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.