TOM SMITH (1956 TO 2022 AND BEYOND)
“Tom Smith, founding member of noise band To Live and Shave in L.A., has died at 65.” (NPR, 1/22/2022, by Marc Masters)
“Back from a long and heavy trudge through the cold contemplating the news that Tom Smith is no longer with us…” (Instagram post by Brian Turner, 1/20/2022)
When it comes to the death of our heroes and the great ones, I’m usually pretty callous to its inevitability, but the death of Tom Smith made me weep at the steering wheel, stuck in slow traffic at a long red light, glumly looking at Facebook on my phone. I know we all get plenty of hero-death notifications on our phones these days, seemingly every week if not outright daily, and just like Alice “I never cry,” but this time he really was a friend of mine, even a mentor at times, a steady and generous correspondent and a sometime contributor to this very publication. What’s more, the news was so sudden and the death so unexpected because he was an unbelievable human who seemed immortal; incredibly intelligent, endlessly creative, always inspired and inspiring, and a handsome devil too. It was like the name Tom Smith might’ve been a punk name, a sarcastic pseudonym, such an ordinary name for such an extraordinary person. In the early aughts he started calling himself Om Myth, and that was a little closer.
Now the days are going by, and I’m thinking about Tom, and I’m stuck. I can’t do my mundane normally scheduled Blastitude newsletter thing without writing about Tom first, but I’m slow at this, especially when there’s so much that could be said about someone who was so much larger than life. Instead of writing, I’ve mostly just been hanging out on internet and appreciating his life and work there, like via the Twitter feeds of a couple other Tom Smith mentees and collaborators, Aaron Dilloway and Jim Magas, who were both hanging with him as far back as the mid-1990s, during his occasional inspiring visits/residencies to the upper Midwest. Their respective feeds, as linked, were alive with TS videos, recordings, and remembrances for awhile starting January 20th, the day when Tom passed away. Scroll back and see what I mean; in there you might also see another Twitter thread created by another upper Midwesterner and heavy music authority Justin Farrar, in which he breaks down the Tom Smith aesthetic very nicely. Justin should know; when he published his great Load Records primer back in the monumental 42nd issue of Your Flesh magazine (dated Fall 1999), on the very next page began a long, definitive, and very entertaining career-spanning interview with Tom by William Christman.
Also been dipping and diving into the Bandcamp page of Tom’s voracious boutique label Karl Schmidt Verlag (a staggering 534 numbered releases by a dizzying array of projects, not all but most featuring Tom in the lineup)… there’s also this superb career-spanning feature and interview with Tom on The Quietus, from about two years ago… lots of pictures and To Live and Shave in L.A. tour history on Rat Bastard’s website… and needless to say, Shave’s “The Plot That Failed” has been blasting in my head non-stop for a week now, after I rewatched the 1993 video once, embedded below and directed by none other Doris Wishman, with Lady Tigra of L’Trimm in the cast. By the way, what Rush-emboldened Southern Rock travesty did Tom pluck from an early-90s 50-cent bin to sample for those insane hooks, the “yeeeeaaah” that goes throughout the verses and especially that “ee-why-yeah-hah” turnaround? Is that Head East or someone even worse?!
Beyond that, like I said, there’s so much to say, so much to remember. I’m already biting off more than I can chew, so I’m just going to leave a couple bits below about Tom’s projects Boat Of and of course To Live and Shave in L.A. Unfinished writing, but at least a glimpse at the breadth and depth of this guy’s art and work. RIP Tom Smith.
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NOTES (UNFINISHED):
I keep getting more and more fascinated by one of his earliest projects, the Athens, GA group Boat Of. Maybe the greatest balance Tom achieved between form and the void… not that Tom ever had any interest in any kind of balance. After Boat Of’s untimely demise, when guitarist Carol Levy died in a car accident, not unlike Neil choosing the ditch, Tom chose the void all the way, with his super-uncompromised group Peach of Immortality, and then possibly the most voided-out band in music history, To Live and Shave in L.A. Compared to these groups Boat Of almost sounds… accessible? They could go into a more percussion-driven monster-groove approach that could be compared to various contemporaries like This Heat, Einsterzende Neubauten, A Certain Ratio, and were even a semi-logical part of the Athens brew that produced the B-52s and Pylon (the latter formed after Boat Of, as Tom told Mike Watt in conversation on The Watt from Pedro Show, 1/7/21 episode), but a completely blown-out version of that early-80s alternative/college/groove thing, a version that was, well, super-uncompromised, and made even something like early Neubauten sound quite normal. That’s just the way Tom always was, super-uncompromised. For full evidence, listen to the Boat Of track below, “Worthy of the Lamb,” live on September 21, 1981 at Night Gallery in Athens, GA, and by the way, is that Tom cracking up some of the audience with a pronounced deep Southern accent at the end (while another one chants “Boat Of Boat Of Boat Of…”)? I always did wonder how an Adel boy could speak with such impressive Northern diction… NOTE: Here’s a blog post Tom published in 2012 with more info on this recording, and a link to Tom’s Soundcloud page where it had been embedded, but that massive page has sadly but understandably been taken down. HOWEVER… hot tip… “Worthy of the Lamb” was also the very last track played on Tom’s epic guest appearance on The Watt From Pedro Show back in January 2021 and you can still hear it there if you fast-forward to almost the 2:44:00 mark (Watt does a three-hour show almost daily, so impressive). Please do listen to the whole episode though, not only a great opportunity to hear lots of Tom’s music, but especially his utterly charming personality having lots of fun talking to Mike Watt in between the long blocks of music. They have a great chat about some of the history of Boat Of immediately after “Worthy of the Lamb,” where Tom doesn’t get into the fun details, like how a young (pre-“farmer rock”) Michael Stipe was in the band for awhile, and they were called Nest (adj.), and before that, Pre-Cave!
To Live and Shave in L.A. were notorious for a lot more than just their name, in a certain circle of 1990s noise/zine culture anyway. Meaning, I was reading about them well before I ever had a chance to hear them, and tried to imagine from wild descriptions and Tom’s own incredible writing what the music could possibly sound like. I also had no idea what record of theirs to start with, after reading about release after release with dizzying titles like Vedder Vedder Bedwetter, Helen Butte vs. Masonna Pussy Badsmell, Where A Horse Is Standing And Where You Belong, and my personal favorite, “Her-Her,” the So “Her,” the Put-Mouth, so when I saw their 1995 digipak CD with the only slightly more prosaic title An Interview with the Mitchell Brothers for $5 in some used bin somewhere (you might still be able to get it for about $5 on Discogs), I snapped it up, took it home, put it on, and even after being prepared for something wild, still couldn’t believe what I was hearing. They weren’t merely a loud and aggressive musical act, they were an instant and complete incineration of the entire history of heavy metal noise, hurtling through a cosmic vortex, a wormhole beyond Jupiter, a deep pit of hell, all at once, as loud as possible, somehow compressed into an unrelenting 45-minute album experience. One time the crew was over at some after-party or another and challenged me to “put on your craziest record, the most insane record you own.” After about ten seconds of thought, I knew I had to put on Interview with the Mitchell Brothers, which I did, and after about 60 seconds of listening, no one there could believe how squarely and effectively I had met the challenge.
I could write about the massive double-CD that is widely regarded (probably by me too) as TLASILA’s (and Tom’s) masterpiece, The Wigmaker in 18th Century Williamsburg (although Magas and Dilloway and all the Michigan guys would pick 30-minuten männercreme for sure), but the one I’ve been spinning the most since Tom’s passing, over and over due to its particularly rarefied air, is the 2004 release God and Country Rally! It was recorded in 1996 by the most core TLASILA trio lineup of Ben Wolcott (oscillators and treatments), Rat Bastard (bass and treatments), and Tom Smith (voice, text, shortwave, edits, tape loops), but joined by two crucial disruptors, Nandor Nevai on percussion and cornet, and Bill Orcutt on guitar. These two somehow position the usual Shave chaos inside the shape of an ‘improvisational free rock quintet’, with Nevai’s fractured but propulsive trash-kit drumming constantly shifting the free-form Shave tectonics forward, while Orcutt provides the most inscrutably rockist guitar cross-chatter I’ve ever heard, something not quite like any of the styles he’d offered before in Harry Pussy and elsewhere.
BTW, there are 80 more albums by To Live and Shave in L.A. on their Bandcamp page, 57 of them coming since God and Country Rally! of which I’ve maybe heard 3 at most.
to live and shave in la always felt a bit heftier conceptually and spiritually than the noise tape trading culture that it emerged from. that interview I did with Tom lasted six hours, he loved to talk and was happy that his work was being appreciated by someone substantially younger. I was devastated that he passed just as I began to form a friendship with him.