By Larry Schwartz
CHRIS Smither was onstage at last year’s New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival when someone from the rear of a crowd roared out his name.
The veteran singer-songwriter looked out at an audience of almost 1000. “Hey Chris!” a fellow way out back was yelling. “It’s Louie! Louie Bergeron!”
“And he turns around to everybody,” Smither recalls, “and he says, `I went to high school with this guy!”‘
Smither was in his early 20s when he left his hometown in the mid-1960s to perform in the coffeehouses of Boston during the folk and blues revival of that time.
He rarely ventures south to the Crescent City. When he does, it’s mostly to perform. “They’re happy to claim me as their own,” he says with a bemused laugh. “I’m introduced as `New Orleans’ own Chris Smither’.”
New Orleans is not the only town to welcome him. At 55, Smither has as strong a following as ever. His career has persisted, he concedes, in a way he could not have predicted when he first played in public in 1966.
“I would have been shocked if you told me I would have been doing it past 40,” Smither says.
He is enjoying a second wind in his career after a lengthy period of alcohol abuse. “I think part of it is that I spent those 10 or 12 years not really doing anything except drinking. So I’m making up for lost time.
“I find myself – I don’t know how to say this – I find myself being extremely happy. Of having finally come to some sort of comfort level with who I am and what I do.”
Among the tracks on his latest album is a cover of Don’t Make Promises, a great song penned by the ill-fated Tim Hardin, who died of a drug overdose in 1980.
Hardin was just one of his contemporaries to have succumbed to the excesses of the times. “I met him once or twice,” Smither says. “He wasn’t a very pleasant fellow.”
Where others took to hard drugs, Smither embraced alcohol with such a vengeance he now talks of “just basically staying drunk for years and years and not really realising or caring much about what was happening and not really realising how much time
was going by.”
He sometimes wonders how he has endured. “Why me and not them?” he says. “It’s a very interesting question. I don’t pretend to understand why.
“Somehow I got through it. I don’t know why and I don’t know how. I do know what the answers are not. It doesn’t have anything to do with being smart or strong or good. It doesn’t have anything to do with that. If I were a Christian, I’d call it grace. But I’m not. So I don’t know what to call
it.
“Something killed them. And it didn’t kill me. I guess I’m thankful for that.”
Decades after venturing to Boston, he dips a lid to a man who first encouraged him to perform there. “It’s sort of been a long time coming,” he says of his cover of Rattlesnake Preacher, a song by the influential Eric von Schmidt on his latest CD, Drive You Home Again.
“I never got round to recording one of his songs until this album. He’s an iconic figure to me. I just visited him last week. He had a throat cancer that’s been removed and he’s undergoing a lot of treatment. We’re going to release a live CD this summer in July and he’s painting the cover for
me.”
Smither is a distinctive fingerstyle guitarist who sings with a mellow voice. He has written a host of songs, recorded by the likes of Bonnie Raitt, who has dubbed him “my Eric Clapton”.
On several albums, he has punctuated original work with covers of artists as diverse as Jesse Winchester, Robert Johnson, Steve Tilson, Bob Dylan, Chuck Berry and Blind Willie McTell.
“I wouldn’t do a song,” he says, “if I didn’t think I could in some sense own it, become it, make it sound as though I’ve written it myself.”
All but four of 11 tracks on Drive are originals. “I remember one Columbus Day,” he sings on one track, “When I was young and learned the world was round … I had trouble keeping both feet on the ground.”
His father was professor of romance languages at Tulane, in New Orleans. “I’m an inveterate reader,” he says. “I read constantly and I read a lot of poetry and just a lot of literature … Some of my earlier memories are being sent down the hall to get the dictionary from the dinner table.”
As a child, he took piano lessons and tinkered with a ukulele he found in his mother’s closet in a way that would later be reflected in his idiosyncratic finger-picking style. He plays mostly in standard tuning, but in a way that leads some to assume he’s tuned his guitar to an open chord. “What
I really do quite a bit of is partial chords,” Smither says. “If you take a chord that you can move up and down the neck in any way and just use one or two strings from it against the steady base …”
Rock ‘n’ roll was a first love. But he was more interested in being a soloist. Then he heard a Lightnin’ Hopkins record, Blues In The Bottle.
“When I was 17, almost 18, I went to Mexico City and I wound up rooming with a guy from Texas. I was playing guitar not the way that I play now and he gave me that record and he said, `You should listen to this guy’.
“I put it on and the standard joke that I tell is that I didn’t know which guy he meant for me to listen to. After about three days, I realised there was only one guy playing. I was blown away mainly because I was actually in love with rock ‘n’ roll at the time. I didn’t want to be in a rock ‘n’ roll
band and here was this guy playing what was to me obviously rock ‘n’ roll and he was all by himself.”
Smither counsels fledgling players not to emulate the guitarists they admire too exactly. “One of the ways that I learned how to play is you listen to these records and you say, now what the hell is he doing there? And you try to do it. You just come up as close as you can. But half the time if
you really work at it and keep developing it, it’ll develop into something that’s really good in its own right.”
Drive was recorded over a fortnight in Austin, Texas, home to guitarist Stephen Bruton. It is the third consecutive album the former folk and blues session player has produced for Smither.
“He and I have been friends for probably 25 years, something like that,” Smither says.
Smither is more confident in the music he makes these days. “There’s a famous line in a movie that Paul Simon did once,” he says of One Trick Pony in 1980, “where he’s in a band and he comes offstage. The crowd is going wild and he looks around at his band members and says, `Well. We
fooled them again’.
“I used to feel that way. And I don’t any more. I no longer ever feel that I’m fooling people.”
The Sunday Age, 05th of March 2000
Larry Schwartz Writer 