By Vivian Manning-SchaffelPublished: Jan 17, 2024
This article was originally published at Shondaland.com
In the vivid memoir “The Ballad of Speedball Baby,” Smith paints an unflinchingly authentic ’90s portrait of life on the road.
Ali Smith’s thing as an artist is imagery that evokes a visceral response. Whether it’s through playing bass in the ’90s alt-punkabilly band Speedball Baby, her sophisticated commissioned celebrity portraits, her powerful photo-driven stories in The New York Times and The Guardian, or her award-winning, Gloria Steinem-blurbed, unflinching depiction of motherhood Momma Love, Smith delivers stories with precision, intellect, and a heady dose of frankness.
This is clear from page one of her candid memoir The Ballad of Speedball Baby, a deliciously voicey recollection centered on her East Village upbringing, how she first picked up a bass, and how that bass — and her friendships with her bandmates — transported her out of the East Village and into vans touring around the world, shaping her into the talented, versatile artist she’d become.
Having recently traded her native New York City for a more bucolic lifestyle abroad, Smith Zoomed with Shondaland from Norwich, England — which she describes as a “liberal bubble in a bunch of farmland.” Befittingly, new wave legend Lene Lovich owns a lot of property nearby. Read on to learn how Smith set about writing her memoir, what it was like to be in a band in the ’90s, and how she found and honed her voice.
VIVIAN MANNING-SCHAFFEL: Why did you decide to tell this part of your life story and make your experience in the band your anchor?
ALI SMITH: There were so many reasons, right? Don’t we all sort of get to this point where you just want to contextualize and understand all that stuff that seemed really hard at the time and do your therapy to become a more sane person? It was a unique time — not to me, per se — and a unique scene I got to be in. New York had a sense of limitless possibility. If you read Ada Calhoun’s St. Marks Is Dead, she’s a brilliant writer who captures the cyclical nature of that vibrant time. So, I’m glad I lived through sort of all the meshuggas, abuse, and trying to figure out how a strong woman — I consider myself a strong woman — could be prey to so many of the same issues that plague all of us really. Maybe that sounds arrogant, like I’m supposed to be smart enough not to fall prey to certain things, but it’s part of the human condition, and to try to explore that and understand it better felt compelling.
I have a dear friend called Miriam Shor. She’s an actor, and she was one of the creators and stars of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. I would tell her all these stories because we both lived through the ’90s in New York; her scene was more like the gay club scene, and mine was more the underground music scene, but we had so much commonality. We would laugh, and I would tell her about being chased by Hare Krishna skinheads. We remembered the same characters, like Hot Dog, who’s in the book, or the street characters that are so New York. We laughed, we cried, we went through the gamut of emotions, and she’s like, “You’ve got to write this down.” Maybe a month later, we got a pedicure, and I handed her this big stack of paper. She just started crying because she was like a proud mom like, “You did it!” So, she kind of started this process in me.
The Ballad of Speedball Baby: A Memoir
Credit: Blackstone Publishing
VMS: What happened after you handed her the stack?
AS: I had a great agent who helped me hash out a lot of these things but couldn’t sell the book, so I kept rewriting until I got to a place where I thought it was going to work. People at the Big Five [publishers] kept saying they love the writing, “but who the f--k is she? We don’t know how to sell that.” I get it. It’s business. I worked in the business — I worked at HarperCollins as an art director. But it is always disappointing to any of us creatives to come up against that sort of unimaginative response: “She’s not famous. How do we sell this?” Surely, there’s room for stories for the other millions who weren’t famous, who did something of some consequence to even just some people, even to just themselves. I still meet people to whom Speedball Baby means something; it still has a lingering effect.
VMS: TikTokers with a million followers get book deals on the reg, but we’re not going to give somebody with an actual story to tell, and the ability to tell it, a deal.
AS: I asked my stepdaughter to read some of it, and she was like, “I love it, but what if you wrote it in the first person, in the present tense, like it’s happening?” That meant I had to write it again, but I went back to it, and she was right. It gave it an immediacy because there is too much distance as a woman in her 50s trying to articulate why she made certain choices in her 20s and 30s. So, I think that shifted it. I got a different agent, and we got three deals.
VMS: That’s amazing! How long was that whole process from soup to nuts?
AS: Several years. I mean, my mother-in-law was still alive, and she died in the pandemic. So, maybe six years or something. You’re like, “I swear this could be good, and so much of it is the legwork, like the war of attrition,” as my friend [and former bandmate] Matt [Verta-Ray] says.
VMS: Throughout the book, you share journal-entry excerpts and photos you’ve taken. Is that how you did your recordkeeping? What was it like trying to excavate and fact-check your past?
AS: I’ve got so many photos and so many journals, and yet I feel like life moved at such a pace in those days. All the evidence is telling me I was here, then I was going out with this one, and then I was in school, but then I was on tour — this was over six months. How is that possible? I realized that your life changes at a speed that you will never do again, so those things happen in rapid succession, and it is really hard to make sense of it. Because I come from a super-litigious father, I’m always afraid of being sued. I made sure I asked people ad nauseam, and then I cross-referenced with the journals and looked at public records to figure out when this place or that was open. There’s also the maximum of “true enough” in a memoir. This is my subjective experience, but I did want to paint a completely credible world, and I think it matters. This book is different than some music memoirs. I approached it with vulnerability when talking about relationships — I think we were all just trying so hard to figure out some form of relationship for ourselves with people, love, sex, intimacy of some sort, and family. I feel like if you’re going to do that and speak for other people, you’ve got to be credible.
This content is imported from youTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.
VMS: Your book is a feminist commentary on being in a band — the only girl in your band — in the ’90s. A big part of making it for a band was getting signed to a record label. Another thread that runs through the book is the meaning of creative achievement, how artists set these lofty goals for themselves, and who you are sometimes veers off to the left.
AS: It was so interesting looking back at that time how conflicted everybody either was, or had to tell themselves they were, about the idea of getting signed or any kind of success. It was so in the language and the ethos of the whole thing, but it’s always that meeting of art and commerce, right? You want people to hear you. You want to get out there. You think the whole game is stupid, but you don’t want to lose the game, you know? Talking to people now, it’s so hard for young people to make money off of music because of Spotify and this and that. After a while, I’m just like, “I don’t know that they’re supposed to make money off of music.” That said, we were horribly abused, and yet I’m sure we still owe MCA! So, that’s not better. They were just figuring out how to commodify everything in the ’90s — they were like, “Oh, Nirvana! We figured it out! Here’s the formula! We know we can sell that.” The idea that there’s supposed to be this full-circle completion and capitalist reward at the end of the day is new, and I don’t know that it’s great for creativity. Maybe it is.
VMS: I love that you wanted to be the star and rejected the role of “girlfriend of” or appendage. What you wrote about being a woman really resonated with me: “The messages from every direction come fast and furious, and they will never stop. Are you winning and losing at being a girl, and then a woman? And while you hate the game, it hurts to lose so badly that you compare yourself. Pit yourself against those who should be your greatest allies.” Back in the ’90s, how did the categorization of female artists, and how everyone was separated by genre, affect your mindset?
AS: In any industry, they create this scarcity; there’s only room for a certain amount of women artists — “We’ve already got a woman, you’ve already got a woman singer, we’ve already got a woman on bass.” Where I was coming from is “I reject your premise. I don’t believe in it.” Like I talked about in the book, we were all sort of alternative. I knew the girls in the Lunachicks — they came to our house all the time — but the band I lived with played shows that didn’t align with them. It was very separate to me. Why did it have to be? Why did I not feel part of riot grrl? Maybe because I’m a more solitary person, but it was so compartmentalized. There wasn’t enough room for all of us just to be us. I think that those women in the Lunachicks are still absolutely gorgeous. It makes me a bit sad to look back and be like, “Why did we feel we had to choose a place to exist?”
VMS: Back then, we were defined by the genres of music that we gravitated to as if they defined our social groups and personality, while because of digital platforms, our kids’ generation isn’t as influenced by genre and will listen to anything.
AS: I think I’ve been more solitary, a more contained person. Maybe I was intimidated by the freedom that they felt. Even with the women in my circles, it is interesting to me how demonized the word “feminism” was. I was not compromising on that word. Maybe some of it has to do with my own relationship to my own sexuality because of my own attack. Maybe some of their unbridled sexuality, which was f--king fantastic, like the Slits. Whatever version, I’m all about it. I’m all for it. But personally, I don’t know that I was able to do that at that time.
VMS: I love how “feminist” is on your shirt right now.
AS: [Laughs] Yeah! I was kind of shocked at how many times I had to explain why I was a feminist, even to women in my scene. They were living as feminists, they were certainly not curtailing their wishes and dreams to be whatever they wanted to be, but it was a continuation of how the real world intrudes on all of our little microcosms of utopia. Maybe sometimes I found those female-empowered groups intimidating. I was in a band with men, but then you didn’t wanna piss them off by saying it because somehow “feminist” equaled anti-men. Not in my band, but there were a lot of guys out there that felt that way. On the surface, they were all down for it, but I would say that there was still something lacking, whereas Matt, my best friend from my band, committed to it. It doesn’t mean that he didn’t fail in those ways. We weren’t talking about that publicly yet. It was just sort of like a private thing. There was no bigger conversation about the privilege of white men.
VMS: How does your work as a photographer inform your writing?
AS: I think it does, absolutely. I think I can create a scene because I do look at it in a visual way, and then I just sort of have to build it with words. I had to learn how to make a through line. I’m used to jump-cutting to the next, and I think there’s a lot of beauty in that actually. I like some books and movies where nothing really happens, it’s a character study, but you have to already have some leverage to do something experimental like that.
VMS: What was your process in writing the book?
AS: I wrote a lot in coffee shops, strangely enough, with loud music on. Somehow, that worked for me: an iced oat latte and loud music. I do like to scurry away and be left alone. I had to learn a little about craft — once you learn to use a tool, it goes in your tool belt. I feel like the proletariat in everything I do — I’m very much a union gal.
VMS: What are your goals as a writer going forward?
AS: Getting more and more centered about who I am and how I’m going to be in the world. That’s always a good thing for all of us. We need more women’s stories told in women’s voices that aren’t just part of celebrity culture, you know? We do have this great, great influx of memoirs from female musicians right now. It’s fantastic. Am I happy they’re being told? Totally. Am I a bit bummed out that they seem to funnel into that same system of celebrity? It’s a bit boring, yes. So, I think we need all the experiences validated and understood, and there’s always a benefit personally. I witnessed a mom who wouldn’t be brave enough to face these parts of herself and own these parts of herself, and it kind of diminished her and has hurt her. I would fight every instinct in myself to end up that way, so it’s not just about her — it’s about the diminishing of our voice, our right to feel all the feels and be all the bes. I believe in that. So, when people read it, I would love it if they felt that I had taken myself to task as much as I took anybody else to task.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.