Rebel With a Piano : Street Performer Who Has Often Bucked Convention Takes His Act to the Promenade

To earn his living, Rich Smith totes out a white upright piano in a ’79 Chevy van that shakes and rattles at every bump.

Arriving at his most frequent venue, Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade, he pulls out two planks he stores on the floor and wheels his upright onto the street. Often he spends more time toting and tuning the piano than actually playing it.

But when he plays, even in a noisy venue filled with competing performers, the effect is often electric. During a recent performance, well more than two dozen people clustered around his upright, no one uttering a word, no one looking away, all silently listening to an improvisation that sounded richly practiced.

“I couldn’t just walk past it,” said one spectator, Dina Smith of Santa Monica. “It’s too dramatic, intelligent, incredible.”

Every street musician has a story. This one is about a rebel with a piano.

Smith, 26, grew up in eastern Massachusetts, grew up listening to classical music and started lessons at 5.

“All I wanted to do was play my own music,” he said. “Teachers teach you to play other people’s music.”

He could never turn off the music in his head. It was always there, waiting for his technique to catch up with its beauty, a second voice. “It’s my soul calling,” he says. “It’s almost the same as being in love with a person, because music physically loves me back. It fills my body and embraces me.”

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His stepfather wanted a quiet house and limited his practice. Smith split, joined the Air Force, and was soon conscripted into an entertainment showcase and an international tour.

There he discovered another facet of music’s power. He remembers Lithuania. “The people there were starving; they didn’t even have any entertainment. When I played for them, I could see how much I was bringing happiness into their lives.”

But the Air Force required more discipline than he was willing to muster. After four years he left, enrolling at the prestigious Berklee College of Music near home.

“Rich stood out very easily,” even among a student body of 3,000,” said associate professor John Aldrich. “His ability to perform is that of a prodigy. He seems to have 18 fingers on each hand.”

But a few credits short of graduation, he felt compelled to move on. As so many rebels have done, he came to Los Angeles to seek his fortune.

Just before he left, however, his formerly unencumbered life became filled with his significant other: a 100-year-old Chickering, full-grand size, the kind you see on the concert stage. A fixer-upper at $1,500. He restored it enough to sling it into a trailer and drive it here.

He found a one-bedroom Venice apartment that he shared with a roommate, converting the living room into an (almost) soundproof studio, walls covered with quarter-inch cardboard and windows boarded over. He slept on a bed behind the piano.

Earlier this month, unable to play as many hours a day as he wanted, he had to give up the apartment. He began camping out on a cousin’s living room couch, his beloved grand placed in storage.

On the Promenade, Guy Marshall, a music producer and teacher at Santa Monica College, watched Smith with admiration. “It’s very visual,” Marshall said. “When he plays, you see colors and scenery.”

Smith offers another metaphor: “My soul feels like a freight train, pushing me to do the music. . . . There are some things I don’t have to question, I just know. Music is one of them. Even if I lost my hands, I’d find a way to play.”

The power of Smith’s personal rebellion seems to spark a bit of the rebel in each of his listeners. He likes it that way.

“When I play,” he says, “I try to imitate a bird flying. I try to imagine starting on the ground, and pulling higher and higher, so that I am finally soaring above it all. That’s what I try to do with my music. That is music by Rich Smith.”