Arabian swelter, and with the air-conditioning broken, CBGB resembled some abattoir of a kitchen in which a bucket of ice is placed in front of a fan to cool the room off. To no avail, of course, and the heat had perspiration glissading down the curve of one’s back, yeah, and the cruel heat also burned away any sense of glamour. After all, CBGB’s Bowery and Bleecker location is not the garden spot of lower Manhattan, and the bar itself is an uneasy oasis. On the left, where the couples are, tables; on the right, where the stragglers, drinkers, and love-seekers are, a long bar; between the two, a high double-backed ladder which, when the room is really crowded, offers the best view. If your bladder sends a distress signal, write home to your mother, for you must make a perilous journey down the aisle between seating area and bar, not knocking over any mike stands as you slide by the tiny stage, squeeze through the pile of amplifiers, duck the elbow thrust of a pool player leaning over to make a shot … and then you end up in an illustrated bathroom that looks like a page that didn’t make [Norman Mailer’s] The Faith of Graffiti.
—from my Village Voice piece “A Conservative Impulse in the New Rock Underground” (August 18, 1975)
My admission into the orphanage began as an assignment like any other, a pop-in/write-up of eight hundred words. The year before, the Voice sent me to review some poet-chick fronting a drummer-less rock band, a setup I pictured as some macrobiotic Beat type with bird’s-nest hair declaiming her lyrics from loose-leaf pages while a lot of noisy noodling went on in the background. How I drew this mental sketch on the basis of near-zero actual familiarity I can’t recall, although I did see the poet Anne Waldman read once in the East Village, standing on one leg like a stork as her voice ascended into incantation. What I can recall is that there was some pro and con among those with actual working knowledge of the downtown scene as to whether this rock-poetess was a true original talent, a magpie on the make, or something betwixt, a combination of thin-lipped calculation and burning vocation, like Bob Dylan after he had outgrown his Woody Guthrie britches and began playing his personas like a cardsharp. Shortly after entering below the awning of a bar and club with an initialed name, a place I’d never been to on a street that still looked like a Robert Frank photograph of raw, spilling night, I gingerly installed myself for a bar-stool view of the stage, which was stationed left of the aisle and barely large enough for a barbershop quartet. The atmosphere was most unmagical, worthy of a cheap paperback set on skid row. It had a palpable texture, this prosy ambience, a bit of World War I trench-warfare leftover aroma of dung, urine, and damp carcass, but it was the seventies and not a time to be picky. Then I saw this visage, this vision, shark-finning the length of the bar, and I knew this had to be Her. A scarf was knotted around her throat, and her hair was raven; her chin cocked directly at her destination point, doorward.
Patti—one of those performers whose first name alone was enough to spell it all—projected star quality, had willed it into being and possession with a bite of hauteur. What Madonna would master and Lady Gaga after her would embellish into jeweled armor, Patti Smith flashed like a blade: the crowned awareness that to become a true star is to act like a star from the moment of self-conception and let the world play catch-up. Even when chewing gum, she seemed to be chewing it for the ages. Patti looked formidable and imperious until she grinned, the sort of equine grin Pauline Kael treasured in Lily Tomlin but goofier, like a latch that allowed her whole body to hang loose.
That grin was retracted before Patti’s first set under a game face of gunslinger intent as she took the stage and wagged around, wiping her nose now and then with a sawing finger, while her musicians tuned up as best they were able. Her lead guitarist, who shared Patti’s sapling thinness, was Lenny Kaye, he of the Yeshiva-student spectacles, whose name was better known to me than Patti’s. I had been reading his articles for years in Hit Parader, Creem, and Rolling Stone (where he reviewed Exile on Main Street), and every rock cultist had a copy of Nuggets, his influential, indispensable double-album compilation of psychedelic hits and rarities, many of which sounded like garbled satellite transmissions from the weird beyond. On bass was Ivan Kral, on piano the nimbus-curled Richard “DNV” Sohl, one of those fallen angels with more room to fall. (He would die of a heart attack at the age of thirty-seven.) As soon as the band revved its engines, it was clear that this wouldn’t be bop prosody set to a bongo beat; the opening number, the Velvet Underground’s “We’re Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together,” came out of the corner punching, Patti hitting the word “shoot” in the Harlem heroin stanza—“Everyone shoot shoot shoot”—with a right-left combination as if the mike stand doubled as a sparring bag. (Patti’s brand of calisthenics would find its musical anthem in “Pumping.”) What other songs were in that first set? “Space Monkey,” to be sure, “The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game” (a Smokey Robinson cover in which Patti substituted “junta” for “hunter”), her tender tribute to her sister, “Kimberly” (how many songs then, before, and now have been dedicated to sisters?), “Redondo Beach” (“where women love other women”—a song and a descriptive phrase that led many young women of lesbian or bi inclination to believe Patti belonged to their sorority), “Piss Factory” (her first single, a prole lament and lyrical gesture of defiance), “Birdland,” and the expansive version of “Gloria” that seemed to camera-pan across the wide-screen horizon on galloping hooves. (It would provide the climactic set piece to her Horses album.) The band wasn’t as tight and motoring as it would become (especially after Jay Dee Daugherty joined on drums), but it also wasn’t the Fugs futzing around, and Patti already had her stage persona pencil-sharpened into a self-conscious, couldn’t-care-less wild child, playing with her zipper like a teenage boy with a horny itch, pistoning her hips, hocking an amoeba blob of spit between songs, scratching her breast as if addressing a stray thought, and, during the incantatory highs, spreading her fingers like a preacher woman summoning the spirits from the Père Lachaise graveyard where Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde were buried to rise and reclaim their former glory. It was one of those nights when the invisible partitions between you and the performance dissolve and you realize, This is something, even if you don’t know what that “something” is yet. There’s a knock at the door that you have to answer.
One thing I learned from Pauline was that when something hits you that high and hard, you have to be able to travel wherever the point of impact takes you and be willing to go to the wall with your enthusiasm and over it if need be, even if you look foolish or “carried away,” because your first shot at writing about it may be the only chance to make people care. It’s better to be thumpingly wrong than a muffled drum with a measured beat. Now, Patti didn’t need me championing her in the Voice—it wasn’t a rescue operation, like Pauline going to bat for Bonnie and Clyde after Bosley Crowther clubbed it in the New York Times; Patti’s breakout probably would have been able to hop from pony to pony no matter who supplied the initial press boost—but I needed to feel that I could write about something new and still forming that mattered, something that I could help make matter. Readers and fellow writers get a mean rise out of demolition work of overblown popularities or grandiose follies, but it’s the trail-scout discoveries that a critic cracks into daylight that make the difference after all the balloons have popped, whether it’s Edmund Wilson’s championing of his brother Princetonian F. Scott Fitzgerald or Randall Jarrell’s rescuing Robert Frost from the hayloft of platitudes and Yankee pith to which his poetry had been consigned; a critic remembered only for his damnings, however brilliant and left bleeding his victims, has failed, leaving behind little more than a patch of crabgrass with a few Easter eggs scattered around.
So, leaning on the throttle to hurry up the future, I reviewed Patti’s performance in the Voice (accompanied by a photo of what looked like Patti in a white Communion dress) with all flags flying:
She’s a knockout performer: funny, spooky, a true off-the-wall original. Like the character in Dickens, she do the poli
ce in different voices. One moment she’s telling an agreeably dopey joke about kangaroos (“… and Momma Kangaroo looked down and exclaimed, ‘Oh, my pocket’s been picked!’ ”) and in the next she’s bopping into the scatological scat of “Piss Factory.”
Because of her notorious poetry readings, her reputation is largely as a crazy-as-birds stage speaker, but it’s clear she’s going to be an extraordinary rock singer, maybe even a great one. Not that her voice has richness or range—there might be 200 female rockers with better voices—no, Patti possesses a greater gift: a genius for phrasing. She’s a poet of steely rhythms—her work demands to be read aloud—so language is her narcotic, her lover, her mustang.
And her body is as eloquent as her voice. Scrawny and angular in repose, it becomes supple and expressive when the music sways. Dressed in black jeans, black coat, and loose T-shirt, she dances with a smooth sassiness, her boyish hips tenderly pistoning, her bamboo-thin arms punctuating the air for emphasis. The performing area at CBGB is as tiny as a bathroom tile so it’ll be interesting to see her hit her stride on a larger stage.
… Rock fans are going to be enraptured making all the allusive connections in her work; one of the best songs—which begins with the entrance of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse and ends with a burial in the horse latitudes—is a surreal fusion of rock mythos and horse/heroin imagery.
So would it be too awful to say that Fame is her steed if Patti Smith chooses to mount? Well, the horse might be the perfect emblem for her career. “I ride the stallion thru the dust storm” is the way she begins a poem entitled “Mustang.” “Get off your mustang, Sally, is what the women told her at the Piss Factory.” But Patti didn’t listen, Patti said screw it, and skinny schizzy Patti is on her way to becoming the wild mustang of American rock.
Okay, true, granted, I slapped a bit of mustard on that fastball, especially in the last sentence (“schizzy” was a pure Pauline-ism). But it was the last great hurrah period of rock-crit tell-it-from-the-mountain epiphanies, and few of us were immune. Only a year earlier a pop music critic high on the totem pole named Jon Landau had pronounced, “I saw rock & roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen” (Arise, ye faithful!), and when Springsteen (with Landau now serving as his record producer and horse whisperer) went on to make the covers of Time and Newsweek the same week, an unprecedented coup, I muttered to myself at the newsstand: “I have seen the future of rock, and now we’re stuck with him.” It wasn’t that I disliked Springsteen—how could you dislike a scrappy car mechanic of a singer-songwriter-showman so driven, enthusiastic, passionate, embracing, and earnest? It’d be like ragging on Thanksgiving. But it was his very earnestness, his eager-to-serve sincerity, that dulled the tips of my nerves even when I was riveted by one of his legendary performances at the Bottom Line in 1975, the stint that has lived in the annals of Bruciana. I remember checking myself during one of his big rousers with the question, “This is incredibly exciting, so why am I not excited?” It just seemed too smoothly assembled from every rock fan’s dream kit of salvation. Eight hundred years later, he’s still never awakened me, his husky voice intoning like something chiseled on Mount Rushmore now, an august chunk of Americana.
When my review hit the pages of the Voice, Patti was happy, the band was happy, her manager, Jane Friedman, was happy, CBGB’s was happy, I was happy, everybody was happy, and it was nice not feeling like the bad guy in print for a change. Normally, I would have pocketed that happy outcome and moved on to the next target spot, but I kept returning to CBGB’s to catch Patti’s sets, sometimes two a night, chatting with Patti and Lenny, the neon beer signs lined above the bar, the click of pool balls, and the smell of wood, beer, urine, sweat, mop water, and time ill spent reminding me oddly, fondly, of the American Legion hall where my parents did so much of their drinking while I fed the pinball machine. A former Hells Angels hangout, CBGB’s still hosted the occasional Angel or three. Word was that the owner, Hilly Kristal, and the Angels had an arrangement in which they could drink for free and in return wouldn’t kill any of us, which seems fair and reasonable. Their arrivals and departures were still intimidating, in particular the entrance of one glowering, fur-bearing boulder who wore his leather vest over a wide-load body that spurned bathwater and soaping those hard-to-reach places as intrusions of civilization. You could smell him coming and you could smell him going, his pungency notable even in this tramp steamer: he had reached the stage when only a fire hose on full blast would help. “Do you think he knows how bad he smells?” one regular asked, to which another dryly replied, “I dunno, you could always go ask him.” Which of course would have resulted in a horizontal ride to the emergency room. The Angels were not to be trifled with, theirs was not a sporting manner. One of the scariest early moments I had in New York was when I was sharing a crosstown taxi with a former teacher of mine from Edgewood High who had temporarily moved to Manhattan to do graduate work at New York University’s theater department. The cab stopped mid-block in the East Village at a red light. “Jesus, look at that fat slob,” my teacher said. It was a hot summer evening, the cab windows were rolled down, voices carried, and the fat slob in question resting on his gut was a Hells Angel squatting on the steps of the Angels’ clubhouse on East Third Street, the same clubhouse where a woman had been thrown to her death from the rooftop by one of the members. It was unclear whether the Angel on the steps had caught the exact phrasing of the exclamation from my teacher, but his head turned in our direction and his eyes twitched, the shift of his buttocks indicating he was about to rise to his feet. The light was still red, two or three cars were in front of us, and then it turned blessedly green, the cabdriver easing forward so that it wouldn’t seem he was hurrying guiltily away. “Sorry,” my former teacher said, his voice overlapping with the driver’s saying, “Man, don’t ever do anything like that again.”
If nothing else, the seventies in New York taught me situational awareness, a vital attribute for every slow-moving mammal prone to daydreaming. Like so many who came to see Patti, I would sometimes glide backward to the street when the opening band began tormenting their guitars after tuning up on each other’s nerves for five or ten minutes. It wasn’t like cooling your heels out on the piazza. Bottles would be dropped from the Palace Hotel men’s shelter above CBGB’s, their green and clear glass smashing on the sidewalk, some of them exploding with pee, the contents recycled from the beer or Thunderbird that the bottles formerly contained. It wasn’t a nightly occurrence, but it happened often enough to keep you limber. Scraggly panhandlers who didn’t bother to work up an inventive line of patter to go with their outstretched palms would pester anyone stationary, even though CBGB’s customers themselves were the very portrait of slim pickings and linty pockets. Abuse was shouted from passing cars, on general principle, not for anything in particular, and the occasional curiosity-seeker or casual-date couple would serenade by, open the front door for a peek, and get a faceful of inchoate racket blasting from the stage—all the deterrence they needed to keep moving to find a different lovebird destination, assuming they weren’t eaten by cannibals before they got to Canal Street.
One night after Patti finished her first set, she stopped to say hi at the bar and leaned in with a pointed suggestion: “James”—she always called me “James”—“you should stick around for these guys. They’re really amazing, you’ve got to see them up close.”
It wasn’t too much to ask, given that it was said to be two of the members of Television, Richard Lloyd and Tom Verlaine, who had convinced Hilly Kristal to book them there on otherwise empty Sunday nights, a band that hardly conformed to Hilly’s original concept as musical host, the full initialed name of the club being CBGB & OMFUG: “Country Bluegrass Blues & Other Music for Uplifting Gourmandizers,” a mirthful mouthful. Inside and out, CBGB’s looked like a hick joint, a misplaced honky-tonk, an impression fortified by Hilly’s flannel shirts. So, in retrospect, Television’s guitar duo were the Romulus and Remus of American punk. It didn�
�t occur to me until then that my skipping the band’s set after the first song or two might have been noted as a shade insulting, given that I had rapturized Patti and looked as if I were giving her regular openers the brush-off. It wasn’t that I was a significant presence in the room but that the funky birth canal of CBGB’s was so tubular it didn’t take binocular vision to spot a regular beating an exit. Patti’s request was also an allusion to the fact that I usually stationed myself at the back. This was a pattern that began in grade school, when we were seated alphabetically and I nearly always ended up against the back wall, helping forge an identity of being the classic wise guy in the last row, the classroom’s color commentator. And it continued with my comradeship with Pauline, who, as mentioned before, favored the last row of the screening room, the film projector’s beam raying directly above our heads. But this hanging-back business was more than precedence and habit. It betrayed my reluctance, my fear of getting too close to anybody or anything; my preference for maintaining detachment, distance, for avoiding involvement and allowing myself a quick escape route from wherever I found myself. I wanted to take everything in, from safe afar, through a panoramic lens. But that night I did as Patti beckoned and positioned myself closer to the stage for Television’s second set.
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