Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story (32 page)

“I outgrew pretty quickly the thrill of being a public figure. As far as it went for me, that was enough. The benefits are nowhere near worth the price.”

Patti agreed with him. She replaced adulation with love, a career with a life. For Hell, “as long as I can stagger on doing the kind of work I want to do and can pay my rent, I’ll be happy.” For Patti, “Because the Night” meant she probably wouldn’t even need to worry about the rent for a while.

The recordings that Patti, Fred, and a visiting Richard Sohl had intended to inaugurate in mid-1986 lay dormant for close to twelve months. And even when the musicians resumed work, it was in the knowledge that they were completely in the dark. In New York in 1976, Patti had had her finger on the pulse of the music that needed to be made, because she was in a large part responsible for that pulse even existing. Ten years later in Detroit, however, she really had no idea of what the music of the day sounded like.

She listened to the radio a lot, but it told her nothing. She heard the urban angst of hip-hop, the cold distance of electronica, the mindless repetition of dance. There was no single stream of musical consciousness to which she could reach out, nothing that she could draw from or improve upon. Once, music had spoken with the voice of millions. Now it seemed to simply listen to the accountants and to the disparate themes of so many different cliques that vied like rival grocery stores for a share of the global marketplace.

She turned inwards, then, ignoring the concerns that the outside world might have, and concentrating instead on those that she and her husband entertained. She still listened to the radio, but it was movies from which she drew the most: the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, whose
Ran
was alluring enough that the Smiths went out in a blizzard to catch it; Godard and Bertolucci; Paul Schrader’s
Mishima;
Woody Allen’s
The Purple Rose of Cairo.

And slowly, with Fred as her musical director, Jay Dee Daugherty joining Sohl in the band, and Jimmy Iovine returning as producer, an album took shape:
Dream of Life,
Patti Smith’s fifth and her first in almost a decade. “Jimmy is wonderful to work with,” she enthused to the
Music Paper.
“Fred and him really collaborated well on this project. The important thing is that all the musicians were properly represented. It was a real collaboration on everyone’s part. Everyone really did their part, from Richard Sohl to the assistant engineer. Everyone put so much into this production.”

If there was a theme to the album, she added, it was the need for open and unsullied communication. “Songs like ‘Where Duty Calls’ and ‘Up There Down There’ shake a few fingers. The underlying principle is the communication between man and woman, between parent and child, between one and their creator. Planetary communication. It’s positiveness behind hope, and also awareness of these kinds of difficult situations.”

The album would also reveal that despite her withdrawal from the public eye, Patti had not lived, or written, in complete isolation. The outside world impinged upon her, inspiring her to write about the things about which she felt the strongest. When 241 US military personnel were killed by a terrorist bomb at the First Battalion, Eighth Marine Headquarters in Beirut, on October 23, 1983, she was moved to compose “Where Duty Calls”:
May the blanket of kings cover them.
When Samuel J. Wagstaff, Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographic mentor, passed away midway through the album sessions, on January 14, 1987, she scribbled down “Paths That Cross.”

In Patti and her husband’s minds, however, the key to the album was “People Have the Power,” a 1980s successor to John Lennon’s “Power to the People” that she referred to in the
Music Paper
as “a network of communication.” It would not only become the album’s first single but develop into the most universal song she ever performed—a clarion call to enlightenment, to unlocking the potential that exists in each and every person but is buried so deeply beneath social and cultural conditioning that only a rare handful ever realize it.

Fred came up with the title. Patti was washing the dishes, she recalled in
Patti Smith Complete,
when he walked into the kitchen and demanded, simply, “People have the power. Write it.”

The next few weeks were spent listening to the recorded speeches of the Reverend Jesse Jackson, absorbing the Bible with sister Linda, and contemplating an end to the bloody war going on in Afghanistan at the time, between the native populace and the invading Russians. (Patti would not be alone in later pondering the irony in the fact that no sooner did the ongoing condemnation of the Western world finally convince the Soviets to leave the country, than the Taliban moved in, setting the stage for an American invasion little more than a decade later.)

“This song became our anthem for
Dream of Life,”
she wrote, the keystone of an album that the Smiths viewed as a joint manifesto for the unlocking of the human spirit—
joint
because although it was released and marketed as a Patti Smith album, in her mind it was nothing less than a total collaboration that should have been credited to both Patti and Fred, had such an appellation not reeked just a little too much of John and Yoko—or, worse, Paul and Linda.

“It’s the only real document we have of Fred’s range,” she told Ben Edmonds. “He wrote all the music, arranged everything; a lot of the song titles, the album title, the concept of the songs … were all Fred’s. I told him we should call it by both our names but he wouldn’t. But he had promised me that on [our next] album he would sing on it and we’d put both our names on it.”

To the
Music Paper,
Patti described
Dream of Life
as just the first in a series of upcoming projects. She and Fred had a lot of other ideas and songs, she explained, that they hadn’t even touched upon. Many, many songs. “We’re looking into the future with some other works.”

Dream of Life
was released in June 1988, destined for a chart peak in the mid-60s. Listeners and critics were cautious. Those who hoped that Patti would simply pick up where
Wave
left off (or maybe even look further back to
Horses
and
Radio Ethiopia)
were certainly disappointed; those who merely expected to be entertained were left unfulfilled and perhaps even baffled.

Listened to in the context of either Patti or Fred’s past work, it did not fit in, nor did it blend with the music that was being made elsewhere in the mid-to-late 1980s. A true picture of the Smiths’ life together it may have been, but it was a cultural orphan all the same, and while reviews certainly
tried
to affect interest and enthusiasm, the album did not offer them any encouragement.

Indeed, even “People Have the Power”—soon to become so powerful and stirring an anthem—seemed like little more than a piece of pointless polemic. The most perceptive contemporary reviews were those that essentially suggested
Dream of Life
was an album that you needed to live with for a time, in the hope that its beauty was simply better disguised than most.

Still, it is a tragedy that Patti and Fred would record just one further piece of music for release, for the soundtrack to Wim Wenders’s 1991 movie
Until the End of the World.
“It Takes Time,” cut with percussionist Hearn Gadbois and bassist Kasim Sulton, was a moody piece that not only exemplified the closeness with which the two Smiths worked but also the nature of their working relationship. Not only did Fred write the music and parts of the poetry, she told Ben Edmonds, “he actually dictated how he wanted me to read my parts.”

Again, people who remembered the Patti of old were astonished to read that. Nobody dictated to Patti Smith. But for Patti, Fred’s presence in her life was the reason why she never stopped thinking about her music. Because living with Fred, she declared, her life
was
music, whether they were recording it or playing it, writing it or merely talking about it. She did not need the roar of the crowd, because she had Fred’s applause. She did not need the words of the critics, because she had Fred’s opinion. And she did not need the constant reassurance that her audience still loved her, because she had Fred’s love.

It sounded so simple. But it was also true.

And then everything was snatched away from her.

The string of tragedies began on March 9, 1989, the thirteenth anniversary of Patti meeting Fred Smith. She was watching an early-morning broadcast of
Tosca
on A&E when she received a call from Robert Mapplethorpe’s brother. Robert had died during the night of AIDS-related complications.

Just before he died, Mapplethorpe had asked Patti to write a memoir of their friendship, and she had sworn that she would. But she did not yet feel ready to assume that responsibility. Still, she knew that Robert would have wanted her to remember him with a new piece of work rather than further tears. She took out her notebook and began composing a new collection of poetry. “I started writing this piece,” she recalled to Lisa Robinson in 1996, “and then I just wrote in a fever for days….

“And I finished it, then I just put it away.”

It was, after all, just one of several poetic volumes that she wrote during the 1980s and early 1990s and that she intended would see publication at some point. There was also a mass of prose work that she was, and is still, in the process of sorting out: one, a lengthy character study that she described as Hesse-ian; another about a traveler who never traveled; and a third about a trumpet player who experienced a mystical awakening in Katmandu. The problem was, she laughed to Jeff Baker of
OregonLive.com
, “I’m a real messy writer. I’ll write one narrative in seven notebooks, interspersed with poems and diaries and observations.” It would take her a year simply to disentangle everything. It was a condition that Mapplethorpe would have recognized instantly and for which he would frequently chide her.

As Patti continued to toil largely in private, her husband was making plans for her return to the stage. Back in 1988, a newborn baby on hand had ensured there would be no tour to promote the newly released
Dream of Life.
By 1990, however, Fred was talking of convening a new band, with Richard Sohl on keyboards and a percussionist to be decided, and just going out on the road. It would not be a conventional rock outing; as he laid out his vision to Patti, he envisaged something leaning closer toward what he called spoken art, Patti’s poetry accompanied by interpretative improvisation from the two musicians.

But on June 3, 1990, the world awoke to learn that Richard Sohl had passed away just days after his thirty-seventh birthday, killed by the weak heart that had always restricted him, and Fred abandoned that dream.

Patti did emerge briefly in 1992 to release a new volume of poetry,
Woolgathering.
And the next year she took the stage in Central Park at the family-friendly SummerStage celebration, flying into New York City with Fred by her side and then flying out again straight after. There was no pressure, no thought of a comeback, and perhaps Patti proved her lack of preparation by forgetting some of the words to “People Have the Power.” Nevertheless, she would later tell Evelyn McDonnell of the
Village Voice,
that afternoon “was one of the happiest nights of my life. I couldn’t believe how great these people were. The whole atmosphere—not just the audience, but I had my brother there, and Fred was there, and so I have really happy memories of it.”

Memories made all the more meaningful by the heartbreak that swiftly followed. On November 9, 1994, Fred Smith suffered a fatal heart attack. When Mapplethorpe died, Patti had thrown herself into her work to deal with his passing. But now, with her husband gone, she would barely write a word for an entire month. Her brother, Todd, was the first to rally to her side, the one who was always trying to pull her back together. Slowly, tremulously, she started writing again—and then Todd passed away as well.

Two coronaries in two months.

Both men were forty-five.

Whereas Fred’s death had forced her to halt, Todd’s convinced her to move. He had been beside her throughout the first weeks of her widowhood, constantly encouraging her to work again. Now that he, too, was gone, she did not want his last passions to have been in vain.

At St. Mark’s Church on January 1, 1995, two days after her forty-eighth birthday and fifty-three days after the death of her husband, Patti took the stage to read her verse and sing a single song. It was the same thing she’d done nearly a quarter-century earlier, at her first-ever public performance. Back in 1971, the song was “Mack the Knife”—a song of defiance. This time, she had chosen to perform “Ghost Dance,” a hymn of birth, from the album
Easter,
which was dedicated to the eternity of the human spirit. In that simple decision, there was a single defining statement.
We shall live again.

Patti was performing at the church because she had promised she would, months before, while Fred was still alive. She’d been working on a new book of poetry at the time, “a book of poems and stories and things that pretty much surrounded a lot of people that I had lost,” including Mapplethorpe and Sohl. “And also people that I admired,” she explained to Gerri Lim of
Big O.
She’d written a poem for the ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev, one for the playwright Jean Genet, one for Audrey Hepburn. “Just different people that I really liked that influenced me.” And as she wrote, she felt the need to perform, because when she performed, she knew, it encouraged her to write. She might not even have discussed the invitation with Fred before she agreed to fly to New York for the show. That’s how important it was to her.

In the aftermath of two more loved ones’ deaths, she had forced herself to keep her commitment. And there she was, back on stage. But she wasn’t really there, because she flew straight back to Detroit once the performance was over, and she pulled the shutters down again. It was too early. It was too soon.