Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story (16 page)

Patti played her first-ever CBGB show at the end of December 1974, right around the time that a passing journalist asked if she still wanted to become a famous poet. She would prefer to be remembered as a great rock ‘n’ roll star, she replied, and she meant it.

“Which,” said Ivan Kral, “is pretty much where I came in to the picture.”

Ivan Král (he later dropped the accent from his last name) was born in 1948 in Prague, then the capital of the Iron Curtain nation of Czechoslovakia. Fifteen years later, in 1963, his parents Karel and Otylie left their homeland for a new life in New York, where Karel was appointed a journalist and translator at the United Nations. Ivan and his brother Pavel followed them in 1966, and, in the near-decade since then, the family had built an entire new life in the West. Because they could not return home.

Karel had been among the most vociferous critics of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Now he was forever watchful of reprisals, and had been assigned an FBI guard to protect him from the still-vengeful Communists. Regularly, the mailman would deliver innocuous-looking invitations for him to speak at grandly titled European conferences, none of which existed as anything but a means of luring him back within reach of the Státní Bezpe?nost, Czechoslovakian secret police.

He didn’t fall for their tricks, but other dissidents were not so lucky. Karel told his son about the Czech tennis player who was picked up while visiting his girlfriend in Romania and dragged back to Prague to try to lure his father out of hiding. And later, as Ivan’s musical career promised to take him back to Europe to tour, his father would have just one warning for him. “Do what you have to do,” the old man said. “But I’m not going to bail you out. If anything happens, you’re on your own. There’s nothing I can do for you.”

Ivan had already tasted fame in Czechoslovakia, as a member of the teenage rock band Saze. The group’s “Pierrot” had topped the Czech charts shortly before he left the country. Now he was working in the mail room at industry mogul Allen Klein’s ABKCO empire—where the affairs of state revolved around the latest happenings in the world of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones—and spending his free time haunting the clubs and nightspots of New York City.

He ran through a handful of small bands, then in 1972 formed Luger, a tight and glamorous group that was constantly being tipped for big things. Unfortunately, Kral reflected, his bandmates—guitarist Mister Paulin, bassist Jon Thomas, and drummer Shayne Harris—were too easily seduced by the modicum of local fame that had already come their way. “They thought they were stars; they would rather go to Max’s and pose than rehearse, so I decided to fold the band.”

That was fall 1974, and he did not have far to look for his next project—or, at least, certainly not as far as he expected. He journeyed to the West Coast to see if he could make a fresh musical start out there, and worked for a time with Shaun Cassidy’s band Longfellow, but he soonreturned to New York City and promptly joined what was left of the Stilettos, as Debbie Harry, Chris Stein, Fred Smith, and drummer Billy O’Connor morphed into a new band, Blondie.

It was a short-lived experience. The band recorded some demos for journalist Alan Betrock, but gigs were few, excitement was elusive, and publicity was minimal. While Patti Smith, Television, and the newly emergent Ramones were devouring local column inches, Blondie remained stubbornly unheralded and unknown. By Christmas 1974, Kral was desperate to find another gig.

He played a couple of auditions for a new band that David Bowie’s old guitarist, Mick Ronson, was building with drummer Hilly Michaels, and that probably would have been a good fit. But then he heard that Patti Smith was auditioning, and that was all he needed to know. For months, he and his friend Jay Dee Daugherty, the 4-track-owning drummer with the Mumps, had been catching Patti’s shows and wondering why she didn’t just form a full band. Now she was, and Kral wanted to be a part of it.

Richard Sohl shuddered as he recalled the auditions that the band held for a second guitar player, beginning a few days after Christmas 1974 and then continuing on the other side of Patti’s New Year’s Day appearance at St. Mark’s Poetry Project. “About fifty guitar players came down,” he said, and more than a handful of them impressed them.

There was, however, always one drawback. Too many guitar players would spend their audition talking to either Kaye or Sohl, either ignoring Patti or, at best, treating her as some kind of adornment to the main business. Even when they learned that she not only sang but also wrote the lyrics, she remained an outsider in their eyes. Sohl remembered one player who, having thrilled everybody during the audition, then blew it all by taking the guys to one side and suggesting they lose the chick. His exact words were “She can’t sing and she looks like shit.”

The audition itself was not an easy prospect. “Our thing then was to play ‘Gloria’ for forty minutes and see who dropped out first,” Sohl continued. “All of those guys didn’t understand what we were doing.”

But then, Patti told Nick Tosches in
Penthouse,
“Ivan Kral came in. This little Czechoslovakian would-be rock star…. We did [‘Land’] andit went on so long I thought I was gonna puke. But Ivan was so nervous he wouldn’t stop, and we figured that was really cool.” What they appreciated most, though, was that Kral meshed so seamlessly with their existing sound, even as he enhanced it. They were a rock ‘n’ roll band at last—but they were still themselves.

“I think my background helped us click,” Kral mused, an observation that Sohl was swift to acknowledge: “We all sympathized very strongly with the fact of Ivan’s exile. I think all of us felt in some ways that we were exiles; we played in that outsider status.”

Patti also came to see him as the guardian angel of the group, someone who was constantly aware of her onstage needs and would do whatever he could to make her look good, even at the cost of his own performance. Patti had recently introduced a stylized revision of the Who’s “My Generation” into the repertoire, replacing the familiar
Things they do look awful cold
/
I hope I die before I get old
refrain with a bellowed
I don’t need that fucking shit / Hope I die because of it;
Kral had a crucial guitar part to worry about, she marveled, but he’d always take the time to make sure her microphone was ready.

Days after Patti’s latest appearance at St. Mark’s (where the audience was made privy to, among other jewels, her uproarious description of ancient Egyptian soothsaying), the January 30, 1975, edition of the
Soho Weekly News
announced Kral’s arrival into the band in the kindest terms: “The very talented Ivan Kral, formerly of Luger, has joined Patti Smith’s band on guitar and bass.” The following week, the group was in Philadelphia, opening for ex-Animal Eric Burdon at the Main Point.

Nobody in the band doubted that they were rising fast. Even though they still weren’t earning much more than five dollars each a night, every show they played was swamped with curious journalists; every time they opened a magazine, there was another mention of Patti.

The gang of four—Patti, Kaye, Kral, and Sohl—were all but permanent residents of CBGB. They would hang in the audience to witness whatever was unfolding on the stage or take the stage themselves, then depart for other hot spots to see and be seen. Four nights coheadlining CBGB with Television, February 13–16, were followed by a reception for the Blue Öyster Cult, whose
Tyranny and Mutation
album was aboutto be released. Smith’s “Baby Ice Dog” was one of its highlights. And when Kral and friend Amos Poe decided to capture New York City underground on film in spring 1975, inevitably they went to CBGB to shoot. They emerged with
Blank Generation,
one of the crucial celluloid documents of the age, a flickering black-and-white record of every key act to call CBGB home.

The accolades continued to pour in. Bruce Springsteen ambled up to Patti one evening to announce that he’d fallen in love with her from her picture in
Creem. Creem
itself was mourning Patti’s decision to quit writing for the magazine because she simply no longer had the time. Her final article, “Jukebox Cruci-Fix,” would appear in the June 1975 issue, looking back on rock ‘n’ roll’s dead from Vladimir Mayakovsky, the anarchist poet, through Johnny Ace and Buddy Holly, and on to her account of visiting Jim Morrison’s grave. But it ended with the pledge that
we don’t look back,
and a hand-scrawled postscript: “This is my last article.”

Patti even earned the admittedly dubious honor of a hilarious parody by Wayne County, onstage at Max’s one night, just days after her own appearance there on April 1. Donning Patti’s trademark stage wear, a white shirt and suit pants, and riffing loosely on her signature work “Land,” County launched into a merciless roast not only of Patti’s love of Jim Morrison but also of the song’s enigmatic equine references
(Horses! Horses! Horses! Horses!).
County raged,
Wildebeest! Wildebeest!
then slipped into a set of poetics that might not quite have been up to Patti’s usual standard but left no listener in doubt about their inspiration.

Jim Morrison is in the bathtub.

The water is soapy, the water is soapy.

And Jim, he stepped on a bar of Ivory Soap, and it’s hard when

you step on a bar of Ivory Soap.

And he slipped and he fell and he hit his head on the soap dish,

and the water went through his nostrils, and up to his eyes,

and passed down his chest and into his lungs.

He was dying, and he started to die, and then Jim Morrison lay

there, and before he died, he sang

I’m forever blowing bubbles.

Publicly, Patti ignored the taunt; the group was too busy to care. But they would never play Max’s again, and suspicious minds do lay the slight at the door of her hurt feelings. But perhaps it had more to do with the changes to Max’s itself. Mickey Ruskin had sold the club in late 1974, and while new manager Tommy Dean swiftly reopened the joint and did his level best to recreate the old scene, for many of those who loved the original pile—and, more importantly, loved the Ruskins who ran it—it wasn’t Max’s any longer.

Especially now that CBGB had stepped into the breach.

With Television once again the opening act, Patti Smith (as the band itself would be known for the next eighteen months) headlined the venue for sixteen nights in April, two shows each evening. It remains one of the key events in the club’s long history: the scene’s two most consistently intriguing groups, side by side across a weekend residency that made a legend of the venue and stars-in-waiting of the acts. Written reports of the shows that tore out of the Bowery that season were describing them as epochal before anyone even dreamed what the epoch might turn out to be. British journalist Charles Shaar Murray of the
New Musical Express
wrote, “Patti Smith is a Heavy Cult Figure … an odd little waif figure in a grubby black suit and black satin shirt, so skinny that her clothes hang baggily all over her, with chopped-off black hair and a face like Keith Richards’ kid sister would have if she’d gotten as wasted by age seventeen as Keith is now. Her band … play like a garage band who’ve learned a few ‘30s licks to go with the mutated AM rock…. Her closing tour de force [‘Land’] was undoubtedly the most gripping performance that I’ve seen by a white act since the last time I saw The Who.”

Hindsight can only applaud such commentators’ foresight and be grateful that, on one night at least, the audiotapes were rolling. Across the three-hour recording that preserves the show for posterity, every song that subsequently accompanied Patti Smith and Television to glory receives a primal and near-definitive rendering. If one listens with the benefit of hindsight and age, it is clear that it was not what the bands did that night that matters. It was what they represented. Yes, Television’s “Marquee Moon” was a little clumsy in places; sure, Patti’s “Space Monkey” could have been tighter. But you can sense the sweat pouring down the walls, the floor-to-ceiling congestion that packed the narrow bar, and the manic determination with which the two bands confronted the potential that everyone said they possessed, before they transformed it into a tangible asset.

Like hearing an audience recording of a very early Sex Pistols show, or Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd before they had their first hits, this is not a simple audiotape but an
experience,
a vérité rendering that even captures the sound of the surreptitious taper, wondering whether his microphone is working. Smith’s poetic interludes were spellbinding, Verlaine’s guitar was incendiary, and it really doesn’t matter that the intro to Television’s “Poor Circulation” would one day be grafted onto “Torn Curtain,” or that Patti’s “Redondo Beach” was taken so fast that it almost out-discos “Heart of Glass.” You can’t quite smell the toilets or taste the cheap beer, but the bootleg ensures that this night at CBGB is reborn regardless.

Although CBGB was fast becoming a rock shrine, not everybody was impressed with it. “All I can remember,” Johnny Ramone said, “is they never had a door on the dressing room, and you played and you wouldn’t even get a free beer.” Joey Ramone was kinder: “CBGB helped make the Ramones. It gave us a place to play when there probably wasn’t another club in the world that would book us, but it also helped us become a part of a community. When we played, we’d look out at the audience and everybody would be there: Patti and her group, Tom [Verlaine] and Television, the Shirts, the Marbles, everybody. And when they played, we’d be there for them.” Indeed, the Ramones would join Patti Smith in utterly surpassing their original role as club regulars to become virtually synonymous with the venue.

Patti Smith and her band were never especially close with the Ramones, but still Joey recalled them as being “good friends to us.” Other groups on the scene, however, failed to share Ramone’s munificence. Stiv Bators, newly arrived in New York City from his native Cleveland, had little time for Patti Smith, an opinion born out of the fact that she had little time for his band, the Dead Boys.