Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story (20 page)

Her words fell on deaf ears at Arista. But on the streets of Britain, it was the imported French and American copies that sold the fastest, as dealers placed ads in the classified sections of the UK music papers announcing their stock of the unexpurgated version.

On March 9, 1976, the band arrived in Detroit, the evening’s concert preceded by a reception at the Lafayette Coney Island, a landmark hot dog and chili joint. A handful of local musicians were there, and Patti pointed one out to Lenny Kaye.

“Who’s that?”

“Fred Smith. Fred
‘Sonic’
Smith,” to differentiate him from their friend in Television.

Even his name sounded like poetry.

Born on September 13, 1949, Fred “Sonic” Smith was a native West Virginian, but he was Detroit through and through. It was there that he’d lived most of his life, and there in 1965 that he formed the MC5, joining forces with vocalist Rob Tyner, guitarist Wayne Kramer, bassist Michael Davis, and drummer Dennis Thompson in a band that was destined to become one of rock ‘n’ roll’s most incendiary, as well as one of its most unappreciated.

A couple of early singles and a series of increasingly ferocious live shows kept the MC5 alive for the first few years, and then a meeting with countercultural activist John Sinclair twisted the quintet’s none-too-developed view of the world outside their rehearsal room into a firestorm of politicized rhetoric. By the time Brother JC Crawford came aboard as an onstage poet/commentator, spieling Sinclair’s revolutionary declarations over the cacophony of a rock band, the MC5 were an act of war, a declaration of hostilities.

They railed against the system, but unlike a lot of the era’s other self-appointed rabble-rousers, they made it count. No weak-kneed trustfund kids who’d just thrown their toys from the stroller; when the MC5 spoke, people listened. They deployed the American flag as a backdrop to their barrage, and swore that one day they would take it back from the governments and corporations that had co-opted it and return it to the people. They were, wrote Sinclair in his memoir
Guitar Army,
“challenging the biggest death machine in the history of the world,” and the only flaw in their argument was that they didn’t realize just how far that machine would go to preserve the status quo. The police routinely closed or busted their shows.

The MC5 released just one LP, the epochal
Kick Out the Jams,
before Sinclair was jailed and the group lost their way immediately. Two further albums came and went; Kramer followed Sinclair into prison. By the mid-1970s, with the MC5 just a memory, Fred Smith was playing in small clubs and friendly support spots with his Sonic’s Rendezvous Band. Few people even glanced in his direction.

But Patti did. He was standing in front of a white radiator, she recalled to Lisa Robinson in 1988, “and the communication was instantaneous. It was more than that. It was mystical, really, something I never forgot.”

She invited Smith to join her band onstage that same night, to add extra guitar to their “My Generation” encore, and she could tell by the way he played, she said, what kind of person he was—“better than me, stronger than me,” she told Patricia Morrisroe.

He accompanied her back to her hotel after the show, and there the roots of a new song began to germinate, titled for the twenty-fifth floor of the hotel, where Patti’s rooms were that night. The two Smiths spent the night together, and then remained in touch after Patti’s tour moved on: late night phone calls, postcards, and letters that crossed America and then the ocean.

On April 17, Patti Smith made her network television debut, appearing on
Saturday Night Live
to perform “Gloria” and a carefully restructured “My Generation.” The following night, the band made a special appearance back at Reno Sweeney. The tour was becoming a procession of highlights, but for the band, the most exciting ones were still to come.

On May 10, they played two shows in East Lansing, Michigan. They then boarded a flight to London to commence their first European tour. And if anybody doubted how excitedly the country was awaiting her, the news announcement in the
New Musical Express
‘s April 17 issue wrapped up six months of anticipation into one single paragraph: “Patti Smith, New York’s queen of rock and arguably America’s biggest female cult phenomenon, is to make her British debut next month. Patti Smith was recently hailed by
Rolling Stone
magazine as ‘the best new solo artist since Bruce Springsteen.’ … Another leading U.S. cult figure, Tom Waits—sometimes described as ‘the male Patti Smith,’ is also in line for a British visit.”

Their first engagement was an appearance on the
Old Grey Whistle Test,
the most important and most watched rock show on British television. More than anything else on the band’s schedule, this appearance was their chance to make a major impression. It would have been easiest, then, for Patti to lead the band through a couple of the songs they had been touring for the last six months, tight rockers that would catch the audience’s attention immediately. Instead, Kral recalled, she selected a song that the band had never even rehearsed, much less played together: “Hey Joe.”

“When she said that was what we were going to play on
Old Grey Whistle Test,
it was exciting. We were in London, we were on TV, and we were walking a tightrope, playing an arrangement of a song we’d never played. And, apparently, it caused a lot of fuss.”

Jimi Hendrix had been dead for almost six years, but in British rock circles, both his name and his legacy were sacrosanct. Artists who covered his material did so at their own peril. When Rod Stewart scored a UK hit with Hendrix’s “Angel,” there were reviews that condemned him for blasphemy, and he performed the song with almost touching attention to Hendrix’s original. Nobody could say that about Patti’s “Hey Joe.”

The performance began with a passionate rampage through her own “Land,” with knowing nods to Oscar Wilde, Otis Redding, and, torn from that week’s newspaper headlines, the disgraced English politician Jeremy Thorpe. The leader of the Liberal Party was embroiled in the kind of sex scandal that only the truly righteous ever get mixed up in,a dizzying panoply of hunky male models, murdered dogs, and fevered denials.

It was an astonishing performance, despite the cameramen simply not knowing what to focus on. According to the newspaper
Sounds’
man on the spot, writer Jonh Ingham, “The broadcast, as usual, misses the great moments. As the pulsating intro breaks into [‘Land,’] she whips off her shades: missed. Suddenly she drops on her knees in front of Lenny, as though to eat his guitar: the cameramen leap wildly, but by the time they focus the exciting, mind-warp instant has passed. When they draw to a close there is an electric, tangible atmosphere—no-one moves or speaks…. Now that was television!”

But the cameras caught enough anyway: Patti an androgynous wire at the microphone, cooler than cool but kinda geeky as well, exuding indifference but seething inside, knowing that she had just ten minutes in which to show England what it had taken four years to introduce to New York City. And she succeeded. The following day, everybody who saw the broadcast had something to say about it, though it generally wasn’t complimentary—all the more so since the show’s own production staff promptly swung from Patti’s live rendition of “Hey Joe” into archive footage of Hendrix performing it in 1968.

That first engagement over, the band flew to the continent: to Copenhagen on May 12, then after that Brussels, Amsterdam, and two nights in Paris, one of which is preserved on a cassette recording that remains precious to everyone who hears it.

It didn’t seem too promising to begin with. Patti’s voice was even more out of sorts than it normally felt, and as early as the second song of the night, “Kimberly,” the musicians sounded ever so slightly perfunctory, with only Ivan Kral’s lead guitar trying to hack anything fresh out of the rhythm and maybe push Patti into another dimension. Instead she made a hash of telling the audience a meandering joke, and things continued chaotic.

An error-strewn “Redondo Beach,” a tentative “Free Money,” and a lazy intro to “Privilege” were all punctuated by lengthy silences—and then suddenly everything fell into place as Patti pounced onto the brutal reiteration of the Twenty-Third Psalm that she had inserted into that song.

It was as if she had suddenly remembered who (and where) she was. And from then on, the performance was peerless. “Pissing in a River,” one of the few new songs that had slipped into the set during the American tour, glistened with laconic longing, and the compulsive, hypnotic dub of “Ain’t It Strange” swirled into a breathless rap through the lurching and only occasionally melodic jam that would one day become “Radio Ethiopia,” which bled, in turn, into “Land” and “Gloria.”

Live recordings from earlier in the year, as the band ground its way in triumph across the United States, are exhilarating, but they start to sound alike after a time, as the repetition of touring dulled the performers’ instincts. No time at all separated the European shows from the American ones, but somehow the band had switched off the autopilot.

Then it was back to London, where the audience that awaited at the Chalk Farm Roundhouse was disparate and, thanks to
Whistle Test,
divided. Journalist Barry Miles (who “knew me when I was just a nobody,” purred Patti) described the gathering as the “regular Sunday night Roundhouse crowd, stoned and shaking sack loads of dandruff over their Levi’s, part Patti Smith cult fans, including a large number of women delighted to have someone female do for rock what David Bowie did for the males,” plus “a few fungoids and weirdoes who have come to check her out.”

Onstage, Patti’s excitement was palpable. She dressed for the album cover, but she was giggling and laughing, applauding the audience that was applauding her before she’d even sung a note, bouncing up and down on the stage like a schoolgirl unwrapping her very own pony.

Somebody shouted for “Gloria,” and Patti shouted it back at the audience. Someone laughed when she picked up her guitar; she laughed along and dedicated her next song to Keith Relf, the former lead vocalist with the Yardbirds who had died two days earlier, electrocuted by his own guitar. As “Radio Ethiopia” took form around her, Patti howled out feedback over her instrument’s yowling, and then it was into the closing salvo. “Gloria” ended the set, “My Generation” opened the encore, and the entire room gave voice to its savage denouement.

Another rap ended the night, a few lines from her poem “Neo Boy”:
everything,
she declared,
comes down so pasturized / everything comes down16 degrees / they say your amplifier is too loud … Tic/toc tic/toc tic/toc / FUCK THE CLOCK!
Then it was bang into a triumphant “Time Is on My Side,” and Patti knew, in that instant, that it was. Years later she would describe it as one of her favorite moments performing rock ‘n’ roll—the audience sang along, some weeping openly, and she reveled in the honest outpouring of emotion.

The band was back at the Roundhouse the following evening, but they also had time to explore London. Patti and Kaye caught the Rolling Stones at Earl’s Court. Then somebody suggested they pile on down to the 100 Club on Oxford Street, to catch Malcolm McLaren’s latest managerial enterprise, the Sex Pistols. Before she was halfway down the stairs, the band’s front man, Johnny Rotten, recognized Patti and swung from whichever Pistols number he was caterwauling into a sneering chorus of
Horseshit! Horseshit! Horseshit!

Patti loved it, but in an interview with Mary Harron of
Punk
magazine, Rotten professed himself less impressed. “I don’t like Patti Smith. Just a bunch of bullshit going on about ‘Oh, yeah, when I was in high school.’ Two out of ten for effort.” But that didn’t stop him from hanging out around the hotel while the band was staying there; “the last night they had to carry her up the stairs. I liked her for that. She was such a physical wreck.”

It was all a very long way from CBGB.

10

BABELFIELD

B
ACK IN NEW
York City, the band began preparing to record their second album. Live work was left to one side now; there was a show to play in Milwaukee, and an afternoon in Central Park to get through, but from then until a scheduled appearance in August at the Orange Festival in Nimes, France (which, in any case, would be canceled weeks later), they would all be able to sleep in their own beds and hang out with their own friends.

On July 26, 1976, Patti dropped by the Ocean Club, the new venue of former Max’s Svengali Mickey Ruskin, where John Cale was playing his own season of shows. There, a fortuitously rolling cassette captured her stepping onstage as early as the second number, “Buffalo Ballet,” to add distinctive, and distinctively haunting, backing vocals to that most plaintive of ballads, and then bouncing back just a couple of songs later to keen behind “I’m Waiting for the Man” and attempt to snatch the occasional verse.
Hey, white boy, what you doin’ uptown?
she shrieks, then extemporizes a line of her own, and suddenly the duet is a conversation, Patti driving between the Lou Reed composition and her own “Rock n Roll Nigger,” while Lou Reed and Talking Head David Byrne, suddenly onstage as well, strummed and rumbled behind them.

Even at the time, there was no doubt—either among the band or elsewhere—that Patti Smith’s second album was the acid test, all the more so since
Horses
was received as something akin to a musical secondcoming. Patti didn’t just have to meet expectations; she had to exceed them.

So while outside observers were puzzling over whom she might select as a producer, floating names such as Lou Reed, David Bowie, and even Brian Eno (whose attempts to handle Television had ended in such ignominious failure), Patti was poring through the top forty in search of a producer who would take the band and its sound in the opposite direction entirely. She’d worked with a fellow artist and the world had heard the results. Now she wanted a technician. That’s what she’d been seeking the first time around as well, but this time she was going to get one.