Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story (30 page)

Outside her music, it was not a sentiment she expressed publicly, nor did she confide in her bandmates. But to Rundgren she confessed it: she’d decided to retire once
Wave
had been waved off. “Patti wanted to record with me for a couple of reasons,” Rundgren told Tobler and Grundy. “One was that she knew at the time that she wasn’t going to be making any more records in the immediate future, and because we’ve been friends for a long time, she just wanted an opportunity for us to work together before she stopped making records.

“The other reason was also because I was a friend—and this isn’t necessarily a good thing—they wanted me to pull together something that wasn’t there, to bridge a gap that was almost unbridgeable, because Patti was already halfway out of the business.”

Rundgren had sworn not to tell Kral, Kaye, Daugherty, and Sohl what Patti had planned, well aware that if they found out, they would have one eye on their futures before a note had even been taped. But they figured it out anyway. They’d all been working with Patti long enough that even if they didn’t know exactly
what
she was thinking, they could still see the track that her thought train was taking. And, of course, she had provided one warning sign: when she’d up and left New York City.

Prior to her departure, the Patti Smith Group had functioned around the principles of twenty-four-hour collaboration. That’s not to say that the musicians had spent twenty-four hours a day every day in one another’s company, but it did mean that if one should have an idea that required the input of his or her bandmates, the entire group could be brought together in one room in no time at all. That was no longer possible. On the road or in the studio, of course, they were still in the same close proximity as they’d always been. But the rest of the time, almost five hundred miles yawned between the musicians and their vocalist. Soon
Wave
would offer the listening public a grandstand view of the group’s creative dislocation.

Even more so than
Easter,
which itself had disappointed as much as it exhilarated,
Wave
was the work of five players brought together to write as they recorded. There was no doubt that with the same opportunity for organic growth as the songs that marked out
Horses
and
Radio Ethiopia,
numbers like “Revenge” and “Broken Flag” could have developed into something truly memorable. Instead, they simply existed, neither statements of power nor explosions of energy; neither spiraling balls of sound and imagery nor tantalizing glimpses into some deep emotional labyrinth.

Too much of the album was rushed and rapid, as if the band knew that its time was limited and just wanted to get one last album out of its system before pushing on with the rest of the musicians’ lives. None of the four band members doubted that they would continue on in their chosen careers once Patti admitted what they suspected she had decided, but of course they did not know what form those careers would take.

The uncertainty, perhaps even bordering on mistrust, was agonizing. Almost a year’s worth of touring had been arranged for the album’s aftermath, back and forth between the United States and Europe until the fall. But would they actually play all the dates? Most of them? Some of them?

Nobody doubted Patti’s professionalism. If she could fulfill her scheduled obligations, she would. But she was still under doctor’s orders as a consequence of the accident—still undergoing chiropractic treatment, still on medication. Add that to her barely disguised loss of interest in the things that had once intrigued her, and the increasingly resigned tone that she took when discussing music itself, and if a block of shows should be canceled, or even an entire season of them, nobody would be too surprised.

As it was, they would march on for a little longer.

It was in March 1979, with the album complete and the first dates of the Patti Smith Group’s next American tour on the horizon, that Patti gave the interview to William Burroughs that was later published in
Spin
magazine. In it, she laid out her own interpretation of the changes that had affected her over the past couple of years.

“When I entered into rock ‘n’ roll,” she told her old friend, “I entered into it in a political sort of way…. I felt that rock ‘n’ roll, after the death of a lot of the ‘60s people, and after the disillusionment of a lot of people after the ‘60s and early ‘70s, people really just wanted to be left alone for a little while…. But when ‘73 came around, and early ‘74, it was just getting worse and worse, and there was no indication of anything new, of anyone regathering their strength and coming back to do anything. I felt that it was important for some of us that had a lot of strength to initiate some new energy.”

She hadn’t aspired to be a star. If anything, as she had said so often in the past, she simply wanted to inspire other people to get up and do something, anything, that would rid their culture of the malaise of inactivity. “I feel that when I was a teenager, I was very lucky. I grew up out of the John F. Kennedy, Bob Dylan, Rolling Stones era, and there was a lot of food for thought in those times…. my mind was constantly fertile. And I felt that in the early-middle ‘70s, there wasn’t much happening at all to stimulate the minds of the new generations.”

There still wasn’t. Writer Nik Cohn once warned that “this year’s anarchists are next year’s boring old farts,” and too few of the performers who rose up on either the musical or the cultural tides of punk had lasted the pace with their vision intact. Among her own peers, Television had broken up under the pressure of, among other things, releasing a second album,
Adventure,
that could not compare with their first. The Ramones had developed into something that even Joey Ramone privately admitted exhausted most of its energy avoiding tumbling into cliche (“and we didn’t always succeed”). Richard Hell had all but turned his back on rock music altogether. Besides her own band, only Blondie and Talking Heads had truly survived, and Blondie’s future was debatable, as the boys in the band battled to be heard above the media pack’s demand for more and more Debbie.

Patti had no intention of being caught in the same trap. “I didn’t start doing what I was doing to build myself a career. And I find myself at a time in my life when, if I’m not careful, that’s exactly what’s gonna be built for me.” It was 1979, she said, “and I’m still involved in this thing. But it’s come to a point in my life [where] I have to stop and say, ‘What am I doing?’”

Once again, the Patti Smith Group’s itinerary commenced with a clutch of shows at the Second Chance in Ann Arbor, what was now Patti’s home territory. The opening portents were good. Three nights saw the band members reacquaint themselves with one another and with the new material, and it was sounding good. Ticket sales—and, apparently, record sales—were not harmed by the distinctly underwhelmed response that
Wave
prompted from the critics. (Even long-time supporter Robert Christgau, while remaining positive, could only describe
Wave
as being “quirkier than the more generally satisfying
Easter
.”)

But the tour schedule was exhausting—some forty-two shows in half a dozen countries—and the longer it went on, the more it became apparent that Patti just wasn’t enjoying herself. With the stage dominated by the same giant American flag that had once ruled the MC5’s stage, and the live show dominated by the songs that seemingly demanded the least from the performers, there were times when it felt as though the band was almost courting the audience’s hostility simply to try to enliven the proceedings.

And, as too many reviewers reported, concertgoers were often left bemused by the number of oldies that had made their way into the group’s show. What to make of the Who’s “The Kids Are Alright,” Manfred Mann’s “5-4-3-2-1,” Presley’s “Jailhouse Rock,” John Lennon’s “It’s So Hard” and “Cold Turkey,” Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower,” or the Yardbirds’ “For Your Love”? Only one oldie, Patti’s increasingly bitter cover of the Byrds’ “So You Want to Be (a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star),” seemed to belong, because it was the one that most seemed to reflect her mood. Scarring the melody with her thrashed and discordant guitar interludes, scything through the sentiment with world-weary vocals and claustrophobic sarcasm, she would spit the song out nightly.
Ah, the promise of the night just swirls around you.
So you wanna be a rock ‘n’ roll star? Well, have fun with that.

As always, there were moments of high passion—“Privilege” seldom failed to draw the old shaman out of the shadows—and high camp—whatever were they thinking as Lenny Kaye took over lead vocals for “Pumping (My Heart)” while Patti worked out with a skipping rope? There was high drama, too, the “Star Spangled Banner” feeding back out of the amps as Patti launched into her familiar rant:
I am an American artist. I have no guilt. I have no truth but the truth inside you. All together we can know all there is to know.
She paused and the band ripped into a scathing “Rock n Roll Nigger.”

There was the April night that she broadcast live across West Germany, Patti reminding the
Rockpalast
audience that it was an honor for her to be speaking to so many millions of people at once “because we’ve been banned live in America.” The same night that the warrior queen became unexpected peacemaker, quelling a fight in the front row. “Settle the fuck down. Stop acting like assholes and settle the fuck down, man.” So there were high points as the tour wandered on. But they relied on chance rather than intention.

Several times across the crippling itinerary, Patti would accept bookings for poetry readings, no matter how far out of her way they took her. A short gap in between American shows in June saw her fly to West Germany and Switzerland for a couple of readings; a day off in September, bookended by shows in Amsterdam and Paris, would be spent flying to Italy to present a reading after a screening of the movie
More American Graffiti.
Why make such an effort? Because it was different, it broke the chain, it made a change.

In August, Fred Smith was alongside her as she played a pair of benefit concerts to raise money for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. That month in San Francisco, the band made an unannounced and unexpected return to the Boarding House, the same small club where she’d played unannounced back in the
Horses
era. This time, she joked and laughed her way through “The Boy I’m Going to Marry” and Debbie Boone’s “You Light Up My Life,” a ghastly hit ballad Patti took a liking to the previous year. With Daugherty and Sohl on joint keyboards, the performance felt much like her earliest shows all those years before, when fame still seemed as implausible as it was inessential, and audiences were drawn largely by the promise of the unexpected.

But the feeling didn’t last. In London in September, journalist Chris Bohn came away from the band’s Wembley Arena show mourning, “This is not meant to be a crucifixion. I hoped for a resurrection and saw only a willful martyr.” His words would prove truer than he could have imagined: as Patti moved on to Italy for the final two shows of the tour, she offered herself up in the middle of a political riot.

The first Italian gig took place in Bologna, in the same kind of soullessly vast and infinitely echoing football stadium into which so many of the tour’s performances had been cast. The local Communist Party assumed for itself a role similar to the one the Hell’s Angels had been assigned at Altamont a decade earlier, prevailing upon the venue’s promoter to allow it to provide security for the show. This arrangement essentially transformed the venue into a free-for-all, with admission fees waived by the simple expedient of removing the fences. Backstage security was placed in the hands of whoever wanted to stand around in the bowels of the stadium looking threatening, and the audience was raised to such a pitch of excitement that even the local police seemed content to simply watch from afar.

The band was exhausted before they hit the stage, worn out from trying to impose even a little sanity onto the proceedings. By the time the show got under way, all five musicians would have been happy to throw in the towel. Somehow they got through the performance; somehow, an eighty-thousand-strong audience seemed to be enjoying what it heard. But the stage was under constant siege from would-be dancers and hangers-on, and Patti’s road crew, too, was worn down by the events of the day. The show, everybody angrily agreed, was a farce.

Add to that the pressure of an Italian media that insisted on dogging Patti’s footsteps everywhere she went, and the crowds of teenaged girls who hung on every corner, all clad identically in the outfits they borrowed from
Horses’
front cover, and it was touch and go whether the following night’s concert, at the Stadio Comunale in Florence on September 10, would even take place. It did, but it would be the last one.

She had predicted the moment in Babel. In a prose piece titled simply “Italy (the Round),” and dedicated to Pasolini, she envisioned
the fluid muscle of the crowd. the hot lights. action as a blade that cuts another slice…. nostalgic ruins in/ruin.

the films are disintegrating … the heroine removes herself from the fading aura.

Again the American flag flew proudly, at a time when the United States’ relations with the borderline-Communist Italy were at a postwar low. Again the crowd rioted, unrestrained by either the venue’s security or any sense of personal responsibility, whipped to a frenzy not by the band’s performance (which, as so often on the tour, was merely adequate) but by the mere presence of the band on stage. And tonight, as the band swung into the last phase of the set, the roiling hysteria exploded. Part of the audience invaded the stage; the remainder seemed intent on destroying the venue.

The band returned to the hotel, shaken and still shaking, and all eyes were on Patti as the group commenced the inevitable postmortem. But Patti’s announcement rendered it moot. After keeping her own counsel all tour long, after dodging any suggestion that she might be considering some kind of break in the aftermath of
Wave,
Patti finally told the band what had been on her mind for so long.