RJ Smith: Bringin' it all back home

Now scribin' for the Country Music Hall of Fame, the chronicler of R&B titans is making sense of a whole scene

Let me say straight away that RJ Smith is my man from back in the day. I have profound bias toward him. From this dude I learned loads and loads on listening to and thinking about American music, back when LA Weekly was a vivrant thing.

I was hanging around RJ when I started writing in that great alternative newspaper about my father and my first son.

As you’ll hear, it’s always meant a bunch to me, knowing RJ Smith. In the periodicals section of Fresno State’s old Henry Madden library, J-school me would devour every week’s issue of the Village Voice. Smith’s column “Swing Shift” was one of the first credible hip music chronicles that I followed in real time.

While RJ was editing and I was writing at The Weekly he put out his first biography, about the photographer Robert Frank. Then he did this beautiful, indispensable book on the musical life of Central Avenue, here in LA. Next came the James Brown biography The One, which is canon. The great Chuck Berry is the subject of his most recent bullseye.

I’m lucky enough to say that we talked about this one a bit, near the end of its writing. All things Chuck Berry are just flat-out fascinating.

But the main thing is this: RJ Smith and I used to go to hella shows. One Endtroducing-era DJ Shadow gig in Silverlake is arguably a top-10 LA concert experience. My memory is of RJ and Charles Aaron watching the DJ somewhat imperiously while I danced with Marina Rosenfeld and the critic Ernest Hardy.

I can still feel that night… still hear Shadow’s mix building.

Anyway, 2024 RJ Smith is in a new work space that made me do a double-take when I heard about it. He’s moved from Echo Park to Nashville and begun writing for the Country Music Hall of Fame. Now, Chuck Berry is very much of country music, but there’s an element of the unexpected here.

Am I right? Or am I being judge-y about Tennessee white people?

I talked to Smith from suburban Las Vegas, a day or two after the Super Bowl, hence the Taylor Swift talk. And if you’re waiting for me to ask what he’s working on next, you can stop. I totally spaced on that.