THE BALLAD OF SPEEDBALL BABY

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.