Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story (39 page)

Yet if the fires of past convictions still burned strongly within her, so too did the knowledge that time changes everything, an inexorable process that reached a claw into her own history with the news that CBGB was closing. And shortly after 1 A.M. on October 16, 2006, Patti Smith would sing the final notes of her final song, “Elegie,” to conclude a three-and-a-half-hour show marking the end of music at the club that had nurtured her to fame thirty years before.

A victim of the city’s skyrocketing rents and the rapacious landlords who uphold them, CBGB had first run into trouble more than a year earlier, when the Bowery Residents’ Committee billed owner Hilly Kristal for $91,000 in back rent, based on a rent increase that Kristal himself declared he had never even received. In early August 2005, it was announced that CBGB would close its doors for the final time on September 1—but the race was on to gain a reprieve. A series of nightly benefit shows at the venue was organized, while Steven Van Zandt, of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, began arranging a rally and concert (headlined by Blondie’s Debbie Harry and Chris Stein) in Washington Square Park.

Kristal himself had remained defiant. “We are doing whatever we can to stay here which includes encouraging people who are in a position to do something about it,” he told the BBC. New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg decried the loss of one of the city’s best-loved institutions and offered to mediate in the dispute. “It’s part of our culture,” he said. “[CBGB] bring[s] a lot of business here. I don’t think they belong anyplace else other than New York City.” Kristal replied, “I just hope that he can back up what he said. I pray that he will.”

Ultimately, the best concession that could be won was a final fourteen months of occupancy, and so Kristal began planning to go out in style.

The last weeks of the club’s existence were a nonstop festival of remembrance. The acoustic Debbie Harry/Chris Stein act and the Dictators celebrated CBGB’s 1970s prime. The hardcore combo Bad Brains stepped up to replay the 1980s. Avail and the Bouncing Souls remembered the venue’s role in breaking the alternative acts of the 1990s and beyond. But the final night was turned over to Patti, for a set that promised to be far more than a simple remembrance service.

“It was an honor to be the last group,” she told
Rolling Stone’s
David Fricke, “and I really thought about what that meant, what kind of responsibility that was. I thought about all the people that played there and that we lost—about Hilly and the whole history. I just wanted to do a night like any other night, sort of like the nights at the beginning but without being nostalgic.”

She recalled her last appearance at CBGB, in 1997, and before that, in August 1979, warming up for that final Patti Smith Group tour of Europe. She remembered, too, the earliest days at the club, the nights in 1974–1975 when CBGB was the womb that nurtured a city’s worth of talent. But most of all she recalled the club’s role in bringing her back from the half-dead in 1977, as she recuperated from her accident but still needed to play. To live.

Perusing her repertoire almost three decades later, she looked for material that she felt related specifically to CBGB: “We Three,” for instance, written with (and about) Tom Verlaine:
Every Sunday I would go / Down to the bar / Where he played guitar.
She sought out songs that had long since fallen from her usual stage repertoire but were an intrinsic component of her own CBGB experience. “The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game” was the first song she ever performed on that stage. The Velvets’ “Pale Blue Eyes”—“we did that too. And I wanted to build up to the last piece of the first set, which was ‘Birdland.’ That was a song that started as a poem, and through several months at CBGB, went from one place to another, morphed and grew. To me, ‘Birdland’ is the quintessential CBGB song.”

But there were so many others, and she cast the net wider, forgiving or forgetting even the past conflicts that had once separated her from the rest of the CBGB regulars. Blondie’s cover of the old reggae classic “The Tide Is High.” The Dead Boys’ “Sonic Reducer.” A string of joyous Ramones numbers. Television’s “Marquee Moon” and “Little Johnny Jewel,” with Richard Lloyd sitting in on lead guitar.

And finally, “Elegie,” with Patti reciting a list of the musicians who had passed away since they last played at CBGB: Richard Sohl, Fred Smith, Stiv Bators, Joey Ramone, Dee Dee Ramone, Johnny Ramone. Less than a year later, Hilly Kristal himself would be added to that roll call; the grand old man of New York City punk died of complications of lung cancer on August 28, 2007. Two years later, Jim Carroll would pass away. And, in between, John Varvatos, the high-end men’s fashion designer, opened a retail store on the site of CBGB.

New York City was changing all the time. As the Dead Boys’ Cheetah Chrome put it to Jennifer Fermino of the
New York Post,
“all of Manhattan has lost its soul to money lords.” But some alterations still took your breath away.

And some foes could never be vanquished. But they could be confronted. Eleven years had passed since Patti welcomed the Velvet Underground into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; eleven years since she condemned it as a crass commercial venture. Now it was Patti’s turn to be recognized. And while she admitted to Jessica Robertson of
Spinner.com
that “I’ve never been pro-institution in terms of rock ‘n’ roll,” still she understood that it was an honor to be selected, and she accepted it with grace and gratitude.

She certainly couldn’t complain about the company she would be keeping. Bob Dylan had been inducted in 1988, the Stones in 1989, Jimi Hendrix in 1992, Jim Morrison and the Doors in 1993. The Velvets were in and so was Bruce Springsteen. Maybe, if she thought about it, she could bristle over the fact that the Ramones and the Talking Heads made it in before she did—five years before, in fact. Blondie had been honored the previous year.

But the MC5 and the Stooges were still waiting, and Television too, although 2007’s inductees also included Grandmaster Flash and Van Halen, together with “my good friend Michael Stipe and REM,” she told
Spinner.com
, and the Ronettes, the early sixties girl group whom “I always loved…. I think it’s a really diverse year. I’m very happy.”

She confessed, however, to one small element of sadness. It was not the first time she’d been nominated for the Hall of Fame—almost a decade has passed since her name was first put forward—and she regretted that “my parents, who really looked forward to this, have both passed away since my first nomination.” She added, “I’ll have to accept in their spirit.”

Theirs and so many others’. There was certainly some controversy when it became apparent that Patti alone was being inducted, without the sidemen who had blazed alongside her: Oliver Ray, Tony Shanahan, Jay Dee Daugherty, Ivan Kral, Richard Sohl—not even Lenny Kaye, who had played with her for more than thirty years.

Patti knew who ought to be there, though, and so they were. “Rock ‘n’ roll is collaborative,” she told
Spinner.com
. “You don’t do anything by yourself.”

So it was strange that neither her guest list nor the event’s own included the name Ivan Kral. The guitarist was forced to purchase his own ticket for the event, not only for the privilege of watching somebody else play the guitar lines he’d created but also to hear Patti include in her acceptance speech a sad reference to “the
late
Richard Sohl and Ivan Kral.” Generously, he put it down to a slip of the speechwriting pen.

There was no room, either, for Oliver Ray, her near-constant companion for more than a decade. With neither fanfare nor publicity, for that is how Patti now operated, he slipped out of both her life and her band; she performed now with the unadorned trio that had accompanied her for much of the past decade: Lenny Kaye, Tony Shanahan, and Jay Dee Daugherty.

Patti was inducted by Rage Against the Machine front man Zack de la Rocha, but she also received the praise of a fellow inductee, Van Halen’s Sammy Hagar. “I’m really happy about Patti Smith … who really had such a short, intense career,” he told Joel Selvin of the
San Francisco Chronicle.
“She did it so cool. She really deserves it for being such a rebel and being a girl at that time…. I think it’s cool that they honor those kinds of people. Some awards shows don’t. They go with the most commercial. Half the people don’t know who Patti Smith is, but I think it’s awesome. She was a true artist, a Neil Young kind of artist, where, shit, man, you do it my way or forget it. I like that.”

Patti’s set kicked off with the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter.” “Because the Night” followed, and then came a song that the Internet message boards had only dreamed she might perform, and that she prefaced with the story of her mother doing the vacuuming to it: “Rock n Roll Nigger.”

“My mom was the main person in the world who wanted to see me in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,” she’d told Nick Blakey. “Before my mom died, literally the day before she died, [she asked] if I ever made it, please sing a certain song for her.” That was the one.

Patti was back onstage again with REM to perform the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog”—a little too politely, with Stipe looking and sounding like a high-class waiter. It was a little disorienting, too, when it looked as though Patti was going to don her spectacles to sing the chorus. But it was vicariously thrilling regardless, and it climaxed with guitarist Peter Buck slinging a monitor off the stage and almost crushing a few onlookers’ feet.

And then it was into the ceremonial finale: Patti led the traditional all-star band through a pulsating “People Have the Power,” with Keith Richards and Stephen Stills dueling guitars behind her, and Sammy Hagar, Eddie Vedder, Michael Stipe, and Ronnie Spector sharing her vocals.

But it was her Hall of Fame performance of “Gimme Shelter” that had provided the first public indication of Patti’s forthcoming new album, a dozen-strong collection of cover songs titled
Twelve.

She had talked of making such a record for years. Even at the height of the original Patti Smith Group, she had kicked back and relaxed into the idea of recording an album of her favorite songs. She still possessed one of the early track listings, too, scrawled on the endpaper of her copy of Jean Genet’s
The Thief’s Journal
sometime in 1978. Every time the live set bristled with another cover performance, it appeared that the idea’s day was dawning, and by the late 1970s, the Patti Smith Group’s repertoire had regularly thrilled or astonished audiences with its dips into a shared cultural jukebox.

“I always wanted to do a covers album,” she told Jessica Robertson, “but I didn’t really feel I had the range to do the kind of album I wanted to do. I didn’t know enough about singing. But now it seemed like the right time. As the project evolved, a lot of the songs on the list I made in the beginning didn’t make the final cut, and a lot of songs that I didn’t plan on doing wound up being the ones I chose.”

There were surprises. She remembered performing Neil Young’s “Helpless” at one of Young’s own benefit concerts as a highlight of her mid-1990s resurgence, and strove now to recapture that moment. She drew inspiration from the random songs she heard while sitting in a New York City cafe with the radio on one day. Stevie Wonder’s “Pastime Paradise,” for example, and Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” Hearing the latter for the first time in years, she recalled, “I never in a million years thought I’d do a Tears for Fears cover,” she told Nick Blakey, “but I was buying coffee and thinking about how fucked up the world is, and then it came on and I heard
Everybody wants to rule the world
and I was like ‘yeah.’ That simple line, in one reference, says it all.”

Jimi Hendrix’s “Are You Experienced?” had been on her wish list since the 1970s, but she had backed away because she didn’t feel experienced enough. Now she could handle it, booking into the Electric Lady to record it live.

The Beatles’ “Within You Without You” and Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” took her back to her youth, to that first summer in New York City. “Gimme Shelter” was an invocation of imminent rape and murder that presaged the end of the 1960s; it was recorded with Tom Verlaine and the Chili Peppers’ Flea joining the Kaye/Shanahan/Daugherty unit, red hot after cutting the Airplane song. Bob Dylan’s “Changing of the Guards” catapulted her forward a decade, to her first summer away from the city:
Street Legal
was the first Bob Dylan album she listened to after she moved to Detroit, and the tangled tale that constitutes its opening track made her weep with its intensity and vision.

Paul Simon’s “The Boy in the Bubble” cast her mind back to the
Dream of Life
sessions, when husband Fred and son Jackson had spun Simon’s
Graceland
around the house and gotten caught up in the silliness of “You Can Call Me Al.” Three years after Patti tackled “The Boy in the Bubble,” Peter Gabriel would add his own unique vision to the same tune, which seems odd because it really wasn’t that great a song to begin with. But Patti made it all right, and that was good enough.

The Doors’ “Soul Kitchen” came to her in a dream; the Allman Brothers’ “Midnight Rider” was just a song she wanted to sing.

“But Nirvana was the most emotional experience,” she told Robertson. She had originally intended to cover Kurt Cobain’s “Heart-Shaped Box,” the band’s most recent hit at the time of the songwriter’s death in 1994. But then she heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Nirvana’s breakthrough hit, on a Los Angeles car radio, added banjo and fiddle to guitar and upright bass, and had at it.

And so
Twelve
came together as smoothly as an oldies radio show—not the greatest album Patti Smith has ever made, but a great one for driving to, or singing along or just remembering with. She even celebrated the fact that there wasn’t a single obscure oldie in sight, not one left-field inclusion to prove how esoteric her ears usually were. Her own records were obscure enough, she told Nick Blakey. “This is not a record for me; this is a record for the people…. Something [for them] to think about and enjoy.”