Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story (21 page)

Even her bandmates raised their eyebrows when she first suggested Jack Douglas, but they also knew why she did it. Douglas was no ingenue. He was assistant engineer on John Lennon’s
Imagine
and engineer on the first New York Dolls album. He worked with Alice Cooper during that band’s tenure under the aegis of producer Bob Ezrin, and when Ezrin turned down the opportunity to produce the second Aerosmith album, it was he who recommended Douglas to them. Since that time, Douglas and Aerosmith had carved three monster records out of their relationship, and if observers thought there was a hell of a gulf between Patti Smith and Aerosmith, then that only heightened Patti’s excitement.

“I wanted to do a record that wasn’t just a cerebral experience [but] more of a physical record,” she later explained at a press conference in London covered by Allan Jones of
Melody Maker.
And from the moment the needle touched down on the opening “Ask the Angels,” it was clear that she had accomplished it.

Recorded at New York City’s Record Plant studios, the album would be dominated by the numbers that had been surfacing in Patti’s live set over the past year. While “Radio Ethiopia” would be the title track and the centerpiece of the record, it was the songs at the fringes that allowed the album’s heart to beat so loud. The miasmic dub of “Ain’t It Strange” was in there; so was “Distant Fingers,” which hadn’t made it onto
Horses.
(This time around the hypnotic rag “Chiklets” would be left on the cutting room floor, a fate it certainly never deserved—it would remain unused until the album’s mid-1990s rerelease.) The group tackled theugly “Pumping (My Heart)” and then contrasted it with the impossibly beautiful “Pissing in a River,” a passionate expression of devotion and love, set to an Ivan Kral melody that seemed almost heartbroken to be married to such a radio-unfriendly title.

Like the still-gestating “25th Floor” and “Godspeed,” “Pissing in a River” was written for Fred Smith, the man whom Patti had so recently met and whom she already knew she was destined to spend her future loving.
Every move I made I move to you,
she sang.
And I came like a magnet for you, now.
Whereas the other two songs would look back at the night the pair first met (“Godspeed” even references the coat Fred was wearing that evening), “Pissing in a River” is the declaration of togetherness, forever-ness, that would develop from that initial encounter, squeezed through the prism of uncertainty, fear, and insecurity that so often accompanies the first months of a relationship.

Although Fred Smith was married at the time, he and his wife, Sigrid, were in the slow process of breaking up, and he was moving into a relationship with Kathy Asheton, whose brother Scott played with Smith in Sonic’s Rendezvous Band. If a part of Patti’s unconscious mind looked back at her time with Sam Shepard and wondered whether she was stepping back into that same sad circus, nobody would have been surprised. Which is perhaps why, in “Pissing in a River,” she crafted lyrics that are a prayer to insecurity in its most painful guise.

She then turned the song over to Kral to beautify. Indeed, Kral was fast becoming Patti’s most reliable writing partner. Across
Horses,
Lenny Kaye had been the only band member who received a straight cowriting credit, though Kral certainly added a dignified air to Patti and Allen Lanier’s “Kimberly.” Now he was stepping wholeheartedly into the spotlight. “Ask the Angels” and “Ain’t It Strange” were both Smith/Kral compositions, and “Pumping (My Heart)” was a collaboration between them and Jay Dee Daugherty. The first record to be credited to the Patti Smith Group was clearly a group effort.

Even the dead had something to contribute—or so Patti later claimed. “I don’t care what anybody says,” she told
ZigZag
magazine’s John Tobler in April 1978, “I don’t care if they think I’m full of shit.” Listen to “Poppies,” she said, the song that merged with the most horrifying aspect of anew prose piece, “Babel,” about a rape taking place under the influence of gas:
She lay there and the gas traveled fast / Through the dorsal spine and down and around the anal cavity.
“There’s several voices, voice-overs like on
Horses.
There’s one voice that came out of my mouth that scared me. I’m like a little one-hundred-pound girl, you know … but the voice in it sounds just like Hendrix, and I felt just like I was being taken over. It scared me. [And] I don’t scare easy, believe me.”

Yet even this spectral encounter would be overshadowed by the freeform chaos of the title track, “Radio Ethiopia.”

Ethiopia was Rimbaud’s last real home; it is also the home of Rastafarianism, the religion whose symbols and luminaries lie at the soul of Jamaican reggae music. Marijuana is the Rastafarian sacrament. Haile Selassie, who was the country’s emperor between 1930 and his death in 1975, was Rastafari’s God Incarnate, a messiah who would lead the African people back to the golden age that slavery had stolen from them. And his father, Ras Makonnen, had been one of Rimbaud’s closest friends. Although Patti denied that she had embraced the religion itself, she did go through a period when “I was studying all aspects of Rastafarianism, including smoking a lot of pot while reading the Bible!”

Until now, she had eschewed drugs. “I regarded them as sacred and secret, something for jazz musicians or Hopi shamans,” she told Simon Reynolds of the
Observer
in 2005. “I hated the suburbanization of drugs in the ‘60s.” Now she felt free to explore, in the guise of the scholarship that would flavor, if not fixate, “Radio Ethiopia.”

The song was further fueled by her friend Janet Hamill’s recent return from that land. Tiring of New York City, Hamill had headed off to travel around the United States and Mexico and then caught a freighter across the Atlantic and journeyed through southern Europe and North Africa and down to Ethiopia. She’d returned in 1975 for the publication of her first collection of poems, and when she and Patti talked, their conversation frequently turned to Ethiopia—or Abyssinia, as it was known in Rimbaud’s day.

Rimbaud spent two years in Harar dealing in coffee and weapons; it was his illness alone that forced him back to France, and he was desperate to return to Abyssinia as he lay dying in the French port townof Marseille. His final letter to his sister, written the day before he died, begs her to find him some stretcher bearers, to carry him to a freighter that he knew was about to leave for Harar. “I am unable to do what I must do,” he wrote. “The first dog on the street can tell you that.”

Patti’s song, she told Stephen Foehr in the
Shambhala Sun,
“was exploring Rimbaud’s state of mind at that moment when he experienced perhaps the last bit of excitement in his life—the hope of returning to Abyssinia—while realizing that he wasn’t going anywhere except where God was going to take him.”

Patti felt she shared that destiny.

As the band prepared to record the track, it was still without lyrics, a ten-minute flood of power, emotion, and raw spectral energy that, at sometimes twice that length, had been climaxing Patti’s shows since her California sojourn the previous November. Live, it was a powerhouse; it often segued out of a reading of Jim Morrison’s “American Prayer,” while bass and guitar rumbled behind her, then wandered through snatches of old verse and impromptu stream of consciousness. In the studio, it became (and remains) one of Patti Smith’s most astonishing performances, and one of the group’s most pivotal: an apparently freeform but in reality deeply structured sequence of riff and melody that only slowly reveals its true nature to the listener.

Arguably, nothing that either Patti or her musicians would ever accomplish afterward could hope to surpass it, for what would be the point? “Radio Ethiopia” is a frozen moment in time, but it is a striking moment of both crisis and accomplishment. “Perhaps it was the repetition of performing, for the flow of language that seemed infinite, that poured through my hand onto sheets of paper onto the wall and into the air, seemed to dry up as we created
Radio Ethiopia,”
she admitted in a note published in
Patti Smith Complete.
“How then to communicate? To reinvent words. Disassociate them. Redefine them.”

She flew blind. “Fuck the slang scrawled across our practice room walls,” the note continued. Words were not the be-all and end-all of poetry. Sound, too, could be words, and while Patti’s note would credit Fred Smith as being the person who, “with few words, showed me the way to draw from my instrument another language,” that realization wasonly a part of the alchemical equation that Patti first teased and then tortured from “Radio Ethiopia.”

Few people in New York City at the time have forgotten the night that the song was recorded. It was August 9, 1976, and a storm was unfolding over the city, a hurricane that had some people contemplating evacuation, and others rushing to protect their homes and businesses from the elements. At Record Plant, Jack Douglas was plugging the gaps beneath the studio doors with towels and rags and strewing newspapers across the floor in readiness for the expected deluge. Patti alone may have been aware of the full moon “setting up for the night of the Lion. The emblem of Ethiopia. The Kingdom of Sheba,” her note put it.

“Radio Ethiopia” would be recorded in a single take, one take that would last for as long as it needed to. It left nothing to chance, and everything.

“Nobody looked at each other, but we were ready,” Patti wrote. The five musicians in a circle, Patti clutching the 1957 Fender Duo-Sonic that she’d just purchased from Manny’s Guitars, and which might once have belonged to Jimi Hendrix. “Legend or not, it was mine.” She paid $110 for it, but she had no intention of learning to play it. “I was interested in expressing ideas … within the realm of sound.” And “Radio Ethiopia” flowed from there, the sound of a clothed naked woman, celebrating the storm but not feeling its impact, “just me on my knees laughing hysterically, thankful for the privilege of playing in a rock and roll band.”

She revisited the moment in a new verse, “High on Rebellion”:
what i feel when i’m playing guitar is completely cold and crazy, like i don’t owe nobody nothing and it’s a test just to see how far I can relax in to the cold wave of a note.

Later, she declared that she would not be working with Jack Douglas again but admitted that he allowed the band to work at its own pace, jamming for as long as it took for them to find the rhythm they required, and that he threw aside his own instincts and not only recorded but also mixed “Radio Ethiopia” live in the studio. In fact, when Patti and the band mused on the possibility of overdubbing the track with the soundsof radios fading in and out, it was Douglas who told them to let it stand as it was, naked and unadorned.

“This is not an avant-garde project of mine,” Patti had prophetically ad-libbed while performing the embryonic “Radio Ethiopia” in Paris earlier in the year. “I still want to be your valentine.” And for anybody who values intention as an art form, and sees successful execution in the defiance of all expectations, she succeeded.

With the sessions at an end, the Patti Smith Group played a couple of New York state shows at Hamilton College in Clinton and Hofstra University in Hempstead, both shows effectively previewing everything that
Radio Ethiopia
had to offer. The band was gearing up for its next challenge: a swift return to the now-slavering Europe for two weeks worth of gigs.

The tour fell on the very eve of release for
Radio Ethiopia,
an album that was already getting a rough ride from critics. Much as Patti predicted, and certainly as she expected, reviewers who had waxed platitudinous over
Horses
simply failed to comprehend the new disc; they demanded to know what had happened to the poetry, slammed the heavy tracks as mutant metal, condemned the ballads for being too pretty.

“Patti Smith certainly has one hell of a lot to answer for,” growled Marianne Partridge’s review in
Melody Maker.
“Not only does she unashamedly use her band as a backcloth for her pretentious ‘poetic’ ramblings, but she simultaneously comes on as the savior of raw-power rock and roll as it struggles to survive the onslaught of esoteric rock. In other words, she’s into the myth-making business. And in this, her second album, the myth is exposed … as cheap thrills.”

That, perhaps, was only to be expected;
Melody Maker
had scarcely been supportive either of Patti or of the fast-collecting storm clouds of punk. But
Rolling Stone’s
Dave Marsh was also dismissive: “While Smith can be an inventive, sometimes inspired writer and performer, her band is basically just another loud punk-rock gang of primitives, riff-based and redundant. The rhythm is disjointed, the guitar chording trite and elementary…. Smith obviously would like to be just another rock singer, with a band that could reach a broad, tough teenage audience. Ceding control to a band that lacks her best qualities and encourages herworst … is hardly the way to go about it.” Marsh also drew an utterly mystifying parallel between the “vulgar” “Pissing in a River” and the “transcendent quality” of “Piss Factory”—two songs that surely have nothing more in common than the very different meaning of a single term in their titles.

But he was not alone. When it rains misunderstanding, it pours, and gathering up the collected reviews, it felt as though only the ever-loyal
Creem
was still on Patti’s side, as Richard Meltzer turned in a typically anarchic but never less than glowing riposte to the po-faced miseries elsewhere in the media. “It’s really a bonafide certified
good’un,
y’know,” he raved, and everyone else who both read that and loved the record thought, “Thank heavens
somebody
understands.”

Patti probably felt the same way. She was in a defiant mood already, referring to herself as a military field marshal, comparing life in a band to the rigors of the army, and penning a beautiful new verse, “Babel Field,” in which Marine Corps maneuvers and guerrilla training, instruments and weapons, guitar necks as bayonets, flash and crash through the chaos of war, which itself is reduced to
violent hieroglyphs of sound and motion.
A guitar weighs less than a machine gun, she wrote, but it packs as much punch, and when she steps up to the microphone,
I have no fear.
In performance, she would occasionally reinforce the punch by adding discordant guitar to the verse and retitling it “Bumblebee.”