"Adam PW Smith was 43 years old when he started a week of touring around Britain with The Dreadnoughts. He was 87 years old by the time that week was over," reads the author bio in Smith's recently selfpublished book, This Place is Awesome.
The music lover and selftaught photo-journalist first saw local high-energy "gypsy-klezmer-polka-celtic-cider-folk-punk band" The Dreadnoughts in 2007 at their second show ever.
When Smith heard the band was touring Britain for a week in 2009, he volunteered to join the five younger men in their van and photograph "the mayhem." He got what he expected, only more of it.
"The lack of privacy, the lack of comfort, the lack of civility," he said. "It aged me in dog years."
Smith end ed up with a profusion of black-andwhite shots that document the onstage pandemonium, vehicular chaos, offstage squalor and tedium.
Unexpectedly, he realized the notes he'd taken provided him with rich material to mine. Particularly the experiences of touring with a low- end -of-the-food-chain band that was promised a meal a night but scrabbled for a place to sleep after each show and functioned with young, intelligent bandmates behaving like the boys in Lord of the Flies.
This Place is Awesome is part photo doc, part travel diary rife with witty and wry insights and observations. "One thing I don't quite understand about the British is why, when the road is twisty and has room for only one vehicle, they insist on planting seven foot high hedges along the sides to give both a sense of claustrophobia and imp end ing doom-" he writes in one section.
"Now call me crazy, but on arriving in a strange town and knowing that I'd be exhausted in a few hours, perhaps the first statement out of my mouth to a local ear would have been 'please spread the word that we need a place to stay tonight,'" he writes in another.
Smith says he's always been fascinated by the reality of rock music and where it differs from the myth. "The myth is kind of predictable and silly," said the man who came of age in the era of 1970s punk.
Photographer Pennie Smith's 1980 book The Clash: Before and After made a huge impression on the youthful Smith. The former Ontarian who started photographing shows at the age of 16- shooting The Cult at their first North American performance, in Montreal-has always dreamt of capturing the moment a band catapults from cult following to more mainstream appreciation. He may not have achieved that with The Dreadnoughts, who could keep packed crowds at Pub 340 on East Cordova jumping until 3 a.m., but whose lead singer and guitarist is now pursuing a PhD in philosophy in Providence, R.I.
Still, the band plans to tour each summer, and 18 months after his first stint on the road with them, Smith joined them again, this time in Poland. "This is clearly the limitation on memory," he said.
Smith shot a video for their song "Polka Never Dies," and hopes to turn 42 hours of footage from Poland into a documentary.
Smith and The Dreadnoughts launched This Place is Awesome at the Railway Club in October and the first run sold out in two weeks. The book is available online and in local book and record shops. For more information, visit adampwsmith.com.
[email protected] Twitter: @Cheryl_Rossi
