Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story (14 page)

Even Patti, who came to love the place, called it “basically a hole in the wall,” and the first night she visited, she recalled, the audience was more of a trickle than a flood. Within weeks, however, CBGB would be flooded with both onlookers and participants.

“The sense of self and new energy was instantaneous,” Patti enthused, recalling the venue’s heyday for David Fricke in 2006. “The confidence it inspired was strong, and the sense of community was immediate. WilliamS. Burroughs lived down the street. He came all the time. We gave him a little table and a chair, and he’d sit there. All of our friends came—Robert Mapplethorpe, Jim Carroll. CBGB was the neighborhood—the artists and poets and musicians—and we all inspired each other.”

In years soon to come, the phenomenon that inspired so many at CBGB would be christened
punk rock.
That first night that Patti was in attendance, though, it was something else entirely. It was art, it was anger, it was boredom ricocheting from arena to club, it was even (as owner Hilly Kristal was wont to tag the music oozing from his establishment)
street rock.
But it wasn’t punk rock.

That term, if you went by the pages of the music press, was reserved for the snotty singer-songwriters who’d been emerging elsewhere on the sub–big time mainstream. Hindsight might be outraged, but there are writers around the United States who still remember (and were maybe even responsible for) the point when Nils Lofgren was called “punk,” Bruce Springsteen was “punk,” Graham Parker was “punk,” and the unfathomable racket leaching from the underbelly of New York City was just the out-of-tune strummings of so many no-name wannabes. It was only when you dug a little deeper that you realized just how many of them there were, and just how stylistically different they all were.

Wayne County, the Dolls, Teenage Lust, and the synth and vocal duo Suicide continued to strut their sordid variations on an unsalable theme of glam rock. CBGB, on the other hand, had an eye toward grimier and gruntier talents, those who weren’t so keen on dressing up, and who were maybe a little more arty-smarty as well—a pack that was led by a band called Television.

By the time decade-old friends Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell formed Television, they had already run through a number of juvenile collaborations. Hell’s poetry magazine
Genesis: Grasp
was one. Another was the Neon Boys, a proto–progressive rock band completed by another of their school friends, Billy Ficca. Attempts to add another guitar player to the Neon Boys lineup repeatedly failed, however, despite the likes of Blondie’s Chris Stein and the future Dee Dee Ramone trying out. The band folded with just a six-song demo to its name, then regrouped briefly and equally unsuccessfully as Goo Goo.

Another year would elapse before the trio reunited under the aegis of Terry Ork, manager of the Cinemabilia bookstore, where Hell and Verlaine both worked. It was Ork, too, who introduced the band to Richard Lloyd, a guitarist who perfectly fit Verlaine and Hell’s specifications; the quartet was christened Television and debuted at the Townhouse Theatre on March 2, 1974. And it was Ork who suggested the band take a leaf out of the early New York Dolls’ book and find a small club to play on a regular basis. Verlaine promptly went out and discovered CBGB; the band would play there for the first time just five days later, on March 31.

Patti already knew Richard Hell vaguely; they met sometime in early 1974, with Television’s first CBGB gig already looming. Away from his musical interests, Hell was also publishing small-press poetry books under his own Dot Dot Dot imprint. Andrew Wylie, one half of the old Telegraph Books team, wrote the first volume,
Yellow Flowers;
the mysterious Theresa Stern composed another,
Wanna Go Out?,
and friends alone realized that “she” was actually another collaboration between Hell and Verlaine. Now Hell was wooing Patti into adding her work to the Dot Dot Dot imprint, and when he invited her down to Television’s CBGB debut, he assumed that their discussions would carry on around the show. He was wrong.

Patti and Lenny Kaye arrived at the show fresh from the press preview of the latest Rolling Stones movie,
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Rolling Stones,
much of which had been shot at the same Madison Square Garden gig that they had both attended two years earlier. They were hopped up already, then, but when Television took the stage, any notion that the Stones would continue on as some kind of musical figurehead was first dampened then dismissed. “When I heard them, I felt like I’d met my kin from whom I’d been separated all my life,” she remembered in her interview with Ed Vulliamy. “I immediately wanted to work with them.”

Compared with what Television would become—the gorgeous spiraling leads and lyrics that were etched into space by their masterpiece album
Marquee Moon
—the early Television was scratchy, blurred, monochromatic. Hell and Verlaine were both powerful front men, which set up its own brutal dynamic on the stage, as each edged the other in search of the spotlight and neither was prepared to give an inch. The songsthat they were writing jarred, too: scarred urban nightmares from Hell, more symbolic, ethereal visions from Verlaine. They did not adopt their pseudonyms for nothing!

But it was that very dichotomy that grasped the watching handfuls, and that sent Patti into paroxysms of both lust and longing. According to Terry Ork, the first thing she told him at the end of the show was how much she wanted—physically wanted—Tom Verlaine. According to the words she wrote for Lisa Robinson’s
Rock Scene
magazine, however, there was more to her passion than that. “Boycott rock & roll on TV. Who wants an image of the image. Rock & roll is not Hollywood jive … [but] the rhythm and alchemy of hand to hand combat…. Already a new group has begun an attack. Starting from the bottom with completely naked necks. A group called TELEVISION who refuse to be a latent image but the machine itself! The picture they transmit is shockingly honest. Like when the media was LIVE and Jack Paar would cry and Ernie Kovacs would fart and Cid Caesar [sic] would curse and nobody would stop them cause the moment it was happening it was real. No taped edited crap.”

No tighter than they needed to be, but still looping their garage riffs through the exquisite guitars of Verlaine and Lloyd, Television teased and squeezed out a set that effortlessly coiled both Hell and Verlaine’s poetic ambitions around riff and rhythm. It was nothing like anything Patti and her cohorts had been doing, or even anticipating. But Patti felt a connection there regardless, one that was only strengthened when she returned home and found herself sitting up all night with Mapplethorpe, Kaye, and Sohl, talking about Television, but also about the directions in which their own music might go in the wake of all that Television portended.

There were no deep dreams of forming a musical movement at that time, nor even of keeping up with the new kids in town, for every one of them was certain that once the media glimpsed Television, the band would become as widely feted as Patti already was. What Television offered was simply the knowledge that it was time to raise their own sights even higher—to place the poetry clubs and cabarets behind them and move into a more conventional rock setting. They talked of expanding the lineup even further, of transforming themselves from a trio to a band. They spoke of amplifying the silent music that already ran beneath the best of Smith’s poems. But most of all, they spoke of cutting a record.

And soon, as Patti watched the television news, she would discover what that record ought to be.

For the past two months, America’s news media had been captivated by the saga of Patty Hearst, heiress to the newspaper fortune of the same name. Nineteen years old and blessed with the kind of beauty that every girl next door should possess, on February 4, 1974, Hearst was snatched from the Berkeley apartment that she shared with her boyfriend. Her kidnappers were members of the Symbionese Liberation Army, a hitherto all-but-unknown left-wing guerrilla group fighting for the rights of California’s poor.

Their ransom demand was simple: the Hearst empire should donate $70 in food to every deserving case in the state, and when analysts pointed out that such a gift would cost the company somewhere in the region of $400 million, then that only amplified the SLA’s message even louder. Could it really be true that the most glamorous state in the union, the most powerful, sun-kissed, and full-of-itself part of the entire United States, was home to so many needy people that it would take $400 million just to feed them for a week?

The Hearst family would finally distribute some $6 million worth of food around the Bay Area, and most analysts expected that to satisfy the kidnappers. But when the time came for Patty to be released, the SLA balked, saying first that the food was of such poor quality that it barely counted, and then that Patty was so disgusted by her family’s perfidy that she was now an SLA member herself. She had one message for the world. “Tell everybody that I’m smiling, that I feel free and strong and I send my greetings and love to all the sisters and brothers out there.”

Just two weeks after Patti and Kaye first saw Television at CBGB, on April 15, 1974, Patty Hearst—or Tania, as she now styled herself—was photographed wielding an M1 carbine during an SLA raid on a San Francisco bank. An even more powerful photo would follow, a shot of a fatigues-clad Hearst standing with her legs spread, gun in hand, before the SLA’s banner, a nine-headed serpent. It was, and it remains, amagnificent image, the ultimate romantic portrait of an urban guerrilla: beautiful, stylish, methodical, cool. Hearst’s own story would reel on for two years longer before she was captured, and for decades more of accusation and denial, triggering a small sea of books, biographies, movies, and portrayals. But for that one frozen moment in April 1974, Hearst was arguably the most famous and notorious, adored and pitied, loved and loathed woman in America, and if the traditional image of a 1960s student crash pad is dominated by a portrait of Che Guevara, a decade later Patty Hearst had replaced him in both style and substance.

And Patti Smith, gazing at the photograph as it was transmitted from the newspapers to the poster stores and on to every right-thinking radical’s bedroom wall, couldn’t help but wonder what was really going on inside the girl’s mind, now that she was on the run.

Patti was part of a generation of young people who were growing increasingly aware that their heroes would always let them down in the end. But this image of Patty Hearst transcended all those fears, because it transcended heroism itself, to become an image and an icon. Hearst herself could be caught or killed; she could say what she liked in defense of her actions. But the poster told no lies—she was an avenging angel. And the verses that Patti wrote about her that month, and then fed back into a stylized revision of the Jimi Hendrix hit “Hey Joe,” would become the psalm that summoned her to earth.

Or maybe, as Patti would giggle, she simply liked hearing the newsreaders talk about Patty, because she could pretend they were speaking about her instead.

With its strong topical focus, “Hey Joe” was the obvious choice for Patti’s debut single. With an equally strong grasp of her personal self-mythologization, so was “Piss Factory,” a poem Patti wrote about her experiences working at the textbook (or was it baby buggies?) factory back in New Jersey, and into which she wrote her first slice of prophesy, too:
I’m gonna get out of here I’m gonna get on that train and go to New York City and I’m gonna be somebody … I’m gonna be so bad, I’m gonna be a big star…. Oh watch me now.

The first half of that prediction had already come true. Maybe this little record would help achieve the second.

Robert Mapplethorpe had agreed to set aside a thousand dollars to cover the recording and manufacturing costs. Patti could have recorded the single anywhere. New York City was littered with tiny hole-in-the-wall recording studios; move out of the city, and the suburbs and beyond would be cheaper as well. But she had no interest in doing things on the cheap.

She knew that there was only one place where you could record a version of a song made famous by Jimi Hendrix. You went to the studio made famous by Hendrix: the Electric Lady complex that he had built on West Eighth Street. There, at least according to the musicians who had passed through since the guitarist’s death, his spirit still hung around, ever ready to add a helping hand to any musician whom he deemed to be worthy.

Patti had been there once before, on August 26, 1970, attending the first true rock ‘n’ roll party of her life as a guest of Jane Friedman. It was the studio’s grand opening party, but Patti was simply too nervous to go into the main room. So she sat on the stairs outside—where she discovered that the party’s host, Jimi Hendrix, didn’t really want to brave the throng either. So they sat on the stairs and just chatted, about his music, about his plans, about his immediate schedule. He told her about the new music he was intending to make once he returned to New York from his next scheduled visit to London. Music that he would never make; less than three weeks later, Hendrix was dead.

“Hey Joe” opens with Patti alone, a few lines of introduction before Richard Sohl’s stately piano slowly mourns the opening bars. Lenny Kaye’s bass and a guesting Tom Verlaine’s guitar follow as the pace picks up. Even compared to the sounds that the trio had been making in the rehearsal studio, the final recording makes clear that Patti Smith had moved into an entire new musical dimension, one in which her musicians didn’t simply accompany and counterpoint her words but became one with them. They created a seamless whole that was so unlike
anything
that had ever masqueraded as rock and poetry that by the time the poem reaches its conclusion—Patti as Patty spitting defiance with a carbine between her legs,
nobody’s little pretty little rich girl … nobody’s milliondollar baby
—the listener too has become a part of the performance.

More than thirty-five years after it was recorded, “Hey Joe” remains one of the high-water marks of 1970s rock as it moved toward the brave new worlds of punk and the new wave. At the time, picked up on the black-labeled 45 that was self-released on Smith and Kaye’s own label, Mer (from the French for “sea”), from the tiny network of New York City-and-elsewhere stores that were sentient enough to even know it existed, “Hey Joe” was simply spellbinding. Nobody knew then what it portended, that the remainder of the decade would be carved from within the shadow of its very existence. But everyone who heard it knew that something that powerful would never wither on the vine.