Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story (33 page)

Then one day in February 1995, the telephone rang. It was Allen Ginsberg. Modern America’s greatest living poet was almost seventy now, but he was still as active as he ever was, still writing and reading. He was in Ann Arbor, or on his way there, for a reading for Jewel Heart, a spiritual, cultural, and humanitarian organization dedicated to propagating Tibetan Buddhist wisdom to the world.

Tibet, of which Patti had dreamed since she was twelve.

The Jewel House reading was already sold out. Four thousand people had paid to hear Ginsberg. Perhaps, Ginsberg ventured, they would like to hear Patti as well? She was touched by the offer, touched by his words, which she would often recall. “Let go of the spirit of the departed,” he told her, “and continue your life’s celebration.” She agreed to perform.

Ginsberg opened the show and held the stage through to the intermission. Then he delivered the promise that much of the audience was already anticipating, speaking quietly and gently of a poet “who took poetry from lofts, bookshops, and gallery performances to the rock ‘n’ roll world stage. We’re really pleased and happy that”—pause—“Patti Smith.” The rest of his sentence was lost beneath the roar of applause that rose up from the stalls, just as the intermission was drowned out beneath the hum of expectation.

Patti started slowly, with a poem she wrote after reading the Dalai Lama’s autobiography,
Freedom in Exile,
in 1991. (She would meet the man in September 1995, at the World Peace Conference in Berlin.) She dipped in and out of her other writings, reducing the audience alternately to laughter and tears but always holding them in the palm of her hand. She asked herself, was performing always this easy? Did it always come this naturally to her? New York City the previous month had been hard, and when her memory swept back to the last time she toured, in 1979, with the stage at the end of an enormous sports stadium, those shows were even harder.

“I traveled the world with a rock ‘n’ roll band in the ‘70s,” she reminded the crowd, and paused while it bellowed its applause. “The last job we ever played was in Italy in a big soccer arena.” The show had ended in chaos, a riot and a revelation. Now she read “Florence,” titled for the scene of that final concert but tonight dedicated to her brother Todd, her road manager throughout so much of her career. Instinctively, her eyes flickered to the side of the stage, almost as if she expected to see him standing there as he always had. But there is only shadow and strangers, and
never again,
she said in a shaky voice, would she ever
experience such selfless devotion, such singular care.

She counted Ginsberg’s backing band of viola, bass, and guitar into a haunting cover of “The Twelfth of Never,” the tear-stained ballad that everyone from Johnny Mathis to Donny Osmond had made their own, then finished with “Cowboy Truths,” from
Woolgathering.
The first she dedicated to Fred; the second could be offered up to the world. And offstage, backstage, she dedicated herself to the future.

Rolling Stone
would later declare her return to be the “comeback of the year,” and excitable fans would call it a resurrection, too. But 1995 was not the resumption of an old career—it was the beginning of a new one, one that might have been enflamed by the fires of the past but was going to stand on its own feet regardless, because that was all that Patti Smith knew how to do.

Later, once people become accustomed to having her back, a few voices—old voices, past voices—would complain that she wasn’t the same woman, the same talent, the same power that she’d been twenty years before. And she would look at them and shake her head sadly.

“No I’m not,” she’d reply. “Are you?”

15

SCREAM OF THE BUTTERFLY

P
ATTI NEVER FELT
the need to inform the world which came first—her decision to return to performing, or her relationship with Oliver Ray, the twenty-something guitarist and photographer whom she met for the first time at Ginsberg’s Jewel Heart benefit. It did not matter, to her or to him, that more than a quarter of a century separated their birth dates, that when Ray was born in 1973, Patti was already two years into the five-year plan that would culminate in superstardom, or that by the time he started middle school, she had already retired. Slowly but effortlessly, Ray slipped into that role of coconspirator, partner, and muse that only a very select handful of others had occupied.

In fact, the two life choices probably informed each other. Jewel Heart had reminded Patti how much she loved performing; Oliver reminded her to keep on reminding herself.

It was difficult, of course. The tiniest thing could remind her of her late husband—the most innocent remark, the least question or suggestion. Even being asked about her future. After Richard Sohl’s death had scuttled Fred’s plans for a new tour, he had begun to formulate another vision to revive his wife’s career. Looking around at a musical environment that suddenly seemed to be swamped by tough, independent female vocalists, from Courtney Love to PJ Harvey, Fred saw Patti’s influence everywhere. He wanted her to take her rightful place among them.

Now other people were echoing Fred’s insistence, and Patti responded with the same amazement she’d had when Fred first broached the idea. She told Andrew Masterson of the Age, “I find it hard to believe that I could have so much impact. It’s an extreme honor. I wouldn’t look at it as a burden. It is an honor and a responsibility and I’m still examining it.”

And she knew that the best way to examine anything is out in the field.

On April 8, 1995, Patti appeared at a tribute concert for the war-ravaged nation of Bosnia at a Methodist church in Ann Arbor, not far from the aching, empty wound of the family home. Lenny Kaye was her sole accompanist. Later that same evening, she played two sets at a second benefit, this one organized in her late husband’s memory across town at the Ark.

The latter performance was less a concert and more of a free-for-all. Patti opened the proceedings with harsh recitals of “Piss Factory,” “Dog Dream,” and “Sohl,” then ceded the stage to a succession of other performers: her sister Kimberly Smith, roadie Andi Ostrowe, and local performers Scott Morgan, Gary Rasmussen, and poetess Carolyn Striho. Patti waited in the darkness on the edge of the stage and interspersed their music with further snatches of verse.

Lenny Kaye delivered a sharp take on the Left Banke’s “Walk Away Renee,” and there was high drama as Carolyn Striho returned to accompany Patti through Nirvana’s “On a Plain.” Exactly one year before, the shotgun-shelled body of the Seattle band’s lead singer, Kurt Cobain, had been discovered in a room above the family garage, and Patti, aware as she always was of the strength of anniversaries, was anxious to pay tribute to the fallen warrior, a performer whose obituaries had already raised him to the same echelon as John Lennon and Jim Morrison. Later in the evening, she would perform Cobain’s “Come as You Are” as well, and then follow it with a new poem, “About a Boy,” dedicated to Cobain, but to a part of Fred as well.

Perhaps sounding rather more grandmotherly than her older fans would be comfortable acknowledging, Patti mourned to
Mojo’s
Ben Edmonds, “When Kurt Cobain took his life, Fred and I were extremely disturbed about that. Both of us liked his work. We thought it was good for young people…. He had a future. As parents, we were deeply disturbed to see this young boy take his own life. The waste, and the emotional debris he left for others to clean up.

“I was also concerned how it would affect young people who looked up to him, or looked to him for answers. I guess that’s the danger of looking to anyone else for answers, but I perceived that he had a responsibility. To himself, to the origin of his gifts, to his family, to the younger generation.”

She wrote the song for two reasons, then. One was to wish Cobain well as his soul continued its journey. The other was to chastise him for leaving the world to get along without him. The question of whether or not a rock star, living or dead, should have such responsibility thrust upon him was one that she was unwilling to consider.

In Patti’s youth, and that of her early fans, premature death had offered an immortality—and, of course, a tragic romance—that had nothing whatsoever in common with any “example” the deceased might have been setting by his or her demise. But in Patti’s middle age, the two had become inextricably linked, a consequence, perhaps, of the very culture of cheap modern celebrity that she found so distasteful elsewhere.

Once, a pop star had been just that, a pop star. Now he or she was expected to be a role model as well. And maybe that was how things ought to be. It just sounded strange hearing Patti—who, after all, had scarcely suffered from the deaths of her first musical idols (all of whom at least materially contributed to their own deaths, even if they did not physically pull a trigger)—voicing that same opinion.

The Ark applause was still ringing in her ears as Patti accepted an invitation to record a song for an upcoming women’s charity compilation,
Ain’t Nuthin’ but a She Thing,
an exquisite collection of songs that already boasted offerings from Annie Lennox, Sinead O’Connor, Luscious Jackson, and hip-hop divas Salt-N-Pepa. Patti, possibly to the organizers’ surprise, agreed immediately, but rather than offer up a new song, or the kind of cover for which she was once renowned, she instead turned in a slow, sultry purr through the torch classic “Don’t Smoke in Bed.”

For anybody who had not heard her sing since
Dream of Life
(or cared to since
Wave
or
Easter),
it was a revelatory performance. More than that, though, it was a heroic performance, not because Patti had the gall to take on a classic of the American songbook, but because she delivered a version that owed nothing to Nina Simone, who had recorded the best-known version. It was so solidly her own that a decade later she would still be performing it; in a review of her February 2008 appearance in the Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series,
New York Times
critic Stephen Holden would write that her performance of “Don’t Smoke in Bed” was “dark, dramatic” and “held its own beside [any other] interpretations.”

“Don’t Smoke in Bed” was a charitable contribution. Elsewhere, however, Patti did not disguise the fact that a lot of the career decisions she made now were financially motivated. Although her catalog was still selling, and was about to receive a fresh boost as Arista compiled her five existing albums into a remastered box set,
The Patti Smith Masters,
she was well aware that her responsibilities as a mother did not end with merely raising her two children, thirteen-year-old Jackson and eight-year-old Jesse. Their education, too, needed to be paid for, and she and Fred had talked long into the night, in the year before his death, of a return to the studio, to ensure that the kids would be taken care of. “I’m a single parent,” she told A. D. Amorosi in the
Philadelphia City Paper.
“I have to provide a living for my family. I am alone without my companion after eighteen years.”

But that was not the only reason why she was inching back into the spotlight. There was also the need to reconnect with a world beyond grief.

At the end of April 1995, Patti offered herself to a second local Tibet benefit; in mid-May, she played a couple of nights at a small club in nearby Ferndale, Michigan; and in early June, having spent the previous few weeks rehearsing with Carolyn Striho’s band, the Detroit Energy Asylum, she was onstage in Pontiac, Michigan. These were low-key shows, tentative steps to determine whether people really did care as much about her return as her friends and fans were convinced they did. But any doubts that she might still have entertained regarding her place in the modern world were firmly dismissed by the response to her next gig, at the Phoenix Concert Hall in Toronto on July 5.

There, in a performance that began with the same one-two poetic punch of “Piss Factory” and “Dog Dream” that had ignited the Fred Smith tribute in April, the Detroit Energy crew eschewed what could have been considered Patti Smith’s greatest hits to present instead the portrait that Neil Strauss would encapsulate in the
New York Times
later in the year. “Ms. Smith,” he wrote, “appears to be taking on a new image in the 90’s, that of an extremely empathetic and compassionate woman pushed back into the public eye by the hand of death.”

The selections included “Don’t Smoke in Bed,” “Because the Night,” “People Have the Power,” “Paths That Cross,” “The Jackson Song,” “Poppies,” “Ghost Dance,” and “Land,” interspersed with verse—“Babelfield” and “Hey Joe” both made defiant appearances. “Farewell Reel” was a new song, but an old one as well, combining a melody she wrote after her husband taught her to play guitar with lyrics that he commenced about a month before he died and Patti completed soon after.

The
Village Voice,
a supporter from the dawn of her performing days, was there in the person of Evelyn McDonnell. “Fronting a band for the first time in 16 years, the woman who brought a shamanistic force to punk’s tattered style is in an expressive trance. She seems unconscious of her elegant, long-boned fingers as they flutter before her, or as she crosses her arms over her chest and rests her hand on her shoulders, anchoring body to earth.”

She was performing “Dancing Barefoot,” and quite unintentionally, it seemed, transforming it from a song of love to a declaration of purpose. “Chanting the line ‘Oh God I fell for you,’” marveled McDonnell, “she suddenly changes it to ‘Oh God I’m back again’ and looked dazedly out at the club—her face mirroring the crowd’s disbelief and joy.” And when her eyes met Oliver Ray’s, and she saw that same light glowing on his face, she knew she had made the correct decision.

Ray, Patti told the world, was a poet, a guitarist, an artist in his own right, and the inspiration behind a lot of what she was preparing to do. He’d been there for her as she rode the shock waves of the past few months, and he would be there for her now as she started writing songs again—beginning with “Fireflies,” which blossomed out of a piece of music he was writing one day when she stopped to listen. Two additional songs were written with Ray by her side—“Walkin’ Blind,” which she would give to the
Dead Man Walking
movie soundtrack album, and “Wander I Go,” which she’d share with Jeff Buckley—and it was these songs that gave her the strength to write more.