Why has the world forgotten Benjamin Smoke?
By Joseph Earp
“If you like … [something] it’ll break,” Benjamin Smoke once mumbled in his twangy Southern accent, his gaunt head bowed. He wasn’t being ‘wise’ mind you: at least not deliberately.
He was talking about a pair of sunglasses.
“Your good sunglasses will break,” he repeated. “And [sunglasses] will never break if you don’t like ‘em. Look.” And with that he hurled his cheap pair into the air, smiling sadistically at the poor sod tasked with interviewing him as his glasses skipped across the tarmac, unscathed.
Benjamin Smoke, the lead singer and songwriter of both the seminal band Smoke and the genre-bending (and gender-bending) outfit The Opal Foxx Quartet, never tried to be wise. He just discussed the world as it passed him by – a world that spurned him for his sexuality, and his oddness, and his difference.
Of course, for Smoke’s fans – a dedicated, dwindling bunch – it’s easy to read into every one of his casual statements and see a portrait of the man himself. Benjamin wasn’t just talking about sunglasses, for Chrissakes, he was talking about his own life. His life: a sad procession of failures and violent attacks throughout which he somehow managed to remain unbent and unbroken, all the way up to his premature death at the age of 39 from AIDS-related illness.
It was a premature demise that should have made him an icon. After all, he was a transgressive activist in the least transgressive part of America, a musician and renegade who gouged his way across Texas’ conservative landscape. He was transgender in an era when wearing women’s clothing was a legitimately life-endangering act, and a gay man who not only refused to hide his sexuality but made it as public as it could possibly be. “For a faggot, do I have a rockin’ band or what?” he used to taunt his audience, licking his lips before launching into songs about masturbation and pain.
He should have died an icon, a legitimate creative and political force. But he didn’t. He died a junkstore Jesus; a forgotten figure relegated to the corner, destined to collect dust for decades.
And yet perversely, such an indiscretion may well have delighted Smoke. After all, he was the politician of pain. Sadomasochism dominated his songwriting in the same way that suffering dominated his life. “Boys like me mean ‘yes’ when they say ‘no,” he howled on ‘Beeper Will’. He wanted to be hurt: actively encouraged it. When police broke up his shows (as they often did) he jumped deep into the throng, taking lashes with the best of them, his silk dress trailing behind him.
Pain made Benjamin Smoke who he was. Pain transformed him. He was so used to tragedy that he wore it like an ill-fitting suit, sashaying about the place in a cloak cut from hurt. “This ain’t just another sad and silly love song,” he sang on ‘Curtains’ in his croaky voice; the sound of an angel with laryngitis. “Believe me, I would rather cry in my beer and keep this to myself.”
If the world were a just and reasonable place, Smoke would be a heroic figure, a musician who challenged notions of sexuality and gender identity long before any other performer even dared to tackle the subject matter.
But the world isn’t a just and reasonable place. That’s what Benjamin always believed: more than that, that’s the true point of his songs. He was a crooked figure in a cruel world. But time may well reveal such a position to be superior to that of an idol.
After all, idols are difficult, temperamental things: failures waiting to happen. The rat is different. The rat doesn’t have a reputation to worry about. Smoke never pretended to be an idol, or a crusader, and viewing him as such destroys the very point of his music. He didn’t want to be a priest – he wanted to a pervert. He wanted to take the base and the crude into the mainstream, and not for political or emotional reasons. No. He wrote about sex and pain because his world was sex and pain.
Why has the world forgotten about Benjamin Smoke? Perhaps because Benjamin Smoke wanted the world to.