A Matter of Life and Breath

You’ve probably never heard of Jimmy Smack – I hadn’t until I read this story in Lärm, the Berlin-based magazine that grubs around in the fringes of pop culture. But then Jimmy is only one part of the attraction here, and while I enjoyed discovering him on YouTube, it was the loving descriptions of Los Angeles and its doomed beauty that really stayed with me. I hope you’ll enjoy it too.

The first breath I took was in a hospital room with a view down on West Sunset Boulevard. That is to say: I am an Angeleno. The artist known as Jimmy Smack also took his first gasps in the City of Angels, or at least that’s what I gather from the sparse biographical information I found online – “born Los Angeles, 1945.” If that’s accurate, the air that first filled Jimmy Smack’s lungs contained even more of the city’s famous photochemical smog than what I inhaled about 35 years later.

In any case, I was still an infant when he – dressed in a kilt, cloak and skull paint – started carrying electric bagpipes and a rhythm box onto the stages of small local venues like the Anti Club, just about a mile and a half away from that hospital room on Sunset. Which is also to say: I, like many others, hadn’t heard of Jimmy Smack until the spring of 2022 when the Dutch label Knekelhuis reissued the entirety of his previously self-released output as the Death Is Certain LP.

Incidentally, Swans released a song entitled Los Angeles, City of Death around the same time. But all cities were cities of death back then, I suppose. People everywhere were crawling their way into post-pandemic life, a bunch of big babies forced to relearn object permanence just when abject impermanence had started to feel like the new norm. And, for a brief moment, gratitude seemed to reign over fear. It felt like the world had not only recalibrated its relationship with life and death, but saw this knowledge as a gift. It’s amazing how quickly we forget… but I digress.

This was the climate in which Jimmy Smack’s oeuvre from the early 1980s also re-entered the world: a collection of droning chants layered over rhythms that pulse like a jackhammer on some tracks, the breath of life that filled his bag pipes transformed simultaneously to the gasps of death on others. It was a fitting soundtrack to the feeling of having just survived the apocalypse.

Death and destruction have always loomed over Los Angeles, however, a metropolis which by so many metrics probably shouldn’t even exist. First, there’s the constant droughts. Then there’s the ever-present threat of the “big one,” the earthquake that will level the city to rubble… or break it off the coastline and send it plummeting to the depths of the Pacific. Personally, I never really understood that last one, the part about falling into the ocean. Especially after seeing streets turned into rivers of fire following the 1994 Northridge earthquake, a mixture of broken water pipes and ruptured gas lines, I figured the city would be turned to ash first, perhaps to rise again like its desert cousin over in Arizona. But the risk of wildfires isn’t one that needs much explanation since January last year. During the next El Niño cycle, however, we’ll be reminded once again of how violently freshly scorched earth can roll down the hillsides when the rain finally comes.

Speaking of the hills around the time Jimmy Smack was performing, there was another terror that kept Angelenos of all ages awake at night: The Hillside Stranger, the Skid Row Stabber and Rodney Alcala were just a small handful of the more than 20 serial killers that stalked the Los Angeles metropolitan area throughout the 1970s and 80s. To be fair, Los Angeles wasn’t even the most dangerous place to be in the “golden age” of the serial killer: According to some data sets, the state of California only ranked 4th in the nation for serial-killer-related deaths. What the city did excel in, however, was its flair for the dramatic. In the epicenter of entertainment, the macabre has always been fair game.

Let’s not even get into how Reagan escalated tensions during the Cold War, or drug wars, or the air pollution and the acid rain… Death probably did feel certain in early 1980s Los Angeles, that’s for sure. Enter Jimmy Smack and his howling bagpipes: Was he a shaman of catharsis or a punk taunting his audience to scream that they couldn’t take anymore? The few existing video recordings of his performances show an intensity that bordered on the ecstatic – but if you squint just a tiny bit, you’ll also see how quickly his act also strayed into the comical. But that was the point: In his own words, Jimmy Smack said he was playing the part of Jimbo the clown.

From the chopping sound of his instrumentation to the menacing details of his costumes, he was out to entertain an audience that felt like they were living through an apocalyptic circus. He also happened to be a classically trained ballet dancer with a background in performance art and had a tattoo on his arm of the grim reaper: a self-made icon of the City of Angels [of Death].

Los Angeles owes its existence to the grace of its fault lines: some of geological origin, others born of the convergence of empires. The city was Spanish until 1821, and then Mexican following the War of Independence until 1848, when the US claimed it under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The city is, of course, still steeped in Mexican customs – and that includes its culture of death, itself a blend of Aztec and Catholic rituals. That isn’t to say that the current governing empire has always embraced it. It took half a century of protests for the Chicano Movement to gain the cultural and political visibility that would ultimately turn a tradition like El Día de los Muertos, or the Day of the Dead, into a national event complete with mass-produced, skull themed merchandise available at your local superstore.

Most reviews of Death Is Certain make a point of mentioning that Jimmy Smack donned skull paint before it became synonymous with European black metal. While that statement is true in and of itself, it fails to locate his work in its own time and place, or to make note of how his makeup drew from the traditions of El Día de los Muertos, or how the addition of his kilt and bagpipes brought the city’s colonial collisions into a kind of bricolage focus: one culture’s instrument of mourning played by the face of another’s. The same reviews are often quick to point out that he wasn’t political like many of his contemporaries on the L.A. underground scene, or to try to place him in the context of deathrock. But if Jimmy Smack is not this and not that, or maybe that, it might also be worth remembering that he was just Jimbo the Clown.

I started school a year or two after Jimmy Smack sold his bagpipes and gave up the act. His performances freaked a few people out and their way of letting him know was by phoning in death threats. It would seem they didn’t quite get Jimbo’s joke… or then again, maybe they did: When you’re a bagpiping grim reaper clown with a wife and kids at home, it’s all a matter of life and breath.

Not that anyone was breathing too easily back then anyway: Even if the state of the world wasn’t getting you down – or, like me, you were just too young to follow the news – stage one “smog alerts” were still ringing out 100 days a year. But one thing as certain as death is that cities will always change: Los Angeles hasn’t even issued its top tier air quality warning since 1998. The city that Jimmy Smack performed in was gone before I was old enough to go to the all-ages clubs. In turn, I barely recognized my old neighborhoods the last time I drove through them, about 10 years ago. The brown haze that once hung over the basin and clung to the San Gabriel Valley had lifted and, in its absence, the style of angst I grew up with replaced by wellness culture and breath work. Now some of those parts of town no longer even exist… ashes to ashes, dust to the Eaton Fire. The apocalypse, it would seem, is in an ongoing state of flux.

Lärm & Gestalt is an independent publisher based in Berlin that works at the intersection of pop culture and memory.

Melissa Frost is a Los Angeles-born, Berlin-based writer and editor with a background in visual art. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London and is the founding editor of Reality Scratch, a biannual art and literature zine focused on the contemporary in terms of the right now.

Daniele Morganti is a freelance illustrator and art director based in Milan. A former Mimaster student, his professional background includes over 10 years of experience in art direction for branding and digital products. When he’s not working, he collects pins, magazines, and fanzines wherever he can find them.