Legend of the Fall

Trying to understand the legendary Mark E. Smith, or at least find him.
by Michael Mannheimer

It’s 6:50 p.m. on Saturday, and I’m supposed to meet the Fall’s infamous frontman Mark E. Smith for an interview in 10 minutes. Hollywood is always a mess on the weekends, and tonight is no different; the three blocks immediately surrounding the Knitting Factory are overrun with middle school tweens hoping to catch a glimpse of their favorite Disney Channel stars at some premiere at the El Capitan. I’m deathly afraid of being late, but I have to fight the temptation to run over each and every one of them. My friend and I get to the venue just in time, walk into the designated meeting place, only to hear the horrible strains of some very opening band. No Fall. No Mark E. Smith. And honestly, I’m not that surprised.

I had my reservations coming in; I mean, this is fucking Mark E. Smith. The man is a legend, and for all the wrong reasons. Smith is notorious for his frantic, snarling vocals and abrasive yet oddly melodic music, as well as his behavior, documented by the BBC film The Fall: The Wonderful and Frightening World of Mark E. Smith, where Smith is so boozed up that you can barely understand a word he says. Back in the day, Smith and company took punk rock and disfigured the shit out of it—forcing power chord riffs and speed drumming to stay behind Smith’s lyrical pontificating. Nowadays, Smith and Co. (different Co. of course) apply the same genre torture to post-punk: invalidating the term one keyboard solo at a time, with barked vocals and a grisly-toothed pop snarl.

So the fact that Smith is not at the “designated meeting spot” doesn’t surprise me. What does surprise me is running into Smith’s very lovely, very welcoming, very sane wife Elena Poulou, who says her husband is waiting in the bar at the Roosevelt Hotel across the street. She instructed me to go to the second floor, and he’d be there.

So we go, and we wait. And wait. I call Poulou, but still no luck, and I soon make a shocking discovery: the Roosevelt Hotel has three bars—one in the restaurant, the private “Library” lounge, and the Tropicana Bar, located next to the pool. Poulou thinks that we are at the wrong one, and that maybe he’s at the Tropicana Bar. I can just picture Smith, who’s 48 but looks at least 10 years older, tossing back a few shots before tossing himself—curled into a perfect cannonball—straight into the deep end.

Smith has always been an enigma. For 30 years he has been the sole constant in the Fall, one of the most influential bands to emerge from the ’80s post-punk era. His personality is both infectious and alienating—as evidenced by the nearly 50 ex-members of the band—and he’s got that whole “I’m so cool that I really don’t care” thing down cold. Hell, the man practically invented it. He’s short, compact and very British. Like a larger version of the backwards talking midget in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks.

Smith’s stage presence that night—sauntering in late, stumbling to the mic and weaving in and out of the merry musical mess—is almost as awkward. During the set, he roamed around the stage, moving the mic stands, singing into two mics at once, messing with the knobs on all the amps and Poulou’s keyboard. He took his coat off and folded it neatly onto one of the stands. One song later, he would put the jacket back on. Rinse. Wash. Repeat. The Fall.

Repetition, then, might be the reason that Smith has been able to make such consistently punishing music during his three decades with the Fall. The band’s 25 albums have nothing but Smith’s rants holding the songs together. The man simply oozes unpredictability. During the Fall’s 1998 tour, Smith was put in jail for one night on assault charges, stemming from a fight with his own band mate. And at a May 8 tour stop in Phoenix, both Smith’s backing band and tour opener the Talk quit the tour, supposedly due to an inability to work with Smith. Talk singer Justin Williams threw a banana peel at Smith’s head during the show, and the ensuing melee questioned the validity of the remaining North American tour dates.

Immediately following the banana incident, Emmett Kelly of Narnack records (The Fall’s American Label) called up bassist Rob Barbato of L.A. band Darker My Love and asked if he was interested in joining Smith for the tour.

“It was kinda shocking, because they were like ‘we need a band’ and I was at work. Emmet called me, and he was like, ‘Drive to San Diego, they are canceling the San Diego show and the Pomona show, so you have a little time to rehearse,’” says Barbato. He quickly recruited Darker My love guitarist Tim Presley and old friend and drummer Orpheo McCord, and suddenly they were making music with Smith. “We got together, rehearsed once for three hours, fucking shitting our pants nervous, and I probably smoked three packs of cigarettes that day,” says Barbato. “And Mark has been very nice and respectful to us the whole time. We’ve had no problems.”

Here lies the problem. Smith seems so spontaneous from day to day, show-to-show, that you never really know what, or who, you are going to get. The Fall’s latest record, 2005’s Fall Heads Roll, documents a band in a serious deep groove. The songs are long and drony, perfect for Smith to spit both his astute observations and bizarre non-sequiturs over.

Perhaps the former backing band had a problem with the unstructured ramblings, or with the way Smith saunters onstage five minutes into the opening song. But despite his erratic behavior, the blame doesn’t always lie with Smith. “People that talk shit on him are people that obviously have treated him a certain way so he reacts that way, and that’s totally their problem,” says Presley. “He doesn’t like people being around, I understand. But I mean, we have to be pretty vulnerable when we go out on stage but then we come back and regroup, he’s very encouraging.”

After running around the Roosevelt Hotel for over an hour (and the ensuing two days worth of failed attempts at a phone conversation), all I have of Smith is that initial image of his entrance, his slight frame pacing the stage erratically, like he was lost, looking for something. Yet, it’s a fitting picture of one of rock and roll’s biggest puzzles. Is he really a huge egotistical asshole, or as Barbato says, “one chill dude?” Either way, he puts on one hell of a show. LAA