Red Velvet Underground: A Rock Memoir, with Recipes

By Freda Love Smith

“Not only a rock memoir and recipe book but also a poignant work of personal self-discovery and the challenges yet joys of parenting.” —Huffington Post

Part memoir, part cookbook, and all rock and roll, Red Velvet Underground tells the story of how musician Freda Love Smith’s indie-rock past grew into her family—and food-centric present.

Smith, born in Nashville and raised in Indiana, is best known as the drummer and co-founder of bands such as the Boston-based Blake Babies, Antenna, and the Mysteries of Life. Red Velvet Underground is loosely framed around cooking lessons Smith gave to her eldest son, Jonah, before he left for college. Smith compares her son’s experiences to her own—meeting Juliana Hatfield and starting the Blake Babies, touring in Evan Dando’s hand-me-down station wagon, and crashing with Henry Rollins, who introduced the band to local California fare—all while plumbing the deeper meanings behind the role of food, cooking, and family.

Interspersed throughout these stories are forty-five flexitarian recipes—mostly, but not exclusively, vegetarian—such as red pepper-cashew spread, spinach and brazil nut pesto, and vegan strawberry-cream scones. Throughout the book, Smith reveals how food, in addition to music, has evolved into an important means for creativity and improvisation. Red Velvet Underground is an engaging exploration of the ways food and music have informed identity through every stage of one woman’s life.

“These are sweet, unsentimental scenes from the ever-evolving life of a woman of many shifting and balancing roles: mother, wife, drummer, student, teacher, friend, daughter, food enthusiast. It’s all tied together with tantalizing recipes that have been lovingly improvised and tweaked into a life-affirming doneness.” —Juliana Hatfield, musician

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781572847613

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

Daily Bread

IAM MAKING STRAWBERRY SCONES with my son Jonah. Not Jonah at four, rosy cheeks and long eyelashes, or Jonah at seven, outsized front teeth and towhead crew cut, but Jonah at eighteen, scraggly blond mustache and apparent hangover. And yet my heart flutters. It is 10:30, Sunday morning. Jonah has been home for one day from the University of Illinois, where he just completed his freshman year.

He towers over me. I show him how to zest a lemon. He gets the hang of it, producing little ribbons of zest and a bright smell that elevates our little apartment kitchen, with its yellow 1970s linoleum and rusty appliances, to a place of memory and emotion where more is at stake than a tray of scones. Jonah chops strawberries into small pieces. I cut chunks of semi-solid coconut oil into our dry ingredient mixture of flour, baking powder, and salt. I explain to Jonah that the globs of fat are OK, that they will help yield tender scones, and the last thing you want to do when you make scones is over-mix. What you want to do is under-mix. Again, he gets it. In the kitchen, as in most areas of his life, Jonah has always been a fast study—when he wants to be.

During the year before Jonah left for college, we met in the kitchen like this most Sundays for cooking lessons. I wanted to teach him how to cook to help prepare him for adulthood, to make sure the son I was sending out into the world could take care of himself in this basic way. But the lessons were complicated and layered. They were a chance to spend time together, to talk through the major events of that transitional year, and a way to tie Jonah to the family, a little, at the exact moment when those ties were loosening. Now that he is home for the summer, I am worried that he will struggle to find a comfortable dynamic within the confines of family life. After nine months of relative freedom, will it be hard for him to live at home? And what about us—me, his father, Jake, and his little brother, Henry?

I, for one, did not adjust quickly to Jonah’s departure for college. I was a wreck. I often caught myself staring into his weirdly clean bedroom feeling alternately empty and freaked out. I hadn’t thought I’d have to contend with this cliché. Eventually, I settled into a new family rhythm. I didn’t stop missing him. But I grew at home with the change. Now, I can’t exactly see what this summer is going to look like or grasp what this new rhythm is going to feel like.

And so, again, as I have done all my life, I look to the kitchen to be more than just a place to make food. I call upon it to be a place where I make sense of things, just as I did as a five-year-old, cutting biscuits with my grandmother while my parents finalized their divorce; as a ten-year-old, making scrambled eggs for my little brother and myself when our mom worked late; as an eighteen-year-old, subsisting on cheap black bean soup while I struggled to find my way in the music business; as a pregnant, macrobiotic twenty-five-year-old with a new lease on life, nourishing myself and in-utero Jonah with brown rice and seaweed; or as a forty-four-year-old, teaching my teenage son how to roast a chicken.

Right when he landed at home yesterday with multiple bags of dirty laundry, I asked Jonah if I could wake him up at 10:00 to make scones together for a Sunday family brunch. Fine, he said, if that’s what you want for Mother’s Day.

I forgot to mention: It is Mother’s Day. And yes, of course, I played that card.

Jonah halves and juices our bald lemon, whisks a tablespoonful of the juice into a bowl of coconut milk, and sets the mixture aside to curdle. We line baking sheets with parchment. I think to myself: Don’t bring up summer jobs. Don’t say anything. It’s Mother’s Day. Your son is home. You’re making scones . . .

And then I say, in a cheerful voice that makes me want to smack myself, So! Any summer job prospects?

Umm, he says. Yeah. My friend works in a doggy daycare, and he might be able to get me a job there. If somebody quits. Maybe.

I silently beat myself back. I want this time with Jonah to help him adjust—to help all of us adjust—to his being home. I will not ruin the day by lecturing him about our money situation or his alarming lack of initiative. I will not scold him about last summer or about the entire school year, about how he has never, ever had a job. I will not say, When I was your age.

Although, seriously, when I was his age? When I was his age, I lived in an apartment in a city far from home. I knew how to cook, how to balance a checkbook, how to clean a toilet. I’d had many jobs. I’d started a band. Maybe my path to adulthood was too accelerated, and maybe that’s why I haven’t pushed my children to achieve the autonomy that life pushed on me. I wanted my kids to be kids for as long as possible. But in fostering this, I’m sure I’ve missed some opportunities to encourage their greater independence. When Jonah turned seventeen, it dawned on me that he was one year from adulthood, and I panicked. I had failed, I realized, to prepare my son for the world by not encouraging him more vehemently to get a job, by not leaving him often enough on his own, by not requiring him to share in household chores. I was overwhelmed with regret, and I must admit that this was a major impetus for the cooking lessons. I was looking for redemption.

I am absorbed, briefly, by the task at hand—folding our ingredients together with a rubber spatula. Gently, I stress to Jonah. God, but he’s a good kid. And I adore him beyond reason.

The thing that will drive me crazy this summer is not his late nights, as his coming in after midnight rarely wakes me anymore; or his outrageous food consumption, as I’ve become accustomed to those vanishing loaves of bread; or even his grubby room and piles of dirty laundry, which stopped being a problem once I decided that they’re not my problem. The thing that will drive me crazy is the moldering. The way he sits in his room wearing headphones, on Facebook or whatever for hours and hours, seeming to accomplish nothing. What I really need is for him to show some gumption, some spark of enthusiasm and productivity. And I hate to ruin Mother’s Day by haranguing him about getting a job. But I have done the math, I have crunched the numbers, and I don’t see how we are going to manage his remaining three years of college without his financial contribution. I really need him to earn some money.

I can’t explain why, but I have always been able to earn money, though I’ve never amassed a penny of it. In middle school and high school I babysat, sold greeting cards, and delivered newspapers. The moment I graduated from high school, I stepped into a professional baking position at an excellent bakery in my hometown of Bloomington, Indiana. At The Daily Bread, I trained to make loaves of bread, baguettes, bagels, and pastries. I learned about mixing, kneading, rising, and proofing, and mastered bakery equipment like scales, heavy-duty mixers, and industrial ovens. Some of the skills I acquired were low-tech; The Daily Bread specialized in Pain Brie, a bread which required repeated beating with a Louisville Slugger that was kept leaning against the bakery wall for this sole purpose. Other skills were more refined, like rolling delicate croissant dough into a flat rectangle, covering it with a smooth sheet of cold butter, cutting it into triangles, and rolling it into perfect crescents. It was a summer of new skills. I learned how to wake myself up at 4:00 in the morning and almost took pleasure in stumbling through pre-dawn Bloomington, muttering to myself, Time to make the donuts.

I learned, also, that good loud music makes light work, and discovered that the music I loved the most was by a band I’d never even heard before that summer: the Velvet Underground. A friend gave me a cassette tape loaded with Velvets songs, and it lived in the bakery, where it accumulated grimy layers of flour and endured repeated plays on the bakery’s dilapidated boom box. I loved picking up the Louisville Slugger and beating the Pain Brie in time to the brutal eighth-note piano outro to Waiting for My Man. I didn’t feel like a kid anymore. I was almost seventeen.

Before that summer, I didn’t exactly play an instrument, having long ago given up on violin and failed at bass and guitar. But my boyfriend had a drum set in his basement, and the Velvet Underground had a female drummer, the astounding Maureen Tucker, to inspire me. And so I learned something else that summer: a basic drum beat. And all summer long I baked bread, listened to the Velvets, and played that basic beat. Before the summer ended, I’d formed my first band and played my first rock show.

I didn’t know it, but I’d created a template for the next twenty-five years of my life. Almost everything would spring from that summer. There would be more baking. There would be more Velvet Underground. There would be more bands, more shows. And there would be more jobs. Many, many, many more jobs.

I’ve worked in four different bakeries. I’ve worked in countless restaurants and cafés as a dishwasher, prep cook, barista, waitress, counter person. I’ve worked at many colleges and universities: Harvard, Indiana University, the Museum School in Boston, Le Cordon Bleu in Chicago, the University of Nottingham, Northwestern University. My duties have nearly run the gamut: adjunct yoga teacher, department administrator, library information assistant, life-drawing model, assistant registrar, English instructor. I have been a canvasser for Greenpeace, an assistant at Forced Exposure magazine, a live-in nanny, and a beauty salon receptionist. For one night, in the middle of a bad, broke month, I was a dancer at the Naked i in Boston. I earned my month’s rent on that one night and never went—or looked—back.

Jonah uses an oiled quarter-cup measure to scoop dough onto our cookie sheets. It’s a trick I learned during one of my bakery jobs. Many of the culinary skills I’ve passed on to my kids originate from the kitchens where I’ve worked. I’m glad to have this knowledge, glad that I have worked and learned my whole life. I want the same for Jonah, but I sure hope he never resorts to some of my more desperate moneymaking ventures, and I hope he doesn’t end up with a list of jobs as kaleidoscopic as mine. I’d be happier if he ended up like those friends of mine who have done the same work for years, building a livelihood systematically, progressing and advancing in stages, from associate to junior partner to senior partner, from assistant professor to associate professor to full professor, not flailing around randomly like me. I’ve hopped from one subsistence job to another, I’ve stopped and started playing music multiple times, and I wonder, still, at middle age, what exactly I want to do with my life. I don’t want him to follow my lead. For now, I want him to get one job, just one nice summer job. As soon as possible.

The house smells like warm strawberries. We tidy up the kitchen, make tea, and set the table for our Mother’s Day brunch. The scones bake quickly and turn out brown and beautiful. We sit down together: Jake, fair, bespectacled and boyish, and Henry, still faintly cherubic at thirteen, with big blue eyes and a lingering blond curl or two, and Jonah, cute and lanky, still with those long eyelashes—oh but that mustache!—his hangover succumbing to the strong, hot tea. I rein in my fretting, reminiscing heart. I want to be here, not whacking dough in my past or swimming around in Jonah’s unknown future, a future I cannot rush him into. I have done what I can for this Sunday morning. I taught my son to zest a lemon, to curdle milk, to under-mix scones.

We pounce on them and gobble them up, every one. It doesn’t matter how many times I have baked scones, at home or at work, I am still amazed that our lumpy, unappetizing mess of a dough has yielded such tender, lightly crumbly treats. They may not be perfect, but they are pretty damn spectacular.

Two weeks later, we are trying our hands at bread. I’ve been growing this crazy idea in my brain that Jonah could be the family bread baker this summer. This lesson is the first step in my cunning plan. Baking bread is a serene activity in this age of the no-knead loaf, not the strenuous event of my baking days gone by. We don’t knead or whack or punch the dough but simply chuck the ingredients into a bowl, stir until it comes together, and give it plenty of hours to sit around. It seems terribly millennial, terribly Jonah—minimal elbow grease, weirdly good results.

I turn on the faucet and show him how to test the temperature of the water on the tender underside of his wrist, rather than on his tougher, less-sensitive fingers. Once the dough is mixed, we set it aside to rise and Jonah goes off to his room, clunking his door behind him.

He has been in his room a great deal these past two weeks.

The first Monday he was home, I returned from work that evening to find him in pajamas, eating a sandwich. Maybe it was unrealistic of me to expect him to be out pounding the pavement, distributing résumés, filling in applications, shaking hands and taking names all over Evanston. But, well—pajamas? Before I could form words, Jonah said, I applied for tons of jobs today.

Oh, I said, stunned. That’s great honey! Where?

A bunch of stuff on Craigslist. Research experiments.

My heart fell.

And I applied to be a brand ambassador for a cigar company.

Jonah did get chosen to be a research subject for a study at Northwestern. He listened to bleeps for about an hour and a half and earned himself exactly $10. I quickly realized that he simply didn’t have a clue about how to look for a job. I started spouting advice at him:

Look, it’s hard to get a job. You need to spend a few hours a day on this, every day. You need to get out there, walk right into businesses. Don’t expect them to come to you. I went on. I couldn’t stop.

A few days passed, no progress, while I fought my irrational inner fury, but Jonah, when pressed, said—again—I applied for tons of jobs today. He’d applied to Starbucks, to Whole Foods. This was better than cigar ambassador, and I was heartened, but I didn’t share his faith in the whole online application process and more advice gushed out of my mouth. Really, I said, there is just no substitute for initiative. You might want to walk over to these places and introduce yourself.

More days passed. Jonah lived from his room by day, went out with his friends at night. I ran out of clichés to spout. And then, thankfully, something came up that took my mind a little off Jonah. Jake got tenure.

Jake had been a professor of media studies at Northwestern University for three years after holding the same title at the University of Nottingham for four years. Months earlier, he’d submitted his case for tenure, and it entered the mysterious, medieval review process, one carefully designed to promote anxiety and insecurity. We tried not to think about it, though it always lurked in the back of our minds. Then, one morning in May, the dean called Jake. How are you? she said. Great, he said. Well, she said, you’re about to get even better.

Talk about the phone call that changed your life—from career stress and uncertainty to job security forever, in five short minutes.

But that phone call was the distant echo of a decisive moment fifteen years before. Back then, Jake and I had a band together called the Mysteries of Life, and we’d recorded two records on RCA. When the label dropped us, we had to decide—should we stay in the game and hunt for a new record deal? Jonah was four and I was pregnant with Henry. The music business was feeling awfully unsteady for our growing family. Meanwhile, Jake had been slowly finishing his undergraduate degree at Indiana University and becoming increasingly enchanted with academia. He had his eye on a PhD program in communication and culture. It would put our lives on an entirely different track. It would be a long haul, and it would be a gamble.

We made the decision and took the gamble. After years of further education, this gamble took us across the ocean to England, to the one and only job Jake was offered after finishing his PhD (he applied to forty), and then eventually back across the ocean to a