A Female Rocker Talks Life on the Road in ‘The Ballad of Speedball Baby’ – The Village Voice

Like most women, musician/photographer Ali Smith has weathered sexual abuse, harassment, misogyny, and sexism in one form or another. In that sense, her story isn’t unique. But in her new memoir, The Ballad of Speedball Baby, Smith’s vivid tales of life on the road as the sole woman and bass player in a ’90s rockabilly-inspired art punk band illustrate her strength and perseverance, while simultaneously highlighting the rare bond between bandmates.

Obsessed with Blondie’s Debbie Harry and German singer/songwriter Nina Hagen as a girl, Smith sought refuge from her parents’ crumbling marriage in music and a rotating roster of television shows she’d sneak-watch with her mother. Her father detested TV, which he called the “great Suburban pacifier,” because of his own traumatic childhood. According to him, she writes, “TV ruined kids’ posture, brains, imagination, patience. It caused cancer. It was responsible for nine out of 10 crimes. It pushed old ladies down on the sidewalk. It would stick a needle in your arm if you let it.” 

In one terrifying incident, her father came home late and caught them watching Saturday Night Live. As he fought with her mother, arms flailing and voices raised, he picked up the TV, what Smith calls her “beautiful little lifeline,” and smashed it to smithereens. A few days later, boxes began to line their apartment and her father eventually moved out, putting a permanent end to their nuclear family. “The good part,” she writes, “was that now we could watch TV around the clock.” SNL in the ’90s had a revolving door of outstanding musical guests, such as Elvis Costello, Patti Smith, David Bowie, and the B-52s, which heightened Smith’s interest in music. When alone in her room she’d fall asleep to 92.7 WLIR and the sounds of Talking Heads, the Cure, Depeche Mode, the Specials, and the Ramones, as her musical education expanded. 

By the time she was a teenager, Smith was making frequent trips from her home in the East Village to CBGB and other infamous New York City punk clubs. She eventually joined Speedball Baby in 1993; after two EPs with Matador, they attracted the attention of MCA Records, who promptly signed them to their first major label deal. It was thrilling at first, but MCA carelessly tossed them on the road, and their dreams of “making it big” crashed and burned during a stop in Los Angeles, where all the label executives had gathered to see them perform — but it didn’t go as they’d hoped.

“Somebody yells ‘Shuuuuut uuuuupppp!’ from the darkness and I know that look on [singer] Ron’s face,” Smith recalls in the book. “Things like that don’t usually bother him. They usually fire us all up. But dammit. This night is special. Or rather, this night was supposed to be special. But it just sucks. And these people are terrible. And this mission has failed, spectacularly … The set ends abruptly, and I meander backstage where old mossy-hair and pink shirt and the three chirping girls from lunch, plus a handful of higher-ups, shuffle their feet and avoid direct eye contact with us.” 

While the show was a failure, it reminded the band that they didn’t belong among those pearly whites, fake tans, and popped collars. That night led to the end of their major-label days. 

“Soon after the disastrous L.A. showcase we played with the [Jon] Blues Explosion, MCA dissolved its relationship with Fort Apache — having not discovered Nirvana through it, literally or figuratively — and a roster of cool, interesting bands were dropped, including us,” Smith explains.

“We survived the death of our major label deal without infighting, without (additional) overdoses, without blaming each other. Maybe that’s because we never really thought the deal made any sense in the first place. In some ways, we just sort of rolled over it, checking, in the rear-view mirror, to see whether the stink meant we’d just run over a skunk.” 

Smith’s memories teeter between her “latch-key kid” upbringing and Speedball Baby’s ’90s heyday throughout the book, which sometimes leads to bumpy transitions from chapter to chapter. At other times, she seems to wander too long through her recollections, turning a passage about her love of baby cows into a rambling description of why. But more often than not, Smith delivers powerful anecdotes about touring with Ron Ward, the band’s charismatic lead singer, who was fighting an on-again-off-again heroin addiction; guitarist Matt Verta-Ray, her “person” and trusted confidante; and drummer Martin Owens, the British transplant.

It’s clear that the situations Smith witnessed left an indelible mark on her. In one scene, she describes Ward nearly dying from a drug overdose at a seedy hotel they’d booked for the night. She writes, “Back in the room, we hear the water still running in the bathtub. It’s been ages since Ron went in there. Matt knocks on the bathroom door. ‘Ronnie? … Ron? … Ron, I’m coming in.’ He cracks the door a bit and whatever he sees makes him burst through it urgently. ‘SHIT!’ his voice echoes off the tiles.” 

“I can’t believe that this is the system. That any schlub can go into a doorway and plop down a little bit of money for what I would consider a whole lot of person.”

Smith recounts her traumatizing tour memories as if she’s still trying to process them herself. As she describes, “I’ve been pinned up against the wall, pulled into a bathroom stall, dragged to the ground into a pile of bodies, and literally swept off my feet several times on this tour, and all by other girls who want to tell me they’re happy I’m here. And while I really appreciate that, I have to admit, it makes me equally sad to be reminded of what an event it seems to see a woman on stage.” But, thanks largely to her bandmates, Smith felt somewhat safe on the road, much safer than other men had made her feel in the past, particularly one she calls “the rapist.” 

“I glare at the backs and sides of the heads of the boys in my band,” she writes. “What have any of them ever done to a girl that she didn’t like? Would any of them have protected me on that cold, lonely, unbelievably unkind night in that tiny apartment when a mean, selfish boy tried to teach me that ‘nothing’ was my worth and had largely succeeded? Will they protect me now, on tour? Only once I fuzzily conclude the answer is ‘probably yes’ do my shoulders drop.” 

When writing about Speedball Baby’s first international tour, fueled by the sale of Verta-Ray’s treasure trove of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s discarded art, Smith’s maternal character begins to reveal itself, beginning with a stop in Amsterdam’s red light district. There, nude women are on display like shiny new toys in the window of an FAO Schwarz, beckoning to desperate men who drool over their perceived sexual “liberation.” “I so badly want to feel good about this,” she pens. “I so badly want to feel that each of these women is empowered. But I can’t get past how much it looks like an amusement park for men. Anything they want to ride whenever they want to if they can afford the ticket. Total control … 

“But the overwhelming feeling I get when I see the women catering to these men is that I want to ask them, each, whether they’re really okay. Whether they’re in school or have dreams or a good family and what they feel like when their high school teacher or their father’s work partner walks by.” 

While Amsterdam, she writes, made her feel “square,” “close-minded,” and determined to claw her way back to being a “hardcore liberal,” Hamburg was worse. Forced to stay in the German city’s “Die Sündigste Meile” (“the most sinful mile”), Smith again stumbled on another “lady museum,” as she calls it. “Up ahead, is a middle-aged man in high-waisted chinos, a sloppy, gray button-down shirt, and a fanny pack,” she writes. “He’s pressed against the glass, hands up like a child salivating over a candy display … He looks at her like she’s a sculpture or a painting. Something that he no doubt admires in some remote, distant way, but not at all as though she’s human.” 

She continues, “I can’t believe that this is the system. That any schlub can go into a doorway and plop down a little bit of money for what I would consider a whole lot of person. Maybe these women don’t see it that way, but I just can’t get over the privilege of being able to do that like it’s nothing at all.” 

Her adventure down Die Sündigste Meile makes her feel miserable; it’s only later, at the hotel, that she finds out the signs they kept seeing, reading “Keine Frauen Erlaubt” mean “No Women Allowed.” Somehow she managed to avoid the routine practice of pimps viciously assaulting any woman who disobeyed their orders. 

When the band reaches Croatia, they’re met at the border by several armed guards. Smith winds up being strip-searched by a lone female officer after Ward’s vitamins are mistaken for methamphetamines. The woman sequesters her in an empty cinderblock room and instructs her to remove her clothing.

“Oh,” she writes. “So we were really doing this. She leans against the door, stone-faced, as I slowly unzip my jeans and lower them. I can see now she’s probably a couple of years older than me — maybe thirty. I consider inviting her to that night’s show. Then I remember that even under the best of circumstances, our band isn’t for everyone.”

“With my pants crumpled around my ankles, I give a little shrug and smile weakly. ‘Up!’ she commands. I tilt my head, like a dog unsure whether she’s heard a rabbit in the underbrush, then slowly lift my t-shirt, exposing a road-weary bra. I stand there, wavering slightly in the soft, gray light of the room, my pants down, my shirt pulled up to prove there aren’t any pouches of heroin strapped around my waist.” 

As The Ballad of Speedball Baby proves, Smith—with her black Converse sneakers, nose ring, pink hair, and bass guitar — has always overcome whatever challenges were thrown in her path, and, in doing so, found her voice.   ❖

Kyle Eustice is a veteran music journalist with a focus on hip-hop. After a stint at The Source, she spent six years at HipHopDX. She is now a senior editor at Hits magazine and simultaneously maintains freelance gigs at Thrasher, Chuck D’s RAPstation, and High Times. Other bylines include Rolling Stone, Spin, Variety, Rock the Bells, and Wax Poetics.