Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story (38 page)

The band for this new project remained the same: Lenny Kaye, Jay Dee Daugherty, Oliver Ray, and Tony Shanahan. Patti and the band produced the album themselves.

Daughter Jesse played piano on the title track, recorded live at the Looking Glass Studios, the house that Philip Glass built. “Trampin’” was a traditional gospel piece that Patti had been singing to herself for a couple of years, ever since she first heard it on an old LP by Marian Anderson, a key figure in the struggle for black artists to win recognition in pre–civil rights America. So liked it so much, she told
Uncut,
that “I asked my daughter if she would learn it on piano…. I’m very proud of her, I think she did a beautiful job.”

That same mood carried over to the remainder of the album. Patti had now lost both of her parents; three years after her father’s death, her mother Beverly passed away on September 19, 2002, at the Underwood-Memorial Hospital in Gloucester County, New Jersey. But if their presence hung over
Trampin’,
it was lightly, gently; “Mother Rose” remembered her mother, but it was gratitude not grief that flavored it, she said. Likewise, she mused, tracks such as “Trespasses” or “Cash” were not about sorrow but “the result of seeing things in life.” Seeing things and knowing that there was not much that could be done to change them.

It was not, overall, a strong record. It was, however, well intentioned. “Peaceable Kingdom,” her vision for a post–September 11 world that had already been trampled by politics and war, was her most overt reference to the causes that had devoured the last few years—and, perhaps, her weakest. It was, grumbled Rob Horning of
PopMatters.com
,
“about as inconspicuous as anything you’d hear on a Sarah McLachlan record; it seems written to be NPR bumper music.” “Stride of the Mind,” Horning continued, was just “a straightforward rocker.”

But then
Trampin’
exploded, across the nine-minute call to arms of “Gandhi” and then through a cut that made even that look brief: the seething, twelve-minutes-plus “Radio Baghdad.” The latter song opened with the sound of children playing before slicing angrily into the warzone reality of their playground, with a frenzy that was as jammed as it was cohesive, structured improvisation forged in the same furnace of imagination from which “Radio Ethiopia” was cast, but shaped by rage and despair as well. More than anything else on the album, “Radio Baghdad” reminded us why Patti still made records.

Trampin’
did not change the world. Neither did her loud opposition to Bush’s reelection campaign in 2004, or her appearances alongside Ralph Nader when he toured in opposition to the Iraq war later that year. And America did not accede to her impassioned demands that it indict Bush “for befouling our country’s name,” cried live to the nation via Sirius Satellite Radio on New Year’s Eve 2005.

But she did not expect them to. Once—thirty years before, for instance—people seemed willing to have their minds changed, if the power of an argument was great enough. Less so today. Not at all so today. Patti acknowledged that sometimes modern activism could feel futile. “We were betrayed,” she later sighed to
Time Out London,
“by the media, our government, even the Democratic Party. Now I find it very difficult to be in my country.”

Even so, she was hopeful. She would rail against the government because it needed to be railed against. And because, as she told writer Nick Blakey, “If you keep poking someone, they’re eventually going to bleed.”

Despite her recent political activity, however, and despite a celebrated career that spanned three decades, it was still her first album,
Horses,
by which she would forever be judged and remembered. It was a touchstone that she was now about to revisit as she took over the organization of the 2005 Meltdown festival, the two-week-long celebration of arts, dance, and music hosted by London’s South Bank Centre (which comprises the neighboring Royal Festival and Queen Elizabeth Halls).

In the twelve years since Meltdown’s inception, it had developed into one of the most eagerly awaited spectacles of the artistic calendar—in no small part because the flavor of each year’s event was decided not by the so-called experts that traditionally helm such festivals but by a specially invited curator. Among the notables to have operated past Meltdowns were Elvis Costello, Laurie Anderson, Nick Cave, John Peel, Scott Walker, Robert Wyatt, and David Bowie. Each one strove to present a program that not only reflected his or her personal tastes but also reached beyond his or her traditional fan base to embrace some often shocking extremes. Now it was Patti’s chance.

Patti admitted to Tim Cooper of the
Times
that she was initially uncertain whether or not to accept the offer; she wasn’t certain whether she could even create
one
“interesting evening, not to mention two weeks of events.” She turned for advice to Morrissey, himself a past curator, and “he was very encouraging. He told me to just barrel on through because the Meltdown people shepherd you along. And it’s been true.”

“This will be the most social experience of my life,” she told the
Guardian’s
Ed Vulliamy. “I don’t interact with a lot of people; I don’t know a lot of famous people. I work very simply. I spend my time with my children and my work…. I tend to be insular and opinionated. But for this, I want to, and will, work alongside people. I’ll perform myself, but if anyone else needs a bit of backing vocal, clarinet, or a shirt ironed, I’ll be there.”

The guest list that she presented to London would encompass some of the most dramatic and dramatically flavored performers of the age. The event would be bookended by two performances drawn from Patti’s love of William Blake: Songs of Innocence, dedicated to the innocence of childhood, and Songs of Experience, dedicated to Jimi Hendrix. Blake would not be the sole poet incarnated for Meltdown; one night would be devoted to William Burroughs, another to Bertolt Brecht.

Patti would even perform, for the first time in its entirety,
The Coral sea.

More than a decade had elapsed since the volume’s publication, but as she confessed to Spencer Tricker of
PopMatters.com
,
“I had tried to read it publicly, but could never sustain reading the entire piece.” Appearing at the New York Public Library on May 28, 1996, she had seemed tearful even before she commenced to read.

In 2005, however, she found a collaborator with whom she could ease the entire piece into a complete performance. Kevin Shields was the English guitarist who had led the ultravisionary band My Bloody Valentine to short-lived but lasting glory at the end of the 1980s; Patti had missed seeing or even hearing the band when it was in its pomp, but she caught up with their music later and immediately fell in love with it. And now her collaboration with Shields “gave me an all-encompassing landscape in which I could explore the emotions that drove me to write it.”

Patti and Shields premiered
The Coral Sea
to the world at Meltdown on June 22, 2005. “We didn’t rehearse,” Patti confessed afterward to Mark Paytress of the
Guardian.
“We simply talked about our expectations and improvised.”

This time around, reviews were unanimous in their enthusiasm.
Observer
critic Molloy Woodcraft adored the performance. “Shields, surrounded by effects pedals, rings great sheets of sound from expensive-looking electric guitars beneath and, occasionally, above … Smith’s declamations as we move around an imaginary ship. It becomes quite mesmerizing at times, Shield’s characteristic bending notes making you feel like the room is moving out of shape. The pair finish up side by side on the sofa as the sound dies away, heads down, lank hair over their eyes, Smith grinning madly. When they depart hand in hand, they look for all the world like mother and son.”

They would repeat the performance the following year, and release a CD of both shows in 2008. The liner notes would encapsulate Patti’s feelings about the events: “I believe we produced together a fitting memorial to Robert, who was, when I was young, my bloody valentine.”

Around their first performance, meanwhile, the rest of Meltdown unfolded. John Cale was there; so were the reformed Television. Yoko Ono, Marc Almond, Tori Amos, and Sparks numbered among a cast list drawn from the furthest extremes of the music scene, reflecting Patti’s personal vision of who and what an artist should be. The Brecht evening, in particular, offered wild variety, as she called a dozen or more different acts to take the stage and sing a song or two. Another night, titled Peaceable Kingdom for the
Trampin’
track, dwelt on Patti’s role as peace activist.

“This may be the most self-referential Meltdown there’s been,” Glenn Max, producer of contemporary culture at the South Bank Centre, told the
Guardian’s
Faisal al Yafai. “Even though there are big ideas here … there’s a lot of her in this show. There’s a real political view to this.”

But there was also nostalgia. Nobody, least of all Patti, had forgotten that 2005 marked the thirtieth anniversary of the release of
Horses.
In 1975, critical opinion as to its merits had been sharply divided. But how thoroughly the positive opinion had won out over the negative would be revealed by the reception for
Horses’
rebirth at Meltdown.

Tickets for the night, June 25, 2005, sold out immediately, while good seats for the other nights were still readily available from the box office. “I was overwhelmed,” Patti admitted to journalist Simon Reynolds of the
Observer.
“To tell the truth, it brought tears to my eyes.
Horses
pretty much broke as a record in England. I always think of us as a semi-English band because we were so maverick in America and then we went to London and played that first date … and the response gave me my first sense that ‘wow, we’re really doing something.’”

As for
why
she was recreating the album, beyond the notion that a recording of the show would make a neat addition to the upcoming thirtieth anniversary reissue of
Horses
itself, “I wanted to do it while I’m still physically able to execute it with full heart and voice. I had nicer hair back then, but my voice is actually stronger now!”

Following in the footsteps of David Bowie, the Cure, and Sparks, all of whom had taken to recreating entire classic albums in concert in recent years, Patti would open the show with
Horses
side 1, track 1, “Gloria”; close it with side 2, track 8, “Elegie”; and then follow the most recent CD reissue by encoring with the bonus track, the live “My Generation” that had appeared on the B-side of “Gloria.”

The band was as close to the original as death and politics would permit—Sohl and Kral were both sadly missed. But Tom Verlaine expanded his original contribution to the record by remaining unobtrusively onstage throughout the performance, and Red Hot Chili Pepper Flea bounced enthusiastically around on bass.

“Improvising randomly,” Tim Cooper would enthuse in the
Independent,
“injecting her songs with love, tenderness, passion and fury, Smith’s restless spirit of invention and sheer passion for her art ensured this was more, far more, than mere nostalgia. It was, as it always was, sheer transcendence.” “Gloria” opened, as defiant as it ever was. “Elegie” closed, and as elegiac as it sounded, it was as somber and beautiful as any song could be. As it ended, and she sang the final line, Patti glanced to the side of the stage, sadly, remembering the friends “who can’t be with us today.”

“This was rock as exploration, adventure, freedom, transcendence,” swore Andrew Perry in the
Daily Telegraph.
“Hearing it so thrillingly brought to life, one wondered why young rock bands today refuse to uphold rock’s questing ideals, happy merely to copy old post punk records.”

But most dramatic of all was Pete Clark’s review in the
Evening Standard.
“It was as if a punk tear had opened up in the space/time continuum: Patti Smith stepped through it, arriving on stage in black jacket, white shirt, black tie and skinny, ripped jeans, and it was 1975 all over again.” Except if time really had been torn open and turned inside out, it was not 1975 that Patti Smith was reincarnating that night at the Royal Festival Hall. It was 1976. May 1976, and she was on her way to London, to oversee the birth of British punk rock.

18

BABELOGUE

J
UST WEEKS AFTER
Meltdown, Patti was in France, where the Ministry of Culture bestowed on her the government’s highest honor given to an artist or writer, naming her a Commandeur dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Back home, however, her own government continued to disappoint her.

By 2006, the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan had settled into sub-Vietnam campaigns of attrition and repression, and she continued to speak out against the administration’s misdeeds—which included some of the most flagrant abuses of process that any modern democracy had ever openly admitted to.

“I spent all morning yesterday writing a song about Guantanamo Bay,” she told the
Guardian’s
Mark Paytress in September 2006. “Without Chains” was inspired by the story of Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish national living in Germany who was arrested in Pakistan in late 2001 and held at Guantanamo for the next four years. “He is the same age as my son, Jackson,” she elaborated in an interview with Louise Jury of the
Independent.
“When I read the story, I realized how I would feel as a mother if my son had been taken away at the age of twenty, put into chains, without any hope of leaving, without any direct charge.”

She’d been affected, too, by the story of a Lebanese village that had been hit by an Israeli air strike that July, killing dozens of civilians. She dedicated the song “Qana” to their memory. This kind of anger, she told the
Guardian,
“isn’t any different than the outrage I once felt about Vietnam or civil rights. My blood is still burning.”