Idol Tracker: Tour hits Carly Smithson’s San Diego, where we visit hubby Todd

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Immediately after the Glendale, Ariz., show, the Idols boarded buses and attempted to sleep on the long ride across the desert to San Diego, site of their second concert. Reports seemed near unanimous that little sleeping got done on this first overnight trip as they each adjusted to their new homes for the next 52 cities and counting –- bunks on the boys’ and girls’ buses. David Cook said later in the day that he had been too pumped up with adrenaline from the excitement of the Glendale show to get much sleep. In any event, by the evening, if their enthusiasm remained undimmed, it was tinged offstage with a barely perceptible bleary quality.

Not having a berth on the bus myself, I hopped a plane to San Diego, following the path of the tour. With time to spare before the evening’s show, I paid a visit to one of the most intriguing and little-known figures from this season, Todd Smithson, husband of Carly, the greatest singer in Idol history.

Throughout Season 7, Todd was the subject of much curiosity and a fair amount of rumor-mongering in some of the Web’s more scurrilous corners. To say he stood out among the homespun, sorority-girl-heavy audience in the Idoldome would be an understatement. With his skater garb and his body blanketed in tattoos, face included, Todd blended into the crowd about as well as Bob Dole might fit in at the mosh pit at Lollapalooza. At almost every show, he gamely watched his wife’s brilliant ‘Idol’ career but gave few interviews or public appearances during the season, leaving many to judge the book entirely by its well-adorned cover.

And so it was with all this in mind that I dropped in at Nothing Sacred, the tattoo parlor that Todd and a fellow artist operate out of a storefront in San Diego’s booming Gaslamp Quarter, just around the corner from the Field, the bar where Carly worked and sang through her long wilderness years.

So I was instantly delighted from the moment he opened his mouth to find that Todd, on very first acquaintance, was the furthest thing from the subject of any sort of concern. Very quickly when talking to him, one sees Todd is clearly a straightforward and unaffected but entirely well-spoken young man who combines the small-business owner’s seriousness and steadiness with an almost bubbly exuberance when he talks, with newlywed-like delight, even after four years of marriage, of his happiness for his wife’s opportunity to make her dreams come true. And amazingly his story, when he tells it, is among the noblest of the many tales I have heard of those who live in the shadow of the ‘Idol’ goliath.

We spoke first of the story of his and Carly’s meeting, an epic saga. In 2001, when he was living in Orlando, Fla., they both happened to miss flights and were trapped waiting at LAX. Remarkably, both had called the same mutual friend to share their plight, and that friend, no doubt amazed at the coincidence, brokered a meeting then and there. They met somewhere in the terminal concourse to share a cigarette and chat for a few minutes. Although the encounter was brief, that night after leaving, each shared the thought with intimates that they had just met the person they were going to marry. The next day, they called each other and spent eight straight hours on the phone –- the first of many such marathon calls in the coming months, bringing Todd’s phone bill as high as $1,400 some months. “When we’re talking, you just get lost in conversation and then you go,” Todd says.

But while for the next few years they continued to talk on the phone, fate kept the pair hanging for quite some time. Each found themselves entangled in other relationships and on opposite ends of America. At last in 2005, Carly was flying across country and her plane was grounded in Atlanta, trapping her there overnight. She phoned Todd, who by then was living in Atlanta, and told him, if you want to see me, now’s your chance, and the pair finally spent an evening in the same room together -– the combustion of which led Carly very quickly to move to Atlanta to be with him.

During this period, Carly’s singing career was very much in its wilderness period, but her dreams hadn’t died, which soon meant that the couple headed to Los Angeles, driving in a car that was so close to dying they were forced to cross most of Arizona in neutral and second gear at 35 miles per hour. After trying to live in L.A., Todd felt pretty adamantly that the town was not for him. They chose San Diego as their home foremost because, he says, “it was the closest place to L.A. that I would live,” allowing Carly to commute to the big city for her career while they enjoyed the laid-back, uncongested life down south.

“We’d come home from L.A. and take the dogs to Ocean Beach, and I’d say, damn it, I don’t want to leave here.” At some point in the midst of the moves, the pair made a Halloween trip to Las Vegas to get married only to find the chapels closed for the night and being forced to wait until the morning of Nov. 1 to tie the knot.

While Carly pursued her music career, Todd became more serious about his tattoo work. Having studied with tattoo artists who worked in classic “Sailor Jerry” styles and having worked at more than 50 shops, Todd felt he was ready to go into business for himself. He found what seemed to be a perfect storefront in the trendy Gaslamp but was skeptical that the building would rent to a tattoo parlor -- those that existed lived in the seedier parts of town. To his amazement, the landlord was willing, the initial investment to open the store and stock up was forthcoming, and he quickly saw his dream materializing with nary a hitch.

While today Todd seems to be the model of stability and groundedness –- solid businessman managing a growing concern, nurturing his marriage through ‘Idol’-driven chaos –- when we get to talking, he tells an extremely eloquent and moving tale about how his odyssey with tattooing had an unexpected maturing effect on him and how the most extreme decision of his life -– to put tattoos on his face -– amazingly became the thing that brought him into man’s estate.

Looking back, Todd recounted how, from a very young age, he’d always wanted to tattoo his face. Being obsessed by the craft in general, he just believed that facial art was an incredibly compelling, attractive and cool medium. He had no thought that the leap would mean any sort of change in his life or his relationship to society.

“I was young and crazy, and I just thought I’d keep being young and crazy,” he says. A tattoo artist friend and mentor told Todd he would be willing to paint him, but only after he proved he really wanted it. Thusly, he gave Todd a moderate-sized work on his chin, roughly in the shape of a goatee, and told him to live with that for a year, and if it at the end of that time he still wanted to make the plunge, the artist would comply. A year later, Todd told him he was ready to go.

He describes having his face tattooed as “the most excruciating, horrible pain” he had ever experienced. But enduring this pain, he says, produced something akin to a spiritual conversion in him. “It’s very hard to explain, but it just woke something up in me. I went to see some friends after, and they said that, during the time I was sitting there, I changed. I came out a different person. I understand now why in all these tribes around the world, if you’re going to become a man, this is something you have to go through.”

But coupled with this new sense of a larger self, Todd found himself completely unprepared for the reaction he was met with in society and was very quickly overwhelmed by the stares he received. He retreated to his house for days, unwilling to go out and confront the response his new face garnered.

Eventually, though, he did venture out and had to learn a veritable new life in society. He tells of being turned away from bars and restaurants, times when he and Carly have been told they’d have to sit in the kitchen. “If you want to get a table in the very back of the restaurant, come out and eat with me. I guarantee that’s where we’ll be sitting.”

And for someone who’s appearance can be controversial, it would seem there could be no greater test than sitting in the audience week after week of the for-the-whole-family entertainment show, his tattoos making him one of the two members of the ‘Idol’ Season 7 family –- the dreadlocked Jason Castro being the other –- who is unable to disguise himself when he goes out in public. “Now I don’t know whether the stares are for the tattoos or for ‘Idol,’ ” he says.

But remarkably, for one who’s treatment sounds almost reminiscent of the Jim Crow South, as Todd speaks of his experience his speech seems completely free of bitterness or rancor toward society. He talks about it in a nonchalant, bemused tone, and one gets the sense that he has passed through to the other side of what may have began as a countercultural instinct (Todd admits he’s not good with rules), that these days he finds his treatment more a subject for mirth and ironic humor than anger, and that detachment gives him an extremely compelling sense of self-assurance and groundedness.

He says that one day he may have the tattoos lasered off his face (the pain of which he winces to consider), saying that he worries that, when he and Carly have children and he shows up at PTA meetings, they’ll be judged. But most important for him is that if he does have the facial work removed, that people not perceive it as a driven by regrets for getting them. “There is no mistake in my mind. I have a great life. I’m married to Carly. I own my own shop. I would never have gotten to have those things if I hadn’t gotten these and gone through what I have.”

Asked how he felt sitting in the Idoldome, the furthest end of the spectrum from the skate/surf culture in San Diego, he focuses entirely on the experience of watching Carly. “It is just unbelievable to see her up there. I can’t tell you how happy it makes me for her, after all she’s gone through. It was amazing.” Despite having been accused of drug trafficking by one website and seeing it written that his shop was headquarters for a group of Nazi skinheads, he seems only to glory in the ‘Idol’ experience and what it has meant for Carly.

And while he admits that the hardest part of the experience has been the separation that working on the show has caused –- now to stretch through the summer for the tour -– later that night backstage after the show, the happy couple, together for this one night, tell how they have given themselves just these few years to pursue their dreams, to do it all, before they settle down and take on adulthood entirely. For Carly, that means that a couple of hours after the show she will board a bus for Fresno, stop three on the ‘Idol’ itinerary.

And for Todd, his journey will take in him the next few months to just about as distant an extreme as you can find in the cultural spectrum. For the last few years, Todd has studied the discipline of Muay Thai, a form of kick-boxing. This September, just as Carly finishes the tour, Todd will travel to Thailand to compete in a series of ranked bouts against the best practitioners in the world. Working on opposite ends of the spectrum, indeed, but one can’t help feeling that, between them, Carly and Todd are America.

-- Richard Rushfield

(Photos courtesy Fox, WireImage)