Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story (12 page)

There could be no more excuses. There could be no more heroes. She was the only idol she would ever need.

The reinvention began immediately. Her latest quest to understand “girl stuff” didn’t matter anymore. She no longer needed the accoutrements. She had no need for overt femininity. It was not the reality of womanhood that was opening up in her mind, but the options that it opened to her. Not as a hard-faced peasant woman, not as a mystic gypsy princess, and certainly not as a pouting pussycat creation who would devour the attention of the outside world through looks and demeanor alone—heaven knew there were enough of those around already, including many of the women who would later take it upon themselves to criticize Patti’s appearance and behavior—but as a woman in herself.

A century earlier, Patti took to reminding people, Rimbaud had predicted that the next wave of great writers would be women, and speaking at a time when female authors tended to occupy themselves with feminine pursuits, he was certainly stepping out onto a limb. But the intervening hundred years had proved him correct. “He was the first guy who ever made a big women’s liberation statement, saying that when women release themselves from the long servitude of men, they’re really gonna gush,” Patti declared in one of her poetry performances. “New rhythms, new poetries, new horrors, new beauties. And I believe in that completely.”

Patti’s second collection of poems,
kodak,
published toward the end of 1972 by the Middle Earth Press of Philadelphia, would emphasize this conviction. The nine poems, spread across seventeen pages, are dominated by Patti’s vision of womanhood triumphant, including a reprise of “Renee Falconetti” alongside another piece in honor of artist Georgia O’Keeffe:
great lady painter / what she do now / she goes out with a stick / and kills snakes.

Even the title piece, a plea from a killer to French documentarian Georges Franju (director of
Le sang des bêtes
—“The Blood of Beasts”—shot in a Paris slaughterhouse), leaves the reader in no doubt as to the nature of the stalking horror that mercilessly eyes its victim. Quotes the murderer,
my initials are PLS and I’d be pleased to leave my monogram.
PLS—Patti Lee Smith.

Patti left behind her own mark—“PATTI SMITH 1946”—stenciled on the wall of her West Twenty-Third Street loft, when she and Robert Mapplethorpe moved out in late 1972. The time had come for the two to part company, at least as roommates. “Separate ways together,” was how she described it in
Just Kids;
“we went our separate ways, but within walking distance of one another.” Mapplethorpe moved across the road from one of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s properties on Bond Street; Patti moved into an apartment on East Tenth with boyfriend Allen Lanier. Being apart from Mapplethorpe would be difficult at times, especially with Lanier out of town so much as the Blue Öyster Cult’s career picked up speed, but they both had their own lives to build around their careers, and now they could watch each other grow.

To coincide with the publication of
kodak,
Patti booked three public performances at the Mercer Arts Center, a club/hangout that backed onto the old Broadway Central Hotel and was establishing itself as an alternative to the now gruelingly fashionable Max’s. Patti’s friend Jane Friedman was acting as her manager by this point, and it was Friedman who was in charge of booking the Mercer’s acts.

The Arts Center was a magnificent environment. Built around three stories’ worth of rooms, it offered rehearsal space, crash pads, and anything else an aspiring artist might require. It also featured a boutique stacked with bizarre plastic miniskirts and the distinctly left-field couture that would soon inspire a visiting Malcolm McLaren to open his Sex boutique in London; a kitchen kitted out with video machines, on which all comers were invited to show their latest creations; and so much more. At the Mercer, the likes of the New York Dolls and Wayne County’s Queen Elizabeth cut their performing chops, and Friedman was swift to offer Patti a berth on its stage, in the club-like surroundings of the Oscar Wilde Room.

It was a bold move on Friedman’s part, and an even more courageous one for Patti to accept. Despite the Arts Center’s all-encompassing mission statement, audiences expecting an evening of degenerate rock ‘n’ roll, a la the Dolls’ most excessive press reports, were ill prepared for the lone woman who emerged with nothing more musical than a toy piano, a trumpet, and a megaphone. As her performances became more regular, her ten minutes were as likely to be devoted to shooting down hecklers as reciting her verse.

Sometimes she would laugh and either win or shame the heckler into silence. Sometimes she would curse and hope that the audience would curse with her. Sometimes she would ignore it, and “sometimes I’ll seduce him to do it more.” She told English journalist Charles Shaar Murray in 1976, “I’m just reacting. I don’t have a stage act—I don’t have a stage
persona.
I don’t turn on a separate set of reflexes when I get on the stage. I’m the same person I am here. In fact, often I’m better here than I am up there…. Sometimes I really dig people who give me a hard time, because it’s friction, but it’s
reaction
.”

She would execute dances and tell jokes. There were times when she felt more like a stand-up comedian or a late-night TV host than a poet, but that suited her. She had never wanted to be a simple poet anyway—a point that Allen Ginsberg would make in 1973, when he characterized her work as a hybrid, conscious or otherwise, of “the Russian style of declaimed poetry, which is memorized, and the American development of oral poetry that was from the coffee houses…. Then there’s an element that goes along with borrowing from the pop stars and that spotlight, too, and that glitter.”

It was Ginsberg, too, who first predicted that Patti could become a national figure; maybe not a superstar, and probably not even a household name, “but it would be interesting if that did develop into a national style. IF the national style could organically integrate that sort of arty personality—the arty Rimbaud—in its spotlight with makeup and T-shirt.”

Right now, however, she was bottom of the bill at the Mercer, her ten-minute recitals prefacing performances by the likes of Ruby and the Rednecks, Moogy and the Rhythm Kings, and Teenage Lust, with Patti often feeling fortunate if she could complete a poem or two. But that would change. By early 1973, Patti was more or less a fixture on the weekly bill, and would even be facing down the Dolls’ most partisan audience, as that band set about shoving themselves into a limelight that really didn’t seem that keen on acknowledging them. In New York City, David Johansson, Johnny Thunders, and company were widely regarded as the city’s next big export. To the rest of the world, they were a joke.

Patti continued to flit across the Manhattan arts scene. January 1973 saw her undertake another of her sporadic theatrical ventures, when she appeared at St. Mark’s Theatre Genesis, playing the part of Dixie in Sam Shepard’s new play
Blue Bitch.
She also appeared in lingerie designer Fernando Sánchez’s latest fashion show, modeling furs on the runway.

On April 2, 1973, Patti reunited with guitarist Lenny Kaye for five nights opening for drag queen Holly Woodlawn at Reno Sweeney. A cabaret launched the previous year by songwriter Lewis Friedman and Eliot Hubbard, Reno Sweeney was what writer Vito Russo called “the center of the universe during the now-legendary cabaret revival of the early ‘70s. Everybody who was anybody either played its famous Paradise Room or sat in the audience to watch.” This list included Jim Steinman, Nona Hendryx, Phoebe Snow, Quentin Crisp, Jackie Curtis, the Manhattan Transfer, and many more.

Holly Woodlawn’s performance slipped exquisitely into the cabaret milieu; for Patti and Kaye, on the other hand, playing to an audience of self-conscious sophisticates was one more challenge to meet. It was one at which they succeeded. The first time the future Joey Ramone saw Patti perform was at Reno Sweeney, and he was entranced.

Days later, the duo were at Kenny’s Castaways, a Village club where they shared the bill with Gunhill Road (a New York City three-piece recently signed to Mercury Records) and the wild folky-jazz hybrid of Cathy Chamberlain’s Rag’n Roll Revue. Patti had her act down now. She would read a poem, then when it was finished, she would screw up the piece of paper she’d written on and toss it onto the floor. Or she’d pick up a chair and smash it against a wall. Anything to grab the audience’s attention, anything to provoke a reaction.

And it worked. After two years of pushing ever harder at what she perceived were the barriers that separated poetry from rock ‘n’ roll, at Kenny’s Castaways she finally achieved the breakthrough she demanded, in the form of a shocked review from the
Village Voice.
Patti was, the reviewer insisted, “in the vanguard of cultural mutation; a cryptic androgynous Keith Richards look-alike poetess-appliqué.”

Yet it was not her appearance that shocked so much as her repertoire: “You Don’t Want to Play with Me Blues,” “Anita Pallenberg in a South American Bar,” the death-laden “A Fire of Unknown Origin” and the Dylan-littered “Dog Dream”—
have you seen / dylan’s dog … the only / thing allowed / to look Dylan in the eye
—all were machine-gunned into an audience that was uncertain whether to applaud or excrete. She introduced “Redondo Beach,” written in one sitting after a row with sister Linda: “Needing time to think, I took an F train to Coney Island and sat on the littered beach until the sun rose,” she remembered in
Patti Smith Complete.
“I came back, wrote the draft and fell asleep.”

But it was the concluding “Rape” that caught the most attention, just as Patti and Kaye knew it would when they selected it to crown their collection of garage-hewn verses. “Rape,” peeping inside
bo’s bodice. lay down darling don’t be modest let me slip my hand in. ohhh that’s soft.

“Rape,” glamorizing, humorizing, humanizing that most brutal crime.

“Rape,” then and probably now as well, the most discomforting poem Patti Smith ever wrote. And she knew it.

But she was unrepentant. She would compare herself to a novelist, slipping in and out of the characters she was writing about. Depicting a rapist required her to become, in her mind, a rapist; “Rape” itself, she explained to Amy Gross in
Mademoiselle,
was the end result of reading everything she could lay her hands on about Richard Speck, the killer who raped, tortured, and murdered eight student nurses in Chicago, in one night in July 1966. Writing the poem six years later, Patti “just lurked about the room for a while, letting the saliva come out of my mouth, till I felt like Speck.”

I’ll never forget how you smelled that night. like cheddar cheese melting under fluorescent light.

But people should not take it so seriously, she said. Her verse was filled with jokes and wordplay.
I’m a wolf in a lamb skin trojan,
for example. Or her descriptions of her victim as a pretty shepherdess, and
beep beep sheep I’m moving in.

Not for the first time, Patti shrugged. “I think of myself not as male or female or rapist but as a comedian.”

On July 3, 1973, Patti marked the second anniversary of Jim Morrison’s death with a reading at friend and filmmaker Jack Smith’s loft, at Greene Street and Canal. Back in the early days of the Playhouse of the Ridiculous (sire of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company), Jack Smith had designed many of that ensemble’s most dramatic costumes, and his influence remained a tangible slice of the underground arts scene. Most of the summer, however, was spent preparing her third poetry collection for publication, this time under the aegis of Andreas Brown, owner of the legendary Gotham Book Mart.

Like so many other writers and artists of the past fifty years, Patti was ranked among the Gotham Book Mart’s most regular customers, not necessarily because she bought a lot of books there, but because she spent as much time as she could browsing within that narrow, crammed space, pouncing upon titles that she may never have heard of—or titles only she had heard of, for the Book Mart’s specialty was rarities and limited editions.

The artist Edward Gorey was another familiar face there, his darkly sinister cartoons strangely at home amid the friendly tumble and jumble of the Book Mart. Gotham would publish many of Gorey’s best-loved works, particularly toward the end of the artist’s life. Brown worked with Patti, on the other hand, at the dawn of her career, lining her up alongside the other poetic giants that crowded the Gotham catalog: Allen Ginsberg (who once worked as a clerk there), Edith Sitwell, W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, and so forth.

The volume was
Witt,
and it featured twenty-two poems that remain among Smith’s best known. Scarcely surprisingly, given its impact that spring, “Rape” was included; so were “Georgia O’Keefe” [sic] and “Prayer.” Another piece, “To Remember Debbie Denise,” would so enthrall boyfriend Allen Lanier that he would soon be setting it to music and, in 1976, recording it for the Blue Öyster Cult’s
Agents of Fortune
album.

But
Witt,
like the volumes that preceded it, was never destined to see anything remotely approaching a mass market. All Patti’s books had been produced by small presses, with the emphasis on “small”; in those days, when word of mouth was by far the most effective marketing tool for any aspiring writer, their circulation was limited to no more than any “fan club” the author had already accrued. Both
Witt
and
kodak
had initial runs of no more than one hundred copies. Patti’s renown remained no more than a whisper, even down those corridors that acknowledged poetry as a force to be reckoned with.

Within her sphere, however, she was slowly gathering a very vocal following, including author Nick Tosches. By the time of Witt, he wrote in 1976, she was “feared, revered, and her public readings elicited the sort of gut response that had been alien to poetry for more than a few decades. Word spread, and people who avoided poetry as the stuff of four-eyed pedants found themselves oohing and howling at what came out of Patti’s mouth. Established poets feared for their credence. Many well-known poets refused to go on after Patti at a reading, she was that awesome.”