The Ballad of Speedball Baby

November 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.

January 12, 2024
As the bassist for the band Speedball Baby and the only woman in the group, Smith has unique takes on feminism, 1990s New York, and the era's punk scene. Raised by a harried mom, Smith was often left to her own devices in a gritty Manhattan. She found community--and perhaps a place to express her anger--in the punk scene, where she met Matt. They became best friends, and he convinced her to join his unruly band. The majority of the book follows Speedball Baby's exploits: riotous shows at the infamous CBGB, a confrontation with a drunk neo-Nazi, and a European tour that included a jaunt through Amsterdam's red light district and a harrowing encounter with Croatian border police. Throughout it all, Smith navigates her own demons, battling loneliness and depression while making connections with other women who are thrilled to see her on the stage. Smith writes without the urgency surely felt during the madcap and sometimes terrifying adventures she lived through, but this is still undoubtedly entertaining and fun, especially for fans.

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January 1, 2024
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.

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