Smith Westerns

I can tell you my love for you will still be strong after the boys of summer have gone

Don Henley – Boys of Summer (1984)

Watching the Karate Kit I could only marvel at the slacker-coolness of Ralph Macchio. In an early scene he has a playful wrestle with a friend who’s sporting a t-shirt of two bloated cartoon pigs fucking, the caption reads, ‘Makin’ Bacon’. He’s wearing that t-shirt ‘cos he don’t give a fuck, and that is cool. It’s the kind of cool that younger kids would admire it’s the kind of cool that adults would recognise, it’s the kind of cool that I’ll never be. It’s Julian Casablancas cool.

The great quality of slacker-rock is that it’s the easiest genre to pull off so long as one of you plays guitar real neat. You can get you wardrobe from an older sibling/cousin. You can get your electricals from skips and you can get your music on cassette from charity shops. It’s one of those trends that is always cool no matter what. It’s cool this year, it was cool last year and the year before that, it was cool in 2001, it was cool in 1992, it was cool in 1984, it was cool in 1978, it will be cool next year.

Listening to The Smith Westerns I imagine them seated cross-legged before some clapped out telly playing Karate Kid on a NES and listening to Don Henley. They drink sprite and wear sweat bands. I want them to play some Williamsburg pool party or some log cabin in the Midwest or a skate pool in LA. I want them to exist in a world where smoking grass doesn’t cause headaches, where everything can be resolved either by skating, karate or ghostbustin’.

The trick to the music is to write a guitar heavy track in the vein of the Ramones and then slow it down around to 100bpm. The lyrics have to be about girls or boys or both. The basist has to lay of any theatricals, there’s no need to give the impression that they can actually play! And the drummer should just focus on the cymbals. It’s not meant to be difficult, it’s meant to be so easy that you could play it in any state and it would sound just as good.