Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story

by Dave Thompson

  Library Of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data

  Thompson, Dave, 1960 Jan. 3—

  Dancing barefoot : the Patti Smith story / Dave Thompson.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-56976-325-4

  1. Smith, Patti. 2. Rock musicians—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  ML420.S672T46 2011

  782.42166092—dc23

  [B]

  2011018859

  Interior design: Jonathan Hahn

  Portions of this book appeared previously in Goldmine magazine and the author’s memoir London’s Burning: True Adventures on the Front Lines of Punk, 1976–1977.

  © 2011 by Dave Thompson

  All rights reserved

  Published by Chicago Review Press, Incorporated

  814 North Franklin Street

  Chicago, Illinois 60610

  ISBN 978-1-56976-325-4

  Printed in the United States of America

  5 4 3 2 1

  For Cherry, who not only showed me what could be done but also gave me the resolve to do it.

  You want me to dance more? I’m like eighty years old.

  —Patti Smith, onstage in Oxford, England, October 2007

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  1. The Sheep Lady from Algiers

  2. Anna of the Harbor

  3. Ballad of a Bad Boy

  4. Death by Water

  5. The Amazing Tale of Skunkdog

  6. Picasso Laughing

  7. Ha! Ha! Houdini

  8. Neo Boy

  9. Christ! The Colors of Your Energies

  10. Babelfield

  11. High on Rebellion

  12. The Salvation of Rock

  13. Burning Roses

  14. Thread

  15. Scream of the Butterfly

  16. A Fire of Unknown Origin

  17. Sandayu the Separate

  18. Babelogue

  Appendix: Patti Smith on Record

  Bibliography

  Index

  PREFACE

  IN 1979, PATTI Smith was on top of the world. Four albums and ten years into her career, she may not yet have been a household name, but she was at least named in all the households that mattered, and the previous year’s “Because the Night” (which she had cowritten with Bruce Springsteen) was already an FM immortal.

  But no matter how well the world thought it knew her, she remained an enigma. Like Bob Dylan before her, she represented that precious moment when popular acclaim meshes with artistic precociousness until the two are utterly indivisible. Where, fans and critics alike would ponder, did the private Patti end and the public persona begin? Was there even a dividing line between the two? Or was her entire existence an ongoing art project whose true nature would only be revealed when it was complete?

  That was the question I intended to ask her when, with the studious enthusiasm of a nineteen-year-old fanzine editor, I made my way into the sound check for what turned out to be the original Patti Smith Group’s final London performance, in the hope of scoring an interview with her.

  Unfortunately, Patti wasn’t there.

  I introduced myself to someone; it turned out to be her brother, Todd, who passed me on to somebody else; it was roadie Andi Ostrowe, and she allowed me to sit unobtrusively in a corner while she went to see if anyone could talk to me. A short while later, guitarist Lenny Kaye ambled over for an interview, which completely threw me, because he wasn’t Patti. Neither was pianist Richard Sohl, who also sat in on the conversation, but I was too polite, or shy, to ask if she was around. It was obvious to me that she wasn’t. The band sound-checked without her, and left the venue without her.

  So did I, and although I wrote up my story and was pleased with the results, I don’t believe I ever published it. Instead, it became the first pages in a scrapbook of impressions and memories that I collected over the years, fragments of which appear here for the first time.

  This book is not intended to be an analytical biography of Patti Smith. Neither is it a straightforward summation of her life. Rather, it is something in between, a biography that places events in the cultural context of the time, as opposed to the sometimes trendier option of viewing everything through the prism of hindsight.

  I have no intention of denigrating or ignoring Patti Smith’s accomplishments over the past thirty years, for it is by those accomplishments that her continued influence and importance can best be measured. But as with so many other artists who served as forces for cultural change, Patti Smith’s greatest influence emanates from the years during which she was still shaping herself and her career. As a result, the book might well feel chronologically top heavy: it is largely the story of a performer growing up in the New York City of the early-to-mid 1970s, while a large part of the city was growing up around her.

  Emphasis on the term “performer”—this is not a tell-all biography. I have steered clear of Patti’s private life: her friends away from her music, her lovers away from the spotlight, her family life. While the conscientious may read between a few of the lines and draw conclusions that do not always place Patti’s actions in the kindest light, there are few scandals unearthed here, and no secret peeps behind closed doors. Such things are of interest to the personal biographer, but my goal is to document a career, because it is the career that defines the artist, not the “Did she?” / “Would she?” / “Is she?” tattle that almost every public figure contends with at some point in his or her career. Plus, I believe that Patti’s audience have too much respect for her, as both a performer and a person, to care about such things.

  Hence my decision to allow Patti’s own words to guide the book, as opposed those of a multitude of onlookers, hangers-on, and casual acquaintances. (Some quotes, from her and others, have been lightly edited for clarity.) I don’t especially care what scandal-hungry groupies or envious peers have to say about Patti, and I don’t believe you would, either. These people knew of Patti, but they did not know her, and there is a profound difference between the two.

  Patti was—and is—both smart and fortunate. She lives her private life in private and has constantly surrounded herself with people who help ensure that it remains there. Nevertheless, I was guided by some remarkable people. I met Ivan Kral, guitarist with the original Patti Smith Group, in 1991, as he worked to help birth the infant Seattle music scene: he was a member of a band called Sky Cries Mary then and was preparing a solo album called Native. I interviewed him for the Seattle Times, alerting the city to the presence of the genius in its midst, and again for Alternative Press. Along with Kaye’s thoughts and Sohl’s interjections from our 1979 interview, Kral’s words helped shape what this book would become.

  So did those of many other interviewees, encountered over a number of years for a variety of publications and purposes: Stiv Bators, John Cale, Jim Carroll, Leee Black Childers, Jayne County (formerly Wayne County), Mick Farren, Richard Hell, Iggy Pop, Wayne Kramer, Hilly Kristal, Richard Lloyd, Ray Manzarek, Hilly Michaels, Elliott Murphy, Bobby Neuwirth, Nico, Johnny and Joey Ramone, Lou Reed, Mick Ronson, Rob Tyner, Cherry Vanilla, Tom Verlaine, and Tony Zanetta.

  Other friends and associates played their own part in this book: my editors Yuval Taylor and Devon Freeny, Amy Hanson, Jo-Ann Greene, Theresa K., Geoff Monmouth, Tobias Wilcox, Trevor and Oliver, and many more.

  Yet when it came to writing this book, I discovered that the only words that could really tell Patti Smith’s stories were Patti’s own. The people around her at different times in her life convey context and meaning, of course. But only Patti knew what she was saying, thinking, reacting to, and causing
to happen as her career unfolded, and it was the unfolding of that career that I was most intrigued by.

  Sometimes she exaggerates; sometimes she deceives. Discussing some of her earliest musical memories, for example, she once shaved five years off her actual age in order to press home a particular point. I addressed these discrepancies when I came across them, but I also endeavored never to lose sight of the point that she was making, particularly since the biographical details as she related them were often immaterial to begin with.

  Besides, Patti’s career is a biography in itself, one that begins with the most implausible outset, continues on through a series of unimaginable events, survives any number of insurmountable crashes, and remains as vibrant today as it was ever in the past. And only she knows how she accomplished that.

  So while I thank everybody who spoke to me, including a number who did so off the record, I do not apologize for using their words so sparingly. This is Patti’s story, and I have chosen to tell it as Patti might have seen it, had she been on the outside looking in. Because this time, she was there.

  1

  THE SHEEP LADY FROM ALGIERS

  SHE WAS BORN Patricia Lee Smith, Tricia to her friends and family, in Chicago on December 30, 1946. World War II had been over for eighteen months, and Christmas for five days, but the remnants of both were still visible everywhere. The very air, it seemed, crackled with optimism and hope, a tangible sense that after so many years of hardship—the Great Depression preceded World War II; the Great War preceded that—the United States was finally poised to embrace its long-postponed destiny. The American Dream was coming, and from the upper echelons of society to the lowest rung of the economic ladder, the mantra that suddenly anything was possible was coming true.

  Grant and Beverly Smith, a skilled pattern- and model-maker and his homemaker wife, certainly believed in the dream. Born in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, on July 29, 1916, Grant H. Smith was thirty and newly discharged from the military when his daughter arrived; his wife, Beverly Williams, was twenty-six. The Irish American couple had married following the war’s end and moved to Illinois because they knew they’d find work there. They were not wealthy, by any stretch of the imagination; sometimes, it felt as though they were barely getting by. Their tiny house was already cramped before the arrival of Patti’s sister Linda in 1948.

  One of Patti’s earliest memories is of sitting on a stoop in Chicago singing “Jesus Loves Me” while she waited for the organ grinder to come up the street with the pet monkey that made her laugh so hard. But when Beverly became pregnant again, with Patti’s brother, Todd, in late 1949, it was time to move on. Patti’s Grandpa Williams had a farm in Tennessee, so they lived there for a short while. Then they returned north, to a housing block on Newell Street in Philadelphia. The homes were originally constructed as a GI housing project, but in later years Patti would prefer a more figurative description: army barracks.

  It was a grim environment, but Grant Smith continued to struggle to build a better life for his family. Patti rarely saw her father after he took a night job at the Honeywell corporation, making thermostats and regulators for the modern heating products that a lot of her neighbors and friends’ families couldn’t even afford. To bring extra money into the household, he would offer to do peoples’ tax returns for them.

  Even at the age of six, Patti was no stranger to music. She grew up listening to her mother’s collection of June Christy and Chris Connor jazz records. Later in life, Patti’s biographers would describe her mother as a former jazz singer; in fact, she was simply a woman who loved jazz and would sing it around the house. She also sang opera, and Patti would join in. When her school presented a version of Verdi’s Aïda, Patti played a young Gypsy boy.

  Maria Callas was another favorite, and Puccini as well. It didn’t matter that Patti couldn’t understand what was being sung. The emotion, alive within the voice of the singer, was enough, and Patti would laugh, cry, or rage as the opera’s stories unfolded, as if she were Italian born and bred.

  “I dreamed when I was a kid about being an opera singer,” she told Terry Gross in an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air. “But I never thought about singing [professionally]. I think I sang in this school choir or something, but I didn’t really excel or have any real gift. But what I did have was, I’ve always, for some reason, been comfortable talking in front of people, or performing in front of people.”

  Patti was indeed an adventurous child. “I don’t want to get too hung up on biochemical warfare,” she told a California audience in 1976. “When I was a kid I ate dirt.” Marshalling a bunch of neighborhood boys, she formed a gang called the Cool Cats, built their base out of empty refrigerator boxes, and laid down one law: no girls were allowed. Only sister Linda was ever admitted, in her capacity as the gang’s nurse, patching up the wounds that would arise whenever the Cool Cats went out to fight the kids down the block. Even Patti was not immune from this single regulation, which is why her fellow warriors all believed she was a boy.

  And then one day her cover was blown. She never did find out how; it was probably one of her gangmates’ mothers. But that was it for her life as a Cool Cat. She was kicked out of her own gang.

  The rejection did not blunt Patti’s intrepid spirit. One day, when she was seven or eight, she found herself walking through an area that the locals called Jericho, an accumulation of truly makeshift homes constructed from shopping trolleys, planks of wood and strips of tarpaulin, and old refrigerator boxes. Just like her old club house. She stopped to look, mindless of the cries of “white cracker” that the predominantly black residents were hurling her way, or the stones and handfuls of dirt that followed the oaths. She just dodged out of the way and continued looking, returning day after day until finally people started to acknowledge her with a wave or a smile. Soon, she laughed years later, she was happily hanging out with them.

  Not all of Patti’s adventures were so courageous, and many more took place in her mind alone. She was a vivid dreamer, with imaginings that bordered on the hallucinatory, and as time passed, she trained her mind to recall them when she woke, to be written down in one of the pads she was constantly scribbling in. She once boasted that she’d never had a dream that she didn’t remember, and she shared many of them with her two siblings, entertaining them with stories of her nocturnal activities. Later, the same training would become a part of her creative process: “Most of my writing and a lot of my songs, or sometimes a melody, comes from a dream,” Patti revealed to British journalist Sandy Robertson in 1978.

  She credited her mother with teaching her that. “[Mother] was always great in weaving a fantasy world, telling us fairy stories, or getting us involved in stories,” Patti told Mademoiselle’s Amy Gross in 1975. Her mother’s fantasies would even inspire her future writing. Destined for Patti’s debut album, the poem “Free Money” was rooted in Beverly’s weekly dream of striking it rich. Her mom “always dreamed about winning the lottery,” she laughed during an interview with Simon Reynolds of the Observer in 2005. “But she never bought a lottery ticket! She would just imagine if she won, make lists of things she would do with the money—a house by the sea for us kids, then all kinds of charitable things.”

  I’ll buy you a jet plane, baby … And take you through the stratosphere.

  Other times, Patti would draw Linda and Todd into the worlds that unfolded from her reading. Both of their parents were very well read—later Patti described them as liberal-minded and sophisticated readers— and she grew up with the same voracious appetite for books. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women was a particular favorite, and as soon as Patti was old enough to formulate the notion of hero worship, Jo—the so-capable elder sister who binds the March family together—became her first role model. It was Jo whose example first led her to write; it was Jo who showed her the magic of performance.

  Patti began writing her own stage plays, which she would later disparage as the childish constructs that they surely were. But she acted the
m out with and for her family all the same. Not because she actually enjoyed doing it, but because it was what Jo did. She told writer Scott Cohen in a 1976 interview in Oui, “I studied her to see what it takes to be a girl who keeps her family together—who writes, creates, inspires people, likes to teach and to entertain.”

  “I wasn’t a disturbed child. I actually had a happy childhood. I loved my brother and sister. We were inseparable. They thought the world of me,” Patti told Terry Gross. She recalled going through some of Todd’s possessions following his death in 1994 and discovering some of the childhood memories that he’d written down, “about how I was like King Arthur, and they were like the knights in my court, and they always believed in me, and I invented endless games and plays and stories for us to be involved in.”

  Jo March was not her sole literary influence. Onstage in Oxford, England, in 2007, she told the audience how, as a child, “I cherish[ed] my Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass books, and I learned about the dodo bird in these books, and I couldn’t wait till I got older and got to meet one.” She also combed the parental bookshelves for copies of Plato and Aristotle, and devoured the Bible as vociferously as she plowed through her father’s books and magazines on the UFO phenomenon.

  The possibility that our skies were filled with flying saucers was common currency after the end of World War II. Hollywood studios were already churning out their B-movie sci-fi epics; pulp paperbacks and magazines were expounding theory and thoughts. Little green men were everywhere, even if nobody reliable had actually seen one, and it would be decades before the scientific community finally announced its own belief that the whole UFO business was an illusion, a manifestation of the Cold War paranoia that likewise gripped the land.