Book Review
Cosmic Scholar:
The Life and Times of Harry Smith (2023)
by John Szwed
It may be hard to imagine, but once upon a time, being cool took work. As it turned out, I was one of the last people to grow up without access to the internet- I remember seeing the internet work for the first time in my freshman college dorm room. I finished college and law school without possessing a lap top computer (I had a desktop computer in law school). Back when I was a lad, discovering the counter-culture required physically travelling to bookshops- I went to Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley and later, City Lights Book Store in San Francisco. Learning about new music meant going to Amoeba and Rasputin Records in Berkeley. These days, it's almost impossible to imagine the lengths I had to go to in order to learn about non-mainstream culture.
How timely then that author John Szwed had written this biography of Harry Smith, best known for his Anthology of American Folk Music, generally credited with inspiring Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead and literally the entire 60's music explosion. Smith was known as an icon of the downtown New York art scene though it was unclear what, exactly, he was up to at any given moment. The Anthology of American Folk Music was released in 1952 and it was created from Smith's amazing collection of 78 records, which he had begun collecting in the 1940's in the San Francisco Bay Area. Smith's biography is more interesting than any fiction, reading Cosmic Scholar is more interesting than reading a dozen works of contemporary literary fiction.
Each chapter is a different adventure: Smith starts in the Pacific Northwest, making field recordings of Native American songs before he had graduated high school. Next he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he became a trailblazer in the world of be-bop jazz and experimental cinema. Following San Francisco he relocated to NYC where he was an inspirational figure to the entire downtown art world through the 1960's and 1970's. During this period he was mostly focused on elaborately insane art films, a chapter which reaches its apogee with his attempt to make an "animated" version of the Wizard of Oz (never completed).
He started doing drugs in the Bay Area- where he was smoking marijuana and taking amphetamines in the 1940's. In New York he graduated to the hard stuff- by the 70's and 80's he became a regular user of cocaine and methamphetamine. As Szwed points out repeatedly (you could call it the story of Smith's life) he was his own worst enemy and managed to burn through friends and patrons via a mixture of extremely uncouth behavior (frequent tantrums) and constant need for people to give him money (he never, ever had a job). Szwed and others mention again and again that one of the marvels of Harry Smith's life is how he managed to even exist for decades in New York- making art and scenes, while never having a visible means of support.
Frankly, he sounds like a trust funder, but Szwed provides enough information(like the fact that he never had a bank account) to rule this out as a possibility. As an avowed experimental artist, much of what Szwed was trying to accomplish, artistically speaking, sounds ridiculous but his inspiration status can't be questioned. How else to explain that his primary supporters at the end of his life were Allen Ginsburg and Jerry Garcia and that his papers were purchased by the Bob Dylan archive?
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