G.E. Smith
The former 'Saturday Night Live' band leader goes for a stroll and a cigar on Newbury Street
"Come on in," says G.E. Smith, climbing onto the bus idling outside the Eliot Hotel. "This is home."
The ponytailed guitarist has just arrived from Burlington, Vt., where his band Moon-alice, a hippie-inflected septet featuring the Jefferson Airplane's Jack Casady on bass, played the night before.
"You want a drink?" Smith asks, taking a seat on the leather couch. "We have water, tea, coffee, and soda."
At 56, Smith doesn't live nearly the rock n' roll lifestyle he did while touring with Hall & Oates in their heyday, or leading the "Saturday Night Live" band for 10 years, or traveling around the world with Bob Dylan. These days, he says, he and his bandmates return to the bus after a show and promptly bury their noses in MacBooks instead of piles of blow.
"I love it on the road, man," says Smith, who was in town to play at the Paradise. "There's a moment when you're leaving the centrifugal pull of the city you just played and you're heading to the next town."
The band has a couple of hours before sound check, so Smith invites us to take a stroll along Newbury Street. He'd hoped to arrive in Boston early enough to inspect some vintage guitars on sale at Skinner Inc. - Smith is an inveterate collector of musical instruments - but it's too late in the day.
Crossing Mass. Ave., Smith immediately pulls out a pack of Parodi cigars and lights one. He's got a box of Cubans on the bus, he says, but he prefers the stubby Parodis because they're made in Scranton, Pa., about an hour from his hometown of Stroudsburg.
Though he played on some of Hall & Oates's biggest hits, including "Private Eyes," "Maneater," and "Kiss On My List," and also backed Dylan for five years, Smith is perhaps best known for his work on "Saturday Night Live," where he was musical director from 1985 to 1995.
"I put it down to luck, man," he says as we pass Sonsie. "There are a lot of guys who play music well. I was just very lucky. New York is very much about fresh meat, and for a while I was fresh meat."
He scored the "SNL" gig, indirectly, through Gilda Radner, whom he had met while working on the comedian's one-woman Broadway show and to whom he was briefly married in the early '80s. (Smith is married now to singer Taylor Barton, and the couple has a 6-year-old daughter, Josie.)
It hasn't hurt Smith's career that in addition to his considerable skills as a guitarist, he's got a distinctive look. The son of a Lebanese father and an English mother, Smith has a prominent forehead, narrow, friendly eyes, and an enviable mop of hair that he's worn every which way over the years. His look even helped him land a job with David Bowie. The two met briefly at a party in 1980, and a few days later, the Thin White Duke called to ask if Smith would appear in the video for his hit song "Fashion."
"He didn't even know I was a guitarist," says Smith, a smile creasing his face. "What can I say? I'm a weird-looking dude."
There aren't many cities Smith hasn't played, and Boston remains a favorite. He recalls dates with Dylan at the Opera House, and the idle afternoons spent walking around the Common. Today, because of the hour, we get only to Berkeley Street before we have to turn around.
"Of all the things I've done, playing with Bob was the best," he says.
And the audition was simple. Smith says Dylan walked into the studio and asked if he could play "Pretty Peggy-O," a traditional tune that appears on Dylan's self-titled 1962 debut LP.
"I was, like, '[Expletive] yeah, I learned it from you!' It's cellular, man," says Smith. "Bob had been playing with these heavy session cats from LA, and they didn't know it. I got the gig."
Checking the time on his cellphone, Smith says he and the band will need to eat soon, and he's got a hankering for barbecue. That's nothing new. He mentions that Hall & Oates used to arrange whole tours around the location of good barbecue restaurants. (Smith's favorite joint is Bob Sykes BarB-Q in Bessemer, Ala.)
At the corner of Newbury Street and Mass. Ave., a man driving a white Escalade stops and rolls down his window.
"You that guy?" he suddenly shouts, holding up traffic. "You that guy with the guitar on 'Saturday Night Live'?"
Smiling, Smith waves hello and then crosses the street. His cellphone rings. The tour manager says the rest of the band is on the bus and ready to roll.
"OK," says Smith. "Daddy's got to work."
