PROFILE / Howard Rice : The World According to Smoggy

It’s Saturday night, and the joint is jumping. Well, at least the gray-bearded singer in the weathered cowboy duds is jumping as he races through a frenetic version of “T for Texas.”

Those who dismiss the suburbs as nothing more than featureless expanses of asphalt and stucco have never met Smoggy Mountain Slim, the San Fernando Valley’s 70-year-old leaping troubadour.

Slim, whose real name is Howard Rice, resembles a refugee from a Western movie, with a rail-thin body and more gaps than teeth. He is about as close as you can come in the land of the mini-mall to the Ozark folk singers who composed songs about floods and train wrecks.

Only Slim’s songs, two of which he has released on record, deal with more urban adventures. One describes the plight of a man who has car trouble on the Grapevine, an event lifted from Slim’s life. The other is an ode to the arrival of the Queen Mary in Long Beach.

“He is absolutely unique,” said Rhonda Sarnicola, the bartender at J/R Cowboy Palace in Chatsworth, where Slim takes the stage on jam nights.

“When he jumps, he has us all jumping. We look like a bunch of kids in a nursery,” added Caroline (Erika) Gutierrez, 40, the owner of the Cowboy Palace.

Wearing a black cowboy hat that blinks like Christmas lights, Slim has spent the last 30 years playing in honky-tonks and watering holes where legions of hopeful musicians labored to become the next Merle Haggard or Patsy Cline.

“Dwight Yoakum used to play here,” said Jim Olesh, 38, the lead singer of a band called South Forty. He ticked off a list of well-known performers who are either from the Valley area or played in the local clubs regularly. “The Flying Burrito Brothers, Gram Parsons, Byron Berline and Clarence White. Basically, they all knew Smoggy Mountain Slim at one time or another.”

“By a great many, I am considered like a legend in the Valley,” Slim said, without bragging. Even though most of his performances are free, just for the opportunity to get up on stage, he is so popular that he is regularly called upon to perform at fund-raising benefits.

“There’s a little ham in everybody, but I probably got more than my share,” Slim said, chuckling.

Smoggy Mountain Slim has flourished as an amateur in a business that has crushed many professionals because he doesn’t care much about hit records or being the best. “There is too much emphasis put on perfection,” said the man who often starts his performances with jokes such as, “I just flew in from Las Vegas--next time I’ll take a plane.”

“My philosophy is, I don’t worry if somebody is better than I am. If somebody is a better player or lover, I used to worry about it, but I don’t anymore. I developed the philosophy if you have a problem, get rid of the problem before it gets rid of you.”

His life has the trappings of a homespun folk tale. He was born in 1920, the son of a lumberjack with a Bunyan-esque reputation in the Wisconsin woods. “He could lift the front end of a Model T,” Slim said.

Slim’s aunt taught him two guitar chords and he began playing in logging camp taverns. He developed his unique, bluegrass-type performing style after working for a time in a polka band. On stage, he whoops and jumps as he barrels through his vast repertoire. He compares his guitar-playing to the mechanical motion of driving a car, “shifting gears” from first to second and into overdrive. Slim spends little time in the slow lane.

In the mid-’50s, he came to California. “People kept telling me about the San Fernando Valley,” he said. “So one day I got on a bus and rode to Burbank.”

Western movies were frequently filmed in the hills east of Los Angeles, which made for an explosion of country music clubs in the Valley.

Slim still remembers the old clubs. “There were at least 40 different places where you could go on Sunday afternoons and see little Western trios playing,” he said. There was Babe’s, the Club Tomahawk in Sylmar, the Wagon in San Fernando, the Moose Lodge in Burbank, the Cobblestone off Sheldon, the Howdy Club and the Valley Hole.

He adopted his nickname partly out of anger at Los Angeles officialdom, who many years ago snubbed an offer from leaders of a once-smoggy Pennsylvania town to send their experts west to help improve Los Angeles air. “Let them take care of their problems and L.A. will take care of theirs,” Slim recalls L.A.’s officials saying.

“That teed me off,” Slim said.

Later, he went to work at Corriganville, a 2,000-acre movie ranch near Santa Susana Pass founded by actor Ray (Crash) Corrigan. Slim was paid $30 a day to play in the “Silver Dollar” saloon, a replica of a Wild West bar where tourists could belly up with the movie cowboys.

Corriganville closed in 1966 and the Valley country music scene changed. The bands became scruffier and there was more dope around. Finally, the little Western clubs began dying off.

“It got harder and harder for different country and Western entertainers to get a job,” Slim said. “It’s down to practically nothing today.”

But Slim has kept playing when and where he could. Today, this 78-r.p.m. performer in a slick, compact-disc world has acquired a following every bit as loyal as that of professional performers.

“People love him,” said Sarnicola, the bartender at the Cowboy Palace.

He never legally married, unless you count a quick trip to Tijuana with a girlfriend years ago, and lives with his sister in Sepulveda.

Many of the younger people look up to him for gray-bearded wisdom, something that Slim feels he is qualified to give.

Basically, his advice boils down to this: Be as good a person as you know how, don’t worry about what others think about you and be genuine.

“The greatest compliment I’ve ever had, someone said, ‘You’re genuine,’ ” he said. “When I’m singing Jimmie Rodgers, I’m not trying to be Jimmie Rodgers. I’m trying to be Smoggy Mountain Slim.”