Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story (25 page)

Patti was still convalescing, but she was of course already considering her next move. A new album—that went without saying. But even before she breathed a word about it, she knew that it would swerve as dramatically away from her last LP, the miasmic glory of
Radio Ethiopia,
as that album had swung away from the skeletal beauty of
Horses.

The album would take shape around “Easter,” her prayer of rebirth and rejuvenation. It would nod to the past by clearing up some of the most deserving old soldiers in the group’s live repertoire: “Rock n Roll Nigger” (her original choice for the new LP’s title), “Space Monkey,” and, at long last, “Privilege.”

And it would speak publicly of her long-distance romance with Fred. They scarcely ever got to see one another, and they had the long-distance phone bills to prove it. But “25th Floor” and “Godspeed” spoke of the love that was growing between them, and the mood of the music would broadcast that sentimentality even further. (Meanwhile, a new poem in
Babel,
“Thread,” would speak to the domesticity that Patti felt when the pair were together:
i was sitting by the window holding your button. i wanted to sew it on your coat.)

But
Easter
would also be constructed around an awareness that after two albums that were already being spoken of as “cult” favorites, fans and Patti’s label alike expected her to finally step out into the commercial daylight. The pressure was exacerbated by, of all people, her old rivals Blondie. Signed to the small Private Stock Records label at the end of 1976, the group had transferred to the major Chrysalis in early 1977, and with their first, eponymous album picking up excellent results and fair sales, all indications were that the group would be breaking through—in Europe, if not the United States—with their second album,
Plastic Letters.

That set was being recorded around the same time that the Patti Smith Group went into the studio themselves, on November 7, 1977, to begin work on
Easter.
Producer Jimmy Iovine would oversee the sessions; Patti selected him because she liked what he’d been doing with Bruce Springsteen. Iovine had been engineer on Springsteen’s 1975 album
Born to Run
and had just wrapped up work in the same capacity on the long-awaited follow-up
Darkness on the Edge of Town.

The
Easter
job was a big deal for Iovine. Although he’d known Patti for over a year now, since they met at the Record Plant studios in 1976, he also knew that she could have worked with any producer she wanted. Instead, she called in a guy who had just one major-label credit to his name: Flame, a band he formed with singer Marge Raymond that was backed up by sundry members of Springsteen’s E Street Band.

Iovine realized that the Patti Smith Group would require careful handling. Not in terms of personality; he got along famously with all of them. But he needed to point out that he was a producer, not a miracle worker, and listening to the group’s outlines of the album, some people had already started wondering if a miracle was what they actually required.

The gigs that the Patti Smith Group had played since her return from injury were a very different beast from those that preceded it. Patti herself acknowledged that the songs had become a lot shorter and faster. There was still room for improvisation, such as that magnificent inconcert moment when the hard-riffing (and, to be truthful, somewhat pedestrian) “25th Floor” lurched into “High on Rebellion,” the self-defining snatch of
Babel
that answered so many of her musical critics while at the same time it offered them further ammunition to use against her:
here I am struggling and filled with dread.
But even “Privilege,” for so long a touchstone for lyrical flights of fancy, could be accused of having settled down, although the blasphemies that were so much a part of it, the cries of
goddamn
that rang through the coda, would soon be outraging radio all the same.

It was the clutch of new songs that would be accompanying the band into the studio that really documented how far the band had shifted from its earlier improvisational roots. They simply didn’t pack the manic edge that was once the hallmark of Smith’s writing. Some of them had not even seen a live stage yet, and as the new album unfolded across the winter, any analysis of its progress could not help but acknowledge how unfulfilled those songs felt. “Till Victory,” “We Three,” even the chanted mystique of the fan favorite “Ghost Dance”—all could have benefited immeasurably from a few months of road work, and the possibility that Patti was leaning hard toward her record label’s desire for a solid commercial success, rather than another album of cult appeal, had never seemed so probable.

Lenny Kaye tried to play down the commercial sheen, by looking toward the future. The band had just flipped its modus operandi, that’s all, recording songs before they performed them live. A few months on the road would soon roughen them up. And when journalist Sandy Robertson repeated the suggestion that they were chasing a hit record, Kaye was adamant: “There was no conscious drive to sell records, that was like our last thought.”

Or was it? Even Patti may not have thought it through yet, but a hit record does more than elevate its makers into the echelons of pop stardom. It can also be a nest egg for the future, for a time when an artist cannot (through injury—a bad fall, for example) or will not (for personal reasons—a new love affair) continue performing.

Patti had already acknowledged that there might come a time when she would no longer be working, and the songwriting credits on the new record were designed to offset that shock for her bandmates, at least in financial terms. On
Radio Ethiopia,
Ivan Kral had been her most frequent songwriting partner. This time, he shared only as many writing credits as Jay Dee Daugherty—that is to say, one. Patti explained that the decision to spread the credits around was made in the name of democracy. But democracy now? Or democracy for the future?

Despite Patti’s and Kaye’s protestations, Jimmy Iovine was under no illusions as to what was expected of him. The album was moving along nicely, but Iovine had yet to hear a solitary song that struck him as a potential hit single, and that was what Arista was calling for.

Iovine had already pulled two live recordings onto the disc: the medley of “25th Floor” and “High on Rebellion” and a reading of the poem “Babelogue.” The latter would segue dramatically into the seething “Rock n Roll Nigger,” a song that the label was already eyeing with considerable trepidation. The notion that the most explosive word in racism could be reclaimed as a label for all outsiders was not a new one; John and Yoko Ono had planted the same seed five years ago with “Woman Is the Nigger of the World.” And one only needed to read Patti’s lyrics to understand that she was making a similar point. But the analogy remained an obscure one, and Arista knew that anytime anyone heard that word, they were immediately going to bristle.

Not for the first time, Patti’s guarantee of complete artistic control, which was one of the hooks that had pulled her onto Arista in the first place, struck the bosses as one freedom too far. But the suggestion that the lyrics be altered was not one that anybody would broach, eitheropenly or surreptitiously. That meant there was no way that the strongest and most commercial song on the LP so far could ever be released as a radio-friendly 45.

Which was why Iovine called up Bruce Springsteen one day to ask whether he had any plans for a demo that had been gathering dust on the shelf following their most recent album sessions. Springsteen had completed only the chorus, but Iovine thought it might be just what the Patti Smith album needed.

Still, when Iovine passed the demo on to Patti, she accepted the gift with something less than wild enthusiasm. She had no compunction about allowing other writers to share in her songwriting credits, but only because they supplied the musical palette that she was unable to create. The idea of, essentially, collaborating on her lyrics, too, was not one that she had ever considered, nor one that she welcomed now. For a time, the song sat more or less unplayed.

But one evening, waiting for Fred Smith’s now all-but-nightly call, she popped the cassette into the player, listened once, and then listened again and again. Iovine had told her that he loved the idea of a woman singing from a man’s point of view; Springsteen added that the song was written in her key. Now she realized that both were correct. “Bruce … gave me the music, and it had some mumbling on it,” she told John Tobler in October 1978, “and Bruce is a genius mumbler, like the sexiest mumbler I ever heard. I just listened to it, and the words just tumbled out of me.” Long before the phone finally rang, she had drafted the lyrics that would soon become an anthem.

“[Bruce] wrote the tag,
Because the night belongs to lovers,”
she added, “which was in between the mumbling; he’d say that every once in a while. He said I didn’t have to keep that bit, but I thought it was really nice—I always write the lyrics to my own songs, unless they’re covers, but I respected his lyrics, and I thought it was a very nice sentiment, so I built the rest of the lyrics, which are obviously mine, around his sentiment.”

“Because the Night” was recorded and slotted into the near-complete album just days after Patti finished writing it. She was already convinced that she had her hit single. To make room for the newcomer, Patti dropped “Godspeed” from the track list, and set it up to be her next B-side instead.

It was time to consider the album cover. Patti wanted something sexy, something sensual—something that she could jerk off to, she laughed. “I thought if I could do it as an experiment, then fifteen-year-old boys could do it,” she told
Rolling Stone’s
Charles M. Young, “and that would make me very happy.” Photographer Lynn Goldsmith delivered. Patti dismissed the inevitable criticism: “People say to me, ‘aren’t you afraid of becoming a sex object?’ Especially a lot of writers are obsessed with making you feel guilty or upset because you might become a sex object. Well, I find that very exciting. I think sex is one of the five highest sensations one can experience. A very high orgasm is a way of communication with our Creator.”

Easter
was complete. It was scheduled for release in March 1978—just in time for Easter. The single “Because the Night” would follow close behind.

Patti remained busy. Her art exhibitions in New York City, including one at the Gotham Book Mart, were both huge successes; so was another at the Galerie Veith Turske in Cologne, West Germany. She flew to that city to give a reading in October 1977; then, back home just days later, the full band performed a phenomenal set at a benefit for the Hayden Planetarium.

Deliberately, though, they kept the new album’s contents under wraps. Not until the first night of their year-end three-day run at CBGB, on December 29, would the Patti Smith Group offer up any hint as to what
Easter
portended, as half the album’s contents were drip-fed into the set list. It would be twenty-four hours more before she finally premiered “Because the Night,” with coauthor Springsteen joining her on stage to help the song along.

The new year started slowly, though, and it was the beginning of February 1978 before the Patti Smith Group finally convened for anything more than rehearsals, flying out to Ann Arbor—Fred “Sonic” Smith’s home turf—to play four shows at the Second Chance. A six-hundred-capacity club at 516 East Liberty Street that opened in 1974 as a student hangout, the Second Chance was now a magnet, in the words of the
Ann Arbor Observer,
for “younger audiences from Detroit’s western suburbs,” a “seedy” clientele in the eyes of some observers, and a more “unruly” one as well. But also a more excitable one. When the Ramones played the Second Chance in February 1977, with Sonic’s Rendezvous Band opening for them, the show passed into history as one of the most gloriously volatile the Ramones ever played outside of New York City—so much so that they were back there for a repeat showing in June.

The venue was certainly a second home for Sonic’s Rendezvous Band, and their supporters were out in force as Fred Smith’s group lined up to open Patti’s four shows. Especially as it went without saying that Sonic himself would join the headliners on stage for much of their set as well.

What nobody expected, though, was the surprise that Fred and Patti were waiting to deliver. That Patti was leaving New York City, to live with Fred in Detroit. The couple had already taken rooms in the Book Cadillac Hotel; they would get started with the house hunting as soon as they could.

Leaving New York City was “a very tough thing”; she would never tire of saying that. But it was “a great joy” as well, the adventure of a lifetime. “You know, like a pioneer. It’s like you have to ‘Go West!’ I’ve always been a very East Coast girl,” she told William Burroughs. “[But] when I was a teenager I thought that the coolest city wasn’t New York, it was Detroit”—because Detroit had Motown.

More than that, though, there was the knowledge that she really didn’t care where she lived, so long as she was with Smith. “I have met the person in my life that I’ve been waiting to meet since I was a little girl…. For the first time, I’m not pursuing—the person has opened up to me another way to express myself truly.” As Patti prepared for the release of her album of rebirth, she was preparing for a new birth as well, counting down the days until she and Fred could be together without rock ‘n’ roll getting in the way.

And right now there seemed to be a lot of days to get through. There were a couple of American shows to perform, in Redondo Beach, California, and Buffalo, New York. Soon the band would be off on its third tour of Europe—but first she’d been asked to appear at Arista’s 1978 sales conference, an event whose entire focus, it seems, was aimed toward the Patti Smith Group.

The day of the conference, February 28, 1978, would have been the late Rolling Stone Brian Jones’s thirty-fifth birthday; Patti had always noted anniversaries like that, even if she wasn’t sure what they portended. Tonight, though, despite all the awful connotations that the term “sales conference” usually bears, the mood inside the room was electric, as though everyone was celebrating something momentous. A birthday, a new day.