Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story (15 page)

By contrast, “Piss Factory” sounds rushed and hectic, a mood ideal for the pell-mell nature of the poem itself, but one that Patti felt obliged to excuse when she was asked about the sessions. The lion’s share of their studio time, she explained, was devoted to recording and mixing “Hey Joe.” “Piss Factory” was run though, recorded, and mixed in an hour.

With its first single in the can, the three-piece group made its live debut at the Greendoor on May 18, 1974. The real test, however, lay two months ahead, when Patti would finally make her headlining entrance to Max’s Kansas City. There she would determine the wisdom, or otherwise, of all that they had been working on in the rehearsal room: the layering of rhythms and melodies behind songs that she had been performing as poems for over three years; the fusion of her work with that of other artists.

“Hey Joe” was not her sole hybrid song. She grafted her poem “Oath” onto the song “Gloria”; the poem’s opening lines,
Jesus died for somebody’s sins / but not mine,
completely redefined Van Morrison’s original ballad of a bad girl. The song had been a big hit for Van Morrison’s first band, Them, back in 1965, and since then it had gravitated into the repertoire of almost every garage band in the country, by virtue of a slobberingly simple rhythm and a chorus chant that grabbed every voice in the room:
G-l-o-r-i-a.
It was Lenny Kaye’s idea to do the song in the first place; according to Patti, she had never wanted to perform it. “I didn’t really have any interest in covering ‘Gloria,’” she admitted to Terry Gross. “But it had three chords and I liked the rhythm, and we just sort of used it for our own design.”

The trio also worked up a version of the old Motown classic “The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game”; with their song “Land,” they interpolated songwriter Chris Kenner’s “Land of 1000 Dances”—a hit for Wilson Pickett—into a brutal tale of homosexual rape in a locker room; and they realigned “Time Is on My Side” to prove that it was. Individually and collectively, the band was creating “a battleground for all kinds of adolescent excursions,” explained Patti on
Fresh Air.
“So that’s why we picked songs like that.”

They believed all their selections were a natural extension of what had gone before, but they also realized that, for the first time, they were crossing the divide between art and commerce, starry-eyed idealism and bull-headed populism. Observers drawn by Patti’s reputation as a poet would wince as Kaye struck up his electrics behind her and her poetry morphed into song, while the know-nothing tourists who flocked to Max’s shrugged and mumbled about Jim Morrison’s leather trousers.

Max’s had changed dramatically since the days when Andy Warhol could describe it as “the exact spot where pop art and pop life came together in the ‘60s.” Or, rather, Max’s clientele had changed. It was more of an industry hangout now—still a place where people went to be seen, but one where there seemed to be a lot more looking than was ever worth looking at. It was a part of the tourist route, with the stars securely roped off behind however many walls of bouncers they could bring.

Enough so-called stars still passed through, though, to ensure that Max’s retained that slither of subversive glamour that had attracted Patti and Mapplethorpe five years before. The club’s booking policy, too, remained haute. Bob Marley played his first-ever US shows there, opening for the then equally unknown Springsteen; Aerosmith, Billy Joel, and Garland Jeffreys passed through. But Max’s was also a testing ground for local talent, and home to established local heroes as well. When the Mercer Arts Center had been forced to close in 1973, after its ceiling collapsed during an Eric Emerson and his Magic Tramps rehearsal, the party—the New York Dolls among them—moved the few blocks up to Max’s Kansas City, and the fates continued to conspire from there.

Patti’s group was booked at Max’s for four nights running, July 12–15, 1974. Sohl later described the earliest Max’s shows as tentative, exciting more for the performers’ own uncertainty and nervousness—“How would we be accepted?”—than for the performances themselves. Their confidence grew, however, as the residency ran on. When the three came offstage following the fourth and final night, it was in the knowledge that, while there would always be dissenters, the supporters would outnumber them every time.

“It could have been our Newport Folk Festival,” Sohl continued, referring to the night nine years earlier when Bob Dylan took the stage before his core constituency of folk-music fans and blew their heads off with a wall of unrepentant electricity, only to have the roars of disapproval all but drown out his rock band. Instead, “people seemed to like it.”

More than that, people seemed to acknowledge, agreeing with the musicians themselves, that the shift was necessary—not only if Patti was to pursue any form of stardom but simply because the day was gone when an artist could afford to sit still through his or her career, content to weave around the same circle of arenas, exhibiting to the same admirers. Besides, it was not as though Patti had deliberately set out to seduce a rock ‘n’ roll crowd. True, her poem “Work Song” did insist
I was working real hard / to show the world / what I could do.
But it was the crowd that had courted her, opening its doors and inviting her in, apparently understanding that she had a lot more in common with its own aims than many who were already inside, including some of rock’s most storied superstars.

Within days, Mickey Ruskin had rebooked Patti for another twenty shows: two a night between August 28 and September 2, 1974, and eight more on the same schedule the following week, September 6–9.

Meanwhile, Television was celebrating the release of its own first record, cut in stark emulation of Smith’s example. The band had been through the fires of record company interest, and had even been paired with Brian Eno for a handful of demo recordings. But Tom Verlaine was never satisfied with what other ears heard in the music he made, and when Richard Hell left for Johnny Thunders’s new band, the Heartbreakers, Verlaine resolved to forgo the record companies and release the group’s debut single under the independent label Ork Records, which Terry Ork formed specifically for that purpose.

Recorded on a 4-track borrowed from the Mumps’ drummer, Jay Dee Daugherty, “Little Johnny Jewel” was hypnotically haphazard and arrogantly ambitious, with Verlaine’s strangled gulp of a voice as dislocated as the glacial riff. The track stretched to more than seven minutes in its original form, so it was sliced down the middle and spread across both sides of the record for single release.

But, for all that future critics would compare Television to a new wave Grateful Dead, the song’s almost endless guitar noodles have more in common with Philip Glass than Jerry Garcia, and its appearance on 45 provoked gasps of disbelief from both without and within. Lou Reed asserted that it had no chance of becoming a hit (not long after Tom Verlaine was reported to have confiscated the batteries from Lou’s tape recorder at a Television gig). And Television’s own Richard Lloyd was so opposed to the release that he promptly quit the group. But he returned three days later—and “Little Johnny Jewel” went on to sell twenty thousand hand-bagged copies by word of mouth alone. It was the correct choice after all.

Patti, needless to say, loved it. She also delighted in the fact that Verlaine had written one of her childhood nicknames, Winghead, into the lyric. The kids at school had called her that because her hair stuck out at strange angles, and she’d loathed them for it. Verlaine made it sound kinda sexy.

In another echo of her past, a revival of
Cowboy Mouth,
the play she wrote with Sam Shepard back in 1971, was running in a small theater in the West Village, Unit 453 in Westbeth’s Exchange for the Arts. Across town, Patti was developing a reputation that in some circles rivaled Shepard’s own.

Her name even traveled to the UK, as
Melody Maker
‘s New York City correspondent, Chris Charlesworth, warned readers, “She’s a bitch straining at the leash in most of her songs, all of which are prefaced by some kind of unusual story.” It was “her ability to hold the audience’s attention” that he perceived as “her main selling point: drift away and you’ll miss something you wish you hadn’t.” Testily, fans may have noted that Genesis, too, prefaced its songs with some kind of unusual story, but if anybody was expecting any further similarities before a Patti Smith performance, they were swiftly disabused.

Patti’s new status was embodied in another piece of poetry from her past, lines from “The Ballad of Hagen Waker” that she might never have dreamed she would experience for herself:
That capricornous fever / of being higher than the crowd / as for the crowd / they are ecstatic.

You know, she had written, it’s often I’m glowing in the dark.

Her schedule remained hectic. The trio staged their latest Rock’n’Rimbaud events, one at the Riverside Plaza Hotel in New York City on October 27, 1974, another within the palatial surroundings of the Roosevelt Hotel’s Blue Hawaiian Discotheque two weeks later. At the November 10 Rock’n’Rimbaud, the musicians were joined for the first time by a fourth member, folk guitarist Sandy Bull.

Bull is widely proclaimed one of the fathers of world music, an incredibly eclectic musician whose talents stretched from riotous Chuck Berry covers to hypnotic Middle Eastern rhythms, from classical favorites to salsa and beyond, all played out on such instruments as oud, sarod, six-string bass, and pedal steel. He had been tremendously popular throughout the 1960s before a drug habit forced him into virtual retirement.

An old friend of Bobby Neuwirth, Bull was just beginning to reemerge from his addictions when Patti, Kaye, and Sohl began considering augmenting their lineup even further. But he was never seen as a full-time recruit to the group; billed as a special guest for the evening, he joined them onstage for the opening “All the Hipsters Go to the Movies,” then disappeared until the final number, an impassioned “Land.” His presence, however, only hardened the trio’s determination to stretch out even further, a mood that their next adventure only amplified.

Days after the Roosevelt Hotel gig, the trio flew to Berkeley, California, to play a show at Rather Ripped Records, the self-styled “best little record store you ever saw.” (The shop’s full name, quoted in its advertisements, was I’d Rather Be Ripped Records, but signage to that effect would not have sat well with the authorities around the Northside neighborhood.) Taking the stage in her white Keith Richards T-shirt, Patti drew the small crowd close and then closer still. “Kids are more maniac in Berkeley than anywhere else in America,” she told Lisa Robinson in
Hit Parader
in 1977. “Even more than CBGB. It’s just so incredible…. They’ll scream and do interpretative dancing. They don’t give a shit about being cool.”

From Rather Ripped, the trio moved on to San Francisco and the Fillmore West—at least according to one of the most intriguing legends in their mythology. As the story goes, promoter Bill Graham offered them a spot at the Fillmore’s latest audition night, which the band celebrated by inviting Jonathan Richman, the Boston songwriter who was in California recording his first album at the time, to sit in on drums. Patti recites this same tale (with no more detail than that) in
Just Kids.
Unfortunately, the Fillmore closed its doors in 1971 and would not reopen until the 1980s. With nobody else appearing to have any memory of the occasion—Richman merely answered “no” when he was asked about it in the 1990s—this would seem to be one of those little legends that gets glued into history without anybody questioning whether it actually occurred. In this case, it probably didn’t.

The group did, however, make it down to Los Angeles for a couple of shows at the Whisky a Go Go, opening for the British funk-rock band Fancy, which was launching its first-ever tour in the wake of the hit single “Wild Thing.” It was an experience that Patti would preserve within the ever-developing text of what was already being singled out as her landmark poem, “Land.”

“Land” started life, she would tell Tony Hiss and David McClelland in 1975, as a poem about “a carnival of fools in a city where you can’t see the stars, but I gave it a New York ballad rendition—you know, let’s keep on laughing, let’s keep on dancing. Then, as I got more confident, it was Scheherazade: ‘Welcome to the Palace of a Thousand Sensations. It hopes you will
lose
it here, baby.’ Then it got real sadistic…. Then it was Arabia, Mexico, UFOs, razors, jackknives, horses, and in some notes I wrote last December 16—the 701st birthday of the great Persian mystic poet Jalaluddin Rumi—Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix.”

Jim Morrison was added to the mix in response to Patti’s Los Angeles performance. “I felt the rhythms of L.A. and understood the Doors’ album
L.A. Woman
for the first time. So Johnny the hero of ‘Land’ became very intimately linked with Morrison,” she explained to Mick Gold of
Street Life.

“Johnny got in trouble, I was in trouble on the stage, Morrison had some trouble on stage. Kids used to scream at Morrison wanting himto do his hits. He was very torn apart and frustrated, because he felt himself to be a blues guy and a poet, but he was promoted more as a sex star. That’s cool too, but he didn’t know how to shift from one to the other. He didn’t want to sing ‘Light My Fire,’ he wanted to sing ‘Horse Latitudes.’”

He was never able to make that transition. So she would make it for him.

8

NEO BOY

“T
HE FIRST TIME
I heard Patti Smith—and I’ve heard a
lot
of people, been in music all my life—she just had a magnetism,” CBGB proprietor Hilly Kristal recalled. “She may not have been a singer, but she sure sounded like one. She stayed on pitch, she bent the notes just right, she sang real well. She communicated. The life was simple for her. It was all new. She was doing something that she’d probably wanted to do all her life. She was excited by her own feeling that it was happening for her. She loved it. I heard the same performance over and over, and she was one of the few people I
could
listen to over and over.”