Speedball baby biography re

The Ballad of Speedball Baby is the thrilling, darkly hilarious, and heart-wrenchingly vulnerable story of Ali Smith's coming-of-age in '90s New York.
SPEEDBALL BABY were conceived at singer Ron Ward,s wedding reception.
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.

•

THE BALLAD OF SPEEDBALL BABY

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

•

The Ballad of Speedball Baby: A Memoir

December 2, 2023

y'all.... SO ... I have waited almost a month to write about this book. Maybe because I loved it so much, I had to actually read it twice. Yep. Truth.

BUY THIS BOOK! (no affiliate link... just an endorsement)

In the 90s I was a producer for a music TV show of some notoriety. That sounds super pretentious. It is not. I had just returned from filmschool, and an attempt at getting into the biz and came back "home". My best friend was the Executive Producer on the show and I first started out as a camera person and then started to produce segments. It was a BLAST. From programming to segment production to interview segments with some really amazing rock stars... it was a blast.

So.

Imagine my complete surprise when this book came up in a search of available books to read in advance of publication. Speedball Baby wasn't a band I had ever heard of. Ever. And totally would have been a band we would have programmed. I am absolutely gobsmacked that this band, on a major label that we worked with, never pushed them more.

As

•

SPEEDBALL BABY come at you all tumble-grind and twang-beat like thunder in a blizzard. Fusing the primordial slurp of rockabilly with a broken-homegrown hybrid of gospel testimony and punk mayhem, the group cuts a swath through the rotting cane fields of the contemporary music scene. Live, they harness hysteria - pounding out a thrown drink conniption fit as exuberant as a St. Vitas dance. Their shows have earned them the loyalty of music lovers and emergency room ghouls on both coasts and between. The notoriously fickle crowds in their home parish of NYC have stuck to SPEEDBALL BABY like feathers on a tarred heretic.

SPEEDBALL BABY were conceived at singer Ron Ward,s wedding reception. Among the assembled guests treated to an impromptu mauling of standards by the well lubricated groom was Madder Rose bass player Matt Verta-Ray. The virus of inspiration - to bring the then Blood Oranges drummer and Wobbly Organist Ward up to the front seat to drive and return Verta-Ray to the guitar chair - became as irresistible as the punch. It even made sense the next day.SPEEDBALL BABY have o