Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story (31 page)

She recalled the conversation years later, talking with the
Australian’s
Richard Jinman. “We were on the edge of success, particularly in Europe. I could smell it. We were getting into the area where people accept anything you do and it was time to reassess myself as a human being and an artist.”

Onstage that night, as she sang “Gloria” for the final time, she had made one lyric change. Most people didn’t even notice it, but it meant something to her.
Jesus died for somebody’s sins—why not mine?

“I didn’t even think of it as retiring,” she told Ramsay Pennybacker of the
Philadelphia Weekly.
“It’s a very stable thing, which I tried to explain to people, but sometimes they found it unacceptable. I mean, I’ve read everything—that I burned out, that I was on drugs—which was totally untrue. I was actually at the top of my game. In Europe, the last show we did was without an opening act. We played before seventy thousand people in Florence. And we were very successful in Europe. And that was the last job I did—for seventy thousand people and it was just our show.

“But the reason I left was because I had met a man who I deeply loved. Who had been through all of that. Who wanted a quiet life, to raise a family.”

The Patti Smith Group was finished. Patti was off to Detroit to raise a family with Fred, and though they weren’t quite the last words she ever shouted from a stage, the last words of “My Generation” still hung unanswerable in the air, just begging for somebody to paraphrase them.

She created it. Let somebody else take it over.

14

THREAD

F
ROM I
TALY
, P
ATTI
flew directly to Detroit. It was her home now—she had no doubts about that. But it takes time to get used to a strange place. It takes even longer before you start feeling comfortable there, and for the locals to treat you like one of their own.

It takes time before they will say hello.

“I did miss the light of [New York City] and how good it had been to me and my friends,” Patti mourned to Lisa Robinson in 1988. “But I never for a moment had any regrets, or thought that ‘I could have been a contender,’ or any of that stuff. That doesn’t mean that certain aspects of adjusting weren’t difficult, but for me the most important things are the people that I care about and my work.”

Fred “Sonic” Smith, too, was difficult to get to know. Although nobody would question his contribution to the history of American rock ‘n’ roll, he remained unheralded for much of his lifetime, and throughout the brightest years of his career, he was at best an underdog and at worst a victim.

He was one of that select band of musicians whom the authorities, for whatever reason, single out as deserving of the harshest treatment that can be meted out to them. The MC5 were pariahs in their own time, regular victims of police harassment and worse. In his
Guitar Army
memoir, band manager John Sinclair recalls how he and Smith “were brutally assaulted, beaten, MACEd, and arrested by members of the National Security Police, the Oakland County Sheriff’s Department, and the Michigan State Police while performing at a teen-club in Oakland” one night—and that was just one incident among many.

If their treatment at the hands of law enforcement engendered a persecution complex in the band, the behavior of the music industry in general only furthered the sense of martyrdom. No matter that the band was signed, during its lifetime, to two of the most influential record labels in the country, Elektra and Atlantic. Wayne Kramer told author Nina Antonia, “[The record industry] despised us because of an anarchistic behavior and militant political stance. We came out of Detroit with our big Marshall amplifiers and spangly clothes, and we leaped around like some unholy version of James Brown on acid, playing free jazz and screaming ‘Kick Out the Jams, Motherfuckers’ at a time when they were just learning to market three days of peace and love. The last thing anybody wanted was a gun-toting, high-volume rock band from Detroit.”

If Fred or his bandmates came out of that experience with a chip on their shoulder, nobody could blame them—even if they had remained bitter for years to come. Because the MC5’s reputation did not fade with the passing years. If anything, it became exaggerated, and with that came a sense that the band’s members could never be forgiven for the sins of their youth. Detroit radio not only ignored the MC5; it also seemed to have disowned them.

Fred pretended not to care, disguised his hurt beneath a gruff exterior. In 1978, Sonic’s Rendezvous Band had visited the UK as the backing group for Iggy Pop. As his bandmates happily entertained all comers in their London dressing room, Smith alone had glowered in the corner, the very air around him defying fans and autograph hunters to disturb him.

“Fred was the artist in the band,” MC5 front man Rob Tyner explained. “He was the one who was always pushing us to make a musical statement as loud as the political statements.” And whereas the rest of the 5 reveled in their outlaw status, Smith was the one who always asked why people didn’t just listen to their music. “He was like a hermit,” Tyner continued. “Not physically, because he could party like the rest of us, but intellectually. He wanted to be taken seriously as an artist and he cut a lot of himself off from a lot of people because he didn’t think they would understand him.”

Patti understood him—understood, too, that eight years after the death of the MC5, her boyfriend was still hurt by the group’s failure. Even their eventual adoption as one of the unquestioned pioneers of the punk movement meant nothing to Fred, for he had seen the band in the tradition of Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, and the great modern jazzers. As Kramer told
Addicted to Noise,
“when he started writing his own songs and guitar breaks, he had his own whole musical vocabulary.”

It was that vocabulary he intended to teach to Patti. He had long given up hope of resuming a musical career of his own. Sonic’s Rendezvous Band issued just one solitary 45 during their lifetime, “City Slang”; no record label would touch them, and he had abandoned hope that any ever would. Without ever thinking of Patti as some kind of mouthpiece for his own work—for who could ever see his soulmate as such?—Fred was nevertheless aware on some level that if the world was to hear what he had to say, it would be through the art of another great artist.

Six months after Patti’s return from Europe, on March 1, 1980, she and Fred Smith were married.

Her calendar for the months that followed was clear. There was just one final show for the Patti Smith Group to play, another benefit for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, but even that performance was fragmented. Patti opened the show alone, reading her poetry. Sohl joined her for a gentle “Hymn,” before Fred took his place for an abstract sound painting, accompanying a movie of Jackson Pollock at work. Patti played clarinet, Fred played sax, and an unmanned guitar squawked feedback throughout. Only when that was over did the full band appear, to roar through an improvised jam, and then it was over.

Briefly back in New York City a few weeks later, Patti called her bandmates together at their accountant’s office and told them they should find themselves a new band.

Because she had.

For much of the next fifteen years, Patti would remain out of the public view. She would still write, and she and her husband would make music together. But they would not perform, they would not speak to the press, and with just one exception, they would not release any of the songs and sounds they created.

That was not always their intention. Indeed, their first attempt to step out of their silence took place within a year of Patti taking leave of the stage, as they laid down the first steps toward a new Patti Smith album.

It promised to be a departure from her past. Under Fred’s tutelage, she was becoming a proficient clarinet player, and the pair would be up late into the night improvising. Or he would talk to her about her singing, encouraging her to make more use of her voice than she ever had in the past, composing songs that he knew would help her reveal her finest qualities.

But with just five songs complete, Patti discovered that she was pregnant with the couple’s first child, Jackson Frederick, and all work halted. A couple of years later, she and Fred cut another couple of songs, and then they stopped again. And when they resumed once more in 1986, that too looked like another false dawn.

“We began to rehearse and things with friends,” she recalled for Mary Anne Cassata of the
Music Paper.
“We felt we had something worthwhile to share, so we went ahead and started working on the album. Right in the middle of recording I found out I was going to have another baby. That was a surprise. We did as much as we could. We recorded until it was too strenuous for me.”

But there may have been another reason for the cessation of these sessions. The faintest of rumors circulated at the time, insisting that no less a figure than Clive Davis had intervened to ask whether Patti needed to work so closely with her husband. Could she not instead reconvene the old band or build a new one to accompany her? It was just a rumor; nothing that has been said or written in the years since then has offered even a hint of substance to it. But if a whisper of it had reached Fred’s ears, the bitterness and, perhaps, insecurity that he had already amassed could only have been set ablaze afresh.

The sessions halted, then, not only until the baby was born but through daughter Jesse Paris’s first months too, because “there’s no job harder than being a wife and a mother,” she told Neil Strauss of the
New York Times
in 1995. “It’s a position that should be respected and honored, not looked upon as some sappy alternative. It’s much more demanding, and required much more nobility than the other work I did.”

In her youth, she recalled to Richard Jinman, she’d lived as an artist, bordering upon a vagabond, sleeping wherever she could find a quiet spot (“subways and graveyards”), and forever wondering where her next square meal might come from. Now she was learning the other side of life, cooking and cleaning, changing diapers, “an endless, difficult, but honorable task” that forced her, she said, to work harder than she ever had in her life.

“I don’t mind being called a housewife,” she insisted in her
New York Times
interview. “Though I didn’t disappear to be a housewife. I disappeared to be by the side of the man that I loved…. I think nothing greater could have happened to me at that time. I learned a lot of things in that process: humility, respect for others…. I developed my skills and hopefully developed into the clean human being that I was as a child.”

She read, immersing herself in authors that her rock ‘n’ roll stardom had forced her to abandon or never even investigate. She got hooked on the cable network USA’s
Kung Fu Theatre,
and rewatched
Route 66.
She started painting again, and lost herself in the world of sixteenth-century Japanese literature. She returned to her poetry, and broached another discipline, writing novels.

They were not for the eyes of her public, however. She wrote to amuse herself, to satisfy her urge to create, to place her thoughts and imagination into some kind of permanent form. And she wrote for Fred.

It was strange, her friends admitted later, to see the woman who had once been so vivaciously self-reliant suddenly turn around and allow herself to become so subsumed in another person’s personality. Fred became her sounding board, not only for her writing but for her desires as well. In other lives, other relationships, he could even have been seen as manipulative and controlling. But Patti saw only beauty. In 1996, she told Lisa Robinson, “Fred’s philosophy was that you create art in the world, but we could also create art just for ourselves. I suppose that’s somewhat selfish, but I can assure you it was beautiful.”

“He was the suggester in the family,” she declared to Ben Edmonds of
Mojo
magazine in 1996. “He was clearly the boss, although he liked to pretend that he wasn’t.”

It was a portrait of Fred that at least one of his old MC5 associates, Rob Tyner, recognized immediately. “Fred was very controlling, or he could be, but the way he did it, you didn’t realize. Toward the end of the MC5, with all of us trying to make our voices heard, he was the quiet one; he’d say his piece and then leave the rest of us to rant and rage about something, then when we were exhausted he’d say his piece again and we’d agree with him. He didn’t wear us down with his opinions, he let us wear ourselves down with our own. I can see him doing the same thing with Patti. So it’s not even control, it’s very gentle persuasion, and you don’t realize what he’s done until you’ve already agreed with him.”

Patti’s life as an artist had turned upside down. In place of the selfish routine she had previously relied upon, she learned to work around the demands of her family. Children “immediately take you out of yourself,” she reminded Lisa Robinson in 1988. “Overnight, you cease to be self-involved. All the million little things you were concerned with in terms of life or work—you know, I had to work a special way, I needed silence, I needed this kind of music—all that’s gone immediately. You have to relearn everything you do. If I wanted to write, I had to learn to write in the morning, whereas I used to write all night and sleep all day.”

Now she would work in the mornings, while the children were feeding or sleeping, sipping her morning coffee and learning how to write with the sun, not the moon, as her muse. “I spent the whole ‘80s learning how to write by myself, from a quarter of a page a day to pages and pages a day,” she told Robinson in her 1996 interview.

To the public, however, she had completely disappeared.

Patti was not the only star of the New York City scene to have apparently vanished. Richard Hell, too, saw the dawn of the new decade as a sign to end his involvement in the music, proclaiming, “I was sick of having to sell my entire life in return for [making records]. If that is the price of recording, I’d rather not do it.