We’re launching this Kickstarter campaign to produce a limited edition, hand numbered box set with more than 12 CDs of the cream-of-the-crop interviews. Out of more than 150 interviews that we found, we’ve selected 18 incredible conversations for this boxed collection.

The Smith Tapes will also be a larger project. After the release of this box set, we will independently release 100 Howard Smith interviews on iTunes. These will be available in themed collections, downloadable as albums or as individual tracks.

So, what's left to do?

We’ve already digitized everything, so the heavy lifting is done. What once were boxes of reel-to-reel tapes stacked in the back of a West Village loft are now thousands of files on hard drives. Sifting through them was a forensic process, like an enormous audio jigsaw puzzle. We listened for clues in the conversations to chronologically piece together hundreds of disorganized and sometimes unlabeled reels. Then, often using online archives and a multitude of fan blogs, we determined the recording dates… It’s been a tedious blast.

We're asking for your help to raise funds for the cost of producing the box set.

As you can imagine, the audio editing, restoration and mastering on this project is intense. The tapes are 40 years old and were not stored with preservation in mind. Remarkably, most are in great shape, but the audio conditions do vary. Some reels have experienced magnetic tape degradation, and some had technical issues in the original recordings. We already have two incredible audio engineers hard at work on their restoration and mastering. They sound great.

This box set is going to be beautiful. We’ve teamed up with Art Director Masaki Koike at Phyx Design (winner of the 2007 Grammy Award: Limited Edition Box Set Category) to design it. The set will contain:

12 CDs of interviews
A USB drive shaped like a vintage cassette tape
A booklet featuring Howard describing each interview
Identically reproduced photos and memorabilia from the original collection to recreate the feel of digging through the boxes of reels yourself!

Disc 1 Mick Jagger 10/22/1969 & Eric Clapton 10/24/1970
Disc 2 Jim Morrison 10/21/1969
Disc 3 James Taylor 3/1970 & Lou Reed 3/26/1969
Disc 4 Frank Zappa 6/6/1971
Disc 5 Pete Townshend 6/1970
Disc 6 John Lennon and Yoko Ono 1/23/1972
Disc 7 Jerry Garcia 9/19/1970 & Janis Joplin 9/30/1970
Disc 8 George Harrison Spring/1969 & Joe Cocker 6/1969
Disc 9 James Rado and Gerome Ragni, HAIR 9/2/1969 & Abbie Hoffman 6/25/1970
Disc 10 Jane Fonda 3/1971
Disc 11 Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda, Easy Rider 6/1969
Disc 12 John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Bed-In Montreal 5/29/1969
Cassette tape USB drive Hugh Hefner 6/1969 & Live phoned-in broadcast reports from Woodstock 8/15-17/1969 & 1 hour of Howard wandering around Woodstock with a handheld tape recorder 8/15-16/1969


http://nanobotrock.com/209-5/2668

...Lo so che oramai sei cittadino del Mondo e oramai di base nel Regno Unito, ma in Italiano no eh!?!Ah ah ah ah, saluti compà!!

Mi scocciava tradurre, ho visto la notizia al volo ed allora l'ho postata prima di andare a suonare

In buona sostanza Smith, giornalista famoso per il suo approccio intimo con gli artisti (nel senso che le sue interviste erano qualcosa di diverso rispetto a quelle classiche) ha fatto una serie di interessantissime interviste, che però non sono mai state pubblicate..per cui adesso si sta facendo un progetto per stampare queste interviste inedite su CD, compresi di copertina ecc. ecc. affinchè siano finalmente fruibili al grande pubblico..e tra le varie interviste "interessanti" ce n'è anche una a Mick Jagger pochi giorni dopo Altmont!

In buona sostanza è questo