The Ballad of Speedball Baby: A Memoir

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.