Red Velvet Underground: A Rock Memoir, with Recipes

by Freda Love Smith

Overview

"Not only a rock memoir and recipe book but also a poignant work of personal self-discovery and the challenges yet joys of parenting." —Huffington Post
Part memoir, part cookbook, and all rock and roll, Red Velvet Underground tells the story of how musician Freda Love Smith's indie-rock past grew into her family—and food-centric present.
Smith, born in Nashville and raised in Indiana, is best known as the drummer and co-founder of bands such as the Boston-based Blake Babies, Antenna, and the Mysteries of Life. Red Velvet Underground is loosely framed around cooking lessons Smith gave to her eldest son, Jonah, before he left for college. Smith compares her son's experiences to her own—meeting Juliana Hatfield and starting the Blake Babies, touring in Evan Dando's hand-me-down station wagon, and crashing with Henry Rollins, who introduced the band to local California fare—all while plumbing the deeper meanings behind the role of food, cooking, and family.
Interspersed throughout these stories are forty-five flexitarian recipes—mostly, but not exclusively, vegetarian—such as red pepper-cashew spread, spinach and brazil nut pesto, and vegan strawberry-cream scones. Throughout the book, Smith reveals how food, in addition to music, has evolved into an important means for creativity and improvisation. Red Velvet Underground is an engaging exploration of the ways food and music have informed identity through every stage of one woman's life.
"These are sweet, unsentimental scenes from the ever-evolving life of a woman of many shifting and balancing roles: mother, wife, drummer, student, teacher, friend, daughter, food enthusiast. It's all tied together with tantalizing recipes that have been lovingly improvised and tweaked into a life-affirming doneness." —Juliana Hatfield, musician

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781572847613
Publisher:	Agate Midway
Publication date:	08/18/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	232
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Freda Love Smith is a lecturer in the School of Communication at Northwestern University. She is the co-founder of the bands The Mysteries of Life and The Blake Babies, who were regulars on MTV and critically applauded in The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, and Spin. Her songs have been licensed widely, from the 2003 Disney film Freaky Friday to American Airlines in-flight entertainment programs. She has a monthly column in Paste and her short stories have appeared in journals such as The North American Review, Smokelong, Bound Off, and Riptide. She lives in Evanston, IL, with her partner, Jake Smith, and two sons.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One – Daily Bread

I am making strawberry scones with my son Jonah. Not Jonah at four, rosy cheeks and long eyelashes, or Jonah at seven, outsized front teeth and towhead crew-cut, but Jonah at eighteen, scraggly blonde mustache and apparent hangover. And yet my heart flutters. It is 10:30, Sunday morning. Jonah has been home for one day from the University of Illinois, where he just completed his freshman year.

He towers over me, I show him how to zest a lemon. He gets the hang of it, producing little ribbons of zest and a bright smell that elevates our little apartment kitchen, with its yellow 1970s linoleum and rusty appliances, to a place of memory and emotion, where more is at stake than a tray of scones. Jonah chops strawberries into small pieces, I cut chunks of semi-solid coconut oil into our dry ingredient mixture of flour, baking powder and salt. I explain to Jonah that the globs of fat are okay, that they will help yield tender scones, and the last thing you want to do when you make scones is over-mix. What you want to do is under-mix. Again, he gets it. In the kitchen, as in most areas of his life, Jonah has always been a fast study, when he wants to be.

During the year before Jonah left for college, we met in the kitchen like this most Sundays for cooking lessons. I wanted to teach him how to cook to help prepare him for adulthood, to make sure I was sending my son out into the world capable of taking care of himself in this basic way. But the lessons were complicated and layered. They were a chance to spend time together, to talk through the major events of that transitional year, and a way to tie Jonah to the family, a little, at the exact moment in time his ties were loosening. Now that he is home for the summer, I am worried that he will struggle to find a comfortable dynamic within the confines of family life. After nine months of relative freedom, will it be hard for him to live at home? And what about for us—me, his father Jake, his little brother Henry?

I, for one, did not adjust quickly to Jonah’s departure for college. I was a wreck. I often caught myself staring into his weirdly-clean bedroom feeling alternately empty and freaked-out. It was a cliché I didn’t think I’d have to contend with. But boy did I. Eventually I settled into a new family rhythm. I didn’t stop missing him. But I grew at home with the change. Now, I can’t exactly see what this summer is going to look like, or grasp what this new rhythm is going to feel like.

And so, again, like I have done all my life, I call upon the kitchen to be more than a place to make food. I call upon it to be a place where I make sense of things, such as I did as a five-year-old, cutting biscuits with my grandmother while my parents finalized their divorce, as a ten-year-old, making scrambled eggs for my little brother and myself when our mom worked late, as an eighteen-year-old, subsisting on cheap black bean soup while I struggled to find my way in the music business, as a pregnant, macrobiotic twenty-five-year-old with a new lease on life, nourishing myself and in-utero Jonah with brown rice and seaweed, or as forty-four-old, teaching my teenage son how to roast a chicken.

I asked Jonah, right when he landed at home yesterday with multiple bags of dirty laundry, if I could wake him up at ten to make scones together for a Sunday family brunch. “Fine,” he said, “If that’s what you want for Mother’s Day.”

I forgot to mention: It is Mother’s Day. And yes, of course, I played that card.


Jonah halves and juices our bald lemon, measures a tablespoonful of the juice into a bowl of coconut milk, and sets it aside to curdle. We line baking sheets with parchment. I think to myself, Don’t bring up summer jobs, don’t say anything, it’s Mother’s Day, your son is home, you’re making scones…

And then I say, in a cheerful voice that makes me want to smack myself, “So! Any summer job prospects?”

“Umm,” he says, “Yeah. My friend works in a doggy daycare and he might be able to get me a job there. If somebody quits. Maybe.”

I silently beat myself back. I want this time with Jonah to help him adjust—to help all of us adjust—to his being home. I will not ruin the day by lecturing him about our money situation, or his alarming lack of initiative. I will not scold him about last summer or about the entire school year, about how he has never, ever had a job. I will not say, “When I was your age.”

Although, seriously, when I was his age. When I was his age, I lived in an apartment in a city far from home. I knew how to cook, basically, how to balance a checkbook, how to clean a toilet. I’d started an original band. I’d had many jobs, already. Maybe my path to adulthood was too accelerated, and maybe that’s why I haven’t pushed my children hard toward the autonomy that life pushed me toward. I wanted my kids to be kids for as long as possible. But in fostering this, I’m sure I’ve missed some opportunities to encourage their greater independence. When Jonah turned seventeen, it dawned on me that he was one year from adulthood, and I panicked. I had failed, I realized, to prepare my son for the world, by not more vehemently encouraging him to get a job, by not leaving him often enough on his own, by not requiring him to actively share in household chores. I was overwhelmed with regret, and I must admit that this was a major impetus for the cooking lessons. I was looking for redemption.

I am absorbed, briefly, by the task at hand, folding our ingredients together with a rubber spatula, “gently,” I stress to Jonah. God, but he’s a good kid. And I adore him beyond reason.

The thing that will drive me crazy this summer is not his late nights—his coming in after midnight rarely wakes me anymore—or his outrageous food consumption—those vanishing loaves of bread to which I’ve grown accustomed—or even his grubby room and piles of dirty laundry, which are not a problem, ever since I decided they’re not my problem. The thing that will drive me crazy is the moldering. The way he sits in his room wearing headphones, on facebook or whatever, for hours and hours, accomplishing apparently nothing. What I really need is for him to show some gumption, some spark of enthusiasm and productivity. And I hate to ruin mother’s day by haranguing him about getting a job. But I have done the math, I have crunched the numbers, and I don’t see how we are going to manage his remaining three years of college without his financial contribution. I really need him to earn some money.


I can’t explain why, but—although I’ve never amassed a penny of it—I have always been able to earn money. In middle school and high school I babysat, sold greeting cards, delivered newspapers. The moment I graduated from high school, I stepped into a professional baking position at an excellent bakery, The Daily Bread, in my hometown of Bloomington, Indiana. I trained to make loaves of bread, baguettes, bagels, and pastry. I learned about mixing, kneading, rising, and proofing, was taught how to use all of the bakery equipment; scales, heavy-duty mixers, industrial ovens. Some of the skills I acquired were low tech—one of the loaves the Daily Bread specialized in, Pan Brie, required repeated beating with a baseball bat, a Louisville Slugger that leaned against the bakery walls for this sole purpose. Other skills were more refined, like rolling delicate croissant dough into a flat, even rectangle, covering it with a smooth sheet of cold butter, cutting it into triangles and rolling it into perfect crescents. It was a summer of new skills. I learned how to wake myself up at four in the morning, and almost took pleasure in stumbling through pre-dawn Bloomington, muttering to myself in an inexplicably funny private joke, “Time to make the donuts.”

I learned, also, that good loud music makes light work, and discovered that the music I loved the most was by a band I’d never even heard of before that summer, the long-defunct Velvet Underground. A friend gave me a cassette tape loaded with Velvets songs, and it lived in the bakery, where it accumulated grimy layers of flour and endured listen after listen in the bakery’s dilapidated boom box. I loved picking up the Louisville Slugger and beating the Pan Brie in time to the brutal eighth note piano outro to “Waiting for My Man.” I didn’t feel like a kid anymore. I was almost seventeen.

Before that summer, I didn’t exactly play an instrument, having long given up on violin and failed at bass and guitar. But my boyfriend had a drum set in his basement, and the Velvet Underground had a female drummer to inspire me. And so I learned something else that summer: A basic drum beat. And all summer long I baked bread, listened to the Velvets, played that basic beat—before the summer ended I’d formed my first band, played my first rock show.

I didn’t know it, but I’d created a template for the next twenty-five years of my life. Almost everything would spring from that summer. There would be more baking. There would be more Velvet Underground. There would be more bands, more shows. And there would be more jobs. Many, many, many more jobs.


I’ve worked in four different bakeries. I’ve worked in countless restaurants and cafes, as a dishwasher, prep-cook, barista, waitress, counter person. I’ve worked at colleges and universities; Harvard, Indiana, Museum School Boston, Le Cordon Bleu, University of Nottingham, Northwestern, where my duties have nearly run the gamut – adjunct yoga teacher, department administrator, library information assistant, life-drawing model, assistant registrar, English instructor. I have been a canvasser for Greenpeace, an assistant at Forced Exposure magazine, a live-in nanny, a beauty salon receptionist. For one night, in the middle of a bad, broke month, I was a dancer at The Naked Eye in Boston. I earned my month’s rent that night, and never went—or looked—back.


Jonah uses an oiled quarter-cup measure to scoop scone dough onto our cookie sheets. It’s a trick I learned during one of my bakery jobs. Many of the culinary skills I’ve passed onto my kids extend from the kitchens I’ve worked in. I’m glad to have this knowledge, glad that I have worked and learned my whole life. I wish this for Jonah, too, but I sure hope he never resorts to desperate money-making ventures, and I hope he doesn’t end up with a list of jobs as epic as mine. I just want him to get one job, now, just one nice summer job.

The house smells like warm strawberries. We tidy up the kitchen, make tea, set the table for our Mother’s Day brunch. The scones bake quickly and turn out brown and beautiful. We sit down together, my husband Jake, blonde, bespectacled and boyish, and Jonah’s little brother Henry, still faintly cherubic at thirteen, with big blue eyes, and Jonah—that mustache!—his hangover succumbing to the strong, hot tea. I reign in my heart from its worrying and reminiscing. I want to be here, not in my past, whacking dough, or swimming around in Jonah’s unknown future, a future I cannot rush him into. I have done what I can for this Sunday morning. I taught my son to zest a lemon, to curdle milk, to under-mix scones.

We pounce on them, gobble them up, every one. It doesn’t matter how many times I have baked scones, at home or at work, I am still amazed that our lumpy, unappetizing mess of a dough has yielded these tender, lightly crumbly treats. They are not perfect, but they are pretty damn spectacular.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Daily Bread
Chapter 2: The Summer of Meat and Potatoes
Chapter 3: Mostly Plants
Chapter 4: The Wok and Other Exotica
Chapter 5: Macaroni and Cheese and Other Road Food
Chapter 6: Home Fires Burning
Chapter 7: Soup is Good Food
Chapter 8: Let Him Make Cake
Chapter 9: The Order of the Universe
Chapter 10: How to Get Your Kid to Eat Greens (Take him on tour, or teach him how to make pesto)
Chapter 11: The Cosmic Muffin
Chapter 12: Huevos Jonah
Chapter 13: Solo Flights and Empty Nests

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Freda Love Smith's Red Velvet Underground:

"These are sweet, unsentimental scenes from the ever-evolving life of a woman of many shifting and balancing roles: mother, wife, drummer, student, teacher, friend, daughter, food enthusiast. It’s all tied together with tantalizing recipes that have been lovingly improvised and tweaked into a life-affirming doneness." —Juliana Hatfield, musician

"Red Velvet Underground is not only a rock memoir and recipe book but also a poignant work of personal self-discovery and the challenges yet joys of parenting." —David Chiu, Huffington Post

"This memoir is filled with twists and turns, rises and falls—all chronicled with Freda’s characteristic charm and seductive wit. You might call it Eat, Play, Love. . . a wealth of road stories and recipes to share." —Anthony DeCurtis, contributing editor at Rolling Stone

"Thoughtful and wry, [Smith]'s a storyteller who doesn't scrub out blemishes but reminds readers just how much being an individual still matters, even in adulthood." —Mark Guarino, Chicago Tribune

"Freda Love Smith and I share three great passions: music, writing, and food. She deftly combines them here, adding an incisive view of motherhood, an inspiring capacity for joy, and a winning dash of Midwest humility. Love and deliciousness suffuse every page of this tender, delightful book." —Ira Robbins, music journalist and cofounder of Trouser Press

“Freda Love Smith titled her memoir Red Velvet Underground: A Rock Memoir, with Recipes, and it’s hard to imagine a better one for this rock musician who became a mother and dedicated home cook.” —The Boston Globe

“In the quietly compelling Red Velvet Underground, Freda weaves together stories of her salad days as a musician, reflections on raising her two sons, and meditations on how the act of cooking can heal and nurture. Anyone who can come off with such lovable sincerity while describing searing and eating her own placenta is a winner in our book.” —Paste Magazine

"The book is a surprisingly heady mix of omnivorous backstory and refreshingly unfussy recipes that managed to bring me out of a serious pre-empty nest cooking funk." —Lisa Bralts Kelly, Innocent Words

"You will find yourself literally and figuratively hungry for more after every chapter." —Len Kasper, broadcast announcer for the Chicago Cubs

"Red Velvet Underground covers a lot of ground. . . in a poignant and elegant voice. It’s just another example of how food not only sustains us but also finds a way to weave into our lives and connects us with other people." —David Chiu, Brooklyn Based

"Freda manages to elevate the personal to the universal with deeply relatable stories. Themes of food, family, and music are woven artfully together with wisdom, warmth, and humor. I found myself alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) inspired to cook, play guitar, kiss my kids, and call my friends. And eat!" —Tanya Donelly, musician

"The former Blake Babies drummer's stories of food, music, and family resonate with warmth and humility." —largehearted boy

"This book has a lot of heart, capturing what it’s like to be caught between the nostalgia for the life you led in your 20s and the sobering responsibilities of being a parent of a kid now reaching that same golden age.” —Bill Janovitz, musician and author of Rocks Off: 50 Tracks That Tell the Story of the Rolling Stones

"A gritty rock club and a modest home kitchen might seem like opposite ends of the earth. But in Freda Love Smith’s new book, Red Velvet Underground, the two are deliciously twined." —Susannah Felts, Chapter 16

"An appealing choice for readers who are looking for a humorous take on parenthood and food." —Derek Sanderson, Library Journal

“Her book deftly stitches together family life, stories from her stints as the drummer in The Blake Babies, Antenna and The Mysteries of Life, and personal food-related memories.” —InsideToronto.com

"Smith shares her own story with honesty and integrity." —Frank Valish, Under the Radar

"Just like flavors in a recipe, this book is an interesting fusion of ingredients that make up the life of [Freda Love Smith]." —WGN-TV Lunchbreak

"We're digging Freda Love Smith's Red Velvet Underground super hard." —Emily Taylor, NUVO

"Freda Love Smith writes an honest and moving memoir about the very food of life—the music, meals, and mistakes we make; the roads we do and don't take; the lessons we give and receive; the people we love, lose, find, and become along the way. Both on the page and behind her drum kit, Love Smith is a subtle yet powerful keeper of the time.” —Chrissie Dickinson, music journalist and former editor of The Journal of Country Music

From the Publisher