An old GOAT (Girlfriend Onceupon A Time) who I dated for three weeks had this charming gem on cassette taped off a friend. Sonny Smith played around the Bay Area for a long time. Whether he's still playing, I don't know. You won't find a single video from this wonderful album online, although it turns up used on eBay and Amazon. That's the only way you'll hear it, other than coming to my house. My favorite song, "Let Me Be Your Baseball Player", as of this writing, ois, according to Google, only mentioned once on the entire internet. (It could be me, though... this has been happening to me a lot lately... it also just happened with "hoosemanacka".)
I went to see Sonny in San Francisco's Make Out Room in 2002 or 3. I chatted with my ex-roommate at the bar waited for the uninteresting Bob Dylan wannabe to finish his set and so Sonny could come out, and only when the show ended did I discover that that had in fact been Sonny, having already moved on from his clever, smooth-talking hip hop in one of what I have since learned are his many frequent stylistic changes. Last I heard he was doing garage rock or something, billing himself as "Sonny And The Sunsets".
I talked to Sonny after the show and asked what happened to his wonderful hip hop style, but he hardly seemed even interested. I asked if he could sell me a copy of the already out-of-print "Who's The Monster" and he told me he didn't even have one anymore. He graciously offered to take down my address, and he'd send me a copy if he ever found one. A few months later a CD copy arrived in the mail, with a note saying, "I found this in my uncle's glove compartment." I never saw Sonny again, although his name popped up occasionally in the local entertainment papers for a long time afterwards. Apparently he developed something of a cult following, but if you look at his prodigious recorded output on most sites, including his Bandcamp and Spotify pages, you'll see no sign that "Who's The Monster..." ever existed.
It includes a live track where he directly complains mid-track about someone at a nearby table talking through his song, and the person never even notices.
You're missing out, that's all I can tell you. Wonderful. See if you can find it.
