Friends who changed me, #3 in a series: Dan Smolan

This past summer my 16-year-old daughter Haley tried out and made the High School Cheerleading Squad in Alameda. She spent a good portion of the summer practicing hard with the other cheerleaders, and since the school year began her mother and I have unexpectedly found ourselves enjoying the American ritual of attending football games in our home town and the surrounding areas of the East Bay.

All of this comes as a huge surprise to everyone, and yet in some ways it is totally understandable. Haley has been getting great energy physically and emotionally from her participation at this school activity, and we like how it has affected her spirits and sense of connection to her school.

But going in I was deeply suspicious: my experience with school spirit at my own high school in La Mesa was quite different from Haley’s. Cheerleaders that wanted to make the team in 1970’s La Mesa had to campaign and be voted in by the students themselves. It was a ballot, and ended up being a popularity contest. I remember feeling furious when an Iraqi girl in my English class named Sindus Habib didn’t make the cut, because she was so good at her cheers and fit the part perfectly. But although she was perfectly accepted by her friends I realized that she didn’t have the necessary killer instinct to do the deliberate socializing that was required for a girl to become popular enough to be voted on the team.

I loosened up at Haley’s school when I learned that the cheerleaders are chosen by the two women adult coaches. The girls simply have to have the ability to learn the moves and do them within a reasonable amount of time. The size of the squad increases and decreases without limits and with the number of qualified girls, including when grades slip and the cheerleader at risk must attend games but sit on the bench until her tests improve. I see girls of various races, cultures and body types on Haley’s team, and it’s a big relief to me. There are even a few somewhat socially shy girls participating, and they are on a level playing field with the other girls as soon as the uniform is put on.

All of Haley’s High School experiences, including the recurring sub-theme of insiders vs. outsiders bring back my own memories from time to time, including the following one:

As a young teenager I met an interesting guy named Dan Smolan on the Junior High school bus. He was a tall guy with a slightly goofy laugh who I noticed had an ability to hang with most of the varied cliques and groups at our school. His best friend was Mark Phillips, and since this early time these two were thick as thieves. They were the kind of guys that went through a phase of riding around on their ten-speeds during adolescence pulling down a few neighborhood mailboxes for laughs and maybe doing something mean to the school property on the weekend when no one was around. No fires or pipe bombs (which did happen occasionally), but more minor stuff they eventually grew out of within the year. But this made them different than me, and I thought of Dan as someone who would take certain chances to increase the laugh factor.

I remember one time hanging casually with Dan at the Homecoming school dance, and being surprised when he excused himself to go over to congratulate the Homecoming King. Dan was well recognized at that brief moment, but he didn’t hang around for the serious soc scene that ensued. The next year the same thing unexpectedly happened to me; a good friend of mine, Mike Ewing, was named the Homecoming King. Years later I realized the compelling reason I knew these guys was our tentative connection as creative types…

One afternoon Dan got a wild hair and drove me to La Jolla shores just to check things out. When we got there he pulled out a Canon camera and started shooting a roll of B&W film, possibly for school. But the engaged way he was doing it told me it wasn’t for an assignment, he was doing it for fun. As he stared at some pilings under a pier, he talked me into wading into the water and striking a pose that he demonstrated for me.

Later when he developed the film in the school darkroom I had a chance to see the shots he had taken. Every picture was remarkable. I had taken the same photography class and had learned the same darkroom techniques, and it was this familiarity that gave me the edge to see a striking difference between his work and mine: every one of his shots was an interesting and composed keeper. When I shot a roll I would hope for 2 or 3 good ones, and I’m often still that way, yet here was Dan with a full roll of noteworthy pictures.

Dan participated with the Annual Yearbook student staff during that Senior year and then something embarrassing happened: the shot of me under the pier had been chosen for the Yearbook. I protested weakly, but Dan’s goofy smile disarmed me. I felt queer about the picture because I hadn’t done the concept, but after seeing it again many months after school ended I realized the picture did have some connection to my personality. I was in a cross-like pose in a natural setting, suggesting a vague non-religious spirituality that would build privately over time.

Another very memorable event was the time Dan rounded up Mark Phillips and I, told us to dress up a little, and then drove us to downtown Horton Plaza on a weekend night. In those days, Horton Plaza was notoriously seedy and trashy, catering to sailors and society’s rejects. People from the suburbs would lock their car doors as they drove by, even in the day. One of my favorite details about this period of Horton Plaza was that drag queens would consistently appear around the fountain area at night, congregating for action and to socialize. More than once a street person blew me away with poetry or a song as we walked by.

On this particular night, the three of us went to the fountain area where there were large public underground rest rooms you would never go into alone. The walls were white tile, and like any bathroom the sound was just crying to be sung to. Dan seemed to know what was coming, and immediately we found four African-American guys standing in a circle sharing a single cigarette and singing in a lively Motown/R&B style. They were friendly, and Dan immediately produced a pack of filter-less cigarettes guaranteeing us the required admission to hang more than 5 minutes. These guys were making up a song on the spot; it was called “The Girl Next Door” and I still remember the tune very well. The hook stuck with me so effectively I still sing it from time to time 30 years later. The gentlemen’s voices were so authentic and soulful, and we encouraged them to record their song and send it in to the very popular local annual KGB Homegrown album contest. They had never heard of this of course, but that was the best we could do. It was a concert of one night only, and we parted ways with the singers forever when we left, but I never forgot the music. As we drove home in Dan’s truck, it was silently but laughably obvious that I would never have had this experience if it hadn’t been for him.

After about age 20 I never saw Dan again, but I heard an unconfirmed rumor in my mid -20’s that Dan had been found wrapped in a blanket on a cold morning on the SF State campus tripping hopelessly on acid, talking to himself incoherently as he was taken away. I was angry that I heard the rumor in an unsympathetic way and hoped he had recovered and had a chance to begin his journey to a happier place, the one most creative people take when they are in their 20’s (when they are lucky enough to get there).

Last year I received several Facebook links to my High School reunion and I clicked on a name page of no-shows, which included me. They had a special page that included photos of those who have passed on early, and I was deeply saddened to see Dan’s picture with a passing date of 1991. There was no further information, and I will be clicking on a few more friends’ pages hoping to eventually learn more to bring closure to the loss of a cool guy that I once knew.

But regardless of that loss, nothing can take away the treasured handful of unique and valued things that happened to me for merely knowing Dan Smolan.

No Prepared Stories Allowed

When I was a young boy, my parents often held dinner parties for their friends and professional acquaintances. These occurred in New York City and San Diego during the 60’s and early 70’s, and between the occasional neck scarves, cocktails, pipes and cigarettes they sometimes resembled Playboy After Dark or Mad Men episodes.

One classic feature of these get-togethers was hearing my parents tell the same stories we kids had heard so many times before. I would wince as soon as the first word came, knowing the punch-line in advance. I swore as a child that when I grew up I would not recycle the same joke at every party I went to, knowing from experience the wooden effect this sometimes had.

The following is my version of a story I would have told at parties all these years if I had been my parents; I will share it here just this once, (and you have my word I will not bring it up unless asked at any future party we might attend).

When I was 20 I got a job as a busboy and waiter at a busy coffee shop/dinner house (CoCo’s/Reuben’s) in La Mesa, California. There were 30 waitresses and 7 Waiters, and most were in their early 20’s and attending college. The work was fast-paced and the shifts and schedules were constantly changing each week, so it took a young person's stamina to generate the kind of frantic energy required for this otherwise simple job. The staff appeared to be mostly wholesome Co-ed types, and we all wore the same uniform which had a socially equalizing effect that I used to appreciate. But despite the seemingly homogenous group there was a range of personalities, including devout Christians, closet druggies, conservatives, radicals etc.

My Mom was recently divorced from my Dad then and I was still living at home, so I was very happy to discover that the restaurant offered partial Dental benefits. This meant I could spare my Mother the expense of having my impacted wisdom teeth removed, which made me very proud. One of the other Waitresses had also recently had her wisdoms out, so she enthusiastically evangelized to me about the healing properties of pineapple and assured me that my recovery would go much better if I tanked up on fresh pineapple before and after the procedure.

The next month, as I lay on the operating table counting to ten backwards, it seemed like only one minute had passed before my sister Jenna and our friend David Jurist had arrived to pick me up from the Oral Surgeon’s office. During the ride home I was delirious from the medication and was told I said funny things, but as the weekend played out the promise seemed to come true: I experienced very little pain and healed several days sooner than the Surgeon had predicted.

During my two recovery days I watched Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth on TV, a very good quality made for TV miniseries that held my full attention. The Jesus actor had unlikely green eyes and seemed British in that vague rock star kind of way, so I was really pulled in to the story despite my vehemently agnostic attitudes.

When I returned to work there were two co-worker friends I couldn’t wait to talk to: the pineapple/natural foods disciple, and one devout Christian who I knew would love to hear my sincere enthusiasm about the Jesus movie.

As always, things were busy, so I quickly touched base with my pineapple friend and told her how right she was: I had gorged faithfully and the surgery had gone so well. She was thrilled to hear the news.

I waited until my first break so the Christian woman and I could relax and talk about Zeffirelli’s great movie. We got very involved discussing the whole story, and I enjoyed finding common ground with a believer and noted her implied respect for me as a card-carrying agnostic. We went through each chapter together, and she suddenly became very impassioned when we got to the scene depicting Christ’s suffering on the cross. “Oh, he suffered so much, he died for us; he felt so much pain…”

Just then, my other friend passed by in a hurry and caught the last part of our conversation.

With a surge of excitement, she asked “Has he tried pineapple??”

The Attraction List

Below is a list I recently made of some of the many reasons why I have been attracted to music over my lifetime…or realized someone else was. There are undoubtedly an infinite number of additional possibilities….




You have been soothed with a lullaby

You have awoken and now have the need to be excited

You are very young and a song calls up an odd emotion you can not name, much like a vegetable that you dislike

An exceptional television theme is worth humming

Your parents’ favorite music produces an ennui you can’t describe; you feel cold and austere like a cloudy day

Someone older than you plays a record at a key moment and you will never forget it

You feel rebellion

You discover a certain music and feel possessive of it

You heard a song when that cute girl/boy agreed to dance with you. You are correct that it was an amazing song to begin with

You have the need to define your identity…and what others are not

New trends and fashions emerge among your friends and disturb you

New trends and fashions emerge among your friends and excite you

You are willing to lead or follow but you will never get out of the way

The singers and/or guitarists of your favorite bands also possess interesting personalities; you like hearing them talk almost as much as you like their music

You have experienced the potential embarrassment of liking the “wrong” socially accepted music

Deep inside you is a message that already exists. An exceptional musician, possibly you, has been preparing to open that message and you are destined to experience it

You don’t know how some musicians do that thing they do. The duration of mystery increases with value over time

You listen to music with an appealing power to offend older people, as well as those your age that don’t get it, (and you don’t want them to)

Appealing to a darker side, you experience a private period of comforting seclusion

You have worked hard at work or school and the need to be entertained is now a quantifiable requirement

Driving a car, feeling the pace and experience of traveling, you find a music that traces the romance of a new place

You guess what will be corny and what will be classic years from now. You compare notes to yourself in 30-40 years

You like hearing music while you work. You choose the station but begin to feel the music on the radio was chosen for you

You play an album or group of songs every single day and then slowly grow out of that ritual

You noticed some time ago that you like music better and more deeply if it takes a little while to discover

You are disheartened to learn that music is so tangible that its dissemination can be directed by simple honesty, commerce or mafia-like violence

A recent sound is more refined than the last thing you enjoyed. You are basically powerless for the next 5 minutes. You then return to your tuna sandwich

A sudden change in context imparts a new listening experience for music with which you are already familiar

Someone plays a song you love rather poorly, and yet for that reason you notice some intrinsic element of excellence that you hadn’t previously appreciated

You like hearing music while you work. There are disputes over what kind of music to work to, so you consider leading the process and then decide to stay out of it

Your mind wanders to slaves in the fields and then Egyptian laborers whose music you will never hear. Why did they choose that rhythm, that melody? It makes perfect sense

Musicians that were oppressed and made to remain silent exist far away from your free world. Perhaps they composed silent songs. Someday someone will imagine and record that music

As an adult you are startled by a young child’s ability to make up a song to a live musician’s spontaneous playing

You feel a sheepishly functional swell of emotion during anthems, both political and non-political

In neighborhoods you do not live in, culture and tradition clash with a new generation. As the fight rages, you are duplicitously grateful for both armies

You enjoy some guilty pleasures, and are pleased nothing is stopping you

You hum a song that everyone loves at that moment, indulging in a simultaneous national or world experience

Curious…where did this new music come from? Tomorrow I might remember it as if it was always familiar

You no longer like hearing music while you work unless you are alone and can enjoy what you really like

You listen to Spiritual and holy music, relishing the need for music in a church you don’t attend

You realize that music can be a conduit to a higher level, perhaps in leaps or very gradual steps

Your long-held opinions are both confirmed and wholly revised by a change in the primary actors of your life

You are comforted by an implied musical message that someone is like you, these are your people, and there are millions like you out there

You are comforted by an implied musical message that you are fairly rare and yet not alone, for this is being heard by at least a few more

You experience a faint but consistent Déjà vu when you hear some type of music that has nothing to do with your race, culture, or time period

You discover that self-described tone-deaf people with no apparent rhythmic abilities and little education can reveal something critically valued about music you didn’t know

As you fall asleep to what is effectively your favorite lullaby, you glimpse what you can never explain

My Light in a Milky Way of Stars

(Photo by Carmen Borgia, 2/2010)

Like most of the rest of the universe of aspiring musicians, I have had dreams as big as you can have them. Dreams are one of the critical ingredients of any success story, and as a youth I never held back my wishes for musical success. Decades down the road now, I know I am in a large club of players who went for something big and ended up taking home the music I made, the treasured memories of having made it, and not much more. After the breakup of my San Francisco-based band The Secret Sons of The Pope in June 1985, I made a carefully considered decision to let go of pursuing a career based on popularity as my primary goal. Following this decision, (which I admit I made by necessity) I immediately felt a burden lifted from my shoulders, which I felt narrowed my goal to the music itself. But then soon returned my ongoing issue of aspiring to a musically high standard. I have wrestled with this off and on since my first band, and sometimes I get over it and other times I’m just not satisfied. Did you see the Lovely Bones movie? If you read the book, you might have been as excited as I was that Peter Jackson had chosen to make a movie out of this very good story. Jackson can be called an experienced Director, and they even secured one of my very favorite participants in music, Brian Eno, to contribute to the soundtrack. But art is fickle enough that even experienced experts can put their foot in it and come up with less than they expected despite their best efforts. IMO the movie landed wrong, and in this case, I think it had something to do with the 100 year-old mystery of translating the art forms of book to movie. We go to movies for different reasons than we read a book, and The Lovely Bones film seemed to end up betraying its benefit to the audience. Another older example of this might be the dreadful Fountainhead movie remake of the book, with Gary Cooper. A horrible outcome, and author Ayn Rand herself wrote the misguided screenplay. Recently I’ve been recording songs that I’ve been playing to myself acoustically for years, and the process is alternately rewarding and vexing. On one hand I am wrestling with my skills of execution, but I am also reckoning with the unexpected result that can appear once committed to tape. (They still say “tape” these days to mean recorded, I heard an NPR commentator use it this week. As a musician I gotta love that). Shall I play it dramatically or understated? Joyful or downbeat? Pull out the stops or reign it in? One wrong decision and the whole song can start to mean a different thing. I remember one time in 7th grade my late childhood friend Scott was goofing around in our Social Studies class. He was the film Monitor, and it was his job to run the projector when we watched a short movie about a given subject. Scott was the class clown, and in a casual moment he picked up the flat brown metal circular lid for the 16mm film canister and pressed it slightly sideways on his head, like a hat. It looked silly that way, and he made a perfect silly voice to go with it. I remember instantly realizing that Scott hadn’t done that before, and yet he knew how he looked without looking in the mirror. It made a big impression on me, because I knew if I had tried the same thing I would have never realized the effect until I saw myself. For me, making music has been a process of not knowing the final result until I try something and then put myself in the audience’s position (listen back without playing). Sometimes I need to come back later and pretend I haven’t heard this music before, with the goal of removing as much personal bias as possible. Occasionally I have the good luck of total amnesia when I return to something and completely fail to remember ever having played it. Then I am in the best position to make a judgment on what I consider to be good, bad, or sending a message of any kind. Some artists like my friend Scott, (who was an actor) have the gift of knowing what they’re doing the moment they are doing it. In my case, I have had to make my temporary blindness an asset, by playing, forgetting, and returning over and over, note by note, until I dictate something/anything of meaning. It’s soooo much slower, but maybe this has given me some kind of advantage I didn’t know I had. Regardless, the two bottom lines will always be, is this any good and did I mean to say it? As I work at home each night on my latest recording, I am reckoning with both.