rick
smith
Poet Lyricist Musician
Clabe Hangan and Rick Smith
Rick Smith was born in New York. His father was artist William A. Smith whose work is in the National Portrait Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Library of Congress. When Rick was eight, his father took him to live in post-World War II Paris. There, he experienced the devastating aftermath of war, which features in his new poetry collection entitled Ear to the Rail. ​​
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The Smiths settled in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where they were once snowed in with Carl Sandburg, a close family friend. Rick began writing during high school at Solebury School, then honed his craft at Bard College, studying with Anthony Hecht, then later with Frank Polite, at the University of Iowa, and Sam Eisenstein, at Los Angeles City College. During college, Rick taught himself to play blues harmonica, a lifelong passion. He played “basket houses” in Greenwich Village and roadhouses in Duchess County, earning his chops with Big Joe Williams, Steve Mann, and others. Rick recorded with the Rick Smith Band, the Hangan Brothers, and currently The Mescal Sheiks, for whom he is the lyricist.
Rick’s poetry collections, The Wren Notebook (2000), Hard Landing (2011), and Whispering in a Mad Dog’s Ear (2014) were published by Lummox Press. His poems have appeared in many journals, including Hanging Loose, Wormwood, Ante, Stonecloud, West Coast Poetry Review, Poetry LA, Rock Bottom, and Delirium.
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He lives with his wife, Erika, and son, Saunder, in Rancho Cucamonga, California, where he practices as a clinical psychologist.
poetry
dining in
Tough day at work.
I just got out of the rain
and traffic. I’m wet,
I’m hungry,
I need to unwind.
But I can’t get her out of the bathroom.
It’s been nearly an hour,
and the shower is still running.
I yell through the door,
“I’m home. What the hell
is going on in there?”
Her words come back at me
through the steam and splash,
“Relax,
just warming up your dinner.”
I’ve got to learn
to be more patient.
Accidents of Moonlight
A parting of corn rows
at 60 m.p.h. on Hwy. 160
out of Winfield
at dusk.
Then:
at a siding in Medicine Lodge,
accidents of moonlight
slanting through couplings;
I’m counting boxcars
at 4 a.m.
Crossing southern Kansas
in seizure-inducing formation,
seeking, seeking,
always seeking the west
where the sun goes to rest.
And flooring it
when the road opens
wide with promise.
Trying to outrun madness,
I drop down
into the Oklahoma panhandle.
I’m losing ground.
Everyone knows it.
If you drive like that
they will find you in a field
in the company of hovering spirits
and your own death rattle.
bad luck
They say it’s bad luck
to kill a cricket
on your honeymoon.
A Jamaican cricket,
the kind you see in the guidebooks,
sings on the floor of the bridal suite.
“These are those damn things
that make all that noise,”
says one of the guests.
I say, “I relocate those guys…”
but I’m too late.
The groom’s boot comes down
way harder than it has to
and converts that little singer to paste.
“He won’t be makin’ that noise again.”
It took 3 1/2 years for the bride
to carry her wedding dress
into the backyard in Victorville,
douse it with kerosene,
torch it under the desert moon
and then dance the night away.
Two weeks later:
One Friday before dawn,
she slowed for a highway clean up
on the 215 South;
the guy behind her didn’t.
where darkness
has been
There is a photograph,
black and white,
the apartment in Montparnasse,
The one with the tiny balcony
overlooking Passage D’Enfer.
My new Mom, in a checkered blouse,
grey and white,
a look on her face:
sublime, transfixed.
She’s on her honeymoon
and peeks out
from behind the easel
holding a large important oil
my dad is composing:
the street scene in Montmartre.
Winter,
a man bundled against the cold,
rides a bike
carries a baguette.
He coasts down an incline
toward us.
The post-war cityscape is bleak
but there is a street lamp
in the foreground
and the dreary day,
the grey, dull day turns darker.
Dad stands in front of the canvas
with a pleased and serious face.
He thinks he can bring brightness
where darkness has been.
Poetry performances
news
In Issue #27 of Trajectory
Here We Are
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We are old
and lying on a mattress
holding hands.
We know what it is
to know things
that people around us
don’t know
and, better yet,
to not know things
that everyone around us
knows.
In the current issue of Earth's Daughters
Crossing Wyoming
We see
flat-bellied billboards
rattling in a north wind
as we roll into Wyoming,
a hungry road
and a hungry sky,
preparing to eat us alive.
There’s no eye contact
at the Flying J Gasmart
but a sign says,
“Have a nice day.”
We stock up on Red Bull
and Slim Jims
fortified for the straightaways
and curves ahead.
The rest stop at Four Corners
spits us out, dazed and soaked
by a salivary storm.
We’re already dissolving
before we reach Redbird.
We lean west at Lusk
and move toward Powder River.
Now, children gather
by the highway
with party napkins
and paper plates.
Are they rooting for us
or drawing us into an ambush?
I’m guessing Black Rock
might be down this way.
The sound of our tires
on this blacktop,
mesmerizing.
We’re tumbling toward a bottom,
talking in tongues,
the ramblings of the disordered mind.
Wyoming, oh yeah,
we crossed it,
but it took a bite.
trying to get to Sedona
lost in the Arizona wide open
my tongue in your lap
for all the truckers to see
we blow toward Tucson
missing our turn off
by an hour
distracted by lower landscapes
writing
Snowed in with Carl Sandburg
by Rick Smith
Published in Under the Sun, 2019
In 1956 we moved from a two-bedroom apartment near First Avenue and 22nd Street in Manhattan to a converted barn in Pineville (population under 600). It was something about a more lenient tax structure for an artist in Pennsylvania. The barn was on two acres and only 65 miles from New York. My sister Kim was already five; the two of us had been sharing our bedroom with an enormous etching press. My father was the artist William A. Smith. The master bedroom doubled as Dad's studio. It was time for a bigger place.
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I didn't want to move. I loved growing up in the city. I had lots of friends, loved the Yankees, and rock and roll was coming in. I wasn't sure they had that in Pennsylvania. It turned out, fortunately, to be very much alive out there, and, best of all, Kim and I had our own rooms.
Mom and Dad had a huge bedroom overlooking onion grass and a row of tulips marching out to the Windy Bush Road, our new address. Dad's studio space was enough for easels, frame racks, posters, and the damn etching press. He was still within easy drive time of the art directors, costume rental warehouses, framers, and photo studios he needed for his commissions from The Saturday Evening Post, Reader's Digest, and the various book publishers who kept him in work. Kim, Mom, neighbors, and strangers could find themselves modeling for Dad and then recognizing themselves in a national magazine or on a book cover. Mom might be Catherine the Great one month and a barfly the next. I could be Abe Lincoln as a young boy, one month, and Hamlet the next. Kim is the little girl drawing on the pavement on page 33 of Carl Sandburg's Wind Song. That's her, too, arms around him on the back cover.
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Books by Rick Smith
"Only the finest poetry displays the poignant beauty that is found in this book. Smith has captured its essence."
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John Berbich
(from a review of The Wren Notebook)
"Rick Smith's poetry is eloquent, lyrical, and highly evocative of the sense of nature that us wingless creatures don't normally have access to (or have lost touch with), addressing the reader with a flutter of wings, a flash of thought, or a swoop through boundless skies."
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- Mark Terrill
"What is most remarkable, here, is the Smith sense of perceiving how an economy of poetics works. . . His best poems are the ones which cover the themes of confrontation and indictment under the auspices of opposing all those who would profit from plotting the murder of our earth home."
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- Michael C. Ford
music
During college, Rick taught himself to play blues harmonica, a lifelong passion. He played “basket houses” in Greenwich Village, and roadhouses in Duchess County, earning his chops with Big Joe Williams, Steve Mann, and others. Rick recorded with the Rick Smith Band, the Hangan Brothers, and currently The Mescal Sheiks, for whom he is the lyricist.
the mescal sheiks
blind man's trick
Listen Now
Blind Man's Trick is The Mescal Sheiks' second album and the first following the loss of lead singer Clabe Hangan and guitarist Dean Sterling. The six songs on the album include Hangan and Sterling and are a part of their legacy.
This World is Not My Home
Listen Now
"Like a bowl of fruit tossed into a blender, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Musically, that same principle equals inventiveness, risk-taking, and things that are new."
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George P. Seedorff - Big City Blues Magazine
the hangan brothers
Listen Now
“These are traditional-leaning blues with lots of spunk and sparks of brilliance...the Hangan Brothers keep it sweet and simple, nothing but the blues."
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Mark A. Cole - Big City Blues Magazine
Mars Market
the gingermen
In the summer of 1965, Rick was in a band called The Gingermen, the house band at the Nite Owl Cafe in Greenwich Village. The Gingermen replaced The Lovin' Spoonful when they had their first hit and went west. Read The Summer of 1965: The Nite Owl Cafe and Riding with The Blues Magoos. At the end of that summer, Rick joined the westward migration and formed the City Lights band in California.
CITY LIGHTS
I came to L.A. with big dreams; my terminal naiveté made me bold. So many Hollywood promises kept me going, and when that occasional promise actually materialized, it was like winning at the slots. Intermittent reward is intoxicating, so I kept at it, supporting myself with day jobs. I cooked short order, took on a few harmonica students (notably Louie Lista) and for nearly 3 years I sold candy door to door on the golden boulevards of So. Cal. I’d carry a cardboard box filled with dollar boxes of butter toffee cashews, chocolate honeycombs, little round chocolate- covered mints. I’d walk into offices and businesses and offer a sample taste to the receptionist and try to sell a box or two. I was paid 30 cents on the dollar, and, in those days, the mid-1960s, you could rent a small place in East Hollywood or down near USC for $65 a month, so I survived as a peddler. I could even take days off to rehearse the band or to hustle a club gig.
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One late afternoon, working the Sunset Strip with my cardboard box, three music business types were walking out of reception when I walked in. You never knew who you’d run into on The Strip. It turned out that one of these guys was Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis Presley’s maniacally protective manager. I always carried demos of my band, The City Lights, in my candy box. I was shameless, hustling for gigs anywhere and everywhere, so within a minute, I had them listening to our regrettable version of the Muddy Waters classic, “Walkin' Blues.” That audition lasted maybe two bars or ten seconds before they unceremoniously dismissed me and my butter toffee cashews.
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The City Lights just weren’t that good, but mercifully, I hadn’t realized it. Of course, we were kids, and the more we played, the better we got, but so often our skill set and our opportunities didn’t match up, like when we opened for the Miracles, or when we auditioned for Dave Anderle at A&M Records. Over time, though, some of the guys were getting studio work and other gigs. Our guitarist, Steve Mann, was working some Wrecking Crew dates. He played on the Gris Gris album with Dr. John and on several Sonny and Cher hits. Another of our guitarists, John Forsha, had worked with the fantastic cabaret singer, Judy Henske. He did a lot of work with Fred Neil, Tim Buckley, Glenn Yarbrough, and even Pat Boone. He played 12-string on Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’ At Me,” which was later made famous by Nilsson on the Midnight Cowboy soundtrack. He played with Linda Ronstadt in her Stone Poneys band and later worked with The Lovin’ Spoonful and with Tom Waits. Our drummer, Llyn Foukes, was teaching art at UCLA and became an internationally celebrated painter. We’d been up in Santa Barbara for a gig when he and I visited a swap meet; I bought him a bulb horn that he admired. He eventually created a music machine I call the Foulkesaphone with bulb horns and cow bells in a full chromatic scale. His Spike Jones influences pre-empted our rock and roll aspirations, and he pursued a new direction with a project called The Rubber Band, which also included Forsha; they ended up performing on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show. Our bass player, Rob Lewine, found success with Blues Image and The Illinois Speed Press. In a later City Lights incarnation, the brilliant multi-instrumentalist and arranger, Baxter Robertson, went on to carve out an impressive career with several releases on the RCA label, the hit song “Feel the Night” from The Karate Kid, and is still at it with his Tiger Club Group. I ended up getting some studio work and cut a couple of tracks for Vault Records with Chuck Bridges’ L.A. Happening.
on the road:
the back story
"We went into the studio to cut 'On The Road,' the John Sebastian tune, back in 1966. The City Lights were in a state of flux; we had Frank Sommers on lead vocals and bass, and Llyn Foulkes on drums. The session was produced by Terry Sachen (who co-wrote "I Know There's An Answer" with Brian Wilson for the "Pet Sounds" album). In the sound booth was Danny Hutton, founding member of Three Dog Night. We had two members of Neil Young's Crazy Horse, Ralph Talbot and Danny Whitten, doing some sweet background vocals. Dick Rosmini laid down the guitar track which lent a strong foundation; his finger-picking skills were legendary and made a nice difference on this record. Van Dyke Parks appeared, I think at the urging of Terry Sachen, to do a piano solo, I had put some harp on the track; when I heard Van Dyke's part, I came up with a simple upper register line to go with it. So, that became my duet with the notorious Van Dyke Parks. I always thought the tune sounded good, but we were up against The Kinks and The Mamas and The Papas; our record tanked. Still sounds good, but it's hard to find. "
THE RICK SMITH BAND
The Rick Smith Band was active on the Los Angeles scene in the late 1970s and early ’80s. They were a fixture at The Hong Kong Café and The Icehouse, sharing the bill with The Blasters, Billy Burnett, and others, and played the Blue Lagune Saloon, The Bla, Bla Cafe, and The Company Theater. It was an all-originals set list and featured Baxter Robertson (keyboards), Jack Rowe and John Lyon on guitars, and an innovative rhythm section of Andy Dworkin (drums) and Kenny Blye (bass). Smith did the singing and harp work; he and Lyon did most of the writing. The album and club performances were well received. The LP got significant airplay in L.A. and the Northwest. It sold well in San Francisco, L.A., and Germany. But not well enough. It is still available on Ebay.
Reviews
"This is an album a major label should have put out. It would have a chance to get a good promotional push, get on rotation playlist radio, get rammed down the throats of America, and possibly even make the Rick Smith Band scads of money. . .Smith shines as a harmonica player, showing lots of versatility and control. . .he's got a lot of vocal personality and always manages to get a song across with feeling. A gold star goes to bassist Ken Blye, whose creative approach is consistently top-notch. Songs range from cruisin' rock ('Heat of the South Bay'), the Chuck Berryish 'Radio Child' to tunes with reggae and jazz influences. Lyrical hooks abound and nab you by the second song, 'Low Class,' which is my favorite. It is a straight cry-in-your-beer country song."
Bruce Duff - Music Connection (L.A.) January 21, 1982
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"A swirling mix of American music, led by singer/harp player Rick Smith, catches you by surprise. The band jumps from flat-out highway rockers to lazy country laments to reggae-tinged tunes that point to years of roadhouse playing. Whether or not the band ever gets much of a spotlight is up for grabs, but song for song and note for note, Hand to Mouth is a homemade effort as solid and strong as anything you'll find coming out of the high-dollar companies. With some quality songwriting thrown in here and there, the Rick Smith Band could easily become contenders."
Bill Bentley - L.A. Weekly July 31 - August 6, 1981
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"Rick Smith has recorded on harmonica with blues great Big Joe Williams and later played on the soundtrack of DAYS OF HEAVEN. On this album, he debuts as a singer-songwriter with a top-notch rock 'n' roll band. While Smith is hardly one of the most mellifluous vocalists around, his semi-recitative vocals very effectively communicate his highly original narrative lyrics (printed on an insert). His songs are populated by a variety of authentic, mostly unsavory characters - heroes, villains, schemers, dreamers, working men, hookers, rednecks, dopers, losers and musicians. Indeed, music and musicians are recurrent themes throughout the album, and provide the lyrics's most positive images. There's a bit of raw language in a few spots, but always inthin an appropriate context. This is a sleeper, which should circulate very well on a word-of-mouth basis."
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Tom Bingham - Rockingchair Record Review - Philadelphia November 1981
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FAT CITY JUG BAND
In the summer of 1968, Rick went to Iowa City for a summer session of the Iowa Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa. And a band broke out. As the liner notes tell the tale, "Keith Dempster runs a beer parlor there called The Mill. That's where people go. Rick Smith, a big candy peddler from L.A., and John Bean, a home town soccer player, were writing free-style at the summer session poetry workshop; Ron Hills was suffering through a prolonged year at the University, trying to maintain his 2S status. They all met at The Mill, drinking beer and crying for women who wouldn't be caught dead in the Midwest. At 2 a.m. that sweet Iowa night, they drove to a quarry full of cold spring water and Devonian limestone. By 3, Fat City was really cooking. Ron and John strung out their guitars by the bonfire; Rick produced a box of 12 harmonicas and began breathing into all of them. Keith drained a jug of Gallo '69 and started blowing those long dirty bass lines for which he is now famous." The band packed The Mill every weekend. In September, they played together for the last time to record the one and only Fat City Jug band album. Llyn Foulkes, Rick's former bandmate in The City Lights, and now a renowned artist, designed the cover and overdubbed washboard for the record at a studio in L.A.
ERNEST TROOST
Ernest Troost is an Americana singer-songwriter, Piedmont-style blues picker, and Emmy Award-winning composer for film and television. After opening for The Hangan Brothers, Troost asked Rick to play harp on his new record, Resurrection Blues. Troost won the New Folk Award at the prestigious Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas with "Switchblade Heart" one of the songs Rick featured on.
Rick Smith interview with tom waits
LAYING DOWN A TRACK FOR DAYS OF HEAVEN
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"In 1978, Roberta Friedman had a roots music show on Pacifica Radio, KPFK, Los Angeles called Richland Woman. I recall her theme song was sung by Maria D'Amato (a.k.a. Maria Muldaur) of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band. From time to time, Roberta asked me to program some shows featuring harmonica players. I went back to the '30s and '40s, playing tracks by the likes of Jazz Gillum, DeFord Bailey, and Gwen Foster. This also gave me the opportunity to air such unusual and under-represented players as Chester Crill (a.k.a. Max Buda of Kaleidoscope), Rick Epping (Floating House Band), Stan Behrens, Louie Lista, Charlie McCoy and Al Wilson (Canned Heat). It was great fun to put so many creative players on the airwaves. After one of these shows, Roberta asked me to play live. I didn't know that Roberta was editing a film at the Redd Foxx offices. She had Paramount Pictures Production staff listening to the program because Paramount had a problem with the film she was working on.
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The movie was "Days of Heaven," directed by Terry Malick and starring Richard Gere and Sam Shepard. Essentially, I was doing an on-the-air audition. They had shot a dance scene to a track off an old Roots label re-issue, but the tune was cut in the 30s, and they were unable to clean up the track sufficiently to use it. They needed a fresh recording; they asked me to learn the original and to replicate it at Paramount Studios. Besides the audio quality problem, there was a second issue. The original player (whose name I can't recall) dropped time during the piece. The dance scene, of course, corresponded to that track, so when I played the tune, I had to drop time at precisely the tempo of the original because the dance scene was already in place.
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The Paramount Studio is cavernous enough to accommodate a symphony orchestra. The lights came down, and I was alone in that space with my little Marine Band harp. I got it on the seventh take.
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In 1979, Days of Heaven was nominated by the Academy for best picture, best music, and best cinematography. Midnight Express beat it out for best music, but Ennio Morricone's score for Days of Heaven remains spectacular in scope and passion. I got about a 44-second solo, a single chord ramp up, complete with idiosyncratic tempo; my claim to fame thanks to Roberta Friedman and to, unbeknownst to me, an on-air audition. You never know..."
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