There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll

by Robinson, Lisa

  She told me she only thought a show was bad if nothing happened. If she wasn’t hated or loved. “If you don’t either flower or self-destruct onstage, then there’s no point. That’s why I always try to do something—even if it’s stupid or I make an ass of myself, as long as there’s some part of the show where I do some parachuting. I never want to do something like . . . a ranch house. A middle-class show would be a bad show. And it’s not always me, it’s the guys too; the cool thing about having a group is that one night Lenny might step outside himself and do a really cool solo.” And, in 1975, she said, “The neat thing about performing, is that for the first time in my life it gives me the chance to live for the moment. Before, even if I was having sex with someone, we’d be turning down the sheets and I’d be writing the poem in my head.”

  I traveled with Patti and her band in a van to shows in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland. She was romantically involved at the time with Allen Lanier from the Blue Oyster Cult and then later, with Television’s Tom Verlaine. She was always worried about her boyfriends. But when it came to the work department, she had no lack of confidence. On a trip to Cleveland, she told me she and Keith Richards (who she hadn’t met) should do a version of her song “Pumping”—that it would be their first hit single. John Cale, who was producing her debut album Horses, accompanied us to Boston, where in between her two shows, we went to a restaurant called Clams on the Half Shell. Patti drank warm milk and John accidentally swallowed a Herco guitar pick. She called her mother, who told her that her Washington, D.C., shows were all sold out for the following week, and also, that she had sent her eight new pairs of underwear. A year or two later, when Richard and I went to Paris to see her perform at the Bataclan Club, she said to me, “Wouldn’t it be great if we broke really big in Europe?” She talked about how, just four years ago, she sang on the streets of Paris with a fire-eater. Of course, who knows how many times she really did that. But that night in Paris, after what had been a triumphant show at the Bataclan, we arrived in a big limousine at La Coupole when it was still La Coupole and we ate escargots and drank champagne. Record executives picked up the check. It was a long way from CBGB’s.

  *

  One night in 1976 at the Bottom Line in New York City, the management of the club wouldn’t serve Patti a drink while she was onstage. So she walked from the stage across the tables, took my hand, marched me up to the bar with her, had me order her a drink, and took it back with her onstage. Right in the middle of the show. Once, during one of her concerts in Central Park, she asked me to shield her on the side of the stage so she could quickly urinate—out in the open—without anyone in the audience seeing her. It wasn’t a big deal; these were just those kinds of times. She told bad jokes. She paraphrased the Declaration of Independence. She improvised a version of the 23rd Psalm. I don’t remember her exact words.

  *

  Patti was developing her look. It started out as very Bob Dylan in his Don’t Look Back period. Then there was the addition of a Lion of Judah t-shirt that read “Love Rastafari and Live.” Or Ivan Kral’s red and black Milwaukee Braves baseball jacket. Wildly colored striped Peruvian wool socks. Moroccan scarves, like the one worn by Keith Richards and the one she gave Bob Dylan when they met, possibly when he showed up at one of her early shows at Gerde’s Folk City. (I wondered at the time if someone had told Dylan, there’s this girl who’s doing you. Much in the same way that someone might have once told Ramblin’ Jack Elliott in the 1960s, hey, there’s this guy who’s doing you.) Patti also wore: a mint green cashmere sweater, a Bob Marley button, a conservative man’s black suit, green khaki army surplus pants tied around the ankles, a gray cashmere pullover, and Richard Sohl’s cashmere black coat. Not all at once.

  We talked a lot about clothes. Patti said she liked getting more money and buying more clothes: “I’m a girl, after all,” she said, “but I can never find anything that I like. All that stuff about being beyond gender—that’s great for art, but when it comes to presents . . . I felt so great yesterday because I was in a store, looking at cashmere sweaters and the man was real snotty and he didn’t want me to look at them. So I just said, ‘Give me these two—a green one and a black one—and don’t even bother to wrap them, just put them in a paper bag.’ I turned over all my money; I gave him a hundred dollars. I felt so good. And then I had to walk home. When I have a lot of money I want a mink jacket. Mink, you know, ’cause it’s status. That’s all. A dark mink jacket, lots of Rastafarian t-shirts and twelve pairs of custom-made pants.”

  *

  In the mid- to late 1970s, we talked and talked; I must have hundreds of hours of tape with just Patti alone. She told me, “When I met Robert [Mapplethorpe], my ambitions in terms of the outside world were really oriented towards Robert. I wanted to be able to do great work, but it was really because of Robert, because when he was young it was important to him to be famous and to know Andy Warhol. To be accepted, to be adored, to be rich. And it just became a sort of mutual intertwining of work or energy to develop Robert’s situation. He was extremely shy and nervous and had difficulty communicating. None of which was my problem.” She said that she always thought she had a cool band, but when they got into the studio with John to make her first album, it was hell. She literally said they experienced “agony and ecstasy.” Fighting and screaming and pain; but that they became a “real band” after that recording experience. For people who may not know, or understand what it’s like within a rock and roll band, no matter who they are, especially in a recording studio, no matter how much they supposedly get along, let me tell you: it’s warfare. Whether or not the drums are miked correctly, or if the hi-hat is loud enough or too loud can throw off the entire rhythm of a song. Or, the mood of the drummer. Or worse, the mood of the lead singer if the vocals aren’t loud enough. If the guitar sound is too tinny, or the bass isn’t solid enough—what might seem like minor details to the uninitiated can make or break a song, a record, a band, a career. A musician is fully capable of pulling you aside, making you sit down and listen to something and telling you in confidence, “Steve’s not on this track,” even though you don’t know, nor do you care, who “Steve” is.

  In 1977, after Patti fell from the stage during a concert in Tampa, I visited her while she was recovering in her apartment at One Fifth Avenue. She wore a neck brace and lay back on her queen-sized bed with its green and white checked sheets and a Moroccan cotton bedspread. I noted at the time (because I always took notes) what surrounded her on the bed and in the room: Styrofoam containers with half-eaten hamburgers, drawings and pages filled with writing, records, books, fan mail, a 1920s picture of Antonin Artaud, a photo of Brian Jones circa the Beggars Banquet album, a Brian Jones scrapbook, a pearl-handled stiletto given to her by Dee Dee Ramone, the complete works of Rimbaud, an 8×10 glossy photo of Rimbaud in Paris, the signed works of William Burroughs, a bronze incense burner, Ethiopian baskets filled with silk rags, a royal babuka rug, a globe that glowed in the dark, a Smith Corona typewriter, the complete works of the 16th-century Japanese warrior Ninja Han, a full-color map of Ethiopia, six copies of Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland, a hand-combed hair shirt from Abyssinia, several pairs of ballet slippers, twenty-two copies of her new album, Radio Ethiopia, a transistor radio, a lion pipe made from the clay found at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, postcards with dervishes on them, a cardboard fretboard to learn guitar chords, a box filled with something she called “radiant dirt,” thirty photos of Jim Morrison’s grave, crime magazines, a Raggedy Ann doll dressed like Patti, old Rolling Stones Hyde Park newspaper headlines, a big empty white bird cage, Charles Lindbergh’s autograph (signed, she pointed out, on Brian Jones’ birthday), a sacred ritual belt from Morocco given to her by Paul Getty III (the one who’d been kidnapped and had his ear cut off, and had been one of her flings), and a pale green silk party dress. “Some kid must have stolen it from his mother,” she said about the dress, “it looks like a Balenciaga.” It all spoke volumes to w
hat she was about; her personal art direction was a direct line to her art. She and I sat there and she talked in a perfectly normal voice, straightforward, strong and direct. And then, the phone rang. It was her new boyfriend, Fred “Sonic” Smith, the original guitarist of the MC5, calling from Detroit. She said, “Hi honey,” and in an instant, her voice had turned into giggly, girlish mush.

  Patti wrote me letters and sent postcards from various tours. In Cannes, she said the boys in her band were in heaven, because all the girls were models. She said she hadn’t left her room. She seemed lonely. And so, to those of us who knew her well, it wasn’t a surprise when, at the height of her fame, after her only Top 10 hit “Because the Night” (the song she co-wrote with Bruce Springsteen), she moved to Detroit to start a new adventure: to marry Fred Smith and raise a family. She disappeared for fourteen years. But, as she wrote in letters to me during that time, she was still working on her art.

  • • •

  In 1976, I was traveling to London on a regular basis to do interviews with Rod Stewart or Pete Townshend or Peter Gabriel or Freddie Mercury for my Inside Track syndicated radio show. I stayed at the Ritz Hotel, had dinners with Bryan Ferry at Mr. Chow’s or San Lorenzo, and scoured flea markets looking for 1940s Clarice Cliff painted dishes to add to my ever-growing collection; at that time, they cost next to nothing. It was on one such trip, in December, that I saw Rupert Murdoch boarding my Pan Am morning flight. He had just bought the New York Post. I was sitting in what was the forerunner of business class—a section between first class and coach—and he, of course, was in first. My syndicated column was carried in the newspapers he owned in San Antonio and Boston, and my friend, the late Lillian Roxon, had worked for him as the New York correspondent for his Sydney Morning Herald. I never did anything like this before (or since), but I asked the stewardess (they were definitely called stewardesses then) to bring him a note that said some of his newspapers carried my column, and if he wasn’t sleeping or working on the flight, I would like to buy him a drink. He came back to my section and sat down next to me. He ordered a bottle of champagne. We drank and talked our way across the Atlantic. He told me the story of his life, and while my memory about this is hazy, I recall he also talked a lot about his first marriage. The minute we got off the plane, I promptly and on purpose forgot everything he said. On his direction, I sent some of my work to an editor at the Post, and in 1976, I got my column “Rock Talk” in the New York Post, where I would write about music for the next two decades.

  And still, whenever I returned to New York from anywhere, if Television was performing at CB’s I wouldn’t miss a night. They always lifted my spirits. They reminded me of why I went into all of this in the first place. Along with the Dolls, Television was underappreciated and commercially unsuccessful. Eventually, they self-destructed. But their first album—with the songs “Marquee Moon” and “Venus de Milo”—still sounds as good as it ever did. And Tom Verlaine did the best live version of anyone (including Bob Dylan) of Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” Today, Patti Smith, Talking Heads, Blondie, and the Ramones are all in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Television, along with the New York Dolls, are not.

  • • •

  The lie, which is more fun than the truth, is that one night, Danny Fields and I decided to “divide up” bands we would go and see, and I “discovered” the Ramones. Like Diana Ross and the Jackson Five. (Except that she didn’t discover them either; Suzanne de Passe did.) No one remembers this the same way, but what I recall is that the Ramones were pestering us to cover them in Rock Scene and Hit Parader. So finally one night, I told Danny I’d go see them at CB’s and would give him a report. They took my breath away. I called Danny the next morning, which meant the next afternoon, and told him that he had to see them. They rushed at breakneck speed through the shortest, cutest, and loudest songs I’d ever heard. The best thing was that all of the songs were under two minutes. Their entire set at that time was only about twenty minutes, which, at that volume, was a huge plus—but also, refreshing. And their humor was, as Joey Ramone referred to it, “dark and dry.” I especially was fond of the lyrics in “Beat on the Brat”—which basically consisted of repeating “beat on the brat” numerous times. Joey told me this song came from personal experience; he saw undisciplined, annoying kids in his Queens neighborhood playground, and, he said, he just felt like killing them. “Everything’s kind of a joke with us,” Joey told me. “You can’t take things too seriously or it doesn’t pay to live.” To civilians, the Ramones had the kind of reputation that the Stones had when they first came to the U.S.—that “lock up your daughters” thing. Danny Fields, who eventually managed the band, told me that when the Ramones checked into a Cincinnati hotel, the register read: This is a punk band. Strange and violent.

  *

  By 1977, there was a strong cult of European rock fans enamored of what they called “the New York Underground”: Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Television, the New York Dolls, John Cale, Iggy, the Ramones. Included in this scene was the French couple Michel Esteban and Lizzy Mercier who lived in Paris and had a clothing store, a punk fanzine called Rock News, and eventually, Michel had a small record label. In April 1977, when I traveled to Paris to see the first Ramones/Talking Heads European tour, it was obvious that the Ramones were not about to return the love. In Zurich, their amps broke. In Geneva, the customs and telephone company were on strike. It took two days for them to drive to Marseille, only to discover that the club didn’t have a stage. In Le Havre, the musicians got severe electric shocks onstage. In Holland, Johnny Ramone’s leather jacket was stolen and Danny Fields had to have another one shipped from New York. The contrast was great between the Ramones—four boys from Queens, all of whom went to bed early and wanted to watch TV—and their tourmates, the Talking Heads, who opened the show and traveled on a bus with the Ramones throughout Europe. Talking Heads singer David Byrne likened the tour to a vacation, saying, “Everything is so scenic.” The Ramones were not enthusiastic. “Nobody talks English,” Johnny told me. “It’s not like America. I miss home. We can’t find lasagna or ravioli, and I miss milk. All the milk here has stuff floating on top of it.” Joey added, “Even the orange juice and the Coca-Cola tastes weird.” Dee Dee chimed in, “But I’d like to find an apartment here in a crooked old building.”

  The Ramones never really even got along with each other. They’d play for forty minutes, but half of that time would be spent yelling at each other onstage. Years later, Joey would tell me, “The Ramones were our own breed of band. We were classified as punk, but it came about spontaneously. When we started, there was Donna Summer and ‘Disco Duck.’ And then Boston, Journey, Foreigner, Kansas and REO Speedwagon. They were all the dominant force of faceless, spineless, radio rock. We were rebellious, annoying, alien. Everybody wanted us to disappear. They didn’t know how to deal with us. Except for the people who found us refreshing—like yourself or Andy Warhol—those outcasts.”

  • • •

  Epilogue: More than thirty-five years later, this world has completely changed. Lou Reed died on October 27, 2013. It was Fran Lebowitz’s birthday and she and I were on our way to a private screening of a new Marty Scorsese movie when I heard the news about Lou. And I thought about how these three New Yorkers—Lou, Fran and Marty—made such important cultural contributions to the culture of this city. And how the music Lou made forty years ago sounds as good today as it ever did.

  I interviewed David Bowie a lot, well into the 1990s. After the heart attack he had while on tour in Germany in 2004, his public appearances have been scarce. He has released only one new album and so far, has not performed in concert. We’ve seen each other socially only rarely. But we email each other about various bands and new music. He seems to be on the Internet all the time and doesn’t miss a trick. He’s one of the few who has managed, so far, to gracefully get off the stage. The Ramones continued to tour the world until Joey Ramone died of lymphoma on E
aster Sunday, 2001. Supposedly Bono phoned him on his deathbed in the hospital. A year after Joey’s death, the Ramones were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where Johnny said, “God bless President George W. Bush and God bless America,” and Dee Dee thanked himself. Three months later, Dee Dee died of a probable drug overdose. In 2004, Johnny died of prostate cancer. Today, there’s a “Joey Ramone Place” street sign on the Bowery and 2nd Street. When I see it, I’m reminded of those lyrics in Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row”: “They’re selling postcards of the hanging.” Richard (DNV) Sohl died in 1990. Fred “Sonic” Smith died in 1994. Patti’s beloved brother Todd died one month later. Patti came back to New York and resumed her performing career. Her children are grown up; her son Jackson is a fantastic guitarist married to former White Stripes’ drummer Meg White. Patti is now an award-winning author, and has been a sort of muse to her good friend, the actor Johnny Depp. She continues to tour the world with pretty much the same band—Lenny Kaye, Jay Dee Daugherty, and Tony Shanahan. (Years ago I heard Patti’s onstage tirades against President George W. Bush during the Iraq War and wondered if I was the only one who remembered that she campaigned for Ralph Nader—who, of course, helped George W. Bush win the 2004 election.) But I still get excited when I hear her song “Horses.” When the Stooges were finally inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010, Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder and I were jumping up and down and singing along as Iggy performed “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” When the band came off the stage, I greeted Iggy in the kitchen (which serves as the “backstage” at the Waldorf Astoria Grand Ballroom) and thanked him for reminding me why I got into this racket in the first place. The young Iggy—born Jim Osterberg—from a trailer park outside of Detroit, was one of the most amazing live performers ever. Intense and sick and full of wild, misunderstood rock and roll abandon. Two years ago, Iggy appeared on American Idol, performing “Real Wild Child” shirtless. He had that body of an eighteen-year-old and the face of someone closer to seventy. I thought about how Lillian Roxon would have called it a “perversion of culture.” Was it good that “America” got to see Iggy? I’m not sure. Certainly, with the exception of the Idol judge Steven Tyler, they couldn’t have possibly understood who the hell he was or what Iggy had meant to us. These days, Iggy’s great song “The Passenger” is the soundtrack for a rum ad on TV. The backing track of Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” is used in a TV ad for computers. When Alice Cooper was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in March 2011, Rob Zombie said that Alice was the band that drove a stake into the heart of the love generation. Of course that’s just not true: the Velvet Underground did that—they just didn’t have any hits. And in 2007, Hilly Kristal, owner of CBGB’s, died of cancer after his club was shut down by rent issues, and while he was trying to make a deal to bring CBGB’s to Las Vegas.