Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story (17 page)

“What Patti Smith did was, she weighed everybody up, to see whether they could be useful to her or not. Useful, meaning, could hercareer benefit from being associated with them? So Television, Richard Hell, Talking Heads, the art types, they were her friends, but the Dead Boys, she wouldn’t give us the time of day, because being photographed with us, or being seen at one of our gigs, wouldn’t be good for her image. That was all she cared about. All Patti Smith cared about was what would be good for Patti Smith. Not her band, not her fans, not her music. Herself.”

Debbie Harry, whose Blondie had been hoping to keep Ivan Kral for themselves, was likewise fiercely antagonistic toward Patti Smith, all the more so after the media began contrasting the two women’s night-and-day approaches toward appearance and demeanor. Whether she liked it or not, Harry was on a collision course with the role of “punk sex symbol” that would define her contribution to the next five years of rock history. Patti, on the other hand, was just Patti.

And Harry never forgave her for recommending that Blondie should just give up trying before it was too late.
Patti Smith: An Unauthorized Biography
quoted her as recalling, “She told me there wasn’t room for two women in the CBGB scene and that I should leave the business ‘cause I didn’t stand a chance against her! She was going to be the star.”

Ultimately, of course, there would be room for them both, and if Blondie did in fact turn out to be the bigger commercial attraction, Sohl, at least, would shrug away any comparison. “We came out of the same place, but we were never going in the same direction,” he said gently. “Blondie made some great records, but they weren’t records that we would ever have made, and I’m sure they’d say the same thing about ours.”

Work toward Patti and the group’s first album was already under way. The previous fall, they had recorded some demos for RCA under the guidance of journalist and A&R man Stephen Holden. RCA had passed on the band, but now the group had a different suitor: Arista, the new label launched by former Columbia Records chief Clive Davis, which was already carving a swath through the established label hierarchy with a combination of smart signings and hot acquisitions. Ownership of the now-defunct Bell label gave Arista both the Bay City Rollers, the hottest teenaged superstars of the age, and Barry Manilow, destined tobecome the housewife’s choice for an entire generation. A raid on RCA had brought both Lou Reed and the Kinks into the Arista family, and now Davis was looking to add Patti Smith to the roster.

Davis had first seen Patti for himself when he visited CBGB in the company of Lou Reed, and the experience left him reeling. “Sometimes, in the music business,” he wrote in
Vanity Fair
in 2010, “you’re lucky to be in the right room on the right night and see an artist do something that is completely unexpected and yet somehow inevitable. Believe me, it happens very few times. But it happened the night I walked into that club on the Bowery.”

According to published reports, he offered Patti $750,000 for seven albums. More important than that, he pledged that he would support her as an artist, not a random hit-making machine. At the end of April, Patti signed on the line.

The
New York Times
announced the deal first. “Since Mr. Davis is eager for star acts and since Miss Smith is nothing if not a potential star, one can expect a massive promotional push for her,” John Rockwell wrote. “All of which means that anyone who wants to see Miss Smith in the ambiance in which she has heretofore flourished—the seedy little club—had better hurry down to CBGB.”

Patti and the band played their last few shows at CBGB, then spent May 1975 in rehearsal. By the time they returned to live work, for a WBAI-FM radio concert on May 28, they were already being billed as Arista recording artists. But Patti had no intention of standing on ceremony for either her label or the concert’s broadcasters. “I’ve been told to watch my language,” she announced, and within three minutes had dropped her first “fuck,” “to prove the station can’t censor the people’s slang. All we care about is food for the people.”

“Fluid” is the term that best describes the concert’s set list. By now, Lou Reed’s “We’re Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together” was the group’s established opener, six years after Reed wrote it for the Velvet Underground and then left it unreleased. Smith snatched her version from
Live 1969,
the recently released collection of vintage Velvets live recordings that she’d reviewed for
Creem
in September 1974. (Reed would reclaim the song in 1978, for his
Street Hassle
album.) Undulatinglytender, “The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game” was still on show, as were “Gloria” and “Redondo Beach.” “Birdland” had been one of Patti’s poems, but the group had developed it into a song over their time at CBGB. The concert also featured “Distant Fingers,” a gorgeous cowrite between Patti and boyfriend Allen Lanier, and “Break It Up,” a slab of mystic imagery copenned by Tom Verlaine.

Nobody was yet certain how many of these would make it onto the band’s upcoming debut album, though, because the band still had one final refinement to make. They had been called to account on more than one occasion for the muddled sound that sometimes beclouded their performances. And once Kral joined the group, there was so much more going on onstage that they needed to know the PA was in good hands; they could no longer entrust it to each venue’s usual operator, who might or might not have a clue what he was even meant to be listening to. So Patti decided to recruit their first sound engineer. At Kral’s suggestion, they turned to the Mumps’ Jay Dee Daugherty.

And when they decided they needed a drummer as well, Daugherty was already there. “I’ve always had Lenny because I need someone to lean on,” Patti explained to
Sounds’
Jonh Ingham in May 1976. “But what if one night we were both in trouble? So we got DNV. And if DNV was in trouble then we were both in trouble, so we needed another one”—Ivan Kral. “One night we were all in trouble and we said, ‘We’ve got to get a drummer to keep this thing all together.’”

Jay Dee Daugherty was born in Santa Barbara, California, on March 22, 1952. He moved to New York City in 1974 with the Mumps, and for a time they were regarded as one of the city’s most promising combos. But while so many other groups rose, the Mumps fizzled out.

Daugherty made his debut with Patti at Paul Colby’s Greenwich Village club the Other End, on June 26, the night that Patti paid tribute to the Rolling Stones, who were in town to play a week of shows at Madison Square Garden. She unveiled her Keith Richard T-shirt during “Time Is on My Side,” and Stephen Holden’s review of the performance in
Rolling Stone
celebrated her passion: “She exudes an inimitable aura of tough street punk and mystic waif, in whose skinny, sexy person the spirits of Rimbaud and William Burroughs miraculously intersect withthe mystic qualities of Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, the Stones, the Velvet Underground, the Marvelettes and Mary Wells, to name but a few.”

In the
Village Voice,
James Wolcott honored her honesty: “When Lenny Kaye was having difficulty setting up his guitar between numbers, Patti paced around, joked around, scratched her stomach, scratched her hair—still Kaye was not quite ready. ‘I don’t really mind,’ she told the audience. ‘I mean, Mick would wait all night for Keith.’” And everyone waited for Hendrix, which is why she would later align the two, Lenny and Jimi, in the prose piece “Konya the Shepherd”—dedicated to Kaye, the boy who
was kissing the sky, night after night, star upon star.

That same night, however, the
Village Voice
also remarked that “even those [onlookers] somewhat used to her galloping id were puzzled by lines like, ‘You gotta a lotta nerve sayin’ you won’t be
my
parking meter.’” For what Patti knew, but the crowd didn’t, was that Bob Dylan was in the audience that night, giving the room, wrote Wolcott, “an extra layer of electricity and Patti, intoxicated by the atmosphere, rocked with stallion abandon. She was positively
playing
to Dylan, like Keith Carradine played to Lily Tomlin in the club scene from
Nashville.”

It was the first time Dylan saw Patti perform, and author Sid Griffin speculates on his impressions in his 2010 book
Shelter from the Storm.
“Smith offered several facets which chimed with Dylan. Firstly, the use of poetry in her act. Secondly … Smith and her band’s extemporized songs eschewed the default settings of orthodox rock’n’roll jamming”—a discipline that Dylan had never successfully mastered. And finally, the fact that she was “audibly and visibly influenced by him…. For Dylan to stumble upon Patti Smith and her band on stage at the Other End must have been akin to Ramblin’ Jack Elliott witnessing the young Dylan in Greenwich Village for the first time in 1961.”

Nobody knew it at the time, but Dylan was piecing together what would become the Rolling Thunder Revue, checking out the morass of musicians who, as word of Dylan’s visibility spread, were now descending on the Village in hope of catching his eye. Rolling Thunder was an absurdly grandiose project: He intended to tour small clubs and theaters in the American Northeast with upwards of two dozen musicians, in a four-hour show that allowed everyone to take his or her own solo turnbefore they all came together to back Dylan’s own performance. Bobby Neuwirth was recruited to marshal the sprawl of backing musicians and lead them through their solo numbers. An all-star band rounded up Joan Baez, T-Bone Burnett, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and Roger McGuinn; scheduled guests would include Allen Ginsberg, Bette Midler, and Joni Mitchell. Sam Shepard would be along for the ride, documenting the unfolding madness for a book; filmmaker Howard Alk would be shooting the affair for a feature film.

Mick Ronson, the English guitarist, had already been recruited to the Rolling Thunder ensemble, and he was there the night Dylan met Smith. “Dylan was looking for names, but not anybody; they had to be people he could sense some kind of link with, and Patti was getting a lot of press calling her the new Dylan or the female Dylan, and Bob was intrigued by that.”

Dylan came to the dressing room at the end of the set, looking a lot healthier than legend usually alleges, and a lot better humored as well. When the photographers wheeled to take his picture, the
Village Voice
reported, Patti gleefully pushed him to one side. “Fuck you, then take
my
picture, boys.” Dylan laughed and stepped away.

“We were like two pit bulls circling,” Patti told Thurston Moore in
Bomb
magazine. “I was a snotnose. I had a very high concentration of adrenaline.”

“Any poets around here?” Dylan asked.

“Poetry sucks,” Patti replied.

“It was neat that I got to see Dylan,” she told Dave Marsh of
Rolling Stone,
“got to spend any time with him before I did my record.” But “we never discussed nothing. We never talked. I mean we
talked
… You know how I felt? I been talking to him in my brain for twelve years, and now I don’t have nothing to say to him. I feel like we should have telepathy by now. Me and my sister don’t talk.”

So when Dylan called Patti the following week, July 3, and invited her to meet him at Gerde’s Folk City, the Village bar where his own early career had unfolded, she initially thought that he was simply asking her out for a drink. In fact, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott told Sid Griffin that “[she] came as Bob’s date.”

It was only once she arrived, and saw the crowd milling around the room, that she realized the evening was to be a little less intimate than that.

Mike Porco, who had run Gerdes since the beginning and was long ago titled “the father of New York folk” was celebrating his birthday that night, and half of the folk scene, it seemed, had turned out to celebrate with him. What better occasion could there have been for Dylan to also announce the Rolling Thunder Revue?

Tom Waits was there, as were David Blue, DaveVan Ronk, and Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen. Joan Baez opened the evening with a solo rendition of one of Patti’s favorite Dylan songs, “One Too Many Mornings”; Roger McGuinn performed “Chestnut Mare,” while Patti watched and thought of horses. Bette Midler sang a couple of songs from her newly completed—and Dylan-aided—next album, and then, according to Patti, she “came over and threw this glass of beer in my face!” Still astonished two years later, she told journalist Barry Miles in March 1977, “[She] just walked up! I never met her before. It was like a John Wayne movie!”

Dylan wandered over, pushed Patti toward the stage. The room was watching. She had nothing prepared, had not even dreamed that she’d be expected to. But she stepped up to the microphone, then turned to guitarist Eric Andersen and told him to play a droning E chord and not let up till she was done. “I just made up this thing. I looked at Bob and made up this thing about brother and sister. But while I’m doing it I start thinking about Sam Shepard …. and so I told this story, really got into it, made this brother and sister be parted by the greed and corruption of the system.”

She finished, then leaned back to Eric Andersen. They conferred for a moment, then nodded, and the guitarist strummed the opening bars to his own song “Sweet Surprise.” The pair duetted, and Patti was beside herself with excitement afterward. “I did a good job and a lot of people liked it. I was real proud.”

She was even prouder when Dylan revealed his real reason for asking her down that night. Everybody else on the stage that evening was a part of the tour, he told her. She didn’t want to be the odd one out, did she?

She turned him down.

“There was no space for me on that tour, and he knew it,” she insisted to
Hit Parader.
“But at that point, it was so early in my career … and he felt that I should be exposed to the public. I thought it was real sweet of him.”

Mick Ronson explained, “The problem was, she wanted to bring her own band on the road, and that wouldn’t have worked because the whole point of Rolling Thunder was everybody using the same group of musicians.” (Emmylou Harris, one of the guests at the still-ongoing sessions that would compose Dylan’s next LP,
Desire,
would turn down a similar offer for the same reason.) “But I think he still wished there’d been some way he could have brought her along.”