Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story (19 page)

“I know people would like to think that we got together to break boundaries of politics and gender, but we didn’t really have time for that. We were really too busy trying to pull enough money together to buy lunch.”

Clive Davis headed the long line of observers who loathed the photograph, and from his office at the top of the Arista hierarchy, he pleaded with Patti to change her mind about using it. She refused, and when
Horses
was released on November 10, 1975, it was Mapplethorpe’s portrait of Patti that gazed out from the record racks—and ultimately became one of the most revered images of the age. It would not only garner artistic acclaim, appearing high on
Rolling Stone
magazine’s list of the top one hundred album covers, but also shape the way Patti herself was perceived—by audiences, by fans, by the still slowly unfolding “punk rock” scene that would embrace her, both musically and visually, as one of its most crucial, vibrant figureheads.

As for the album itself, it is nigh on impossible, from our current vantage point, to appreciate just how
Horses
divided the establishment upon its original release.

In America, the most influential voices seemed to like the record. Griel Marcus told
Village Voice
readers that Patti “has made an authentic record that is in no way merely a transcript once-removed of her live show.” John Rockwell of the
New York Times
warned that “it will annoy some people and be dismissed by others,” but insisted that it was “an extraordinary disc, and every minute of it is worth repeated rehearings.” Later, in
Rolling Stone,
Rockwell reiterated his praises, calling the album “wonderful in large measure,” and he had a high old time acknowledging the homage that Patti herself admitted was paramount in her music: “All eight songs betray a loving fascination with the oldies of rock.” Patti and her band might have been breaching musical frontiers toward which rock had never cast more than a passing, folk-inflected eye. But she had made a great record, simple as that.

Across the ocean in the UK, however, Patti’s importance was the source of no end of controversy.

The people who liked Patti loved her. Manchester-based television host Tony Wilson made several attempts to book the band onto his late-night music show
So It Goes,
and was unequivocal in his admiration for what she represented. Writing in her 2010 autobiography
Mr Manchester and the Factory Girl,
his ex-wife Lindsay Reade recalled him proclaiming, “Suddenly there was an album
[Horses]
that was fresh and didn’t sound like all that other shite.” (His enthusiasm would not last—“In ‘76 she was great because then she was a New York poetess playing at being a rock star. And by ‘77 she was a rock star playing at being a New York poetess”—but still it was his love for Patti that would help birth one of the great creative partnerships of the decade to come: Wilson later recalled first meeting artist Peter Saville at a Patti Smith concert. Together they would be responsible for that most iconic of post-punk British record labels, Factory.)

Others, however, were less convinced, debating and dissecting Patti in both the letters columns and the editorial pages of the weekly music papers
Melody Maker
and the
New Musical Express.
Both publications had, in recent months, been murmuring of changes afoot in the music scene, changes that would either launch the music ever upward toward new pinnacles of artistic expression and experimentation, or guide it back to the basic purity with which rock ‘n’ roll first came into the world. Emerson, Lake & Palmer or a pile of scratchy old Sun label singles—the choice, the warring voices were saying, was yours.

According to the
NME,
Patti fell firmly into the latter camp. Not in execution, of course, for
Horses
was as much a product of modern recording technology as any progressive rock marathon, but in attitude. It brought rock ‘n’ roll back from the abyss of overextended soloing with a basic four-piece band fronted by a lyricist with something to say. “First albums this good are pretty damn few and far between,” wrote
NME
‘s Charles Shaar Murray. “It’s better than the first Roxy album, better than the first Beatles and Stones albums, better than Dylan’s first album, as good as the first Doors and Who and Hendrix and Velvet Underground albums.” And why? Because “it’s strange, askew and flat-out weird. It’sneurotic and unhealthy and dank, a message in a bottle sent from some place that you and I have only been to in the worst moments of self-doubting defeated psychosis.”
Horses,
he concluded, “is what happens when the fuses blow and the light goes out.”

But
Melody Maker
savaged it, complaining that
Horses
represented all that was “wrong with rock and roll right now…. There’s no way that the completely contrived and affected ‘amateurism’ of
Horses
constitutes good rock and roll. That old ‘so bad it’s good’ aesthetic has been played to death.
Horses
is just bad. Period.”

How prescient those two opposing viewpoints were would become apparent in the months after
Horses’
release.

Jane Friedman lined up live shows to promote the album, and first the group returned to California for a clutch of gigs in Berkeley, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. In L.A., Don Snowden of the
Pasadena Guardian
pounced, complaining that at times “it was virtually impossible to decipher the lyrics over the roar of the band”—which was especially problematic, he pointed out, given Patti’s reputation as a poet. But “even on a bad night, her best moments showed Patti Smith to be a unique and provocative artist well worth checking out.”

It was in L.A., too, that Patti earned the enmity of a band that was, in the eyes of her fans, the diametric opposite of all that she represented. The all-teen, all-sexy Runaways had stepped out of impresario Kim Fowley’s rehearsal studio and onto the stages of a world that wanted nothing more (or so Fowley hoped) than a taste of hard-rocking female jailbait.

Ivan Kral was first to witness the Runaways in action, watching them perform at the Starwood and then walking into the backstage area just as Kim Fowley emerged with Robert Plant by his side. The following night, onstage with Smith, he made a point of wearing his newly obtained Runaways T-shirt, and all the Runaways wanted was to return the favor, and say hello to Patti and her band.

So the quintet, led by singer Cherie Currie, wandered into Patti’s dressing room at the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach, and they hadn’t even opened their mouths when Patti, barely glancing up at the proffered handshakes, barked, “You girls. Out.”

English journalist Chris Salewicz recorded the fallout in a 1976 interview with the Runaways. Currie set the ball rolling. “She was such a …
LURRGHHHH.
I mean, she was so disgusting with those saggy …”

“Tits,” Jett said.

“Tits,” Currie agreed.

Like Blondie’s Debbie Harry, the Runaways theorized that they had fallen afoul of Patti’s desire to become the first, and biggest, female rocker in the pool. The Dead Boys’ Stiv Bators, a close friend of Joan Jett’s, declared that Patti “couldn’t stand competition. People talk about her as ‘a patron of the arts,’ with Jim Carroll and Tom Verlaine, but she blanked Richard Hell when she thought he was moving into her poetic territory, and she blanked Debbie and the Runaways because she wanted to be the only female rocker that anyone was talking about. She was merciless.”

The band returned to the East Coast. Philly was next, and then it was back to New York City for three nights at the Bottom Line immediately after Christmas. It would be the faithful’s first opportunity to catch the live set that had fallen into place in California. The new set would prove that, already,
Horses
was behind them, as new material began jockeying for position in their show.

It included the sinister dub of “Ain’t It Strange” and the paradoxically pretty “Pumping (My Heart),” neither of which would see vinyl until the end of the following year. They performed a beautifully stylized version of “Privilege,” former Manfred Mann front man Paul Jones’s theme to the dystopian rock movie of the same name, which would remain unreleased until 1978. They had even taken to playing a medley of the Velvet Underground’s “Pale Blue Eyes” and the old garage stomper “Louie Louie” that has never been officially released.

A handful of
Horses
favorites remained on board, of course, but both “Land” and “Birdland” were as likely to become the backdrop to new improvisations and verse as they were to adhere to their vinyl incarnations. “Remember when I used to do this in the old days?” Patti asked as she unwrapped a new verse, “Nigger Book,” from her pocket. “Fresh off the acoustic typewriter?”

Around them, past poems such as “Seventh Heaven,” “Snowball,” “Space Monkey,” “Seven Ways of Going,” and “Mafia” might be reprised; one night she pulled “Sally” out of her past, with a laughing “I can’t believe I’m going to do this one.” Some nights, Patti would drop into a few lines of Darlene Love’s “The Boy I’m Going to Marry,” or the almost painfully keening “Work Song,” with its
I was working real hard
lament.

“It was important to us that we never stood still,” Sohl explained. “Even when we were touring all the time and we had no time to rehearse or even think about what we were doing, we knew one another so well that we could just go off on these completely unrehearsed tangents, knowing that they would work.”

The group would be on the road almost constantly for the next five months, a full American tour that touched down occasionally in what would become Patti’s nests of strongest support—New York City and environs, Philadelphia, Boston, D.C., and Cleveland on the East Coast; the corridor from San Francisco to San Diego on the West—but ventured further afield too.

Their support act was John Cale, whose
Helen of Troy
album had been released the same week as
Horses
—although you got the impression that he’d have preferred if it hadn’t been. Shortly before flying to New York City to work with Patti, he handed his label, Island, the demos for his new LP. From there, he headed over to Europe for a tour, then returned to London to find his demos on the release schedule. Furious and dismayed, he fled the UK, returned to New York City, and joined Patti in Jane Friedman’s managerial stable.

Cale would appear onstage alone, with just his piano for company, performing a solo set of songs before Patti alone came out to join him. They would sing a couple of songs together, then as the full band appeared on stage, Cale would exit. But he would always return, running back onstage for the encore “My Generation,” thundering his bass line through Patti’s profanity-laced version of the old rocker and then, as Patti cried out her final incitement—
We created it, let’s take it over!—
waiting for Lenny Kaye to hurl himself across the stage and catching the guitarist in his arms.

The first half of 1976 saw Patti and her band either hit their stride or reach their peak, depending upon one’s personal point of view. Richard Meltzer, writing in
Creem,
described their live show as “the best by a cunny since Billie Holiday and best by either gonad group since James Morrison’s prime,” and he was right. One of the most popular bootleg records of the year would be Patti’s
Teenage Perversity & Ships in the Night,
recorded at the Roxy in Los Angeles on January 30, 1976. It captures the band literally seething, even overcoming the unexpected appearance of Iggy Pop onstage to describe how he had “just been worked over for a week by a Transylvanian masseuse in San Francisco.”

Not everybody was a fan, however. An unannounced show at San Francisco’s Boarding House in January prompted
San Francisco Chronicle
scribe John Wasserman to disguise his review as an open letter to Lily Tomlin, in which he asked outright, “Have you ever heard of Patti Smith? Well, she is a new comedienne…. I know that ‘imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,’ but I think this Patti Smith has gone too far. She is doing your act.” Robert Weinter of
After Dark,
too, found her antics difficult to countenance: “The emergence of ‘rock poetess’ Patti Smith as a potential superstar is the greatest hoax perpetrated on the American public since Andy Warhol’s soup cans and Patricia Hearst’s kidnapping. Encouraging her to disseminate her minimal art is like encouraging the local garbage man to go onstage to clang garbage-can tops.”

As she toured, Patti attracted more such castigations. But one couldn’t help but feel that they were increasingly isolated voices in the wilderness. A lot of people might not have understood what Patti was doing. But those who got it really got it.

Arista, too, was following the group’s progress. The label arranged for the show in Cleveland to be recorded in its entirety, then culled one track, the set-ending “My Generation.” It became the B-side to the band’s debut single, “Gloria,” which had served as
Horses’
opening track. Arista expunged the expletives from “My Generation” with a high-pitched beep for the all-important UK release—all-important because the UK was already shaping up to be as fascinated with Patti as America, thanks to those first astonished reports filed in the
New Musical Express
and
Melody Maker,
and the occasional follow-ups since then.

Talking to the British press, Patti was infuriated by her first taste of record company censorship. “You tell the kids that I say not to buyit,” she railed to Mick Gold in
Street Life.
“You tell them it’s against my wishes. In the States we fought and fought for that recording not to be censored. Just like the American government wanted to censor Bran-cusi’s sculpture
Bird in Space.
Brancusi had to fight to redefine sculpture and I’m fighting to redefine rock ‘n’ roll…. I would rather see somebody bootleg the American version and put it out the way it’s supposed to be. It’s not that I don’t care about money, but this is blood money. We fought for that record to be released.”