Lucking Out

by James Wolcott

  It took them forever to tune up, but then it always took them forever to tune up, bent over their guitars like car mechanics over a tricky transmission. Then Verlaine, relatively satisfied, would nod, their name would be announced to scattered applause, the lights would come up, and Tom would open with a little joke. It was always the same little joke, the same lame little icebreaker. It was about asking a flower seller on the street about buying some flowers for his sweetie and the seller giving him one rude brush-off after another before squawking: “Listen, pal, stop bothering me—can’cha see I’m trying to sell these flowers?” It was not a joke that got funnier in the retelling, and the fondness Verlaine held for it would always be inexplicable, like so much else about him. He was and would remain an unbreakable code. After the punch line died a small, swift death came the siren-whine of guitar as Television began “Fire Engine,” a cover of a 13th Floor Elevators song whose cover-appeal was also elusive, so Tinkertoy was its construction, no matter how gussied up the guitar attack. Up close was better than the back, but I still wasn’t getting the gnostic gospel message. But at some point in the set, perhaps it was “Venus de Milo,” perhaps it was the gorgeous “Judy” (which the band never recorded, a sin, a crime, though it has surfaced on bootlegs, like a plaintive cry retrieved from the ruins of Atlantis), Verlaine lifted his face to the light, eyelids closed, and I could see that he was beautiful, the light striking his Antonin Artaud cheekbones like a close-up in The Passion of Joan of Arc. (One of Patti’s favorites, and I could see now how Verlaine was Artaud to her Falconetti, not a comparison that rose naturally from seeing them hold hands like sweethearts between sets at the rear of CBGB’s.) The imploring death rattle that was his normal singing voice didn’t matter, because it was meant to sound constricted, his eyelids fluttering like exaggerated REM sleep or pained rapture. As the songs became longer and the virtuoso soloing of Verlaine and Richard Lloyd wove intricately, passionately upward in a double helix without spiraling off course and descending into doodling, as drummer Billy Ficca kept jazzy order in the backseat (instead of pounding rhythm like a heavy-metal humpster), I felt a religious conversion coming on without quite being sold, despite the bravura finish (the first of many bravura finishes) of “Marquee Moon,” which planted the summit flag on the set. Because although there was dynamic dissonance to Television’s performing and the discordant jabs that testified to the influence of free-form improvisationalists such as Albert Ayler and John Coltrane, two of Verlaine’s favorites, there was also an underlayer of discombobulation.

  Or, rather, a side pocket.

  Flanked on Verlaine’s right was Television’s bassist, Richard Hell. Hell was not only the band’s bass thumper but also a singer and songwriter and a longtime friend of Verlaine’s, the Paul McCartney to his John Lennon, ideally. (Verlaine once told me that one of the best things about the Beatles was the way they could shout out harmonies and make them seem intimate.) They had met at boarding school in Delaware, a couple of matching misfits named Tom Miller and Richard Meyers who hopped the fence to hitchhike to Florida together, only to be stopped in Alabama, not the most welcoming place for strangers, and sent packing home. But the two of them had gotten a gulp of the fugitive kick of busting out of the regiment and didn’t intend to take their boring slot in the employment line. New York was where they had to be, the cockroaches welcoming them with waving antennae. They eventually adopted alter egos together, shedding their everyday humdrum names for legendary French poète maudit personas—Verlaine deriving from Paul Verlaine and Hell from Arthur Rimbaud’s Season in Hell—dissolving their former identities by dropping acid together to invite visions and synesthesia, knocking down the partition walls of selfhood. They also gender-bender-blended, adopting a mutual drag persona in print, that of the floozy poet Theresa Stern, a Puerto Rican prostitute working the streets of Hoboken and the author of Wanna Go Out? (“Wanna go out?” was what hookers asked in the seventies of any man who caught their eye, the predecessor to the later invitation “Wanna party?”) The author’s photo for Theresa Stern was a composite shot of Verlaine and Hell wearing wigs—a blurred sister persona. (Though it would be Hell who kept up the Stern impersonation solo in print, giving interviews under her name.) It was seeing the drag-happy New York Dolls at the Mercer Arts Center that clicked Hell into realizing there was much more sexy fun to be had playing rock than pecking at the typewriter keys like a trained chicken.

  Photographs of the test-run incarnation of Television called the Neon Boys reveal the pouty preening of so many rockers dabbling then in David Bowie’s and the New York Dolls’ makeup kits, going for that androgynous, washed-ashore, fuck-me-I’m-pretty look. But by the time Television was double billing with Patti, Verlaine had adopted the nondescript tee or the thrift-shop bargain shirt that actually buttoned for those special non-festive occasions, dissolving the barrier between street clothes and stage wear and spurning the theatricality of glitter and glam droogies like the Dolls and their imitators. It was a taste choice, Verlaine being a master of high-visibility low profitability, but it also reflected a recoil from the train-wreck legacy of the Dolls, whose members buckled from too many drugs and reeled off the road, regrouping and forging ahead but never again with the runaway splendor of their legendary performances at Mercer Arts Center, where the lead singer, David Johansen, and the guitarist Johnny Thunders augured to be the Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the East Village cockroach kingdom. (As was remarked at the time, David had the lips and Thunders the licks.) The commercial flop of the Dolls and their inability to break out beyond their cult following (though their influence in England was incalculable, the Smiths’ Morrissey being their number one pining fan), coupled with their casualty toll and reliable undependability, made it that much harder for newer New York bands to get signed. I mentioned this once to Bob Christgau, saying that some of the younger rockers felt the Dolls had blown it for those coming up after them, to which Bob shot back, “Well, if that’s how they feel, fuck ’em.” He wasn’t going to coddle a bunch of ingrates.

  Hell’s look was his own—like Edie Beale, he inventively made do with whatever was near at hand and served his whims—but his Cannes-starlet bare-shoulder T-shirts and sunglasses and color palette clashed with Television’s first-thing-picked-off-the-floor antifashion indifference, its muted choice of cuts and fabrics, which sent a different message statement: it’s the music that counts. Not visual flash and certainly not pose-flexing showmanship, which Hell also had on tap. Unlike the archetypal rock bassist forged in the medieval ironworks, Hell didn’t hold his sentry position as the unmovable pillar in a cross-fire hurricane, bolted to the bass and rooted to the floor in the classic stoic stance of the Stones’ Bill Wyman and The Who’s John Entwistle. He got buggy onstage with a popcorn-popping battery of head-wagging, moue-making, and hair-raking, with a few Pete Townshend jumps thrown in that had rather less liftoff than Townshend’s, but then Pete was the more practiced catapulter. Perhaps Hell made a minor spectacle of himself in self-defense to distract from his bass playing, which fell a bit below minimum requirements even by garage-band standards. “Close enough for rock” went the jokey catchphrase, but Hell wasn’t close enough to get close enough for rock, often seeming to lose his place on the bass. What he brought to the stage was louche charisma and the authorship of the future punk anthems “Blank Generation” (“I belong to the blank generation and/I can take it or leave it each time”) and “Love Comes in Spurts.” But even these assertive numbers were rudimentary pumpers compared with the topographies Television was intent on exploring; friendship or no friendship, it never would have worked out. There was room for only one vision in Television, Verlaine’s. Hell would soon vacate the crew, his corner filled by Fred Smith, who defected from Blondie and conformed to the Wyman-Entwistle model of unassuming sentinel safeguarding the beat. Hot-chick interest peeled considerably after Hell left the band, but he wouldn’t be gone from the CBGB’s stage for long, returning with a sound that went every which way,
like bullets careening off steel drums with a slow-death heartbeat in the background of something big about to keel over.

  Patti was the first draw at CBGB’s and the first to break out of the pack. I interviewed her in her studio apartment a block up from St. Marks Place, which looked as if it had been tossed by narcs given a bad tip on a drug stash and not bothering to tidy up afterward. It was hot, as I recall: no air-conditioning, Patti tugging on a bra strap that seemed to be chafing. In the sink a Lone Ranger mask floated in a glass of water. Before we went up to the studio, I met Patti at a coffee place in the East Village where, prominently on the table, was a brick-heavy copy of a dictionary of symbolism. I got the impression that she used it to interpret the symbols in her own lyrics, explore the Jungian range of their profundity, and when I mentioned this reference book being displayed for my benefit to someone later, he found it posey and pretentious. I found it the opposite. A truly pretentious artist would have disavowed any scholarly knowledge or curiosity about the symbols in his or her work, regarding them as mysterious effusions from the etheric realm that it was up to each listener to unriddle—oh, don’t ask me to explain, it’s up to you to explore the ambiguities while leaving my precious artistic integrity intact. “We murder to dissect,” and all that. Patti didn’t treat her creative apparatus as a tamperproof black box with a secret password. Patti was an unabashed autodidact. That was one of the most admirable things about her. In a decade with so much fatalistic derision stocking the pantry, her hero worship was unfashionably uncool, her faith in the pantheon unshaken. Our idols are our instructors, and revelations without knowledge are just pieces of dreams with no assembly kit. William Blake, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Rimbaud, Edie Sedgwick, Isabelle Eberhardt (who dressed as a boy and adventured in Arab lands, her memoir one of Patti’s touchstones), her friend Robert Mapplethorpe, Robert Bresson, Carl Dreyer, they constituted the geometric points of the constellation she aspired to join. I was present when one of her cryptic idols paid a call, and I wrote it up for the Voice as if witness to a superpower summit:

  A copy of Witt was slid across the table to Patti Smith. “Would you sign this for me, please?” “Sure,” said Patti, “what’s your first name?” He told her. “Like in New Jersey?” Patti asked, and he said no—with a z. “Well, I’ll draw you a map of Jersey,” and so on the inside page Patti scratched its intestinal boundaries, in the middle labeled it Neo Jersey, signed her name, and passed the copy of Witt back to Jerzy Kosinski.

  The night before, after the second set at the Other End, the greenroom door opened and the remark hanging in the air was Bob Dylan asking a member of Patti’s band, “You’ve never been to New Jersey?” So, all hail Jersey. And in honor of Dylan’s own flair for geographical salutation (“So long New York, hello East Orange”), all hail the Rock and Roll Republic of New York. With the Rolling Stones holding out at Madison Square Garden, Patti Smith and her band at the Other End, and Bob Dylan making visitations to both events, New York was once again the world’s Rock and Roll Republic.

  Patti Smith had a special Rimbaud-emblematized statement printed up in honor of Stones week, and when her band went into its version of “Time Is on My Side” (yes it is), she unbuttoned her blouse to reveal a Keith Richards T-shirt beneath. On the opening night she was tearing into each song and even those somewhat used to her galloping id were puzzled by lines like, “You gotta lotta nerve sayin’ you won’t be my parking meter.” Unknown to many in the audience, parked in the back of the room, his meter running a little quick, was the legendary Bobby D. himself. Dylan, despite his wary, quintessential cool, was giving the already highly charged room an extra layer of electricity and Patti, intoxicated by the atmosphere, rocked with stallion abandon. She was positively playing to Dylan, like Keith Carradine played to Lily Tomlin in the club scene from Nashville. But Dylan is an expert at gamesmanship, and he sat there, crossing and uncrossing his legs, playing back.

  Afterwards, Dylan went backstage to introduce himself to Patti. He looked healthy, modestly relaxed (though his eyes never stopped burning with cool-blue fire), of unimposing physicality, yet the corporeal Dylan can never be separated from the mythic Dylan, and it’s that other Dylan—the brooding, volatile, poet-star of Don’t Look Back—who heightens or destroys the mood of a room with the tiniest of gestures. So despite Dylan’s casual graciousness, everyone was excitedly unsettled.

  And there was a sexual excitation in the room as well. Bob Dylan, the verdict was unanimous, is an intensely sexual provocateur—“he really got me below the belt,” one of the women in the room said later. Understand, Dylan wasn’t egregiously coming on—he didn’t have to. For the sharp-pencil, slightly petulant vocals on Blood on the Tracks hardly prepared one for the warm, soft-bed tone of his speaking voice: the message driven home with that—Dylan offhand is still Dylan compelling. So with just small talk he had us all subdued, even Patti, though when the photographers’ popping flashbulbs began, she laughingly pushed him aside, saying, “Fuck you, then take my picture, boys.” Dylan smiled and swayed away.

  The party soon broke up—Dylan had given his encouragement to Patti, the rest of us had a glimpse from some future version of Don’t Look Back (but with a different star)—and the speculation about Dylan’s visit commenced. What did his casual benediction signify?

  Probably nothing, was the reasonable answer. But such sensible explanations are unsatisfying, not only because it’s a waste of Dylan’s mystique to interpret his moves on the most prosaic level, but because the four-day engagement at the Other End convincingly demonstrated that Patti and the band are no small-time cult phenomenon. Not only was Patti in good voice, but the band is extending itself confidently. Jay Daugherty, the newly acquired drummer, provides rhythmic heat, and Lenny Kaye has improved markedly on guitar—his solo on “Time Is on My Side” for example moves Keith Richards riffing to Verlaine slashing. The band’s technical improvement has helped revivify the repertoire: “Break It Up” is now more sharply focused, “Piss Factory” is dramatically jazzy, and their anthem, “Gloria,” ends the evening crashingly. Missing were “Free Money,” and “Land”—the Peckinpahesque cinematic version of “Land of 1000 Dances”—which is being saved for the forthcoming album.

  Something is definitely going on here and I think I know what it is. During one of her sets Patti made the seemingly disconnected remark, “Don’t give up on Arnie Palmer.” But when the laughter subsided, she added, “The greats are still the greatest.” Yes, of course! All her life Patti Smith has had rock and roll in her blood—she has been, like the rest of us, a fan; this is part of her connection with her audience—and now she’s returning what rock has given her with the full force of her love. Perhaps Dylan perceives that this passion is a planet wave of no small sweep. Yet what I cherished most about Patti’s engagement was not the pounding rock-and-roll intensity but a throwaway gesture of camaraderie. When Lenny Kaye was having difficulty setting up his guitar between numbers, Patti paced around, joked around, scratched her stomach, scratched her hair—still Kaye was not quite ready. “I don’t really mind,” she told the audience. “I mean, Mick would wait all night for Keith.”

  Keith was a frequent comparison point for Patti, who once lamented that she had to go onstage and perform even when she had her period—“Keith doesn’t have these problems.”

  I actually left the sanctity of studio apartment and black cat to catch Patti on out-of-town appearances, at a time when audience reception for a New York poet-rocker was a roll of the dice, the dominant bands being mega-hair arena rockers who bombasticized everything they flagellated and drew upon what the poet Philip Larkin once derisively called the “myth kitty,” invoking the combination of Nibelungen, Camelot, and Satan’s barbecue pit that Spinal Tap would turn into a tacky arcade. By contrast, the Patti Smith Group looked like a scarecrow outfit with aspirations that would barely form a bicep—abjuring the Nietzschean hard-on of heavy metal and scratching an artier, jazzier upward path, “arty” and “jaz
zy” being what so many mid-seventies rock fans most wanted to avoid when they went out at night to get laid and wasted, as hormones and Kiss intended. But by now the Patti Smith Group had added a drummer, Jay Dee Daugherty, and acquisitioned its own rogue force and demolition expert, albeit with impeccable avant-rock credentials: the grinning volcano that was and is John Cale, whose mood swings you didn’t want to get in the middle of. A classically trained musician born in Wales who had once taken part in an eighteen-hour piano performance with John Cage, Cale was a founding partner of the Velvet Underground with the singer-songwriter-scowler Lou Reed, his viola sawing away moodily on the Velvets’ “Black Angel’s Death Song,” a shredding, assaultive La Monte Young dissonance and groaning industrial drone that seemed to rise from the bowels of the subway system. He also played keyboards, his electric organ propelling the Velvets’ improvisatory epic “Sister Ray” like a runaway calliope. He and Reed had an unamicable parting, unamicable partings being one of Lou’s specialties, and he recorded a number of solo albums with literary-minded song titles (“Hedda Gabler,” “Graham Greene”) and others of savage candor, such as the cuckold’s tale of “Guts,” with its pulp-novel opening. He also produced albums, including the desolate masterpieces by his fellow Velvets castaway, the imperiously beautiful and opaque ice sculpture Nico (whose handbag rattled wherever she walked, holding a bootleg pharmacy), and he was chosen as producer of Patti’s debut album, Horses. He and Patti’s manager, the shortcake Jane Friedman, were living together, and Cale would join the band onstage for their encore cover of the Who’s “My Generation.” He also was billed as a solo artist in concert appearances in which Patti headlined (sandwiched between Television and Patti on one halcyon occasion), injecting songs with a haunted-sanitarium psychodrama punctuated by primal screams that outdid John Lennon’s on his Plastic Ono Band album—Cale’s had more grizzly volume, less sinus infection. Crooning Elvis’s “Heartbreak Hotel,” he would miserabilize, “I get so lonely/I get so lonely I could … DDDDD​IIIII​IIIIE​EEEEE​EEEEE​EEEEE​EEEEE​EEEEE​EEEEE​EEE!!​!” That woke up the dead. It was common info that the recording sessions for Horses had been “stormy,” and Cale was capable of generating thunderclouds even without a lot of ego friction in a collider chamber like the recording studio.