Since this is our last issue of the Twentieth Century, it seemed appropriate to gaze into the Future and examine a drummer who I feel will be one of the rhythmic titans of the next millenium. Jody Smith performs with the Atomic Thunk, which plays what he calls “Acid Hole Jazz.” I call it “John Coltrane Meets the Meters.” Jody can also be heard on Liquidrone’s excellent Factory CD. The interview took place on my back porch in Abita Springs.

“I was born July 4, 1976 at Touro Hospital—the ultimate Bicentennial baby. No one on either side of my family has ever been a musician or pursued music short of turning the knobs on a radio. My mom’s an artist and my dad’s a psychologist. One side wants to create and the other side wants to be over-analytical, which is probably why I’m so meticulous when I play. I spent my childhood in St. Tammany, went to school there and still live in Abita Springs.

I started off playing snare drum in the concert band at Abita Springs Junior High. On my 15th birthday, I got my first drum set.

I took to it pretty fast. It seemed natural to me. My mom told me that when I was three or four years old, people would say, “My God, that kid sounds like he’s playing the drums!”

I was learning by just listening to Mr. Bungle records and Fishbone and Frank Zappa and Mahavishnu Orchestra and King Crimson—just a lot of real powerful drum stuff that was blowing me away.

The first band I was in where I could tie these influences together was this sort of spastic fusion-esque band called Under The Rug. It was guitar, bass and drums.

When we broke up, I spent a lot of time checking out two of my favorite New Orleans drummers—A.P. Gonzalez of Lump and Willie Green, who plays with the Neville Brothers now but was playing with the New Orleans Klezmer Allstars then. The first time I saw A.P. Gonzalez I was so blown away. He’s like Tony Williams and John Bonham wrapped up in one drummer. He was just out there, ripping it up. I would go see Lump every chance I possibly could and to this day, I think they’re the best band to come out of New Orleans.

It seems like the New Orleans music media kind of focuses on music that is particularly New Orleans-esque, and consequently a lot of bands are left out of the spotlight. That’s too bad. I can’t help but wonder if some of those bands would still be around had they received the attention somebody like Los Hombres Calientes gets or another band that has famous New Orleans names in it or is playing a particular style of New Orleans music that could be marketed with a tourism slant on it. If New Orleans is a diverse city, it should encompass all the things that are going on. These bands were well-supported. They had CDs out but you never read about them. Media coverage seems one-sided at times.

We started the Atomic Thunk about two years ago. Originally, we had a guitarist and singer and they left the band. It was just the three of us [including saxophonist Jagon Eldridge and bassist Jeremy Delle] and we decided to pull it off as a trio—bass, sax and drums. No one in the city was doing it and we found that we could fill the space up if we just went out there and played aggressively—really just throwing down live, having that polyrhythmic power-driving momentum thing happening.

Now it seems like we’ve found a guitarist—George Sartin—who’s worked with the Neville Brothers and the Uptown Allstars. He came out and saw us and liked us. We’ve been working him in and layering everything.

One of my all-time idols is the late, great stand-up comedian Bill Hicks, and in a lot of his rants he would say, “Who’d a-thunk it?” One of my friends said “Thunk” would be a good name for a band and I ran it past the band and then Jagon said, “Oh man, I think we should be the Atomic Thunk!” And that was it.

When I hear the band, it seems like there’s a Frank Zappa/John Zorn/Mr. Bungle thing happening musically. It’s instrumental—there’s no words. The structure’s there and we try to get comfortable enough with the structure to where we can improvise over the parts. We have songs that have 13 or 14 parts in them.

People assume we are improvising, which often seems crazy to us because the songs are so structured. There is soloing and there’s interplay between us, complementing what the others are playing. We’re probably better orchestrators than we are improvisers.

It’s awesome having the feedback from an audience. Because it’s so inconsistent, the kind of crowd we have, I personally have learned, regardless of who’s there, to just play the best I can. You can get all caught up in it and play a bad show, but I heard Henry Rollins say once that generally speaking there’s one person in the crowd who gets it. You have to go out and be confident and do your thing. I look out at the crowd a lot when I’m playing—when I’m not looking down at the ground or looking at the other people in the band.

My style—I use a lot of Latin cymbal patterns and cross it over into funk or rock situations. I like laying down the groove real hard and using odd fills the way Roland Kirk played solos—a fill that just seems out and to try to land back in the right place and keep the groove happening. I’ve gotten a lot of that inspiration from different drummers, as well as saxophonists.

I’ve got a drum machine I’ve been incorporating into the songs and I sit on my couch and program these beats and record them. In the middle of a song, I’ll hit the “play” button and just play over it. You’ve got to be tight to play with it because basically you’re playing with a metronome. If it doesn’t work, you have to push “stop” fast. It happens sometimes because I don’t have a foot switch and I have my drum machine off to the left and I press the “start” button and if you don’t push the “start” button directly on the one—if you’re a sixteenth note off, it’s going to be playing and you’re already a sixteenth note ahead of it.

I hear rhythms everywhere. It almost drives me crazy. Rhythm doesn’t have to have a groove—it can just be a succession of notes. That’s why I like guys like Tom Waits, because he facilitates that—natural, organic sounds.

When you’re out in the country, out in nature, if you throw on all electronic music, you feel like it’s not complementing your surroundings. If you throw on a Jimi Hendrix album or Art Blakey album or Cannonball Adderley, it’s perfect. People will always want to hear human input. Until we’re inserting the microchip up our ass, people are going to want to hear humans. Humans are imperfect and a lot of electronic music is too perfect. We’re never going to be perfect.”