Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story (23 page)

But the London shows were imperious regardless. “We’re Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together” opened, of course, though Patti’s first words to the audience were a reminder of the city’s other live attraction that evening: “I’d like to thank you all for not going to see Peter Frampton tonight.” A slinky “Kimberly” and a funky “Redondo Beach” kept the roars of recognition going, before a haunting piano passage fooled everyone into expecting a new song. Instead, they got an elegiac “Free Money.”

The show was almost halfway over before “Ask the Angels” ushered in the material from the new album, bookended between “Louie Louie” and a triumphant “Time Is on My Side.” But “Pumping (My Heart)” was dense and unfamiliar, and an epic “Ain’t It Strange” wrapped itself into twelve minutes of concentric circles around that most lazily compulsive of almost-reggae rhythms, before—depending upon where your musical tastes were sitting—Patti either thrilled or baffled the crowd by introducing reggae icon Tapper Zukie to the mix.

Possibly the finest Jamaican toaster of the mid-1970s, Tapper Zukie was a magical wordsmith whose sense of timing has seldom been equaled. The first Jamaican DJ to take up residence in the UK, he was a firm favorite on British-based sound systems of the time. His album
MPLA
would be one the biggest-selling British reggae releases of 1976, and with the now-historic merging of roots reggae and the early punk scene already under way, Zukie found himself as popular with white rockers as with the Jamaican community. When Patti invited him onto her stage, she believed she was introducing Zukie to her audience and conferring her stamp of approval on him. For many of the evening’s witnesses, it was as likely the other way around.

Zukie told writer Peter I, “I was on tour … and this guy Don Letts was runnin’ a record shop down in the West End, and he talk to this lady when she came into the shop and say she want to come in contact with me…. And he call my friend Militant Barry and hook up with me and say Patti Smith want us to come down to Hammersmith Odeon, so we went…. And she just bowed down in front of me and said ‘Man, when I see you, man, it’s like seeing James Brown.’ …

“She said she learned to play ‘pon record from my album
Man Ah Warrior.
So she walk me out on the stage in front of about five thousandpeople and bow down in front of me and tell them that she learnt to play music from my album.”

Ivan Kral, who never traveled without his Super 8 camera, set up one of the roadies at the side of the stage with instructions to film everything that looked worthwhile. He was rewarded with a stellar sequence of Zukie, proud and prancing on the lip of the stage, while even Patti relegated herself to a supporting role behind him.

A handful of hecklers arose from the stalls. Early on, reacting to the Odeon’s all-seated policy, one voice demanded, “Next time, make it the Roundhouse.” But as they grew more virulent, Patti responded with the staccato signals of “Radio Ethiopia,” an eternity of feedback, riffing, and caterwauling that only slowly resolved itself back into anything the audience might recognize—a motorvatin’ guitar and harp riff—and then snatched it away again with a furious “Rock n Roll Nigger.” And then they were into the home stretch: everyone hailed a swaggering “Gloria,” and you may never have heard “Land” reduced to an audience clap-along before, but it didn’t seem to phase Patti any. Shame that the cassette tape that preserved the evening for posterity should run out before the song did, but it was still a great rendition.

The following week’s reviews passed sneering commentary on Patti’s attempts to smash her guitar at the end of the performance, raising it above her head and bringing it down on the ground repeatedly. She failed, and the guitar remained resolutely intact. But Kral revealed a secret: She didn’t really fail. She didn’t intend to break it, and by the time it was finally granted retirement, that little old guitar was still in one piece.

As they had back in May, the Patti Smith Group also fanned out to sightsee, shop, and take in some other concerts around London. For Kral, the highlight was getting a ticket to see his childhood idol Cliff Richard. For Patti, it was the chance to hightail it down to the ICA to catch the Clash, another of the bands rising up on punk’s first wave, and join them onstage for a knockabout thrash through their own “I’m So Bored with the USA.”

Suddenly, it seemed, Andy Paley was recalled to America by other commitments two shows from the end of the tour. As feared, the Manchester and Edinburgh shows were canceled.

Home by the end of the month, Patti took in Bruce Springsteen’s latest New York City performance, at the Palladium on October 30. She joined him on stage too, for a head-spinning collision of his “Rosalita” and her “Land.” She had danced onstage with him in the past, but tonight’s collaboration between the king and queen of the New York City streets, as tired journalists had already dubbed them, was something special, so special that when the Patti Smith Group returned to the city after a short jaunt to California, Springsteen would appear both in the audience and on the stage. So would John Cale, whose recent bandmate Bruce Brody had replaced Andy Paley on keyboards.

The band was playing a full week of shows at the Bottom Line, dynamic evenings in which absolutely nothing could be accused of conforming to a script. One night, when Kaye leaped into the audience during “Ain’t It Strange,” Patti followed him, and the pair embarked on a crazy game of chase, leaping onto tables before she dragged him back to the stage. “It was just a lot of this adolescent energy and anarchy,” Kaye recalled to Patricia Morrisroe, “and there was something very liberating about it because we were pushing the edge of the envelope.”

The repertoire matched the mayhem. Back on home turf, Patti slipped guilelessly between rock and verse, often opening the shows with a succession of rapid-fire verbiage even before “We’re Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together” brought the band into view. Old British Invasion covers flew out of the memory banks; improvisations wrapped around the most familiar album tracks; Dolly Parton’s country classic “Jolene” rubbed shoulders with “Ballad of a Bad Boy.” Patti was in her element, and when Springsteen leaped onstage on the fifth night, turning up at both the early and late shows, a raucous “Land” became a hypnotic “Not Fade Away,” “Radio Ethiopia” merged with “Rock n Roll Nigger,” and if anybody ever questioned whether a year on the road had reduced the Patti Smith Group to a regimented pile driver—another of the accusations that were spit out by the UK press—this was their response: a series of shows so loose and unstructured that the only thing that could ever have kept them together was the instinctive connection Patti and her musicians had shared since their earliest days as a band.

The anarchy continued. The day after the Bottom Line residency ended, on November 29, Patti was scheduled to speak at a twenty-four-hour “Hungerthon” being arranged by WNEW radio and hosted by the genteel singer-songwriter Harry Chapin. It was Chapin who was charged with the task of asking Patti to moderate her language, as there was no time delay, and he who received her withering on-air response. WNEW prided itself as being an alternative to traditional rock radio, but how alternative was it really, Patti demanded to know, if “the first thing that happens when I walk in is that you tell me you don’t have a bleep machine and to watch what I say?”

Her tirade went on, and while it echoed in part the disaffected cries of the punk rock generation, it also spoke for every concern Patti had ever voiced through her own work. “Rock ‘n’ roll is being taken over by the people again. By young kids who don’t want to hear about your digital delay. They don’t want to hear about any of this stuff. They don’t want to hear that they can’t do an Eric Clapton solo. They just want to get out there and just get down on a rhythm. They want to crawl like a dog or they want to rise up. They just want to feel something.”

She weaved in a message to match the fundraiser’s own aims. Demanding that the rich West use its power to feed the hungry of the world rather than worry about “what color they are, or … what they’re listening to on their radios”—or, as the undercurrent of her conversation made clear, any of the other questions or conditions that the West seemed to employ whenever a Third World nation went cap in hand for aid. But neither Chapin nor Metromedia, WNEW’s owners, were amused. Plans for the station to broadcast the Patti Smith Group’s New Year’s Eve show at the New York Palladium were abandoned.

In March 1977, the
Yipster Times
would publish Patti’s page-long defense of her actions and denouncement of her critics: “We believe in the total freedom of communication and we will not be compromised…. They are trying to silence us, but they cannot succeed.” And, paraphrasing Jim Morrison, “We Want The Radio And We Want It Now.” The article was accompanied by French photographer, artist, and singer Lizzy “Lyzzy” Mercier Descloux’s famous photograph of Patti seated on a sidewalk in Paris, cigarette in hand, beneath a single graffiti-scrawled slogan,
Vive l’anarchie.

Other broadcasters were less squeamish. On December 7, the Patti Smith Group recorded two songs, “Ask the Angels” and “Free Money,” for the
Mike Douglas Show.

They then set out on one of the most oddly mismatched tours of their entire career. Nobody seems certain what genius it was who thought the Patti Smith Group could ever share an audience, or anything else for that matter, with Sparks, the hyper-ironic California siblings who had spent the last two years as superstars in Europe but whose American profile seemed doomed forever to languish against a wall of humor-free apathy.

Hilly Michaels, Sparks’ New Yorker drummer, was astonished by the pairing. “Sparks and Patti Smith on the same bill for a good dozen shows? Fellini couldn’t have thought up something that weird. It was like a grandiose traveling musical oddities tour for a while, and there was a lot of friction between the Patti Smith Group and us.” Some nights, Sparks were not even granted a sound check before the doors opened.

Only Ivan Kral offered Michaels any respite from the hostility. Michaels had been playing alongside Mick Ronson when Kral auditioned for the guitarist’s band just before he joined Patti, and Michaels recalled, “He was a super-nice guy and my only warm relief with a friendly ‘hi’ to me when we all toured together.”

One concession was made to the distinctly different audiences that the two bands could expect to attract: an agreement to alternate the headline slot. Michaels continued, “Depending on the city, either she or we would open first. We had our pockets of places where we were stronger, where the crowd went absolutely wild when we took the stage, and Patti had hers.”

In Montreal, Canada, a solidly Sparks-loving crowd was making so much noise before the show started that Patti, having agreed to open that evening, was too nervous to even come out of her dressing room. At the Masonic Auditorium in Detroit on December 12, on the other hand, a fanatically devoted Patti audience greeted Sparks on stage with a hail of abuse that swiftly graduated to flying bottles.

Another night, Michaels confessed, brought one of the scariest experiences of his entire onstage life. Again Sparks faced a loyal Patti Smith crowd, and as they ran out onto the stage, the entire venue erupted into a chorus of catcalls. “There was this thunderous
‘boooooooo’
resonatingfrom three-thousand-plus people, just as we were getting ready to start. We were all a bit paralyzed by that! It was an uphill struggle from the get-go, and we had to perform our asses off for every single show.”

It was with some relief that the two bands finally parted company following a show at Seneca College in Toronto, Canada, on December 19. The Patti Smith Group headed back to New York City, to wrap up a tumultuous year with a tumultuous performance: their New Year’s Eve gig at the Palladium.

Robert Christgau reported on the show for the
Village Voice,
marveling at an audience that rushed the stage “like KISS fans,” and then celebrating the performance’s climax by describing it as “the true ‘My Generation.’” The song began with Patti wrestling a guitar away from her female roadie, Andi Ostrowe, “and ended with [her]—joined eventually by Ivan Kral—performing the legendary guitar-smashing ritual that the Who gave up in the sixties.”

Patti, too, would soon be giving up that sort of ritual. But whereas the Who, and all the other acts who had set themselves up in opposition to the status quo of the day, eventually retired from the battlefield, mission unfulfilled—because how could it be fulfilled with
Tommy
around your neck?—when Patti retired, it was because her job was done.

Six weeks after her last London show, the Sex Pistols appeared on British television and cursed their way into tabloid immortality. Punk rock was confirmed as
the
musical fashion of the next two years and was set to become the father of most of the others that followed. Even today, more than thirty years after punk came to life, it remains an underground current, one that has survived every effort to tame, blame, or merely contain its energies.

Its birth was not painless, and there were moments when it felt as though the infant might never live to adulthood. But Patti kept a close eye on her child all the same, and today when you ask her what punk rock means, her answer is unhesitating. “I think it doesn’t necessarily have to take any specific form of music, because it’s really a spirit,” she told Gerri Lim of the Singapore magazine
Big O
in 1995. “And what the spirit is, I think, it removes itself or tries to repurify things whenthings get too convoluted or when they get too commercial. There’s this resurgent spirit that people call punk that purifies everything again….

“It’s the new guard coming in to purify, to let things renew and begin again.”

12

THE SALVATION OF ROCK

T
HE STAGE WAS
as dark as a well-lit stage could be. Shadowed by amplifiers, blocked by her bandmates, and surrounded by the accoutrements that the headlining act deemed essential to their well-being, Patti was performing in near-total blackness.