Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story (18 page)

Dylan was not offended. Perhaps hoping that he could still change Patti’s mind, or maybe just extending the hand of friendship, he invited her back to the club on July 5, to take the stage for a dry run of what she could experience every night if she joined the tour: a heavyweight band comprising Dylan on piano, Ronson on guitar, bassist Rob Stoner, and Bobby Neuwirth handling guitar and mandolin.

Patti was in high spirits that night. Far from her own band and audience, she relaxed into a full set of lightweight folk songs: “Goodnight Irene,” “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” and sundry other old favorites.

Another day, journalist Larry Sloman was stunned to walk into a Rolling Thunder rehearsal at SIR Studios to find Ramblin’ Jack Elliot playing a Grateful Dead song onstage, with bassist Rob Stoner “thumping along on bass, [and] Patti Smith … wandering around the rear, directing the music with grandiose sweeps of her arms.”

Everybody around her knew that Patti was sorely tempted by Dylan’s offer, and that the presence of so many old friends on the tour buses—Shepard, Neuwirth, Ginsberg—tugged at her more than she might even have admitted.

But it wasn’t to be, and afterward, she admitted to Thurston Moore, she feared that Dylan would never speak to her again. But a few days after she delivered her final refusal, she was walking down Fourth Street when she bumped into him as he headed toward the Bottom Line. He paused, and reached into his pocket to produce one of the photographstaken of the pair of them, now splashed across the cover of the latest
Village Voice.

“Who are these two people?” he asked, smiling broadly. “You know who these people are?”

9

CHRIST! THE COLORS OF YOUR ENERGIES

A
RISTA BOOKED THE
band to go into the studio in August. For a time, there had been talk of them traveling down to Miami’s Criteria Studios to record with producer Tom Dowd, as he rode the success of his recent work with Eric Clapton and the Bee Gees. “I didn’t know anything about producers and just picked Tom Dowd because I admired him,” Patti recalled to Lucy O’Brien in the
Independent on Sunday.

But then a more suitable choice crossed her mind: John Cale, the legendary cofounder of the Velvet Underground who had already stamped his mark on some of the most important recordings of the last few years. After contributing as a performer to the Velvets’ first two albums, he produced the debut LP by the Stooges and three albums by Nico. He handled what would have been the Modern Lovers’ vinyl debut, had the oil crisis not forced their record label at the time to dump them midway through the sessions. And, as if to complete the circle, he had almost formed a band with Ivan Kral shortly before the guitarist joined Patti.

None of which had anything to do with Patti’s decision to bring him on board. “My picking John was about as arbitrary as picking Rimbaud,” she told Dave Marsh. “I saw the cover of
Illuminations
with Rimbaud’s face, y’know, he looked so cool, just like Bob Dylan. So Rimbaudbecame my favorite poet. I looked at the cover of [Cale’s 1974 album]
Fear
and I said, ‘Now there’s a set of cheekbones.’ …

“The thing is … in my mind I picked him because his records sounded good. But I hired the wrong guy. All I was really looking for was a technical person. Instead, I got a total maniac artist. I went to pick out an expensive watercolor painting and instead I got a mirror.”

That discovery was still to come. For now, Patti was simply overjoyed to have obtained Cale’s services for the record—so overjoyed that when he first got a call from Patti and her manager, Cale was left wondering what she even wanted. In his autobiography,
What’s Welsh for Zen,
he recalled, “I said, ‘Does she want me to produce a record? Does she want me to get into bed with her?’” And Patti and Jane Friedman, on the other side of the speaker phone, roared.

Cale had seen Patti perform before, he told the
Independent on Sunday
years later, so he understood how much her act depended on both her physicality as a performer and her “use of language … the way images collided with one another.” As her producer, his first question would be, “How do I contain this energy? How do I capture it on a record?” Such dilemmas are the reason why live albums have a quality that studio discs can never attain, and why a great live act often makes a lousy studio band. Cale’s goal was to ensure that Patti made the transition more smoothly than most.

A few weeks before the first studio date, he had Jane Friedman book the group a show in Woodstock so he could see them perform away from their usual audience. It was an awkward request;
he
might have been curious to discover how the band functioned in front of a room full of strangers, but Patti and the band had no interest at all. Besides, Patti was adamant that she hated the countryside.

But that was only the first of their problems. A small and unsuspecting audience stared in disbelief as Cale missed most of the first set when he passed out at the side of the stage. He came to in time for the second set, but spent a lot of that throwing up. “That meant the second set was better than the first,” Cale excused himself afterward, but he clearly wasn’t overly concerned about endearing himself to the band or, at least, to the band’s sense of self-perception.

“How did you like them?” Clive Davis asked Cale at a meeting the following day. “I fell asleep,” Cale replied. “Jet lag, Clive, jet lag.”

“As soon as I got into the studio with Patti,” Cale wrote in his autobiography, “the flirtatious girl on the telephone had been replaced by a female General Patton.” But he was willing to put up with that. From the moment he heard her “electric voice” during that first telephone conversation, he’d known he wanted to work with her. He knew, just as his fans did, that some of his best work as both a producer and a recording artist in his own right was cut around the strengths of a powerful female vocal: Nico on the first Velvet Underground album and then across the three albums he had produced for her since then; Judy Nylon making a cameo on Cale’s own “The Man Who Couldn’t Afford to Orgy.”

Patti fell into the same orbit as those women, as Nico remembered. “John always reacts well to strong women. I don’t know what kind of relationship he had with them outside of the studio. But in the studio it is a physical thing, sexual, John pushing toward his orgasm and the woman pushing toward hers. On my albums we were like two lovers even when we weren’t lovers. You can hear it in the arrangements—we are fighting for our own satisfaction but pushing for each other’s as well.

“It was the same when he worked with Judy [Nylon would later become part of Cale’s live band] and Deerfrance [Nylon’s successor in that same group] and it was the same when he was working with Patti. They fought like animals, but the music sounded like they were fucking like animals as well.”

Patti “should have married John Cale,” Nico laughed to biographer Richard Witts. “They could live in a gingerbread house and make gingerbread children.” They didn’t, of course; there was never any possibility of that. But Nico’s words ring true regardless, when considered in light of both the final fruits of the recording sessions and the participants’ own recollections of the sessions themselves.

Cale began by observing that the band was playing out of tune “because their instruments were warped.” Before they recorded a single note, he suggested, they should replace their battered tools. Hardly surprisingly, the band agreed. “You had to make them feel that they werereally good musicians to allow room for Patti’s poetry to come through,” Cale explained in
What’s Welsh for Zen.

He was not certain, though, precisely “what persona this record was going to have until I had her improvise against herself. Then I could see how she had managed to make use of so much from Lou Reed and Dylan in the music.” The difference, he surmised, was that Reed’s improvisations “came primarily from psychological insights, whereas Patti’s were attuned to the rhythms of Welsh Methodist preachers”—an observation, of course, that only a Welshman could make. He also realized that if Patti was going to succeed with a record-buying audience, he would have to help her channel “her aggressive, challenging voice” away from the live stage and into the studio.

Patti herself stood in his way. “I knew nothing about recording or being in the studio,” she continued in that joint
Independent on Sunday
interview. “I was very, very suspicious, very guarded and hard to work with, because I was so conscious of how I perceived rock ‘n’ roll. It was becoming overproduced, overmerchandised, and too glamorous.” Patti saw it as her duty to stem that tide, and she would eventually realize that Cale was on her side. “But I made it difficult for him to do some of the things he had to do.”

One night, she laughed, they drove Cale so crazy that he was falling asleep at the desk and banging his head on it in a bid to try to stay awake. But “instead of throwing his hands up or being pissed at me, John got even crazier and more obsessive. It was like having two crazy poets dealing with showers of words…. There’s a certain beauty in it that wouldn’t have happened without John.”

Or as she put it to Susan Shapiro in
Crawdaddy
at the time, “He’s a fighter and I’m a fighter, so we’re fightin’. Sometimes fightin’ produces a champ.”

At other points, Cale’s influence was merely cosmetic. For instance, he convinced Patti to drop the mock-Caribbean tone she adopted when performing the reggae-inflected “Redondo Beach” in favor of a more lackadaisical but ultimately more convincing tone. He also suggested that they add strings to the record—such embellishments had worked on several of his own past albums, his love of the Beach Boys shiningthrough a lot of his work (not least of all “Mr. Wilson,” on his last LP,
Slow Dazzle)
—but Patti refused to countenance such a suggestion.

She did, however, welcome the participation of several musicians outside her own band. Tom Verlaine was called in to supply the anguished guitar lines that highlighted his cocomposition “Break It Up.” And Allen Lanier, who penned music for two of Patti’s poems on the album, “Kimberly” and “Elegie,” would perform the languid tones of the latter, a poem written to mark the death of Jimi Hendrix, which Patti insisted be recorded on the fifth anniversary of the guitarist’s death: September 18, 1975.

That day was their last in the studio, and Verlaine had already been booked to record his part on the same day. According to Cale, the friction between Lanier and Verlaine was palpable (he credited it to Patti’s supposed romantic involvement with both men). The result was “one of the most explosive sessions” of them all, with an atmosphere “so tense it was frightening.” Frightening, that is, to everybody apart from Patti, who had what Cale called “a mother hen thing about getting all her boys together.” When Verlaine and Lanier inevitably sparked, “she thought that was very sexy.”

Contentious to the end, the
Horses
sessions finally wrapped. Straight from the studio, Patti and the band headed uptown to the City Center, to take part in a three-day convention for the Arista label. A host of their labelmates were also on display, at an event that Clive Davis had, rather brilliantly, decided to open to the general public as well as the industry suits who normally populate such happenings. Barry Manilow, Loudon Wainwright III, Martha Reeves, and Gil Scott-Heron were also on the bill, but it was Patti Smith who would be headlining, in the minds of both the assembled multitude and the label head himself. Those other acts would undoubtedly go on to sell plenty of records. But Patti was selling a lifestyle.

Patti’s set was short, just four songs—“Birdland,” “Redondo Beach,” “Break It Up,” and “Land”—plus an encore of “Free Money.” But the results of six weeks in the studio were clear to all. “Birdland,” in particular, had taken flight; already flirting with the ghost of Charlie Parker, now it consummated the marriage, and a lot of that was down to Cale. “There’s a lotta inspiration going on between the murderer and the victim,” Patti explained to Dave Marsh. “And [Cale] had me so nuts that I wound up doing this nine-minute [version] that transcended anything I ever did before.”

Tighter than ever before, the band and their vocalist had melded now into a seamless whole. Journalist Lisa Robinson, reviewing the evening, called the performance “stupendous, a truly exciting moment”—and coming from a writer who had seen Patti perform on so many previous occasions, that was high praise indeed. “Everyone connected with Arista records was ecstatic,” Robinson concluded.

That new cohesion, too, was Cale’s doing. “What John did for us was to make us aware of each other,” Patti acknowledged to Chris Charlesworth of
Melody Maker.
“He said that we were really nebulous and weren’t that close, and I thought we were, y’know? But, after that recording, we really broke past everything, got to know each other’s fragile stuff. We’re like brothers and sisters.”

When it came time to shoot the album’s cover art, another member of Patti’s artistic family was inevitably behind the lens: Robert Mapplethorpe. He photographed the four band members, of course, and their portraits were applied to the album’s back cover. But for the frontcover image, Mapplethorpe took a portrait of Patti alone, her black suit jacket slung over one white-shirted shoulder, her hair a tangled mess, her expression not severe but not inviting, either.

It was simultaneously sexless and sexy, emotionless and exciting, deeply androgynous and irresistibly feminine. “The singer’s eyes pierce her compatriot’s lens,” wrote Amy Hanson in 2010, “and you can almost hear the lyrics to the album’s closing ‘Elegie.’ ‘There must be something I can dream tonight / The air is filled with the moves of you.’ She might have written those words for Jimi Hendrix but they are just as appropriate here.”

It was quite unlike any photograph that any “female musician” had ever displayed across the cover of a debut LP.

“People have made a lot of stuff about the
Horses
cover,” Patti reflected to journalist Michael Bracewell. “But a lot of what we do is bred on innocence. How people interpret it is up to them. I thought of myself as a poet and a performer, and so how did I dress? I didn’t havemuch money; I liked to dress like Baudelaire. I looked at a picture of him and he was dressed, like, with this ribbon or tie and a white shirt. I wasn’t thinking that I was going to break any boundaries. I just like dressing like Baudelaire….