Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story (22 page)

She would face down the media in the same way that she faced down hecklers: schooled in the politics of rock journalism herself, although she rarely adhered to their most brutal tenets, she was well aware of the ease with which the most devoted pack of critics can turn on the tip of a stylus, raising you up just to knock you down later. (Some people even suggested that she had purposefully constructed
Radio Ethiopia
to provoke such a brutal response so that she could get the critical firestorm out of the way and then regain equilibrium with the next release.)

For instance, when some critics noted that the band frequently drowned out Patti herself, they decided that this meant she had scaled back her poetic intentions. Patti mocked this off-target accusation mercilessly. “If everybody’s hung up about poetry, there’s a big fucking poem in the record,” she would argue at her London press conference. “Tellthem if they’re hung up because there’s no poem in the record … it’s got the longest poem in the history of man. It took me four months…. The poem, I don’t say it … everything you don’t hear on the record because of the bass and drums … I’ve written the poem. In other words, it’s like when you listen to
Madame Butterfly
.”

She would elaborate to
Sounds’
Sandy Robertson in March 1978: “People think that because you write poetry that every word you say is supposed to be, like, gilded or something. I think that language is almost obsolete anyway. I write poetry because I was seduced by the word.” The word, however, had been supplanted now. Language was dead. Sound was the new common denominator. Rock ‘n’ roll, she predicted, will be “the most universal language in the next ten years,” and
Radio Ethiopia
was its first word.

“This album is, I think, much more feminine than the first album,” she explained to another
Sounds
correspondent, Vivien Goldman, in November 1976. “The rhythm, it’s more like ocean…. ‘Radio Ethiopia’ I think is very inspiring. I was listening to old Albert Ayler records, live, and they’re not that much different to ‘Radio Ethiopia.’ All it is, is a commitment and a surrendering to a certain energy.”

That may be so, or it may be bullshit. The live show, after all, had been driving deliriously toward those same peaks of dissonance, feedback, and pummeling riffery for half a year now. And rehearsals for the European tour suggested that the barrage was about to grow louder.

Crisis. Two days before they left for Europe, September 27, Richard Sohl was forced to pull out of the party. The pianist’s doctors had diagnosed physical exhaustion. He’d always been the physically slightest member of the band, even when lined up alongside Patti’s natural frailty, and the last year of almost nonstop travel, gigging, and recording had finally exacted the harshest toll. He couldn’t have toured if he’d wanted to, and Patti had no intention of even suggesting he try.

A quick call rallied one of Lenny Kaye’s friends, keyboard player Andy Paley, down from Boston. His band, the Paley Brothers, were on the rise at the time, and he was also the producer behind the recent revival of the Shangri-Las. The archetypal 1960s girl group had reformed that summer to record a new album with Paley at the helm—and with a sharpeye firmly focused on Blondie, whose own repertoire still included the Shangri-Las’ “Out on the Street.” The record was never completed, but the Shangri-Las would play CBGB one night, an impromptu performance with Paley and Kaye in their backing band.

“Andy is real crazy,” Patti laughed to
New Musical Express
writer Charles Shaar Murray in October 1976. “He’s amazing. Amazingly crazy. He was telling me what a good soldier he was gonna be … and he’s so
spaced out.”

The tour would consume the entire month of October, opening in Scandinavia, where the first night at Stockholm’s Konserthuset was filmed for broadcast on local television. It’s the only full visual record in circulation today of the band at the height of its musical and improvisational talents, as Patti stepped for the first time into her role as a rock performer first, a poet and artist second.

She dances awkwardly but beguilingly, turning her back on the audience more than once to sing directly to her bandmates instead. Or she flails unself-consciously, whirling through a breathtaking “Ain’t It Strange,” dropping on to her back and then raising herself crablike on all fours, strapping on a guitar as she raps a breathless prelude to “Radio Ethiopia”:
Deep in the heart of your brain is a lever, in the heart of your brain is a switch, deep in the heart of your existence.
Today, of course, the improvised riffs and lyrics of “Radio Ethiopia” might border on the familiar, but it is easy to place yourself back in the crowd in Stockholm, with the song screaming out for the first time, endless and maybe even nameless, a catacomb of sound that only resolved itself into something approaching a song for the pleasure of snatching that solace away again.

After Scandinavia, the tour would swing down through one-night stands in Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, West Germany, and Austria, before settling into Patti’s beloved Paris. It was not an easy journey, and Andy Paley appeared to be the inadvertent root of much of the difficulty. “You know what he put us through?” Patti asked Charles Shaar Murray. The first night on the road, he was interviewed by a woman whose command of the English language was apparently limited to the word “champagne.” So they ordered some up and proceeded to have a party. “Then,” continued Patti, “he had a nervous breakdown and heartattack.” In fact, it was only a
suspected
heart attack, while the group was flying to Hamburg, but still, an ambulance was waiting to pick him up when the plane landed and rush him to hospital. He was discharged in time for the next show—and returned promptly to his chosen on-the-road lifestyle.

New Musical Express
journalist Murray joined the tour in Amsterdam, catching the show at the Paradiso and then meeting up with Patti as she toured the city the following morning, stopping by a flea market and watching as she pawed through a record stall and emerged triumphant with a handful of bootlegs, three of her own and one by Blue Öyster Cult. She was still showing off her finds, and recommending
Teenage Perversity & Ships in the Night
to anyone who cared, when the storeowner caught sight of her.

Assuming this strange woman was planning to steal the record, he grabbed for it. Patti stood her ground.

“Fuck you, asshole. I’m Patti Smith and this is
my record!
I ain’t getting any money for this. I oughtta call the cops on ya.”

Then she turned and walked imperiously away.

Eventually the tour arrived in Paris, for two shows, three days, and a bittersweet reunion. Nico, the impossible beauty whom Patti knew from her earliest days in New York, had relocated to the city. Now a suicidal smack-head, she’d been dropped by her last record company, Island, after they misconstrued as racist a remark she made about not liking Negroes. As a child, she said, she was raped by a black man; as an adult, she had lived with a Black Panthers death threat hanging over her head. Being in their presence, she said, made her nervous.

It was not the only way in which Nico had grown paranoid and frightened. One of her idols, Ulrike Meinhof (one-half of the so-called Baader-Meinhof Gang, a left-wing guerrilla organization that flourished in mid-1970s West Germany) was dead, having committed suicide in prison, and Nico’s natural tendency to absorb the trials of her icons left her feeling as though she, too, was incarcerated on a spiritual death row. On top of all that, her harmonium, the instrument with which she had recorded three of the most remarkable records of the decade so far, was gone, either stolen or sold to pay off a drug debt. She was at rock bottom.

“I was without money and now I couldn’t even earn a living playing without my organ. A friend of mine saw one with green bellows in an obscure shop, the only one in Paris. Patti bought it for me. I was so happy and ashamed. I said ‘I’ll give you back the money when I get it,’ but she insisted the organ was a present, and I should forget about the money. I cried. I was ashamed she saw me without money.”

She told Richard Witts, “I felt like she could be a sister, because she was the double of Philippe Garrel [the movie director and, at that time, Nico’s lover], and I liked to be together with her.”

Patti’s generosity would help Nico place her career back on track, and so would her example. When she visited London eighteen months later, Nico would find herself feted by the same punk audience that Patti had helped to kick-start; a former member of the Velvet Underground could scarcely go wrong in a city so enraptured by the new music. And when it
did
go wrong, as the assembled hordes of punk stood bemused and outraged by the solitary woman making medieval noise on the spit-drenched stage (so much for the egalitarianism with which punk had first spread its wings), that, too, was a lesson that she could have learned from Patti Smith. And she would turn it around.

Nico was not the only cherished icon with whom Patti reconnected during her stay in Paris. On her second trip to the city in 1972, she had stood at Jim Morrison’s grave and dreamed that he would emerge to share a duet with her. Now, four years later, she received the visitation that she had been searching for.

She was onstage at the city’s Pavillon de Paris, a theater built on the site of an old slaughterhouse, and no matter how hard she tried to suppress the impression, “I had a really weird feeling that Jim was there, there with the people.” They were just going into “Land” with its invocation of horses, she told John Tobler, “and, of course, I can’t not think of Jim when I’m in Paris…. I realized I was in the slaughterhouse for horses, and I was gonna do ‘Horses,’ and then I remembered ‘Horse Latitudes,’ so I sort of went into a drift, going into the leather raft carrying the to-be-slaughtered-horses of ‘Horse Latitudes,’ and then I got a really weird feeling that I was being taken over, and I started crying, and my voice has changed.”

It was, she swore, Jim Morrison.

“I don’t think he’s alive like a human being, but I don’t think he’s dead in a completed high stage, like the other guys are. I don’t think his work was done…. I think he had a book to write; he wanted to leave his greatness through poetry. Morrison had this obsession about poetry, and he never completed himself, and I feel him. I feel him bugging me.”

11

HIGH ON REBELLION

P
UNK ROCK HAD
yet to become a mainstream concern when the Patti Smith Group touched down in London in October 1976. Little more than a month had elapsed since the Sex Pistols–headlined 100 Club Punk Festival first alerted the media at large to the emergence of a powerful new musical movement, but another month would need to pass before the Pistols appeared cussing and cursing on nationwide television and turned an underground cult into an overground sensation.

The requirements of the explosion-to-come were still being streamlined. Not only was the design of the uniform that would mark someone as a punk evolving, but the stylizing of the musical nuances, too, were moving away from the sonic free-for-all that hallmarked the nascent movement’s first few months, toward the strict three-chord structure that today’s world knows as punk rock. And somewhere along the line, some time during the summertime that divided Patti’s first London shows from her second, she had been firmly placed on the outside looking in.

It was a development she surely had expected. A year and a half later, she would counsel British youth via Sandy Robertson of
Sounds:
“We’re only here to provide inspiration, and be a temporary life raft until you’re ready to do your own work…. I think that we must steal from masters, that we need teachers. Every great man has been an apprentice in his life, it’s how you pay your dues. I feel like I paid my dues to the Rolling Stones, and now I don’t need them. I still believe in them, though. I don’t feel any desire to say, ‘Fuck you’ to the Stones; they gave me a lot.”

But that, she discovered, was the difference between herself and many of her British fans. It would be an absurd generalization (although that has not stopped some commentators) to say that British youth rose up as one to say “fuck you” to the music of the previous decade and replace it with punk rock, to consign everything that had gone before to the dustbins of history. But a lot of them did, and in among all the discarded ELP, ELO, Rolling Stones, and Beatles albums with which the nation’s used record stores were now overflowing, there was a lot of more recent fare as well. Bruce Springsteen, Nils Lofgren, Graham Parker, Dr. Feelgood … so many names had risen up in the past year or so, haunted the headlines for a few glorious months, and then been cast aside as suddenly irrelevant.

Radio Ethiopia
would not suffer that same fate, but not because Patti was immune to the culling. It would be overlooked altogether, left unsold on British record shelves as the full weight of the music press’s diatribes sank into the impressionable skulls of prospective buyers and the notion that poetry had a part to play in punk rock was abandoned.

Ticket sales for the UK leg of the tour were sluggish. Two shows at London’s three-thousand-plus-capacity Hammersmith Odeon suddenly seemed oddly ambitious, while scheduled gigs in Birmingham, Manchester, and Edinburgh were beginning to resemble implausible conceits. There was even talk that the latter two concerts might be canceled due to poor ticket sales.

Upon her landing in London, at the same press conference where Patti defended her poetic intentions, a questioner asked whether she had any idea why the gigs weren’t selling out. She could have answered this question, too, if she’d chosen. Instead, she bellowed “fuck you” at the masses and pelted them with food. By the end of the rapidly curtailed conference, she was reiterating her status as the field marshal of rock ‘n’ roll, and warning a room full of journalists, “I’m declaring war.”

“For a two-year-old,” wrote cub journalist and avowed Patti fan Julie Burchill, “it would have been a very impressive performance. From the Queen of Rock and Roll, it was like watching God jerk off.”