Taxicab confessions

By Kimberly Chun

› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER

As a writer, a not-quite-closeted voyeur, and an I-can't-drive-65 speed freak, I can totally get the appeal of cab-driving. The all-American romance of the open road double-knitted with the tweaker paranoia of urban zoology! Yum.

Thus, I regularly ask an ex–music writer chum who now helms his own hack whether he's had any compelling characters slide into his backseat. But apart from the time when both back wheels spun off his moving vehicle — and the occasional "Follow that car! That beeyatch stole by my Mitsubishi!" moment and the sundry Danielle Steele scion — the answer is usually "no." "I just get a lot of drunks," he usually answers.

Translation: There are more bombed-out corpses in the back than there were, ahem, onstage at the Paramount Theatre on Feb. 18, when I watched, horrified yet transfixed, as the 74-year-old George Jones, one of my favorite country vocalists, struggled to hit notes and stay on mic with what was described as a bronchial infection.

To gauge the real pain and humiliation, all you had to do was see the just-kill-me-now, wolf-mother anguish breaking through the Steel Magnolias pancake drag on backup vocalist Sheri Smith's face throughout the ordeal. Memo to Rick Rubin: Please save the Possum from his own tour.

Thanks to his well-honed musical taste, my friend does get lot of compliments on — and soused sing-along tributes to — his radio selections. (Soon he'll be blasting Pirate Cat Radio 87.9 FM's new swashbuckling broadcast of The Howard Stern Show live and uncensored from 6 to 11 a.m. in SF.) As would, I'm certain, Sonny Smith, had he ever driven a hansom. We can all imagine what that would be like when the Mission singer-songwriter's Stranger Danger!, a musical theater production set in a taxi that Smith developed while in residency at the Lab, returns to the Make-Out, where he workshopped it last fall. Smith himself plays a cab driver who, he e-mailed, "never finishes his crappy novel about a doomed trip to Vegas and then on a rainy night is visited by a few apparitions and is kinda steered towards some kind of reconciliation by mysterious, even mystical forces. I'm dead serious."

His band plays in the backseat of the faux cab, which Smith, 33, built from salvaged Veteran's Cab parts. The follow-up to his One-Act Plays theatrical project and the fruit of a residency and current affiliated artist stay at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Danger was inspired by Smith's fascination with "fake driving scenes" in old movies. "It's not a classic musical," he demurred on a pay phone from Headlands. "At least I hope not."

Smith has evolved quite a bit from the days when he was sending his debut, this is my story, this is my song (Jackpine), en masse to the Guardian. Not many other folk singers have stepped so easily between the theatrical and visual art worlds, but Smith believes his fascination with character has helped. "It took a long time for me to have them converge, and they're still converging," he said. Now he said he's "opened up to more art all the time, conceptual ideas, plus the whole world of writing grants. You don't do that if you're just a musician guy trying to get booked into du Nord."

Putting out CDs has fallen by the wayside, although Smith still has music to give: After story, he self-released sweet lorraine, which includes harmonies by Jolie Holland, and he plans to give away his next album, Fruitvale, an ode to the residents of his old Oakland hood, free at Danger. "Fruitvale is a real interesting place — mostly black and Asian and Latino people and the few white people live up in the hills. The money rolls up the hill," he observed. "I could really sense the fact that people were really segregated, even though there was a Chinese-owned Mexican taco place that sold fried fish and had mostly black people coming in. So I thought a lot about racial issues."

He isn't worried about selling Fruitvale to a label — or fried fish fans. "I think there's a statute of limitations on how long you can take before you make another album," he said. "I haven't been working that angle, really." At which point we agree that his art is starting to sound a bit like a con. "Maybe I can get a grant calling myself a con artist," he joked. *

STRANGER DANGER!

Wed/1, 8 p.m.

Make-Out Room

3225 22nd St., SF

$10–$11

(415) 647-2888

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