Maybe Cyrinda Foxe really did carry the scars from a run-in with the Hell’s Angels.
Maybe Nico really did study with Lee Strasberg and hang out with Marilyn Monroe.
And maybe Patti Smith, laboring through her teenage pregnancy, really did get kicked so hard by her unborn child that a tiny leg burst out of her stomach and hung there still kicking till the doctor could jam it back in again.
Any girl who could live through an experience like that, reasoned Curtis, had to have something going for her, and he recommended that Tony Ingrassia, Femme Fatale’s director, cast his own eye over her. Ingrassia, too, felt she had a part to play in the production.
Patti had never set foot onstage before—not since that childhood opera, anyway. But you’d never have guessed it. Already most comfortable in the trademark black-urban-guerrilla chic of her later public fame, she was majestic and magnetic, cool, mean and hard-bitten, radiating an intensity that could not have been further from the burlesque grind and exaggerated sexuality of her costars.
With another Warhol associate, Mary Woronov, adding further star power to what was already a spellbinding underground bill, Femme Fatale: The Three Faces of Gloria opened at the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club on East Seventy-Fourth Street on May 6, 1970. The following month, shortly before the play transferred to the upstairs room at Max’s, Gay magazine’s Everett Henderson described it as “an uneven, amusing, boring, hilarious, weird, simplistic study of lots of old movies, gangster riffs and the Sharon Tate murder…. I do not dare judge the performances or the direction. Anthony Ingrassia … successfully got the actors on stage and whipped them through a suitable number of convulsions … energetically play[ing] projections of themselves as stars…. If you are fed up with the slick, stainless steel emptiness of Uptown garbage like Company, … it may amuse or irritate you, thrill you or bore you, but it is robust and it is alive.”
The success of Femme Fatale, and her part in that success, did not close Patti’s eyes to her main pursuit, however. Nor to her continuing ability to magnetize the people she most needed to have around her.
Her own adopted family had expanded by one after she and Mapplethorpe befriended a teenaged junkie named Jim Carroll. He was twenty years old, but, Patti assured him, he possessed an infinitely older soul.
The young man was already establishing a reputation as a poet, and in just a few months the Paris Review would cement his position among the city’s literary elite by publishing an excerpt from his book The Basketball Diaries, an autobiographical account of falling off the rails at oneof the city’s most exclusive private schools, Trinity. Carroll had served a stint in Rikers for possession of heroin; by spring 1970 he was living at the Chelsea, penning the poetry that would become the Pulitzer-nominated Living at the Movies.
Inevitably, he and Patti met just outside the Chelsea, although Carroll had seen her around before that, “checking me out” at Max’s Kansas City or watching his readings at St. Mark’s Church. According to Carroll’s account in Please Kill Me, Patti and Mapplethorpe were fighting as Carroll came into view, but the battle stopped the moment she spotted him. “Hey, you’re Jim Carroll, right? I’m Patti.”
They small-talked for a moment, and then Patti asked if she could drop by his room the following day. She had a book about Native Americans that she wanted to give him.
“Sure,” Carroll began. “I’m in room …”
“I know what room you’re in,” she replied.
“Already he was pretty much universally recognized as the best poet of his generation,” Patti told the New York Times’ William Grimes in 2009. “The work was sophisticated and elegant. He had beauty.” The wiry blond also became her confidant and sounding board for at least as long as their relationship lasted, a tempestuous era that Carroll later celebrated in his book, Forced Entries: The Downtown Diaries, 1971–1973.
Moving into the West Twenty-Third Street loft that Patti and Mapplethorpe had started renting as an “art factory” but that quickly supplanted the Chelsea as their home, he followed Bobby Neuwirth into the select band of people with whom she’d share her poetry. She’d been seduced, Carroll said, not only by the fact that he, too, was a poet, but also by his heroin habit. “I think she would have been disappointed if I’d stopped,” he told Patricia Morrisroe.
But an even more powerful figure was approaching, one who would finally offer Patti the strength to stop dreaming about her ambitions and start living them.
Sam Shepard, three years Patti’s senior, had arrived in New York City in 1963. He’d worked as a bus boy around Greenwich Village while he insinuated himself into the city’s lifeblood. He was a musician, a playwright, an author, an actor, and over the course of the next five years, each of these ambitions drew him into its soul.
The band he played drums for, the Holy Modal Rounders, made something of a local impact even before they landed a track on the soundtrack to the film Easy Rider in 1969. Shepard was a fixture off-off-Broadway, leading the Theatre Genesis—another of the artistic endeavors that called St. Mark’s Church home—to glory. He collected Obies, the Village Voice’s greatest theatrical award, like other actors collected reviews: by 1970, he had won half a dozen.
If there was any man on the arts scene at that time who could have given Patti Smith a glimpse of her own future glory, it was Shepard.
5
THE AMAZING TALE OF SKUNKDOG
PATTI WAS DATING Todd Rundgren, the brilliant young Philadelphian who had escaped the clutches of his last band, the Nazz, to launch a wildly idiosyncratic solo career from the upstate New York headquarters of his manager Albert Grossman—the same Albert Grossman who had once managed Dylan and now handled Joplin. Bobby Neuwirth had introduced Patti to Rundgren, and now Rundgren introduced her to Sam Shepard, backstage at a Rounders gig at the Village Gate. His own relationship with Patti wound up soon afterward.
Patti quickly discovered that Shepard was married, with a young son, no less, but their attraction, she insisted, was so pronounced that neither she nor Sam had any choice in the matter. They were destined to be together, for however long they could last. Together they visited the Italian gypsy tattooist Vali to be engraved with permanent reminders of their romance: a lightning bolt for Smith, the Native American symbol of a hawk moon for Shepard. And just to ensure that permanence, Sandy Daley filmed the entire process.
Days they spent discussing their work; nights would see the pair descend upon Max’s, “have a lot of rum and get into trouble. We were hell-raisers.
“Sam loved my writing more than anyone I ever knew,” Patti told Patricia Morrisroe. “He made me value myself as a writer.” He also encouraged her earliest forays from poetry into song. “It had never occurred to me to sing,” she told Ramsay Pennybacker of the Philadelphia Weekly. “You know, he asked me to write song lyrics to one of his plays, Mad Dog Blues. I said, ‘I don’t know how to write song lyrics.’ And he said, ‘You write them all the time!’”
He bought Patti her first guitar, a 1931 Gibson acoustic, and she taught herself to play along to a handful of Dylan songs. Meeting new people, especially musicians, she would ask them if they wanted to see a really neat guitar, then bring it out to show them. That guitar has probably been tuned by more famous fingers than any other instrument on earth. Even Bob Dylan would get his hands on it one day.
Shepard now encouraged her to take the next step—to make her debut as a performing poetess. Throughout the summer of 1970, Patti had delivered impromptu poetry readings to whoever cared to stop and listen as they passed through the lobby (and other rooms) of the Chelsea. In February 1971, she booked her first official event, at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project’s regular Wednesday-night reading.
The performance might have gone quite differently had she not met guitarist Lenny Kaye just a few weeks before. Interviewed on the Rocktropolis network in 1997, Patti recalled, “I read an article he wrote about a cappella music in 1970 and was so taken with it, I called to thank him for writing it
and we became friends.” Soon she was showing up every Saturday night at the Village Oldies record store on Bleecker Street where Kaye worked. He would crank up the oldies, the Deauvilles and the Moonglows and company, and the two of them would simply dance. “So that’s how we got friendly,” Kaye reflected in Please Kill Me.
Born three days before Patti, on December 27, 1946, Kaye was the nephew of songwriter Larry Kusik, composer of “A Time for Us” from Romeo and Juliet and “Speak Softly Love” from The Godfather. With connections like that, Kaye’s musical career had started promisingly: under Uncle Larry’s tutelage, Kaye cut the single “Crazy Like a Fox,” released in early 1966 under the pseudonym Link Cromwell. Unfortunately, his star had been in decline ever since. There was no follow-up, and Kayewas now performing around the bars with a band, the Zoo, and supplementing his income with freelance music journalism. He broke into Rolling Stone in May 1969, with a review of the oddball Lothar and the Hand People’s first album, a smorgasbord of theremin-led lunacy; now he was writing reviews for Fusion and Crawdaddy too, and editing the music column for the men’s magazine Cavalier.
Patti, too, was looking to break into music journalism, and their early conversations revolved around the introductions that Kaye could bring her. But he was fascinated by her other writing as well, and as he looked through her treasured notebooks of poems, and felt the rock rhythms that percolated so naturally through her verse, a crazy notion began to coalesce.
Her poetry reading was already scheduled, and Patti knew that it would be the easiest thing in the world for her to just get it over with, take the podium and spout her poetry, one more in the long line of hopefuls who haunted St. Mark’s. Or she could perform—and what better way to brush away the cobwebs than to elevate her poetry to the plateau she envisioned when she wrote it?
Would Kaye be interested in accompanying her on three or four poems? He would.
On February 10, Kaye joined Patti for her debut performance. Her Factory friend Gerard Malanga was the “headline” act, recruited by Robert Mapplethorpe to give Smith her break. And the audience that night spilled far from the customary gathering of beatniks and nobodies who normally swelled the attendance into double figures.
Sam Shepard, naturally, was there. So was Bobby Neuwirth, accompanied by Edgar and Johnny Winter, and another of Patti and Mapplethorpe’s friends, Steve Paul, founder of the Scene nightclub. Bookstore owner Terry Ork, whose eponymous record label would become one of the key documents of mid-1970s New York City, was there, as were Danny Fields and journalist Lisa Robinson. Jim Carroll turned up accompanied by some boys that Patti described as fashion models—because that was what people thought they looked like.
Allen Ginsburg arrived with John Giorno, whose Giorno Poetry Systems was the loudest voice in the universe of New York City poetics. Mutual friends from the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, Malanga’scohorts from the Factory … they all piled out that evening, and nobody really knew what to expect from the skinny girl who cleared her throat to remind the audience, “Anytime if you can’t hear me, tell me, because I don’t want to beat off alone up here, it’s really dumb.” The bespectacled guitarist sat grinning beside her.
They didn’t know what to expect, but she gave it to them regardless, her speech littered with a nervous overuse of the word “like”: “If, um, anytime like you can’t hear me like tell me because like, um, OK, um … Today is like, um, Bertolt Brecht’s birthday and, um, February 10, and in tribute to [him] first thing I want to do is like, um, is just a little version, my version of like one of his great masterpieces. Oh, fuck, I don’t even got it. ‘Mack the Knife.’”
It was Bob Dylan who had introduced Patti to Brecht in the first place, back in 1965. Studying her copy of his newly released Bringing It All Back Home, she’d begun taking note of the records that littered the floor of the cover photograph. One was by singer Lotte Lenya, wife of Brecht’s songwriting partner Kurt Weill and the custodian of the two men’s works. Patti was intrigued. More than thirty years later, she explained the fascination to Ed Vulliamy of the Guardian. “I wanted to listen to whatever Bob was listening to, which then opened a whole world to me, of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. And in particular the way in which Brecht’s work blends art and activism, and the strength of his characters. It’s this idea: that power can come from below, from the people.”
Lenny Kaye kicked up a barely amplified rhythm on his guitar, and Patti caterwauled, uncertain but convincing regardless, through Brecht’s “Mack the Knife.” You could hear her confidence building as the song went on, and when she did call a halt with an off-mike “OK,” the audience immediately responded with a ripple of bemused but genuine applause.
Patti was not the first poet to grapple with rock ‘n’ roll. Ginsberg had been moving in that direction for years, even before he recorded a clutch of songs with Bob Dylan the previous year, while Anne Sexton had toured with a full-fledged jazz rock band, Her Kind, during the late 1960s. And then, of course, there was the dribble of rockers who sawthemselves as poets too: Jim Morrison in America, Marc Bolan in England, and so on. They were different, though, because they operated on stages that could handle the cross-pollination: Bolan haunted the hash-hazed dens of psychedelic London, where whimsy and fantasy were part and parcel of the multimedia celebration; Morrison had a full-fledged promotional machine to ram his poetic aspirations down his audience’s throat. And Sexton’s first live performance was at a rally for Eugene McCarthy at Boston’s Fenway Park in July 1968, while her tours tended to visit museums and galleries as much as established concert and poetry centers.
But Sexton’s motives were not that far from Patti’s fledgling dreams. The band, Sexton averred in a summer 1971 interview with Barbara Kevles of the Paris Review, “opens up my poems in a new way by involving them in the sound of rock music…. People flock to Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and the Beatles—these are the popular poets of the English-speaking world.” Patti may not have seen matters so clearly or so calculatedly. But she understood them all the same.
“Mack the Knife” over, Kaye stepped away. Now Patti stood alone, smiling uncertainly, looking out at the luminaries gathered to watch her. Her next reading, she declared, was dedicated to “crime,” and then she sped on, through unaccompanied renditions of her own creations—all composed as poems, but now teetering on the edge of something inherently musical too: “Oath,” “The Devil Has a Hangnail,” “The Wait for You,” “You’re the River,” “A Saint in Any Form,” “The Murdered Boy,” and “White Lightning,” before Kaye reappeared for a keening “A Fire of Unknown Origin” and the wild “Don’t Hang Me Up, Jesse James,” dedicated “to all my favorite guys, including Bobby Neuwirth, who really helped me with my shit.”
“Prayer,” “a little prayer I made up,” followed, coyly dedicated to François Villon. “He was really neat because he was a poet but he was a murderer too.”
The climax of her performance, however, was “Ballad of a Bad Boy.”
“This is for Sam,” Patti said quietly, before she and Kaye launched into a rhythmic riff and swaggering chant that came so close to predicting the pair’s future that the modern listener spends the entire performance anticipating the moment that the rest of the band will kick in. They don’t, but the tuning dial was already racing toward Radio Ethiopia, and no matter who the history books are currently crediting with the blueprint for New York City punk rock, “Ballad of a Bad Boy” really was Year Zero.
I wept on a stock car / I captured the junkyards / and I sped thru the canyons … wrecking cars was my art.
A “negative effect” rippled through the room, she told David Fricke of Rolling Stone in 2004, as Kaye unleashed “his sonic interpretation of a stock car race.” The audience shifted and grumbled; expressions turned exasperated; eyes and ears averted themselves. Poetry, those angry faces seemed to say, was about the power of words, not the needling of noise.
Patti disagreed. “I took that [negativity] as a positive sign.”
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sp; Despite the presence of so many poets in the audience, Patti continued to feel like an outsider, a voice on the fringes of even the New York underground’s left-field sensibilities. And although she knew the traditional routes into their world, she eschewed them. Conventional poetry readings bored her; she would rather play a rock ‘n’ roll show, to a rock ‘n’ roll audience, than endure another night of studious academia in front of her so-called peers.
That is the route she took. It was a grueling apprenticeship, she said. Nobody was interested in what she had to say, and she knew that if she had a fifteen-minute slot, ten of them would be spent arguing with the audience. But it was exposure and it was experience.
Her immediate plans, however, moved away from music and verse. One evening, which ultimately stretched over two, Patti and Shepard sat down to write together, passing a typewriter back and forth to create a play that Patti titled Cowboy Mouth, from a line in Dylan’s “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” Part autobiography, part wishful thinking, the play is the story of Slim and Cavalle, two lovers—“two big dreamers,” Patti told Robb Baker of After Dark—whose life together has deteriorated to the point of wastefulness, a state of affairs for which Slim blames nobody more than Cavalle.
He seeks redemption by asking her to tell him about the life of the French poet Gerard de Nerval, a supposed madman who would walkthe park of the Palais Royal, with his pet lobster on a pale blue ribbon. He liked lobsters, he claimed, because they didn’t bark. He also had a pet raven, to whom he taught the words J’ai soif—“I’m thirsty”—and when Nerval died, hanging himself on January 25, 1855, with a relic that he insisted was the Queen of Sheba’s garter, the raven circled his body, calling out those same words.
Other times, Cavalle bemoans her lot in life: savage memories of a childhood spent in therapy, and the bitter pill of having grown from an ugly duckling into an ugly duck. “I never got to be the fucking swan. I paid all those dues and I never got to be the fucking swan.”
Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story Page 7