Malibuite Of The Moment: Marston Smith

Name: Marston Smith

Hometown: Malibu

Job: Cellist, sculptor

Favorite musician: I listen to everything from high-energy trance to really old recordings of bluegrass or Zydeco – I like everything if it’s amazing. I like one percent of everything no matter what it is: baroque, prehistoric, grunge – I don’t like anything atonal, and I don’t understand jazz. As a classical musician I have very precise cord changes.

Favorite movies: I don’t like Superman or Batman – I used to like those Uzbekistan nightwalk or something like that, they sort of did horror films, but it was in the future – I love the “Girl With The Dragon Tattoo,” I like tons of things of Netflix with the long format. I don’t watch a ton of movies because I love the long format of “Game of Thrones.”

Favorite TV shows: There’s one on Amazon Prime called “Live Live Live”, something like that – I like the ones with the mafia where the guy’s trying to get away and opens up a casino, and he’s an accountant for the mob – that’s a cool series. I can’t remember the name.

Favorite books: I love the character Jack Reacher – you know, he’s such a contrary guy, and he said that many times, the cops say, what’s your name? And he causes usually more death and mayhem than he cures. Jack Reacher is a retired ex-cop in the military, but he’s 6’5” or 6’6”, he’s this huge guy with giant arms, and he takes on the Russian mob, he takes on the Dixie mob.

Favorite travel destination: Croatia. Medieval cities, mountain cities too, like in Tuscany. We went there on a vacation a couple years ago – everything we stayed in was medieval.

Somewhere you’d like to go next: I don’t want to travel so much – I want to rent a house on a little island, like Korčula, in Croatia, and have everybody live there, and just invite all our friends.

Favorite food: Fish. One of our favorite restaurants is Nicolas Eatery, that’s this new place in Malibu. I like Greek food – Taverna by Tony. I like fresh fish.

Favorite drink: It’s coffee. Jack Reacher only drinks coffee.

Favorite Malibu spot: My studio. I have an armory here – a zombie atery with bazookas, with 40-millimeter shell, I have a clothes rack full of hussar – you know that jacket Jimi Hendrix wore, I hmy leather chair has like 10 suits of armor on it, I have my giant sculpture, I have a female centaur up on the wall. so it’s full of potential, it’s like my creative dream-maker.

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Tell me about your childhood.

I grew up in Malibu, and my father was a nuclear physicist at Rand Corporation, a think tank in Santa Monica. So he would do a lot of top secret stuff, but future planning, and he built a bomb shelter when I was a little boy, and he got in all the national newspapers.

My mother was a philosopher, a self-taught Jungian philosopher, and she would go to Greece every year and consult the oracle at Delphi, and she would lecture on Fridays and Saturdays, and she did that from when she was 27 to now, and she’s 95. Now they’re online, like Zoom. She has a class weekly meeting people from as far as India and Europe. Her name is Betty Smith, and she has a book of Greek dialogues – dreams and myths and archetypes.

How did you get into the cello?

My father played harpsicord, and every Sunday when we were young, my sisters played violin and viola and cello, so he could play harpsicord, and I could play the continual part – the baseline. The other physicists and mathematicians would come from Rand Corporation, and it was a popular gathering that was just part of our lives.

When I went to college, I was supposed to be a mathematician – that’s the language God speaks: everything math. But then I finally got to UC Santa Cruz as a cello major, an undergraduate degree in cello performance. I later went to New York, and got a master’s with [famous cellist] Bernard Greenhouse.

At UC Santa Barbara, I joined this wacky group called Little Emo, and we opened for tons of different groups like the Grateful Dead – people who came to do concerts in Santa Barbara, we would be the opener. It was just too much fun.

It stood for ‘Educational Media Organization’ – the lead guy violinist, always portrayed himself as this trickster, this little munchkin, and I was always the guy who played the hero of everything, and it was just great fun, and I still do that today. I still do the gig – I do hero, I play in a kilt, like a highlander, or I play in Spartan armor.

Obviously if I play a wedding, I have to wear a tux, but I designed a white, kind of Oxford naval officer, double-breasted suit, which is still military in a way.

What sort of music do you play?

We play Brandenberg, harpsicord, and we would actually play very brilliant Baroque music, which is in a sense almost rock ‘n’ roll. Essentially, when we do smaller shows to our own concerts, onstage we’d still play our classical music, and baroque stuff at group. Not until I got out of graduate school, I came back to the studio cellar. Every day I’d go to a different recording studio, and I’d go to another one in the afternoon, and another one in the morning. Back in the day, in the early 80s, we had live players. On sweetening tracks for everybody, from Elton John, to Earth, Wind & Fire, just thousands. We probably played 1000 records and 500 films, so I was also sidelining for a bunch of movies, like “Brewster’s Millions” and more recently “Red Dragon” and different commercials.

In the 90s I started my full-on hero thing, playing Universal City - if I could sell 100 seats, that’s $1000 – if I was selling them at 15 a piece, that’s more than I could make do a solo gig for a corporate client. The corporate gigs are the best, and I have some wonderful clients – those are bread and butter for a live entertainer. My perfect gig is the lawn of the Ritz Carlton, and they have this fabulous sound system, and you’re playing Coldplay the way it should be played, with no words, just melodies, with improv, and do 10-minute versions of a songs with a magnificent orchestra playing in back.

Could you talk more about your costumes?

I love doing a cirque vampire. My studio is full of headdresses, giant antlers with giant sheepskin faces, and I have piles of armor of Greek and Roman armor here. The new thing in the corporate is there’s all these technology, and they always go, what’s visually stimulating? I built these costumes that are covered with super-light tubular settings – fabric that almost floats in the wind, and with low fans, you can make this colossal wig that’s ten feet long, and you’re wearing Halco Cross Predator, so I put giant tusks on these helmets and make these costumes for a sort of post-apocalyptic thing.

I make the costumes myself. The Roman or ancient Greek stuff I can buy from people in the United States or from people in India – there’s a lot of metalworking that’s very inexpensive – those are kind of my kind of live performance projects. Now I’m doing a lot with a green screen, where there can be eight Spartan soldiers, and one guy’s got an electric cello, but I shot myself five times with five different armors, and spread myself on the computer.

You’re also a sculptor.

Yes. I used to make these full-size people, and I started putting faces on them, and I got tired of that, and so what I did was I made scrolls, like a violin scroll, but with a massive number of tuning pegs, and the most elegant things I could imagine were the two-and-a-half-feet tall, three-feet-tall scroll heads on the necks of these sculptures I was making. I so loved it, because it meant something to me, a very visceral emotion that here is the epitome of music, the language of emotion, and here you make these magnificent bodies there were armored with muscles and tendons and sort of exaggerating the body, so it just felt like a very passionate thing.

How has Malibu changed in your lifetime?

It’s less normal people with horses in their backyard. I mean, we are kind of an estate – I grew up here, but then built my own house in the upper acre, so I still live on the property with my mother, who’s 95, so I look after her, and one of my sisters died, but her daughters live here and they have eight horses, eight dogs, 28 cats, eight rabbits, 800 flying marsupials. It’s been pretty fun living here, it’s just there’s not a large culture. There’s maybe one art gallery in Malibu, a framing store, but maybe not anymore.

Now when you walk on the beach, nobody lives there, they’re renters, or Airbnb, or just vacation homes, so there’s very few – if you walk along the beach, you might walk a mile, and there are only a couple of houses that are lived in, because you have to be so wealthy. I mean you Billionaire’s Beach at the bottom of the hill – I’m one mile up. It’s called Billionaire’s Beach because there’s now houses that sell for $100 million, so it’s changed, but we’ve made it a garden, we have chickens – toy chickens, they’re called silkies, but they’re kind of the rage, because they’re funny-looking, they’re kind of a flower exhibit. Anyway, I have room here to sculpt, I built some prop cars out front for a zombie movie I want to make. So it’s really fun to live here, it’s like in the country, and the city is relatively close, so we can go to Santa Monica – there’s so much happening in Santa Monica, whereas Malibu’s a bedroom community.