Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story (35 page)

It would be only a short outing, ten dates in six cities, shoehorned into what Dylan fans were already calling his Never Ending Tour, and few observers doubted that Dylan arranged the gigs more for Patti’s benefit than his own. He rarely hit the road after Thanksgiving any longer, and he’d already thundered through over one hundred shows that year. But, as Patti would reflect to Neil Strauss in the
New York Times
once the tour was over, “I thought the audience was basically Bob’s people, but they seemed real happy to see us because they know that I’m one of Bob’s people, too.”

The tour commenced on December 7, 1995, at the O’Neill Center in Danbury, Connecticut, with a set that was guaranteed both to please and to ease Patti back into the rigors of a full rock ‘n’ roll tour. To give the old fans something to cling to, Patti offered “Dancing Barefoot,” “Because the Night,” “Ghost Dance,” “Rock n Roll Nigger,” and, offering proof of its growing status as an anthem of sorts, “People Have the Power.” Heralding the new era were “Wicked Messenger,” “Walkin’ Blind,” the Rolling Stones’ “Not Fade Away,” and the epic “Beneath the Southern Cross.” You could see Patti enjoying herself, reacquainting herself with all that she had once loved about performing, and reveling in Dylan’s obvious concern and care.

The first night, she confessed to Ben Edmonds, was “pretty shaky.” But only the first night. By the second, she was “back in familiar territory.” And besides, she insisted that her sole intention on the tour was to set the stage for Dylan, to thank him for his faith in her by confirming his audience’s faith in him. “I think we did a pretty good job and I know that he was happy.”

And so was she. “I’m playing with one of my major influences, as a performer, writer,” she told the
Philadelphia City Paper.
“From a very early time, talking about Philadelphia, one of my big things was taking the bus to Sam Goody’s waiting for
Blonde on Blonde
to come out. Playing with him now brings a beautiful humor to the picture. It makes me think if I could just tap that girl, the dejected one on the bus, and tell her she’d be working with Dylan one day … It’s just wonderful.”

The tour was onto its third night, at the Orpheum Theater in Boston, when Dylan made the move he’d been waiting to make. One of Patti’s favorite songs of his was “Dark Eyes,” from his 1985 album
Empire Burlesque.
He’d rarely performed it since that time, and not once in the eight years of the Never Ending Tour. But tonight he did, sliding it in after “Mama, You’ve Been on My Mind”; Patti danced out on the stage to sing alongside him. “A lot of girls have come along since Patti started,” Dylan told the audience afterward. “But Patti is still the best, you know.”

They reprised the duet every night for the remainder of the tour, and on the final night of a three-gig stand at Philadelphia’s Electric Factory, she reappeared during the encores to join him on “Blowin’ in the Wind” as well. “Singing with him was just like being in heaven,” she told
Mojo.
“I was so happy.”

But as much as she loved celebrating and being celebrated by one of her idols, Patti didn’t necessarily relish being placed on a pedestal by society at large. “Our culture has shifted the purpose and the goal of music and all of the arts,” she later complained to
Observer
journalist Sean O’Hagan. “That’s why I don’t like MTV. Music television is all about the media-oriented version of what it is to be a rock star, it’s not about what Bob Dylan or Jimi Hendrix were about—which included great images, sure, but they had spiritual and political and revolutionary content, too. I believe their early goal was to do something utterly and truly great, or nothing at all. All of them insisted on the primacy of the work—the art, not the artist. This emphasis on style that we have today—the image, the video, the stylist, the game plan—that’s not rock ‘n’ roll at all. That’s careerism.”

She looked around at her peers on the comeback trail, patting their own self-satisfied backs with appearances on
MTV Unplugged
and
VH1 Storytellers,
“picking up their lifetime achievement awards.” But what, she asked, were they
really
doing? Nothing. She snarled at the very existence of a hall of fame for rock music, seeing it as just another way to make money, not simply commercializing art but bastardizing it as well, reducing passion to a plaque on a wall. She shared, too, her late husband’s loathing of any establishment operation that claimed, way too late in many cases, to be honoring the very same people it had done its best to ostracize in years gone by.

Rock ‘n’ roll did not need a museum. The fact that it existed was enough.

And yet there she was in January 1996, standing on stage at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City, inducting the Velvet Underground into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The same band whose first LP she had reviewed for
Creem
in 1974, knowing that even among the readers who had heard
of
the group, the number who had actually
heard
them was infinitesimally tiny.

That
was how much things had changed since she’d been gone. Not that the Velvets were inducted, but that there was even a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for them to be inducted into. The antisocial little monster called rock ‘n’ roll that she’d spent her teens and twenties defending, convinced that it was the one thing left to youth that had the power to make things different or better—that little monster was now a responsible member of society, a rebel no longer. And she despised that.

Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, Maureen Tucker, and Nico. The Velvet Underground, she told the assembled suits, “opened wounds worth opening, with a brutal innocence, without apology, cutting across the grain, gritty, urbanic. And in their search for the kingdom, for laughter, for salvation, they explored the darkest areas of the psyche.” The Velvets were a triumph of the musician over the establishment, and the fact that people remembered their names proved that their victory was lasting. Could a Velvet Underground even form today, much less exist, much less make a difference?

Patti would change her tune about the Hall of Fame soon enough. Until then, she tried to remain optimistic. “I think things are a lot more open than they were in the ‘70s,” she had told Gerrie Lim a few months earlier. “The field is quite wide and I’m really proud of a lot of the things that the new guard has done, all these groups from My Bloody Valentine to Nirvana. My son likes Green Day. There’s a lot of energy in music right now.” She herself would be content to play the outsider, the returning revolutionary—perhaps even (in the eyes of a prospective audience growing more and more excited about her return) the woman who would turn around the opening oath of her old take on “Gloria”: to suggest that if Jesus wasn’t up for the job, then maybe she would die for rock ‘n’ roll’s sins.

At the Hall of Fame, however, she celebrated the past and then left the building at the first chance she was given, in tears of such vehemence that it was easier to fly home, which was still Detroit for a few months more, than spend another minute in its company.

Gone again.

16

A FIRE OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN

J
UST AS
P
ATTI
was reintroducing herself to the world in mid-1995, one of her oldest friends was also garnering renewed public attention—albeit posthumously. Six years after the death of Robert Mapplethorpe, Massachusetts-born, Manhattan-based author and editor Patricia Morrisroe published her biography of the artist. It was a doorstop of a book, the fruits of some sixteen interviews between author and subject, and many more between Morrisroe and Mapplethorpe’s associates, and it reexamined his life in painstaking, and often painful, detail.

Patti had been happy to be interviewed for the starkly titled
Mapplethorpe.
She was not so happy with what she read in it.

“I gave [Morrisroe] what I thought was a good sense of what it was like to be an artist,” Patti complained to Hilton Als of
The New Yorker.
“I saw Robert go from an extremely shy misfit to an extremely accomplished person.” But that process was “represented in the book as one hustle after another.” When
she
remembered those days, she said, she recalled the joyfulness with which they approached every project, and the “youthful fervor” with which they completed it. They weren’t plotting to be famous, she swore. It was just that they had “a million ideas and lots of energy.” It was innocence, not calculation, that led them to lead the lives that they lived.

Just a year after the publication of
Mapplethorpe,
Patti released her own book in an attempt to eulogize her former partner.
The Coral Sea
was the piece Patti had begun writing on the day Mapplethorpe died. Its title was taken from one of his photographs, of the aircraft carrier USS
Coral Sea,
but its imagery was pure legend—the legend of everlasting friendship, two kids growing together and staying together, no matter how much turmoil life had forced them to endure.
The Coral Sea,
she said, had taken on a life of its own; it had called upon her to draw from all that she knew about Mapplethorpe both as an artist and as a human being. The writing had been easy, too, developing swiftly into a set of sixteen interwoven prose poems whose very energy, she felt, echoed that with which they had lived their lives.

But for the first time since she embarked on her comeback, Patti found the critics were less than enthralled. Her romantic, allegorical, and sometimes almost biblical tribute to her friend was seen as naive at best, self-serving in places, and no match for the vision of Mapplethorpe that was conjured in the pages of Morrisroe’s biography. For the moment,
Mapplethorpe
was the account by which he was to be judged, rightly or wrongly.

It had been a long time since Patti had last faced up to public criticism, and longer still since it had hit her so hard. Respect was devilishly hard to come by, and shaken by the reception of
The Coral Sea,
Patti could be excused if she wondered whether her now-imminent comeback album,
Gone Again,
would suffer likewise—a victim not of outright dislike but of unfavorable comparison with a more imposing edifice. And whereas
The Coral Sea
was oft compared, absurdly, to
Mapplethorpe, Gone Again
was up against Patti’s own past work.

It would not be an entirely fair comparison. If one listened to music purely for its tunes, for the choruses that could be easily sung along with, one would be hard pressed to distinguish the best of
Gone Again
from that of either
Easter
or
Wave;
Patti herself acknowledged that. Her music remained as clear and uncluttered as ever. But those were not the records she was competing with. Instead, her new album would be judged against the two discs that preceded them—in particular, the one that announced her to the world in the first place, the twenty-one-year-old
Horses,
just as each of the records that followed it had been. The fact that so many years separated the two records would not make an iota of difference in the eyes and ears of the critics.

It would have been so easy for reviewers to dismiss the record. What, they could have asked, did a returning Patti Smith have to offer that she had not already dispensed in the past? The same question, in other words, that is asked of every returning hero, from the latest vintage reunion (and the 1990s overflowed with such events) to the periodic returns to action of bands that had never really gone away (the Rolling Stones, for example).

But
Gone Again
received a far easier ride than anybody might have expected, borne aloft on a wave of generosity that bordered upon gratitude:
thank you
for returning,
thank you
for recording,
thank you
for remembering us. The fact that it deserved such largesse is of course immaterial; browsing today through the reviews that awaited
Gone Again,
one is still struck by the sheer love and affection with which Patti was received back into the arms of the critical establishment. When
Rolling Stone
featured
Gone Again
in its “essential recordings of the 1990s” poll in 1999, nobody would even think to question its inclusion.

Patti had continued teasing her audience with live shows through early 1996, as guest appearances and benefits again consumed far more of her time than full-on concerts. But when she did break cover with the band, the results were spectacular. Two nights at San Francisco’s Warfield Theatre, opening a weeklong Californian sojourn, brought the audience to its knees with both shocking revivals, as “Gloria” returned from her grave to round out both nights, and new surprises, such as Lenny Kaye’s renditions of “Love of the Common People” and Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water,” with the latter’s signature riff performed by Jackson Smith, Patti’s thirteen-year-old son.

Appearances on the FOX variety show
Saturday Night Special
in Los Angeles in May and
Later … with Jools Holland
in London in June brought out a driving “Gone Again” and a spoken “People Have the Power.” Then, back in New York City for two nights at the Irving Plaza, she gave
The Late Show with David Letterman
a triumphant “Summer Cannibals.”

She had much to celebrate. Not only had she made her musical comeback, but she had made a personal return as well, uprooting her life and family once again and coming home to New York City, to a brownstone in Greenwich Village. And now that she was there, it felt as though she had never left.

Yet she did not have long in which to unpack, and certainly no time to put everything away. In fact, she acknowledged, she might never do so. Thirty years before, sharing an apartment with Robert Mapplethorpe, she had driven him to distraction by leaving her art, her writings, her every thought scattered on the floor, as though the very act of dropping it was the only thing she created it for. Even now, she was still most comfortable amid the clutter of her creativity, in a tumbleweed tangle of manuscripts, photographs, paintings, and notebooks. Plastic toys and Polaroids. Favorite books and pop culture iconography. Newspaper cuttings and political tracts. And tour itineraries.