The Ballad of Speedball Baby
A Memoir
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The Ballad of Speedball Baby is the thrilling, extremely funny, and heart-wrenchingly vulnerable story of Ali Smith—coming of age in ’90s New York—who commits to the messy, exhilarating life of a musician and must survive the slings and arrows society reserves for women who refuse to comply.
As an only child reeling from the demolition of her parents’ toxic marriage, the New York City underground music scene offers a young Ali a different family of misfits and talented outsiders to belong to.
She becomes the bass player for edgy band Speedball Baby, a decision that will take her around the world—from onstage at the legendary CBGBs to the red-light district of Amsterdam. She’s often the only girl in a broken-down tour van, being strip-searched at the Croatian border, chased by lunatics, and navigating the seedy underbelly of a male-dominated music scene full of addiction, violence, and misogyny—all while keeping her sharp wit and dark humor intact.
Rimmed with heavy black eyeliner and smelling faintly of cheap booze, The Ballad of Speedball Baby is a pulse-quickening, unpredictable ride through the ’90s music scene—alternately terrifying, hilarious, and painfully evocative—as well as a love letter to the power of female solidarity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
