Smith's sense of humour and timing is exemplary,
and his selection of targets for parody is keen, reminding me of a guitar-bearing
Tom Lehrer....
Laughs aside, what raises Smith above the legion
of puerile Valdemar fans with guitars is his serious side. "Starlight
And Saxophone", "Mandela". "Rocket Ride" and
the dark-edged "PQR" are all excellent, but two tracks stand
even above those: the faerie story "Storm Dancing", whose haunting
melody will echo in your head long after it is over, and the magnificent
Jim Henson tribute "A Boy And His Frog". There aren't too many
songs that make me cry; this is one of them.
... There are very few real songwriters in
the world; Tom Smith is one of them, a bearded SF geek with a pen and
a stopwatch who turns out music with substance and style.
RATING: A
... Tom's stage presence is, initially, unassuming.
Just a guy with a guitar, rotund, indifferently dressed (not that there's
anything wrong with that!) with a music stand of dog-eared sheets that
fall to the floor once in a while. Absolutely no distance between him
and the audience.
None of that matters when Tom begins to work.
He's fast, he's witty, he plays as well as
any folk musician and has a warm, hearty voice.... Many of Tom's songs
are song parodies, but others are traditional folk song structures adapted
for talking about, well, having sex with aliens and getting drunk on
alien beverages--and others are his own well-constructed songs. No one-trick
pony he.
And boy, he works the crowd. Most don't need
to be worked: they sang along even when he didn't ask them to. But he
plays and talks and doesn't miss a beat when someone shouts out a comment.
He picked on (with utmost kindness) a woman who had never seen him perform
before--and nearly had her convulsed with the laughter of surprise.
The fascinating and wonderful thing was that
I could just feel the sense of community being built by this performance.
Tom was referencing everybody's common experience as fans.... If it's
part of Fandom's common culture, and is part of the stuff that binds
the community together even if it isn't SF or Fantasy, it was legitimately
part of the show.
And did I mention he was funny?... His big
closer, "Rocket Ride" (a paean to all the B-Movie 50's cadillac-fin
spaceship stories of our childhood and all the sensawunda they embodied
in all that tinsel) is just one flat-out great song. Hell, if Bruce
Springsteen sang it he'd have the crowd on its feet stomping and cheering.
So I left Tom's concert delighted, moved--and
enlightened.... In the words of George S. Patton, Jr., "A man that
eloquent has got to be saved!"