When Joshua Smith was a kid in the small town of Griffin, Georgia, his dad ran the local gym, Tuck’s Powerdome. Josh’s dad, Tucker Smith, was an ace softball player and a local celebrity who everybody called Big Tuck. His son inherited his nickname: Little Tuck. Somewhere along the way, the ‘c’ was lost and Little Tuck became Tuk. Tuk Smith.
Anyway, the gym. It was the kind of place guys would hit straight after work, deadlifting in their blue jeans and work boots. His dad had a thing for tigers, and its logo was a big cat that looked like it had munched down on a handful of steroids. The young Tuk practically grew up in that gym.
“Five years old and swinging off the equipment,” he says now. He worked there part-time, too, years later. “When I was at school I was strong as fuck. I looked crazy: big punk hair, Exploited T-shirt. I definitely stood out in a small town like that.”
Whatever fortitude he learned in that gym as a young punk-rock kid has stood him in good stead since. His former outfit, power-pop-punk scrappers Biters, were done in by a combination of record business boneheadedness and a level of public apathy that was in inverse proportion to the band’s brilliance. His solo career, which began in the wake of that band’s split in 2018, was plagued by more music-industry fuckery that saw a finished debut album being shelved and a gig opening for Mötley Crüe and Def Leppard on their joint stadium tour falling through.
A second mini-album, 2022’s Ballad Of A Misspent Youth, released under the name Tuk Smith & The Restless Hearts, saw him maxing out his own credit cards to pay for it. All of that would have sunk lesser musicians, but Tuk Smith is too stubborn, too defiant, too punk-rock to quit.
Thank the gods of rock’n’roll that he is. His new album, Rogue To Redemption, is another slice of melodic brilliance that upholds the lineage of the acts he loves – Cheap Trick, Thin Lizzy, Ramones. Songs such as Glorybound and Still A Dreamer are mini-stories and colourful vignettes about people he didn’t know but could have. He references Born To Run, Ziggy Stardust and Bat Out Of Hell as inspiration: records that are thematically linked and vividly fleshed out without being fullblown concept albums.
“I’ve always wanted to do this three-part trilogy,” he says. “Ballad Of A Misspent Youth was creating these characters, Rogue To Redemption is them on this kind of hero’s journey.”
And what’s the third part of the trilogy?
“Oh, dude, I haven’t got to that yet,” he says, grinning. “I still need to write it.”
He’s calling via Zoom from his home in Nashville. He’s lived in the city for a couple of years now. As he talks, a dog barks behind him. He goes to the couch where she’s sitting, and holds her to the camera. This is Uma, a “full-blooded mutt” he adopted after she was thrown out of a moving car right outside her house. “I call her my pirate dog,” he says. “We’re kindred spirits. She’s from the island of broken toys too.”
He’s a dog guy. Rogue To Redemption comes out on Smith’s own label, Gypsy Rose Records. It’s named after a previous pooch, a border collie named Gypsy Rose that he picked up from a family of carnies working on a Renaissance Fair Festival, where she was part of their act.
“She died the day I was moving to Nashville, while we were packing up,” he says, a twinge of sadness in his voice. “It felt like she wasn’t meant to go on this journey with me. Naming the label after her just felt like a cool tribute.”
The label itself was born out of necessity: “I couldn’t find a record label that would do shit for me,” he says bluntly.
An unlikely saviour came in the shape of a fan. The guy had recently cashed in some investments and he wanted to help Tuk out. He suggested they buy back the rights to the old Biters records. “I said: ‘Those records are already out there, I can do a record cheap.’ And I knew I could do it on a very tight budget.”
Smith ended up recording everything but the drums at his home studio, right there in the house he’s talking from. The finished record’s effervescent snappiness doesn’t reflect its sometimes arduous creation.
“It was detrimental to my mental health,” he says. “The whole process has been so stressful. I’m not only writing the record, but I’m recording it, producing it, sending files off to a mixer. I have nobody to bounce stuff off. I had to learn how to run a label. I had to learn about, like, metadata.”
Everybody gets into rock’n’roll to learn about the metadata, right?
“Oh, fuck no. I never thought I’d have to worry about fucking [spitting out the word] algorithms.” He sighs. “I can’t relate to what’s happening in mainstream pop culture. It used to be shaped by weirdos and mavericks – Prince, Bowie, Kurt Cobain. There aren’t many of those any more. It’s been boiled down to fifteen-second gimmicks for social media. People try to make art because they want it to be liked on TikTok. I don‘t want to be on my deathbed looking back and going: ‘I put all my energy into fucking “content”.’”
That’s where Tuk Smith finds himself in 2024. He recalls a conversation he had with a friend in the industry who told him: “Dude, you don’t sound like Post Malone, it’s just not going to happen.”
That doesn’t mean Smith is giving up the ghost any time soon. “I don’t have generational wealth or anything so I had to figure out how to make this shit happen myself,” he says “And what I’ve learned is, you just make your fucking records, and the people that like it will find out about it.”
Uma barks in agreement. The music industry may be a huge, uncaring, soulless behemoth, but sometimes all you need is a little encouragement from closer to home.
Rogue To Redemption is out now via Gypsy Rose Records.
