FREAK: Death of a Punk-Rock Gunslinger

No one who met Fred “FREAK” Smith ever forgot him. Loud, flashy and profane, he played guitar like no one else. But then it all went very, very wrong. Could it have ended differently?

Fred "FREAK" Smith in action, photographer unknown.

The D.C. punk scene was not exactly safe.

Jimi, drunk out of his skull on a motorcycle, ran into a parked car. It was Christmas, and his 25th birthday. John got shot in the face by some kid looking to earn his stripes. (He lived, incredibly, but that’s another story.) Adam hung himself, but everyone saw that one coming. And then there was FREAK.

FREAK—yes, all caps—was the shit, a gunslinger with a souped-up Strat and a 100-Watt Marshall. He didn’t look like the other punks. Decked out in studded belts and metal-plated boots, dreads locked in a pitched battle against his receding hairline, FREAK came on like Gene Simmons cast as Mad Max—if Max were paunchy, balding, and Black. But with a guitar in his hand? Forget it. He could do it all, from scorching metallic leads to delicate and ethereal washes of sound. I remember the first time I saw him play, watching his fingers blur across the fretboard, seeing as much as hearing the perfect architecture of his constructions. I was still a teenager, but even then I knew I was in the presence of a master.

Then it went wrong. His band broke up and he moved to Los Angeles, looking for a bigger stage. FREAK wasn’t the first big fish from a small pond to learn there were limits to how far his talent might take him, but something curdled after he left the safe confines of the D.C. punk scene. It would’ve been sad enough if he’d ended up behind the counter at Guitar Center or sweeping up at a rehearsal space, but it was so much worse than that. On August 8th, 2017, FREAK’s lifeless body was found behind the softball field at Las Palmas Park in San Fernando, lying in a slick of his own blood. He’d been stabbed to death.

I barely knew FREAK; I doubt he could’ve picked me out of a lineup. But I admired him—and what I see now is that I saw a piece of myself in him. So…how had it all ended so badly? As far as I know, I’d never pissed anyone off enough to want to stab me—the worst I got was being punched by skinheads, who knew a soft target when they saw one. But I wonder how close I came to dying—not FREAK’s quick death but his slower, unheralded one, all alone as his musical dreams ebbed away to nothing.

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In the punk scene, cred was everything.

Merely possessing a third-generation dub of Bad Brains’ first demo tape bestowed life-altering gravitas—or so I hoped—and FREAK had cred in spades. He’d been the guitarist in Beefeater, a brazenly political punk / funk / metal band who seemed to spend as much time lecturing their audiences as actually playing to them. He was the punk scene’s Falstaff—one of them, at least—and whether he was dancing on bars, ensconced in the 9:30 Club’s little ticket office or actually playing music, he was always on stage.

When I first encountered FREAK, in 1986, he hadn’t yet legally changed his name—in hindsight, a harbinger of things to come. Back then he was plain old Fred Smith but his bravado was infectious, a bug I wanted very much to catch. Our tastes didn’t really align—metal left me cold, and my interest in Goth barely extended beyond pale, kohl-eyed girls with black nail polish—but I was taken with his sheer cockiness, his determination not to pass through life unnoticed. FREAK was a poet of profanity, deploying the word “fucker” in novel and previously unimagined shadings, middle fingers upraised and making it all look like a piece of fucking cake. His friend Joyce Lacovara remembers his ability to make life feel like a cartoon:

“We lived in the same building. Often after hours, we would pry open the mailbox of an old man who we knew hid his vodka there from his wife. We always replaced it. Probably my favorite Fred moment was the two of us in the pouring rain holding hands, skipping/dancing while singing “Singing in the Rain” while clumping up the middle of 17th Street in our big punk rock boots.”

Of course, there was a darker side. Monica Richards, FREAK’s collaborator in Strange Boutique—a Goth outfit he’d later describe as the best band he’d ever be in—was privy to the rougher aspects of his upbringing:

“His father was a U.S. marshal, and an alcoholic who had been very hard on him when he was a kid. His parents divorced when he was young. He went to seminary school where, in his words, he learned about racism and hatred. He had a number of stories from when he was a kid, and many weren't good ones.”

I wasn’t a child of divorce, but like everybody else in the punk scene, I’d had a challenging childhood. I knew firsthand the sense of otherness early pain can engender—the sneaking suspicion that you aren’t like the rest of the kids, that you’ll never really fit in—and how it has a way of embedding deep inside, directing your actions in unseen ways. Maybe that’s why I studied FREAK. Everything about him—from his profanity to his oversized personality to his chosen name—seemed calculated to telegraph I AM DIFFERENT.

There is, of course, the obvious and needed point: As a Black man in the punk scene, he was different. How big of a deal this was depends on your perspective. It wasn’t to me—D.C. was then roughly 70% Black—but then again I’m not. In several interviews, FREAK noted the many insulting comparisons made about him and other Black musicians in the scene:

“It was very strange to be these “token negroes” playing in front of predominantly all white audiences, but we did it. As Shawn Brown [Dag Nasty, Swiz] and myself will attest, there were fucking issues man. A lot of fucking issues that we had to address when we did shows. When I first heard someone refer to me as the “negro Lemmy,” I was floored. I immediately lowered my mic stand down from the height that I set it. When I heard Shawn Brown being referred to as “the negro version of Ian MacKaye” I was floored again. When I told him, he was taken aback but still plugged on. In retrospect, even in this new scene, I was always wondering, would racism ever end?” (Maximum Rocknroll, May 2010)

But the punk scene was FREAK’s home, maybe his only possible one. He could play anything he wanted, and yet his political, sartorial, and musical tastes—in the words of his former bandmate Onam Emmet: “whatever was mean and loud and aggressive”—meant that punk was the obvious choice, even if he seemed determined to not quite fit in.

I knew how this felt, too. Even after I fully embedded in the D.C. punk scene, I’d do strange little things to ensure I stuck out: Drinking and drugging flagrantly in largely straight-edge circles; playing up the weirder and more perverse elements of my humor for shock value. Anything I could do to remind others that I was different, not on the team, not fully trustworthy. It’s painful, both to remember this period in my life and to recognize that some people never escaped it, recreating those primal childhood rejections over and over until there was nowhere left for them to belong.

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I remember the first time I walked down the 9:30’s long, anticipatory hallway—past the little ticket office where FREAK worked—and through the doors into the performance space.

It wasn’t very big—“Posted Capacity 249” read a placard on one black-painted wall—and the sight lines were broken up by random-seeming columns rising from the floor. I didn’t care; I felt like I’d reached the very heart of the universe, and I knew in my bones I had to find some way to belong there. It was 1986, and I was 15 years old.

A few months later, my high school band scored an opening slot at a “three bands for three bucks” showcase. I can still recall the tremors coursing through my legs as I ascended the steps at the side of the grotty stage and gazed out over the crowd. I had reached the outer limits of my ambition; there was nothing left to conquer.

These days, the word “band” most often refers to a musical group, but there are older meanings, too. The word may derive from Proto-Germanic, Old Norse or some older tongue, but it’s a meaning from Middle English that sticks with me: “A force that unites, bonds, or ties.” The intoxication I felt onstage was a force, one I was powerless to resist, and in all my time in the D.C. scene—roughly the mid-‘80s through the early ‘90s—it was all I lived for. It told me who I was. No one talked about “making it”—not openly at least. And yet nothing but performing gave me a sense of purpose; nothing else could make me feel seen. And so I sweated and sweltered in musty basement rehearsal spaces, hoping against hope I’d break through.

I was, of course, selling myself short. It wasn’t merely that playing bass in a punk band was, objectively, the least ambitious life goal imaginable. But having found a kind of brotherhood (and, later, sisterhood) in music, I couldn’t imagine any higher aspiration. In the years after that first 9:30 show, I watched as my bandmates inevitably split for college, leaving me with a modicum of cred but no life plan to speak of. All the while some interior voice whispered: There must be something more than this. It would take me years, but eventually I’d heed it.

I wonder if FREAK heard this voice, too, but didn’t listen. Being possessed of greater natural talent than I was, I suspect he harbored higher aspirations. Tracing his career, it’s clear he was angling for some kind of commercial viability—even if it was one that slipped from his grasp again and again.

After the ultra-confrontational Beefeater disbanded, FREAK’s next outfit was the gothy and atmospheric Strange Boutique. They were a great band with memorable songs, charisma, and chops, but still: It’s telling that the most-repeated story about FREAK’s tenure in the band revolves around a passing compliment from Killing Joke guitarist Geordie Walker. Kind words from your idols are meaningful, sometimes deeply so. But in FREAK’s own telling, such praise “can’t fill your van with gas or put new strings on guitars.”

Strange Boutique called it quits in 1993. The following year, FREAK moved to Los Angeles, where his musical projects included American Corpse Flower—whose ReverbNation bio reads “creating an intense walk on a very dark and ominous path”—and Blaxmyth, a self-described “Ghetto Metal” band in which FREAK replaced cofounder D-Roc of Body Count, who’d died of lymphoma.

Blaxmyth actually had a shot, or a shot at a shot. In 2007, they entered Bodog Music’s Battle of the Bands to compete for a million-dollar recording contract. According to Joyce Lacovara:

“[I] visited Fred and Dee out there. They were a couple here in D.C. and had moved out there together looking for the good life. Fred was doing advertising for a local paper and not real happy about it. The next thing I knew Dee was out of the picture and we were watching him on TV…I was thinking Fred had finally got where he needed to be but I didn’t understand yet about his mental issues. The band finished second in the contest so didn’t get the record deal.”

This would be, in retrospect, the high point. And with it we come, inevitably, to the saddest and most wrenching part of FREAK’s story.

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FREAK soldiered on with Blaxmyth for a while, but the writing was on the wall.

As Monica Richards recounts:

“He was brilliant in the band, but his style was constantly being ripped apart by the band members, as it was clear they were still grieving. They kept saying he wasn’t as good as [D-Roc]. He told me he said to them ‘If you want your old guitarist so badly, dig him up.’ He was in the band for a few years, was loved by the fans and I really felt he was finding himself again. But he ended up leaving…he told me he didn’t find the respect he needed from his band members.”

FREAK’s decline was largely invisible to his friends back home. But as his messages became increasingly manic and inscrutable, some grew concerned. In late 2011, he returned to D.C. to play a final, shambolic show at the Black Cat. Filmmaker Scott Crawford (Salad Days) was there:

“It was gut-wrenching. He kept on telling me ‘It’s gonna be huge; it’s gonna sell out! There were like ten people there. His singer never showed up, so he tuned his guitar for like 20 minutes, stalling for time.”

It’s tender to realize that even at this seeming low point, FREAK still had nearly six years to live, years in which perhaps things could’ve turned around. But they never did. As Joyce Lacovara related to me:

“Suddenly he told me he was homeless and I noticed how unhealthy he looked in the occasional photos posted. He told me he had cancer several times but couldn’t answer any of the questions I asked about the disease or treatment so…I never really knew if that was true or not. Other friends out there told me he was really struggling mentally. They tried to help but…Fred had become a hard guy to help. He got very hard to communicate with and I realized there was something…maybe a lot of things very wrong.”

As reported in an NPR article published shortly after his death, FREAK lived for a time at Blake Homes, a now-closed sober living facility in San Fernando. But for reasons unknown he left, opting to camp fewer than 100 feet away in Las Palmas Park. He’d never leave. Sometime on August 8th, 2017, he was stabbed to death by an unknown assailant. According to one source who maintains connections in the L.A.P.D.:

“The investigator felt strongly that [FREAK] had been killed by another street person in a substance-fueled fight and, furthermore, that the assailant had almost certainly found a way to die in the weeks following. The takeaway I got was that the cops felt that at a certain level, life was cheap and easily lost in pointless squabbles.”

Stabbing—or being stabbed—are shockingly intimate acts. FREAK probably had some connection, if a tenuous one, with the person who took his life. It’s awful to even contemplate, but what I wonder now is if in FREAK’s final moments—as he realized there was no coming back from this one—what he felt was relief.

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Not long after the election of Donald Trump, an Egyptian-born writing partner of mine said something that stuck with me, both for its prescience and how it illuminates FREAK’s downward spiral.

“In America,” he said, “there is no ceiling and no floor. Anyone can rise to the very top—regardless of their ability, or lack of it. But if you fall, god help you. Because there is nothing to stop you from sinking to the very, very bottom.”

Was there some way to prevent FREAK’s death? A couple of years after his murder, I mentioned the crime to Ian MacKaye (Minor Threat, Fugazi, Dischord Records). At one point in the conversation he asked: “Did we fail him?” I was taken by the starkness of his comment; later, I asked him to expand on it:

“I was relating a conversation with Onam in which that question came up. I concluded that we hadn't failed FREAK, but rather provided a community in which he was able to be his own FREAK self with no judgement. Of course, it was temporary. Communities are living organisms and thus don't last forever. Each of us has to follow our trajectories...some with shorter arcs than others.”

What would caring for aging punks look like—an assisted-living facility done up in leather and plaid? Would they submit to such care, anyway? FREAK’s obstinance and aversion to accepting help are constant refrains in the interviews I’ve read and conducted. Perhaps most plainly, there was his refusal to choose a different and more viable life path. How many musicians actually “make it” is a thorny question—as is defining precisely what that even means. Still, at least one recent survey suggests that just 11% of independent artists are able to make a living solely through their music. I suspect the true number is even lower.

Here’s where—for me at least—FREAK’s story cuts closest and most painfully. When I started playing the bass guitar, at the age of twelve, I had no other ambition other than to become one of those precious few working musicians. But over time, my refusal to admit that my plan wasn’t working kept me in a state of bitter enmity, both with those who loved me and with music itself—as if it owed me something, not the other way around.

When being a gigging musician didn’t pan out, I tried to make a go of it scoring films—even though I’m not really a movie guy. When it all ran aground, in my mid-40s, I suffered a profound identity crisis, coming within inches of losing my marriage and my family. I did accept help, though only under duress. If I hadn’t, well…I’d rather not contemplate that too deeply.

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Punk promised that the past could be erased, that there was—in John Lydon’s immortal sneer—”No future.”

Some of the people I knew from the scene—like Jimmy and Adam and John—lived and died like freshly struck matches: briefly and brightly. But with the fortunate exception of John, they checked out early. No one ever talked about what would happen after the fire went out, how we’d keep ourselves warm when the painful realities of making a go of it in the straight world—with a name like FREAK, no less—became more urgent.

FREAK was well-loved. If you peruse the Facebook groups and punk forums and message boards dedicated to him, you’ll see that—despite his tendencies towards boorishness and aggressive humor—a lot of people cared for him. But I wonder if he knew it, if that warm glow ever truly penetrated to his core.

It took me far too long, but eventually I used the fading flame of my own match to light a fire, feeble at first but stronger and more trustworthy now. I’m still around to feel the love of those who knew me at my most troubled, and to love them in return. I made it just in the nick of time.