Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story (34 page)

On July 27, Patti returned to SummerStage in New York City for a performance that spliced verse and song in a way that Patti had not attempted since the early 1970s. Her 1993 appearance had been one of her happiest moments; tonight her happiness would be tinged with bit-tersweetness, but the performance would prove no less triumphant. Two years ago, she had simply been interrupting her silence. Now she was breaking it.

The forty-minute set ranged back and forth across her career: “Land,” dedicated to Robert Mapplethorpe, and “Y,” which was taken from a poem about him; “Ballad of a Bad Boy,” which she wrote for Sam Shepard. A piece from the late 1970s called “Wing,” and then out came the band, Lenny Kaye and her sister Kimberly, both bearing acoustic guitars, to sing and chant through “Ghost Dance,” “Paths That Cross,” and “People Have the Power.”

It was a lighthearted set awash in good vibes and strummed acoustics. The following day, however, offered up the return that even Patti’s oldest supporters had been waiting for, as she hooked up again with Kaye and with drummer Jay Dee Daugherty, added a friend of Lenny’s, Tony Shanahan, on bass, and mounted a one-off surprise show at Lollapalooza.

Lollapalooza was in its fifth consecutive year now, a leviathan festival of alternative rock that was originally conceived as a vehicle for Jane’s Addiction’s farewell tour but then altered the face of live music for the decade. At a time when the United States in general, and the music industry in particular, swore that it was paralyzed by a ghastly recession, Lollapalooza proved that people were still willing to go out and have a good time—provided that a good time was guaranteed. In other words, recession wasn’t to blame for the country’s malaise. People were just sick of being sold the same old shit.

By July 1995, the latest incarnation of the traveling show had lumbered as far as Randall’s Island, New York, with a bill that included Kurt Cobain’s widow Courtney Love and her band Hole, Sonic Youth, Beck, Moby, Cypress Hill, and more. Enlisted at the last minute, Patti was granted a thirty-minute spot on the festival’s second stage. She wound up performing for an hour, in front of an audience that probably included every single musician on the afternoon’s bill, few of whom were even old enough to have seen her perform before.

She won them all over, with a fiery performance that was both magical and, to some, messianic, as she not only unleashed a seething “People Have the Power” but also made it apparent that she was determined to ensure that they kept it.

Time and again as she eased herself back into the world of interviews, Patti acknowledged that it was not the performances themselves that she missed during the years she spent in Detroit so much as the people she performed to—and now they were with her everywhere. Hours after Lollapalooza, she was signing books at Barnes & Noble on Astor Place in Manhattan. A new anthology,
Early Work, 1970–1979,
had just been published; it contained exactly what the cover would suggest. The purpose of the collection, she explained to Gerri Lim of
Big O,
was to relieve her fans of the ballooning costs that were now attached to her out-of-print writings. “It came to my attention that some people were selling copies of my old books to kids for a lot of money, so I agreed to have them compiled.” As for the signing, “It was exhausting. Hundreds of people showed up.”

Patti knew that her fans were still fascinated by her past—although her eyes were now focused on her future.

She had been friends with Rosemary Carroll, poet Jim’s ex-wife, ever since Rosemary first appeared in Jim’s life in the mid-1970s. Now they were business associates as well. Casting around for somebody to manage her career as she built toward her rock ‘n’ roll return, Patti knew that Rosemary would do the job well. Plus, she wanted somebody who could keep everyone else’s demands in check, because she still wasn’t certain whether she’d be able to do it herself.

She need not have worried on that account.

“She’s polite but firm about the scope of our interview,” the
Village Voice
‘s Evelyn McDonnell recalled of becoming the first journalist to sit down in earnest with Patti in 1995. “This is a transitional time for her, as she eases herself back into the spotlight, and we have a transitional talk: Nothing about the deaths, the family … or even her new material. We talk exactly the allotted hour.”

That hour raced past, though. Patti was wild with enthusiasm, talking of recording and live work. “I always liked performing while we were recording, because I like to keep in contact with the people. Somehow that energy you receive gets funneled into the record. I mean, you’re doing a record for everybody, and I like to go into the studio having a sense of those people—some symbol of them.”

Her old record deal with Arista was still in place, though she was adamant that even after all these years, the label still didn’t truly understand what she did. They let her get on with it, though; that was the main thing. Also still in place, it seemed, was a large part of her old band, the Patti Smith Group that rose with her to such heights in the late 1970s. After recent appearances alongside her already, both Lenny Kaye and Jay Dee Daugherty were lined up to return, and to
Big O
she spoke of featuring “other guitar players on this record—my old guitar player Ivan Kral and perhaps Tom Verlaine and certain other people might be guest-playing.”

In fact, Kral would never return, held back by his own career in the modern Czech Republic and by private disagreements with Patti herself. And, of course, Richard Sohl was dead. But Luis Resto, borrowed from the Detroit Energy Asylum, “plays very similar to Richard”; Tony Shanahan was back on bass, and Electric Lady studios, down in the Village, had just been booked for July.

The choice of venue was not arbitrary. The first time Patti had visited the studio was the day she met Jimi Hendrix. The second time she’d been there was to record her first-ever single, “Hey Joe,” in 1974. And the third, a year later, had been to cut
Horses.
As she returned to the Electric Lady for her first visit since her debut album, she immersed herself in the memories the place still held.

Patti stood in the hallway looking at the murals and gold discs with which the studio was decorated. Suddenly she remembered standing in that same spot in 1975, with Robert Mapplethorpe taking pictures of her and John Cale. And at that moment, Lenny Kaye walked over, stood beside her and said, “Amazing, isn’t it?”

“It was like he could feel what I was feeling,” she told Ben Edmonds. “The first time we were back in the studio, just hearing those Lenny guitar tones and Jay on the drums, it … triggered so many memories.”

Chronologically, the new album was ignited by two songs drawn from Patti’s years with Fred. She had collected a stash of cassettes of her late husband’s songwriting ideas, but at first she found them too painful to listen to. It was Lenny who played through them and selected “Summer Cannibals,” a composition that Fred had had lying around since the early 1970s, and the punchy “Gone Again,” a song that would have been the title track to the couple’s next joint album, had Fred lived. “Gone Again” was also the last piece of music Fred had composed for the record, and now Patti needed to marshal all her resources to write the lyrics.

Some songs remained too personal. Patti had written “She Walked Home” in spring 1994, following the death of Jackie Kennedy; she read in a magazine that when the former First Lady heard she was dying, she took one final walk alone through Central Park. “She Walked Home” captured that image, and later in the year as Fred lay dying, he would often ask Patti to play it to him while he sang along. The song, she said, became Fred’s own. She would never record it.

Oliver Ray’s magnificent “Fireflies” was on board, and with it a liquid guitar from Patti’s old friend Tom Verlaine. Verlaine also appeared on “Wander I Go,” recorded at the same sessions but absent from the finished disc. A spectral throb, it added the visiting Jeff Buckley’s acoustic to Verlaine’s electric guitar. Buckley would become a constant presence in the studio, and Patti was delighted. As young lovers, she and Robert Mapplethorpe would “neck like high school kids” to his father Tim Buckley’s
Goodbye and Hello
album, Patti confessed in
Mojo,
and the son would make an equally indelible impression on
Gone Again.
Jeff harmonized high through “Beneath the Southern Cross” and asked for the session for “Fireflies” to be delayed so he could run home to grab his essrage, an Egyptian instrument that he knew the piece was crying out for.

Luis Resto was Patti’s collaborator on the sweet “My Madrigal”; Lenny Kaye resparked their old songwriting partnership on the fluttering “Beneath the Southern Cross.” But it was the songs that Patti alone composed that were destined to become the heart of
Gone Again.
Contrary to those reviewers who would later pick out the Fred-led rockers as the album’s highlights, tracks like “About a Boy,” “Dead to the World,” “Wing,” and “Ravens” gave
Gone Again
its most memorable flavor; over the drifting soundscapes, Patti’s lyrics resonated like the poems they might once have been, beautiful visions poised just on the musical side of improvisation, and built not around tune but around imagery.

“
Gone Again
is more personal than Fred and I ever wanted to do an album,” Patti would later admit to Jon Pareles of the
New York Times.
“I know that it’s a pretty personal piece of work to inflict on people.” But she didn’t care. She made it for herself.

Few of the album’s songs had been through the crucible of live performance; only “About a Boy,” “Farewell Reel,” and her super-stylized take on Bob Dylan’s “Wicked Messenger” had a firm place in her live set. Two decades earlier, her later work with the Patti Smith Group had suffered from a lack of live exposure, as had
Dream of Life
in 1988. This time, however, it was not a significant shortcoming, since Patti’s method of songwriting had changed. No more jamming for hours with her bandmates; no more extemporizing lyrics and rhythms onstage. “I practiced really hard and learned to write these little songs.” (She admitted, however, “I never learned to play anything but waltz time.” Consequently, Jon Pareles observed,
“Gone Again
is full of waltzes.”)

Patti’s first album in eight years would not be released until mid-1996. In the meantime, summer 1995 gave way to fall, and studio sessions were replaced with a slow dance of occasional concerts, one-off appearances, and benefits, most of which saw Patti still more confident reading than singing, and apparently stepping willingly into the role of spiritual guide to a growing array of musical admirers.

As her husband had insisted, Patti’s influence was inescapable. Though new revolutions had arisen during Patti’s years away, their figureheads were her devotees. Thurston Moore of New York’s Sonic Youth and Michael Stipe of Athens, Georgia–based college favorites REM both spoke glowingly of Patti as both an influence and an inspiration—and they would be rewarded with her friendship and collaboration.

“I didn’t know her,” Moore wrote in
Bomb
magazine. “I could only embrace the identity I perceived. I was impressionable and she came on like an alien…. I wanted to meet her and take her to a movie, but she was so unobtainable and fantastic. I could only entrust my faith to the future. The future would allow me to have a date with Patti Smith or at least hang out with her.”

He achieved that ambition in October 1995, when Patti and Lenny Kaye attended a celebration of Jack Kerouac in his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts. Moore joined them and was asked to play guitar on three songs. They played shows in “cool churches” in Lowell and Boston, spent a day sightseeing around Kerouac’s Lowell and another taking photographs—framed shots of Moore’s hand—for an exhibition Patti was planning. “I was friends,” he wrote, “with someone I had dreamed of being friends with for nearly twenty years.”

Next, Patti visited San Francisco, for two shows that she recalled as the two extremes of her new approach. She described the first show to the
Philadelphia Weekly’s
Ramsay Pennybacker as “conservatively structured. It was upbeat but more of a typical poetry reading with some music. And the second show, just an hour later, was kind of wild. The people were more energetic and more interactive, and the show sort of lost its structure and it’s like we were having a little party together with poetry and music.”

Over two nights at the end of November, the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth, Patti and her band took over Philadelphia’s Theatre of Living Arts for three shows designed to showcase her new material for the first time, but also to get Patti used to the idea of being on the road again. Weeks earlier, a surprise call from Bob Dylan had ended with her agreeing to tour for the first time since 1979.

The last time Patti had spoken privately with Dylan was on that day in 1975 when they bumped into each other on Fourth Street in New York City. He’d shown her the photo of the two of them on the cover of the
Village Voice
and asked her if she knew who those two people were. At the time she laughed and said no. Now she knew. They were two people who, twenty years later, would be talking on the telephone, one hedging about her hopes for a renewed career; the other insisting that the world needed her presence.

Lenny Kaye, Jay Dee Daugherty, Tony Shanahan, and Tom Verlaine lined up as Patti’s band. She knew that they were scarcely prepared to undertake any kind of tour, but she didn’t care. No matter that they could cram in no more than five hours of rehearsal time. The musicians knew one another; they knew the material. They would get by.

Michael Stipe, after years as a fan, joined the tour as their official photographer. Oliver Ray was along as well, not only in his role as Patti’s boyfriend but also to add his guitar to one song each evening. His appearances were brief, then, but they were scarcely unimportant. For the first time since Fred’s death, Patti was seen to be happy in public.