Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story (10 page)

I wept on a stock car / I captured the junkyards / and I sped thru the canyons … wrecking cars was my art.

A “negative effect” rippled through the room, she told David Fricke of
Rolling Stone
in 2004, as Kaye unleashed “his sonic interpretation of a stock car race.” The audience shifted and grumbled; expressions turned exasperated; eyes and ears averted themselves. Poetry, those angry faces seemed to say, was about the power of words, not the needling of noise.

Patti disagreed. “I took that [negativity] as a positive sign.”

Despite the presence of so many poets in the audience, Patti continued to feel like an outsider, a voice on the fringes of even the New York underground’s left-field sensibilities. And although she knew the traditional routes into their world, she eschewed them. Conventional poetry readings bored her; she would rather play a rock ‘n’ roll show, to a rock ‘n’ roll audience, than endure another night of studious academia in front of her so-called peers.

That is the route she took. It was a grueling apprenticeship, she said. Nobody was interested in what she had to say, and she knew that if she had a fifteen-minute slot, ten of them would be spent arguing with the audience. But it was exposure and it was experience.

Her immediate plans, however, moved away from music and verse. One evening, which ultimately stretched over two, Patti and Shepard sat down to write together, passing a typewriter back and forth to create a play that Patti titled
Cowboy Mouth,
from a line in Dylan’s “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” Part autobiography, part wishful thinking, the play is the story of Slim and Cavalle, two lovers—“two big dreamers,” Patti told Robb Baker of
After Dark
—whose life together has deteriorated to the point of wastefulness, a state of affairs for which Slim blames nobody more than Cavalle.

He seeks redemption by asking her to tell him about the life of the French poet Gerard de Nerval, a supposed madman who would walkthe park of the Palais Royal, with his pet lobster on a pale blue ribbon. He liked lobsters, he claimed, because they didn’t bark. He also had a pet raven, to whom he taught the words
J’ai soif—
“I’m thirsty”—and when Nerval died, hanging himself on January 25, 1855, with a relic that he insisted was the Queen of Sheba’s garter, the raven circled his body, calling out those same words.

Other times, Cavalle bemoans her lot in life: savage memories of a childhood spent in therapy, and the bitter pill of having grown from an ugly duckling into an ugly duck. “I never got to be the fucking swan. I paid all those dues and I never got to be the fucking swan.”

A third character, the Lobster Man, is introduced, a would-be rock ‘n’ roll savior, all glam and leather, who soon transforms into the same kind of martyr as the poets Cavalle waxed so lyrical about: the play ends with Cavalle delivering a monologue, while the Lobster Man takes a gun and shoots himself in the head. It was, Patti mourned, the true story of her life with Shepard: two people who came together in love but were destined for “a sad end…. We knew we couldn’t stay together.”

They headed straight into rehearsals for the play anyway. Actor Robert Glaudini was cast as the Lobster Man—but the playwrights themselves took on the roles of doomed lovers Cavalle (Patti) and Slim (Sam). “It was just a play between us,” Patti explained to Robb Baker. “We had lots of alchemy, because we had written the play, we were sayin’ our own lines. Lots of light comin’ out of that stage.” Alongside another Shepard short,
Back Bog Beast Bait,
the play was set to open at the American Place Theater, at St. Clement’s Episcopal Church at 423 West Forty-Sixth Street, on April 29, 1971.

Patti’s latest transition from poet to stage actress was not seamless. According to the program issued for that opening-night performance, the theatrical union Actors’ Equity had forced her to change her name before registering, to avoid being confused with another actress named Patti Smith. She became Johnny Guitar. In addition, claimed the program notes, “she goes abroad twice a year to sing in bars, wearing a black dress and leaning on pianos. She says her best number is ‘My Funny Valentine.’ She also says, ‘I ain’t no actress.’”

Cowboy Mouth
was scarcely a success, not even to its cocreator Shepard. Just weeks earlier, he had taken the stage at the same theater with his wife, O-Lan, in another of his plays,
Mad Dog Blues,
and it was no secret among those who knew of his extramarital romance that O-Lan’s character was at least partly based on Patti. Now here was Patti in person, playing herself while Sam did the same, and it was more than Shepard could tolerate. It was difficult enough to live certain elements of his own life sometimes, without then reliving them on stage.

A few days earlier, Shepard had been asked to join the Holy Modal Rounders in Vermont. He wasn’t sure at first whether he wanted to leave New York City. But one night of
Cowboy Mouth
made up his mind for him. Without a word to Patti, he fled north and, from there, took his wife and son to London.

Patti consoled herself by delving deeper into her writing, both poetry and journalism. She landed another reading at St. Mark’s, opening for Jim Carroll, and found herself headlining the show instead when Carroll was busted for possession in Rye, New York, and detained half the night by the local sheriff. She was invited to introduce a few other readers, too. She wrote her first (and only) review for
Rolling Stone
in the August 19, 1971, issue, lavishing praise on Todd Rundgren’s newly released
Runt
LP but neglecting to mention that they had been lovers. “Like Mozart,” she wrote, “Todd Rundgren never wanted to be born; his mother labored hard to put him here and he’s fought hard to singe his musical autograph in the progressive pages of rock & roll.”

Another friend stepped forward.

Three years earlier, Sandy Pearlman had been a writer for
Crawdaddy
when he had the idea of putting a band together to perform a series of musical poems he had written,
Imaginos.
Since that time, the band he created, Soft White Underbelly, had morphed into the Stalk-Forrest Group, but it was about to change its name again, to the Blue Öyster Cult, and set out on a career pioneering a seismic brand of militaristically mystical metal. Pearlman would remain their manager, and looking to expand his stable of clients, he was pushing Patti to delve deeper into rock ‘n’ roll as well.

His dream of pairing her with a keyboard player and composer named Lee Crabtree collapsed when Crabtree committed suicide following a row with his parents over an inheritance from his grandfather. So Pearlman suggested Patti join the Blue Öyster Cult instead, as a behind-the-scenes writer if not a performer. Patti never took him up on the offer, but she did start dating the band’s keyboard and rhythm guitar player, Allen Lanier, igniting what would become the most permanent relationship she had ever known. She and Lanier would remain partners until 1978.

Other opportunities arose. She talked with promoter Steve Paul about the possibility of putting together a band with another of his clients, guitarist Rick Derringer; they even took a few promo photos together. Patti stepped back from this project as well. She wanted to perform, but she wanted to do so completely on her own terms, with a musical collaborator whose own ambitions walked hand-in-hand with hers. Not a yes-man per se, but somebody who would allow her to lay down the law when she saw fit to do so, while at the same time putting forward ideas that she would wish she’d thought of herself.

Steve Paul moved on to offer Iggy Pop a berth in Derringer’s band (he, too, turned it down). The Blue Öyster Cult moved on to sign with Columbia Records and become the most significant American metal merchants of the 1970s.

And Patti moved on as well. In September 1971, she appeared for the first time before cameras being held by somebody who was not a close friend or associate. The BBC was in New York City, shooting a documentary about the Chelsea Hotel and interviewing its most familiar—or persistent—denizens.

With her feathered hair, silver jewelry, and a beguilingly engaging smile, archetypal hippie chick Patti was among those who eased their way into shot, performing a short poem for the cameras that, to the surprise, perhaps, of everybody she told, made it into the final cut. Just six lines long, “my little prayer for New York” is performed by a clearly shy and obviously nervous young woman, batting her eyes at the camera and gazing upwards from beneath her bangs.

New York is the thing that seduced me
New York is the thing that formed me
New York is the thing that deformed me
New York is the thing that perverted me
New York is the thing that converted me
And New York’s the thing I love, too.

Compared to much of the rest of the documentary, her verse takes its significance only from the retrospective identity of its performer. But it is strangely affecting as well, an acknowledgement not only of the magnetism of New York City but also of the hold that the city has on so many imaginations. And it was that hold that Patti wanted to infiltrate for herself. Other performers became a part of New York City, but that was a one-way street. She wanted the traffic to run in both directions.

September 1971 also saw the Detroit-based rock magazine
Creem
publish three of Patti’s poems, at the same time recruiting her as one of their occasional freelance contributors. “For Bob Neuwirth,” “Autobiography,” and “For Sam Shepard” (the last a slightly revised “Ballad of a Bad Boy”) all appeared in that issue, making this her first true step outside of New York City. The magazine’s nationwide distribution allowed readers across America to experience Patti’s writing firsthand, and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore spoke for many when he recalled for Robert Matheu and Brian J. Bowe’s book
Creem: America’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll Magazine,
“The first time I ever heard of Patti Smith was in
Creem
… when they ran her poetry. Those pictures of her with the short Keith Richards hair and the cigarette—they completely made you stop in your tracks. What is that? It read so good and looked so good, it made me realize that that’s what I wanted to do. I want to go to New York and see that.”

She was writing occasional pieces, too, for
Rock
magazine, a monthly competitor to
Rolling Stone
that took itself very seriously indeed—certainly too seriously to entertain a writer who, dispatched to interview Eric Clapton, commenced her inquisition by asking him for his six favorite colors.

Finally, she received a call from tiny publisher Telegraph Books, run out of a storefront on Jones Street by writers Andrew Wylie and Victor Bockris. They wanted to publish the first collection of her poetry.

In his 1999 biography of Patti, Bockris outlined her appeal to Telegraph Books: that she provided, for the first time, a voice for a generation that was still attempting to adjust to the violence that had marked the end of the 1960s, violence that shattered the hippie dream that was the hallmark of the decade’s final years. The fatal stabbing at the Rolling Stones’ Altamont Free Concert in December 1969, the Manson murders that shocked the world earlier that same year, the continued war in Vietnam, the US government’s increasingly heavy-handed response to domestic protest, “the increasingly dangerous drug scene that had changed from something peaceful and friendly to something violent, dangerous, and criminal”—all of these things were battering a generation that had been persuaded, however fleetingly, to dream of a man-made utopia. Patti Smith, Bockris reasoned, was the voice that could help them survive the storm.

She may not, Bockris continued, have been aware of this calling, and may not have been prepared to answer it. But he and Wylie glimpsed her potential regardless, and they would do their level best to encourage her to answer it.

Gerard Malanga made the necessary introductions, although Bockris has also insisted that it would have been difficult for anybody on the New York City arts scene of the day
not
to be aware of Patti Smith. He wrote in
Patti Smith: An Unauthorized Biography:
“For a short time in the spring and summer of 1971, she was high on the list of New York’s ‘Hot 100’ who were going to Make It, and was turning down offers right, left, and center.”

This is probably an exaggeration. Yes, she had succeeded in her handful of public readings to date, before an audience composed largely of friends and associates. Yes, she was making some headway in the world of rock journalism. But they were baby steps at best, and if Patti’s personality was sufficiently urgent that the people she encountered were not quick to forget her, she was scarcely the first young up-and-comer to have that effect on people. Any offers that Patti was receiving at this timewere being made by would-be entrepreneurs who were in the exact same position she was: just starting out on the first rung of their chosen ladder and casting around for anybody who could help them move a little higher. Which is precisely what Patti was doing when she accepted Telegraph Books’ offer.

Fronted by an indelibly atmospheric black-and-white photograph taken by New Yorker Judy Linn (destined to become one of the young Patti’s most dedicated chroniclers), Patti’s first book of poems,
Seventh Heaven,
would emerge as a forty-seven-page collection of twenty-two poems, dedicated to actress Anita Pallenberg. It would be published the following spring as a limited run of fifty signed and numbered first editions, alongside a regular run of one thousand copies selling at a dollar apiece.

Writing it was simple, or so Patti later laughed in the
New York Times Magazine.
Speaking with writers Tony Hiss and David McClelland in late 1975, she explained, “I’d sit at the typewriter and type until I felt sexy, then I’d go and masturbate to get high, and then I’d come back in that higher place and write some more.”

By now more than a year had passed since her first St. Mark’s reading, and Patti sensibly opted not to include in her book any of the verses performed there, nor those that might have been glimpsed in
Creem.
Instead, she included her tributes to her sister Linda, actress/singer Marianne Faithfull, aviator Amelia Earhart, and actress Marilyn Monroe, under her married name, Marilyn Miller. The collection also featured her odes to French martyr Joan of Arc and one of the actresses who have portrayed her, Renee Falconetti, and her elegy to Edie Sedgwick, written just days after the news of the beauty-no-more’s drug death on November 16, 1971.