Turners Falls RiverCulture Calendar
The One Smith is about music, cars, love, a car crash, and personal refinement. Eric Schmider picked up a guitar at five and a wrench at ten. Mix Beatles, jazz, and folk with vintage Cameros, Jaguars, and Ferraris, and you get a fifteen year old kid racing from garage to garage-band across New Mexico's endless roads. In 1993 Eric left his job restoring cars and moved to Boston to pursue music. He joined the folk circuit, quickly rising in the ranks, and then drove into the rock scene where he got a taste for touring. After years of pushing through power pop bands to country groups, Eric felt the urge to reconnect to his high speed roots. He returned to the Southwest to buy a fast car. While in New Mexico he met his soon-to-be Californian Failure who was serendipitously on her way to Boston to attend school and to dance. Nights of long drives and love songs shaped the two into an inseparable couple. A car crash broke her back. The incident bonded them even closer when Eric quit his job to care for her. Love and attention, he found, can fix a broken body, but the relationship never was fully repaired.
