Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story (26 page)

Even more excitingly, Arista was taping Patti’s performance, a selection of readings from
Babel,
with an eye toward releasing a full Patti Smith poetry album. There was even talk of it being released in the Savoy Jazz series, Patti crowed to John Tobler. “Be in there with Albert Ayler and all those guys.”

Unfortunately, events would move too fast. Just one excerpt from the performance, a truly stirring “Babel Field,” ever saw the light of day (it would appear as a UK B-side later in the year), as the label heads begin to reconsider what was happening with Patti’s career.

A veteran Arista staffer laid out their dilemma a few years later: “On the one hand we had ‘Because the Night,’ which the entire label was behind, and
Easter,
which we knew was going to be huge, but on the other, we had Patti Smith’s reputation as a poetess and an artist, which really never sat well with the label, because how do you sell that?

“I think when Clive [Davis] first signed her, that was the direction he saw her moving in, but things had changed since then—punk rock was now huge and Patti Smith was a part of that movement whether she liked it or not, and she was also the first person from that movement to be signed. So there was a sense at the label, both in London and in New York City, that if anybody needed a hit record, it was the woman who started it all, which placed the people who believed in her at the start under a lot of pressure, and meant that projects they had maybe hoped to see through had to be put back; the poetry album, for instance. And I think it put Patti under a lot of pressure as well, which is why things turned out as they did.”

Patti never released that poetry album. Instead, she would turn to John Giorno’s Poetry Systems, the poet’s now decade-old mission to spotlight the harshest and most beautiful contemporary verse and writers that New York City (and beyond) had to offer. Patti’s epic “The Histories of the Universe” would appear on his 1978 spoken-word collection
Big Ego,
alongside contributions from Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, and Jackie Curtis, among others.

Later in the year, she would also perform at Giorno’s Nova Convention, a festival honoring William Burroughs. Patti gifted her “Poem for Jim Morrison” and “Bumblebee” to the souvenir live album, and offered her tribute to the guest of honor: “If all the stuff that we say about music being the most universal communication … Mr. Burroughs and Mr. Gysin and all these people, the thing they’ve given me is the foresight and the freedom to communicate with the future through sound.”

She also looked back to her first reading at St. Mark’s Poetry Project, all those years before. “They didn’t mind me but they were very shocked at Lenny … poor Lenny, with his little Champ amp. Heavy metal had come into St. Mark’s. But times have changed,” she chuckled. “Look how big Lenny’s amp is now.”

Her art, it seemed, was becoming very separate from her commerce.

As before, the Patti Smith Group launched their European tour in Scandinavia, wound their way south through West Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium, and France, then hopped the water to London at the end of March 1978. They appeared on British television’s top-rated arts magazine program,
The South Bank Show,
where they performed, perhaps surprisingly, “Rock n Roll Nigger.” They also returned to the
Old Grey Whistle Test
to thrash “25th Floor” and “Because the Night,” and finally there were three nights at the Rainbow Theatre, a two-thousand-seater in North London’s Finsbury Park, and a reunion with Tapper Zukie, support act at all three shows.

Easter
entered the UK chart that same week, buoyed by a clutch of reviews that may not have been wholeheartedly supportive but were at least more positive than those that had greeted its predecessor. Advance orders were pouring in for “Because the Night” as well, sufficient to see it on the UK singles chart before the end of the month.

It would ultimately peak at #5, held out of the #1 slot by the combined powers of German disco band Boney M., a 1950s revival act called the Darts (extolling, ironically, the virtues of a “Boy from New York City”), and the two latest releases from the Bee Gees’ factory of hits; history tends to overlook them today, but there was a moment in the late 1970s when the brothers Gibb were even bigger than punk rock, and this was it.

Lower on the listings, Blondie’s “(I’m Always Touched by Your) Presence, Dear” was serving up that band’s second UK hit, following the #2 smash “Denis” earlier in the year. For now, though, the Patti Smith Group was the biggest name in punk, American or British, and the only negative aspect was Patti’s own seemingly growing detachment from it all.

“I’d like to see this album sell a billion copies and Patti become a superstar,” Lester Bangs wrote in
Phonograph Record Magazine,
“even though I know that eventuality will turn her into even more of a monster than she’s already become. Better her than Styx, or that guy who wants to hold you till the fear in him subsides.” How Patti must have shuddered when she read those words; she didn’t want to be a superstar or a monster. She wanted to stop.

In concert, she seemed tired.
Melody Maker
‘s Chris Brazier caught one of the Rainbow shows and said it outright: “She has none of the bounding excess of energy, the sheer childlike exuberance that used to crackle through her performance.” She barely spoke to the audience; she rarely budged from her perch in front of the microphone. To crowds who may never have caught her in the past, her performance was probably everything they hoped for, and there were definitely moments of high drama: Her arrival onstage at the start, a tatty little figure in an outsized bowler hat, clutching a crook and a little toy sheep and declaring, “The Lord is my shepherd.” The segue from a somber “We Three” to a breathless “Time Is on My Side.” Kral throwing a hint of “Whole Lotta Love” into a fiery “Radio Ethiopia.” All of these were moments to cherish. But to fans who had caught any of her previous London shows, or seen her anywhere else for that matter, this was not the Patti Smith they remembered.

In fact, Patti was feeling unwell at the London shows. In West Germany, Paul Morley of the
New Musical Express
reported, she had been “mesmerising … honouring the vibrant spirits of destiny, anarchy, surrealism.” But next she sat down to talk with the British media, and that, too, seemed an oddly disheartened performance.

Easter,
of course, dominated her thoughts—but not only the album. Christian mythology, too, was paramount in her mind as she discussed her own relationship with Christ—something, she said, she was still learning to reevaluate.

She was not on the verge of a full-fledged religious conversion; she would not undergo the kind of transformation that, coincidentally, was awaiting Bob Dylan before the year was out. But when she spoke of Christianity, she did so with a fervor that she had once reserved for her personal heroes and theories alone. And those heroes themselves had a new member in their ranks. “To me, Christ, Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, they’re all the same,” she informed Chris Brazier. “To me, the greatest thing about Christ is not necessarily Christ himself but the belief of the people that have kept him alive through the centuries.”

She still stuck by the lyric that, to many people, best encapsulates her early, ragged beauty, the line from “Oath” (and, later, “Gloria”), that insists
Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.
But now she was willing to explain it. “I wasn’t saying that I didn’t like Christ or didn’t believe in him, just that I wanted to take the responsibility for the things I do…. I believe that crime goes hand in hand with art, and I didn’t want some unknown entity taking the blame or credit for anything I do.”

She also believed that she needed to accept “a more New Testament kind of communication.” In the Old Testament, she explained, man communicated directly with God; in the New, he required a go-between, Jesus. “Well, I’m a one-to-one girl and I have always sought to communicate with God through myself.” Now she wasn’t so sure. “I feel that was one of the reasons I fell offstage…. I’m reevaluating my state of being.” Maybe, she was thinking, we need that middleman to help us understand what God is really saying, rather than trusting to our own instincts to translate his words correctly.

But who are we, and who is God? Replace the concept of a supreme being with that of true love (which isn’t as much of a stretch, though the right wing might argue), replace the concept of an emissary with that of the object of true love, and perhaps one gets at what Patti was truly saying. Though she bound it up in so much mystique and mystery that a lot of people stop reading halfway through the first paragraph, what she had realized was that she didn’t need to go it alone anymore. That there was someone else ready to stand beside her.

She had not found God. She had found Fred.

Back in the United States, radio flooded behind “Because the Night,” and as both single and LP soared upwards (they came to rest, ultimately, at #13 and #20, respectively), Patti celebrated: “The whole point of doing work is to communicate ecstasy or joy…. We’re communicating to a lot more people.

“I think it’s great that I have a hit single,” she told Charles Young in
Rolling Stone.
“Because what it means is that it’s possible to have integrity and be successful again. I mean, I believe that in their hearts, all the great ‘60s guys had great integrity and they all did great work. They all had a sort of political consciousness and some spiritual consciousness. And they were successful. The way I look at it, I haven’t changed none. I haven’t changed since I was seven years old. And I’ve gotten more corrupt in certain ways.”

It was not lost on her, of course, that many of the people who were drawn to the song came to it from the Springsteen angle. After a three-year silence on the recording front as he fought with a former manager, Springsteen was preparing to stir again with
Darkness on the Edge of Town,
and fans who had been driven to fever pitch by the live shows that filled that gap were snatching at every little bit of Boss that they could lay their paws on.

Nor could Patti overlook the fact that the bulk of
Easter
was being widely regarded a mere sideshow to the main event of “Because the Night.” She expected AM radio stations to play only the single, but it was “pretty gutless,” she complained to Steve Simels in
Stereo Review,
for the once-wide-open vistas of FM radio to have constricted so much that they were doing the same. Even so, she admitted to Young that a lot of the LP was scarcely suitable for radio play. “The album includes on it
fuck, piss, shit, seed, nigger
—it’s got everything but
shitlicker
on it. Ya know, it’s much more daring, much more perverse, and, ah, much more corrupt than
Radio Ethiopia
.” Which only confirmed Jimmy Iovine’s earlier fears for
Easter
—that it was a good album without any radio-friendly pop fodder to speak of.

It became a major issue when the time came to choose a follow-up single. Arista’s American office evaded the issue altogether by not even releasing one. In the UK, the label plumped for “Privilege,” hoping to juxtapose the old song’s familiarity and the inevitable media-whipped storm about the
goddamns.
Arista provided further incentive for purchasers by including a new live recording of “25th Floor” and the sales conference rendition of “Babel Field”—by now known as “Babelfield”—on the twelve-inch single. But “Privilege” faltered at #72 that summer; British radio steadfastly avoided it precisely because of the blasphemies.

Still, Patti respected Arista’s decision to release “Privilege,” all the more so since it contrasted so sharply with their treatment of “My Generation” two years earlier. Advance research had already made it clear that the single would receive no airplay, but what Patti would describe to John Tobler as “a new regime at Arista … who really fight for me” was not deterred. At the time, singles weren’t only released to become hits; sometimes they were there to make a point about the artist, and anybody coming to Patti Smith for the first time via that bumper twelve-inch package would have learned a lot.

The Patti Smith Group toured the United States through the spring and early summer of 1978. They hopped back to the UK at the end of August, for a week of shows that commenced with a headlining performance at the annual Reading Festival. Next they hit the continent, and then they were back touring America into December. It was an exhausting workload, one that was only exacerbated by the sheer weight of promotional work Patti had piled onto her shoulders as well.

But it was not without its highlights. In June 1978, nearly thirteen years after she first saw the Rolling Stones live in Philadelphia, Patti opened for them in Atlanta, as the old warhorse toured its
Some Girls
LP. And in July she hit the cover of
Rolling Stone
magazine; Charles Young’s article inside unequivocally proclaimed her “at the age of thirty-one, a star.”

She added in a handful of UK interviews to promote the belated publication of
Babel
in that country. In fact, the collection was in for a rough ride, at least from the media. There were some horrifically cruel reviews in the British press, including
New Musical Express
writer Ian Penman’s insistence that “most of us were writing better than this in the lower Sixth [eleventh grade], with or without expensive drugs, friends or book deals…. This is self-conceit, and it should have been burnt out or burnt years ago. This is semi-literature, and I hate it even more when I realise that it’s probably the only book of ‘poetry’ a lot of impressionable young people will buy this or any other year.”

His final observation was probably correct; thirty-plus years later, if you can find a copy of
Babel
in a used bookstore, much of it will be either marked up or underlined. It may not have been destined to land with the cultural impact of a Kerouac or Ginsberg volume, but to a generation that was coming of literary age in the late 1970s,
Babel
was as valuable a work as any of Patti’s predecessors’ might have been—and as relevant as well. Ginsberg himself acknowledged this when he remarked to Victor Bockris, “I was surprised by Patti Smith’s rise…. I wonder how she’ll do. I was reading Rimbaud’s last letters, [written] when he was dying, about how miserable life was and ‘all I am is a motionless stump’ and I’m wondering how she’s going to deal with that aspect of heroism.”