11/20/2023

Smith, the bassist for 1990s punk band Speedball Baby, delivers a winning and moody memoir that covers her coming-of-age in New York City’s vibrant and volatile music scene. Smith grew up as a latchkey child of divorce in 1980s and ’90s Manhattan, where she drowned out the damage from her parents’ difficult divorce by immersing herself in the city’s hardcore and punk milieus. While attempting to juggle a violent boyfriend and empty pockets as a young adult, Smith leaned on the friends who would become Speedball Baby, whom she collected during adolescent nights out: guitarist Matt Verta-Ray was the group’s grounded leader who quietly funded the band’s work by selling a trove of Basquiat paintings he stumbled onto on a curb in Hell’s Kitchen shortly after the artist’s death; singer Ron Ward wrote poetic songs about the highs and lows of his drug use. Speedball Baby’s exploits took them from obscurity to major label semisuccess and back again, though in Smith’s telling, the band was equally happy playing dives where they were actively antagonized as they are performing in European venues where fans recall their mid-’90s to early-2000s heyday. Smith vividly captures the era’s grit and glamour (“Our band plays... in bars where the sour/sweet smell of years’ worth of spilled beer lives inside the wood”) without glossing over its uglier attributes, including sexism, physical assault, and skinheads. Aspiring musicians and punk fans will eat this up.

Ali Smith writes artfully, with harrowingly honest vision. An unflinching look at being a female punk rock musician searching for a place to belong in a scummy man’s rock world. A wild ride. I could not stop reading it.”

Ali Smith’s The Ballad of Speedball Baby is a sometimes-harrowing ride poetically described in neon prose. Ali takes me to places I’ve been myself as a fellow ‘woman of the road’ and rocked and rolled. She brings it all back home so vividly with humor, originality, and love—and ‘oh-yeah-that-happened-to-me-too’ truthfulness. Like the touring band’s rite of passage: crashing in a stranger’s house in Where-am-I? USA and barely escaping with your life and bass guitar…or bartending in an East Village dive bar. It’s a special experience being a Woman in Rock, and as Ali’s story unfolds, she’ll bring you along for the trip of your life.”

To me personally, no band has personified the sound of New York better than Speedball Baby since Lou Reed or Suicide.”

Ali Smith is one of my all-time favorite crackpots—like Zelda Fitzgerald!”

By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, The Ballad of Speedball Baby isn’t just a vivid account of mid-’90s Lower East Side bohemia and an unsparing portrait of what it’s really like to be in a band. It’s also a ripping read.”

Beautifully written tales of grim outsider rock ’n’ roll, the ups and downs, and the subterranean…Ali Smith writes of a completely different New York City, a dirtier time I just missed, and the fragile band bond very few have gotten right.”

I loved reading this book about a punk world I didn’t get to experience in New York City. I don’t think I could have survived this dark, crazy, happy place. I’m not as tough as Ali Smith.”

2023-11-28
The bassist of a 1990s punk band chronicles her complicated childhood and stint in the limelight.

“We’re a chaotic, shambolic, confrontational, poetic band from the bowels of New York City’s Lower East Side,” Smith writes about Speedball Baby. Her tone is conversational and engaging as she recounts her tales, weaving memories of her scattershot upbringing as an “anxious kid who performed every song-and-dance routine in her repertoire in order to keep two fairly unhappy parents as happy as possible,” alongside glimmers of sordid, exciting, and dangerous experiences from her 20s. The latter is rife with drinking, drugs, and scrambling to survive as Smith navigated one crazy circumstance after another. Following “the nuclear-family explosion,” she identified herself as the “one person that had come into this world broken, unfixable, unredeemable,” and she saw music as her “ticket to….well, everything.” On tour, the reactions of audiences ran the gamut from rowdy, violent enthusiasm to boredom, even hatred. “I don’t usually know where we’ve been,” writes Smith, “until I read about it later in my journal….It is a fucked up town because they’re all fucked up towns and ‘the man’ is always bringing you down, so let’s burn it all down to the ground….A music orgasm.” The narrative features many memorable descriptions of the downtown New York scene—the stage at CBGB, for example, was “almost like one you’d build in your garage out of wood stolen from a nearby construction site.” Of life with Matt, her significant other, Smith writes, “No rules. No limitations. No fear.” The author’s other main relationships are with her band members. “We survived the death of our major label deal without infighting, without (additional) overdoses, without blaming each other,” she writes, looking back on the grittiness with genuine gratitude.

An appealing book for punk fans and those interested in 1990s women musicians.