Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story (37 page)

A world in which freedom meant truly to be free, not just the puppet of one more violent regime.

It was the age of blame. In 1998, President Bill Clinton came under attack for his relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, in a sequence of events that swiftly swirled from rumor and innuendo to direct questions about Clinton’s ability to continue governing the country. For the first time since President Nixon masterminded the Watergate break-ins, a sitting American president faced trial, but not, as in Nixon’s case, for any criminal behavior. Clinton faced judgment over his so-called moral standards, a conflict that quickly moved out of the governmental realm to become a straight fight between right- and left-wing politicians over the standards of American life itself.

Patti was swift to respond, not to any perceived wrongdoing on Clinton’s part, but to the utterly disproportionate response that his behavior provoked. Speaking for a
Rolling Stone
feature called “The Clinton Conversations,” in which an array of cultural figures were asked to comment upon the ongoing circus, she sighed, “The Clinton thing is so insidious; what they’re unraveling—you could take any human being, start probing, and find their little private can of worms. We are becoming our own Big Brother by allowing all this to happen. If we are going to say it’s all right to take away the privacy of the person who has the highest seat in the land, how can the rest of us possibly be protected?”

But there was more to her concerns than that. The past decade had seen American politics, if not Western politics as a whole, devolve from a conflict of political ideologies into a battle between conflicting moralities. For years, abortion had been the leading battleground; more recently, the ability of gays to serve in the military had come to the fore. Soon, the concept of gay marriage would be exercising the minds of the nation and dividing once again down political party lines.

“When I look at the crucifixion of Clinton, I look at the crucifixion of my generation,” Patti continued. “They are finally nailing us for introducing new ideas about sexual mores, sexual freedom, personal freedom: ‘OK, you wanted sexual freedom, we’re gonna give it to you—to the point where it is going to saturate and sicken the whole planet.’”

Patti’s private fury over the state of the world elbowed aside the personal pains that had preoccupied her for the past five years. Where she had once used her guaranteed audience to spotlight the issues that she and her husband held dear, such as the continued plight of Tibet, she now began to speak equally passionately about more overtly political matters.

Gung Ho,
the warlike title of which would seem more and more apt as time passed, is the album that confirmed her growing interest in politics. What’s more, it did so without any of the embarrassing grandstanding that normally accompanies an artist’s attempt to take a political stand.

Patti had watched, doubtless as aghast as many other people, as a host of well-meaning pop stars and other public figures stepped forth during the 1980s and 1990s to deliver their personal solutions to any number of worldly problems, few of which were able to look beyond the view from the penthouse suite. The thirteen songs that made up
Gung Ho,
on the other hand, allowed the listener to make up his or her own mind on whatever issue Patti was putting over, and the ensuing openness permitted the album to become her most musically and lyrically satisfying since
Easter.

The year ended with Patti onstage at the Bowery Ballroom once again, ringing in the new century onstage with sister Kimberly, Tom Verlaine, and keyboard player Grant Hart. Much of the new album was already in place in the repertoire; no fewer than seven of the unheard record’s tracks were in the set, all already flexing their muscles in readiness for the album’s March 2000 launch.

The following evening, Patti was at St. Mark’s for a brief reading. February brought her now-annual appearance at the Free Tibet benefit, and yet another Bowery Ballroom gig, an Internet broadcast previewing
Gung Ho
to the world. But she was also settling into the routine that would mark her course for the next decade: touring when she wanted to, recording when she felt like it, and speaking out when she needed to.

Reviews of her most political record to date were kind. “It’s a fuller, more exhilarating effort than [‘Gone Again’] or ‘Peace and Noise,’” declared Seth Mnookin of
Salon.com
. “Smith sings, screams, moans, groans and roars about Mother Teresa, Ho Chi Minh, slavery, Gen. George Custer, Salome, war, redemption and honor … [and] veers from anthems to open-ended jams to downright funky ditties.”

Jon Pareles picked up the thread in
Rolling Stone.
“With
Gung Ho,
she’s back to life, taking on the whole world. She belts manifestoes, plunges headlong into love, offers benedictions and hurls herself into history and myth. She casts herself as Salome in the slinky ‘Lo and Beholden,’ as the accusatory ghosts of African-American slaves in the tolling ‘Strange Messengers,’ as General Custer’s lonesome wife in the neo-Appalachian ‘Libbie’s Song.’”

True, producer Gil Norton’s work may have been just a little too locked within the sonic pastures that had sounded scintillating when he first unveiled them with the Pixies a decade earlier. True, too, that the full
Gung Ho
experience may last a few songs longer than it needed to. But there was another Grammy nomination lurking within the album’s first single, “Glitter in Their Eyes”; sister Kimberly, son Jackson, Tom Verlaine, Grant Hart, and Michael Stipe all offered audible contributions; and if the album scarcely bothered the US chart, nodding in and out of the lower reaches of the Top 200, then that scarcely bothered Patti.

Again, she wasn’t competing for a place within whichever hierarchy ruled the industry this week. She was simply allowing her voice to be heard in the places where she felt it was most needed.

17

SANDAYU THE SEPARATE

I
N 2000,
THE
United States faced a presidential election, and the upcoming tussle between George “Dubya” Bush, the mass-executioner governor of Texas and the son of outgoing president Clinton’s predecessor, and Al Gore, Clinton’s uncannily uninspiring vice president, was guaranteed to fill nobody beyond their own address books with joy.

The result was a contest that aroused so much of the country to demand an alternative that when consumer advocate Ralph Nader put himself forward as a third option in the traditional two-horse race, a surprising number of people who might otherwise have considered themselves Democratic or Republican Party loyalists cast aside their allegiances to fight alongside him.

Patti, however, had been a long-standing supporter of Nader’s Green Party. She would joke with Deyva Arthur of the party’s quarterly newspaper that her involvement probably dated back to when she “met somebody on the street, and they signed me up.” But she also acknowledged, “I’m really an independent person. I go where there is good, no matter where it comes from. Also I do a lot of work in Europe where the Green Party is really strong, like in Germany.” She threw herself wholeheartedly into Nader’s campaign. “Ralph Nader’s activism, in every sense of the word, is what attracts me. I gravitate toward people and ideology that is earth- and people-friendly.”

She donated “People Have the Power” as a Nader campaign anthem, and the new album’s “New Party” too. She added
The Wizard of Oz’s
“Over the Rainbow” to her repertoire as further tribute to the hopes she believed Nader embodied. She spoke at his rallies, and as the November election day drew closer, she toured alongside the Nader campaign, performing at rallies in New York City, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.

“I’m not an entertainer so to say,” she insisted. “I don’t really care about my career. I just want to do good work, and incorporating Ralph’s teachings in all our performances is part of doing good work.”

Nader lost, inevitably, and with him fell the Democrats, their traditional support eroded just enough by the Green Party’s high-profile campaign to allow Bush to capture a slim majority of votes in the nation’s baffling electoral college system—and become the first president over a century to ascend to power despite the fact that a plurality of voters preferred his opponent. People clearly did not have the power after all.

Patti’s live schedule through the first years of the new millennium remained packed. She dropped in and out of the highest-visibility venues as she saw fit, but was just as likely to wash up at a benefit, a reading, or simply an impromptu gathering as she was to book a two-night stand at a regular theater. Festival dates and opera house engagements were interspersed with small club appearances, and in March 2000 she even returned to the Waldorf-Astoria to induct the man who signed her to Arista records, Clive Davis, into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

June 2001 opened with Patti playing three nights at the Village Underground in New York City and closed with her triumphing over the Roskilde Festival in Denmark. The following month, she moved from the Ocean club in London to the Fuji Rock Festival in Japan.

And on October 3, with New York City still reeling from the terrorist attacks that brought down the World Trade Center three weeks previous, she was among the throng who turned out at St. Mark’s for the reading unequivocally titled New Poems to End Greed, Imperialism, Opportunism and Terrorism: Poets Respond to the September 11th Attacks and Ensuing Events. Alongside Ed Sanders, Edwin Torres, Cecilia Vicuña, Jackson Mac Low, Anselm Berrigan, Todd Colby, and many others, Patti added her shock, rage, and sorrow to the city’s outpouring of grief.

Patti spoke further on the subject in a poem published in
Interview
magazine the following month. “Twin Death” was set over six days in September, beginning that first morning when she
awoke to the sound of a passenger plane singing its end. awoke to the sensation of spirits—a purgatory of souls ascending the billowing smoke and ash filling the sky at the base of my street.
The poem passed through the stages of vigilance
(awoke to the sound off-15’s and helicopters circling above),
anger
(awoke to the cries of “usa! usa!”)
and sorrow
(it is a morning for mourning)
and finally onto readjustment
(for the first time since the attack, I enter a subway).
Now she prayed that the government could make that same adjustment.

But she knew that it wouldn’t.

Patti shared in America’s revulsion over the attacks, and those feelings would never leave her. But they would be pushed to the back of her consciousness by her opposition to the events that followed. Over the course of the next year, the Western war machine swiftly assaulted Afghanistan—where the Taliban government had at least supported the terrorists’ aims—and then just as quickly diverted its attention toward Iraq, a country that had nothing whatsoever to do with September 11 but with whom the United States nonetheless had unfinished business. Like many other Americans, Patti questioned the evidence President Bush and his British ally Tony Blair were touting to justify a preemptive strike, and squirmed uneasily at the aggressive actions that were being perpetrated in their names.

On September 11, 2002, the first anniversary of the attacks, Patti appeared at a WBAI New York event titled Patriots for Peace and Global Justice. The following day, she was alongside Louis J. Posner, founder of the electoral reform movement Voter March, protesting the slide to war with Iraq outside the United Nations Headquarters in New York City, while Bush was inside delivering his side of the story to the General Assembly. And on October 26, she was at an antiwar rally in D.C., leading 150,000 people through an impassioned “People Have the Power,” a song that was rapidly establishing for itself as potent a place in the new peace movement as “Give Peace a Chance” had occupied at the height of the Vietnam War.

Of course, not everyone opposed the war in Iraq; Patti knew that her political activism would alienate some fans. But it would empower them too, to see beyond the media’s insistence that we need to turn to our leaders, in whatever field we perceive them, for the answers we’re searching for. Indeed, by setting herself up in opposition to what she was aware many of her fans deeply believed, she was delivering the lesson that she herself had learned when she stood by Jim Morrison’s gravesite all those years ago, when she realized that there was no room for heroes in the world that she was entering.

You could listen to what they said and take inspiration from their actions. But ultimately, the final decision was yours to make, and only a fool would blindly follow others.

Within this understanding lies the truth behind the public persona that Patti Smith brought to the first decade of the twenty-first century, a decade during which her own private life receded even further from the spotlight than ever before. She was living
not
the life of an artist, for that implies struggle and disappointment, nor that of a bohemian, for that brings with it its own heavyweight baggage. But somewhere in between those poles, a woman worked in a field that simply hadn’t existed before she created it, one in which she could say or do or dress as she wished, knowing that an audience was already out there for her, and that it cared.

It cared when she released
Land (1975–2002),
a two-disc retrospective that included a dazzling selection of classics and rarities, as well as a newly recorded and highly remarkable cover of Prince’s “When Doves Cry.” It cared just as much when the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh staged Strange Messenger, an exhibition of Patti’s drawings, silk screens, and photographs, in September 2002. Quite simply, she was a part of America’s artistic landscape, as established an insider as it is possible for an outsider to be.

Patti finally left the Arista label, and on October 20, 2002—Arthur Rimbaud’s birthday—she signed on with Columbia Records. Two years later, Columbia would release
Trampin’,
Patti Smith’s last album of the decade to contain any original songs.