A third character, the Lobster Man, is introduced, a would-be rock ‘n’ roll savior, all glam and leather, who soon transforms into the same kind of martyr as the poets Cavalle waxed so lyrical about: the play ends with Cavalle delivering a monologue, while the Lobster Man takes a gun and shoots himself in the head. It was, Patti mourned, the true story of her life with Shepard: two people who came together in love but were destined for “a sad end…. We knew we couldn’t stay together.”
They headed straight into rehearsals for the play anyway. Actor Robert Glaudini was cast as the Lobster Man—but the playwrights themselves took on the roles of doomed lovers Cavalle (Patti) and Slim (Sam). “It was just a play between us,” Patti explained to Robb Baker. “We had lots of alchemy, because we had written the play, we were sayin’ our own lines. Lots of light comin’ out of that stage.” Alongside another Shepard short, Back Bog Beast Bait, the play was set to open at the American Place Theater, at St. Clement’s Episcopal Church at 423 West Forty-Sixth Street, on April 29, 1971.
Patti’s latest transition from poet to stage actress was not seamless. According to the program issued for that opening-night performance, the theatrical union Actors’ Equity had forced her to change her name before registering, to avoid being confused with another actress named Patti Smith. She became Johnny Guitar. In addition, claimed the program notes, “she goes abroad twice a year to sing in bars, wearing a black dress and leaning on pianos. She says her best number is ‘My Funny Valentine.’ She also says, ‘I ain’t no actress.’”
Cowboy Mouth was scarcely a success, not even to its cocreator Shepard. Just weeks earlier, he had taken the stage at the same theater with his wife, O-Lan, in another of his plays, Mad Dog Blues, and it was no secret among those who knew of his extramarital romance that O-Lan’s character was at least partly based on Patti. Now here was Patti in person, playing herself while Sam did the same, and it was more than Shepard could tolerate. It was difficult enough to live certain elements of his own life sometimes, without then reliving them on stage.
A few days earlier, Shepard had been asked to join the Holy Modal Rounders in Vermont. He wasn’t sure at first whether he wanted to leave New York City. But one night of Cowboy Mouth made up his mind for him. Without a word to Patti, he fled north and, from there, took his wife and son to London.
Patti consoled herself by delving deeper into her writing, both poetry and journalism. She landed another reading at St. Mark’s, opening for Jim Carroll, and found herself headlining the show instead when Carroll was busted for possession in Rye, New York, and detained half the night by the local sheriff. She was invited to introduce a few other readers, too. She wrote her first (and only) review for Rolling Stone in the August 19, 1971, issue, lavishing praise on Todd Rundgren’s newly released Runt LP but neglecting to mention that they had been lovers. “Like Mozart,” she wrote, “Todd Rundgren never wanted to be born; his mother labored hard to put him here and he’s fought hard to singe his musical autograph in the progressive pages of rock & roll.”
Another friend stepped forward.
Three years earlier, Sandy Pearlman had been a writer for Crawdaddy when he had the idea of putting a band together to perform a series of musical poems he had written, Imaginos. Since that time, the band he created, Soft White Underbelly, had morphed into the Stalk-Forrest Group, but it was about to change its name again, to the Blue Öyster Cult, and set out on a career pioneering a seismic brand of militaristically mystical metal. Pearlman would remain their manager, and looking to expand his stable of clients, he was pushing Patti to delve deeper into rock ‘n’ roll as well.
His dream of pairing her with a keyboard player and composer named Lee Crabtree collapsed when Crabtree committed suicide following a row with his parents over an inheritance from his grandfather. So Pearlman suggested Patti join the Blue Öyster Cult instead, as a behind-the-scenes writer if not a performer. Patti never took him up on the offer, but she did start dating the band’s keyboard and rhythm guitar player, Allen Lanier, igniting what would become the most permanent relationship she had ever known. She and Lanier would remain partners until 1978.
Other opportunities arose. She talked with promoter Steve Paul about the possibility of putting together a band with another of his clients, guitarist Rick Derringer; they even took a few promo photos together. Patti stepped back from this project as well. She wanted to perform, but she wanted to do so completely on her own terms, with a musical collaborator whose own ambitions walked hand-in-hand with hers. Not a yes-man per se, but somebody who would allow her to lay down the law when she saw fit to do so, while at the same time putting forward ideas that she would wish she’d thought of herself.
Steve Paul moved on to offer Iggy Pop a berth in Derringer’s band (he, too, turned it down). The Blue Öyster Cult moved on to sign with Columbia Records and become the most significant American metal merchants of the 1970s.
And Patti moved on as well. In September 1971, she appeared for the first time before cameras being held by somebody who was not a close friend or associate. The BBC was in New York City, shooting a documentary about the Chelsea Hotel and interviewing its most familiar—or persistent—denizens.
With her feathered hair, silver jewelry, and a beguilingly engaging smile, archetypal hippie chick Patti was among those who eased their way into shot, performing a short poem for the cameras that, to the surprise, perhaps, of everybody she told, made it into the final cut. Just six lines long, “my little prayer for New York” is performed by a clearly shy and obviously nervous young woman, batting her eyes at the camera and gazing upwards from beneath her bangs.
New York is the thing that seduced me
New York is the thing that formed me
New York is the thing that deformed me
New York is the thing that perverted me
New York is the thing that converted me
And New York’s the thing I love, too.
Compared to much of the rest of the documentary, her verse takes its significance only from the retrospective identity of its performer. But it is strangely affecting as well, an acknowledgement not only of the magnetism of New York City but also of the hold that the city has on so many imaginations. And it was that hold that Patti wanted to infiltrate for herself. Other performers became a part of New York City, but that was a one-way street. She wanted the traffic to run in both directions.
September 1971 also saw the Detroit-based rock magazine Creem publish three of Patti’s poems, at the same time recruiting her as one of their occasional freelance contributors. “For Bob Neuwirth,” “Autobiography,” and “For Sam Shepard” (the last a slightly revised “Ballad of a Bad Boy”) all appeared in that issue, making this her first true step outside of New York City. The magazine’s nationwide distribution allowed readers across America to experience Patti’s writing firsthand, and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore spoke for many when he recalled for Robert Matheu and Brian J. Bowe’s book Creem: America’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll Magazine, “The first time I ever heard of Patti Smith was in Creem … when they ran her poetry. Those pictures of her with the short Keith Richards hair and the cigarette—they completely made you stop in your tracks. What is that? It read so good and looked so good, it made me realize that that’s what I wanted to do. I want to go to New York and see that.”
She was writing occasional pieces, too, for Rock magazine, a monthly competitor to Rolling Stone that took itself very seriously indeed—certainly too seriously to entertain a writer who, dispatched to interview Eric Clapton, commenced her inquisition by asking him for his six favorite colors.
Finally, she received a call from tiny publisher Telegraph Books, run out of a storefront on Jones Street by writers Andrew Wylie and Victor Bockris. They wanted to publish the first collection of her poetry.
In his 1999 biography of Patti, Bockris outlined her appeal to Telegraph Books: that she provided, for the first time, a voice for a generation that was still attempting to adjust to the vio
lence that had marked the end of the 1960s, violence that shattered the hippie dream that was the hallmark of the decade’s final years. The fatal stabbing at the Rolling Stones’ Altamont Free Concert in December 1969, the Manson murders that shocked the world earlier that same year, the continued war in Vietnam, the US government’s increasingly heavy-handed response to domestic protest, “the increasingly dangerous drug scene that had changed from something peaceful and friendly to something violent, dangerous, and criminal”—all of these things were battering a generation that had been persuaded, however fleetingly, to dream of a man-made utopia. Patti Smith, Bockris reasoned, was the voice that could help them survive the storm.
She may not, Bockris continued, have been aware of this calling, and may not have been prepared to answer it. But he and Wylie glimpsed her potential regardless, and they would do their level best to encourage her to answer it.
Gerard Malanga made the necessary introductions, although Bockris has also insisted that it would have been difficult for anybody on the New York City arts scene of the day not to be aware of Patti Smith. He wrote in Patti Smith: An Unauthorized Biography: “For a short time in the spring and summer of 1971, she was high on the list of New York’s ‘Hot 100’ who were going to Make It, and was turning down offers right, left, and center.”
This is probably an exaggeration. Yes, she had succeeded in her handful of public readings to date, before an audience composed largely of friends and associates. Yes, she was making some headway in the world of rock journalism. But they were baby steps at best, and if Patti’s personality was sufficiently urgent that the people she encountered were not quick to forget her, she was scarcely the first young up-and-comer to have that effect on people. Any offers that Patti was receiving at this timewere being made by would-be entrepreneurs who were in the exact same position she was: just starting out on the first rung of their chosen ladder and casting around for anybody who could help them move a little higher. Which is precisely what Patti was doing when she accepted Telegraph Books’ offer.
Fronted by an indelibly atmospheric black-and-white photograph taken by New Yorker Judy Linn (destined to become one of the young Patti’s most dedicated chroniclers), Patti’s first book of poems, Seventh Heaven, would emerge as a forty-seven-page collection of twenty-two poems, dedicated to actress Anita Pallenberg. It would be published the following spring as a limited run of fifty signed and numbered first editions, alongside a regular run of one thousand copies selling at a dollar apiece.
Writing it was simple, or so Patti later laughed in the New York Times Magazine. Speaking with writers Tony Hiss and David McClelland in late 1975, she explained, “I’d sit at the typewriter and type until I felt sexy, then I’d go and masturbate to get high, and then I’d come back in that higher place and write some more.”
By now more than a year had passed since her first St. Mark’s reading, and Patti sensibly opted not to include in her book any of the verses performed there, nor those that might have been glimpsed in Creem. Instead, she included her tributes to her sister Linda, actress/singer Marianne Faithfull, aviator Amelia Earhart, and actress Marilyn Monroe, under her married name, Marilyn Miller. The collection also featured her odes to French martyr Joan of Arc and one of the actresses who have portrayed her, Renee Falconetti, and her elegy to Edie Sedgwick, written just days after the news of the beauty-no-more’s drug death on November 16, 1971.
I’d like to see / her rise again / her white white bones / with baby Brian Jones.
Patti refused to rest while she awaited publication.
Christmas Day 1971 saw her return to the Poetry Project, to run through a dozen verses, including several (“Mary Jane,” “Renee Falconetti,” “Death by Water,” “Seventh Heaven,” and “Amelia Earhart”) that were scheduled for inclusion in Seventh Heaven. Again it was a well-received performance—less immediately incendiary than her debut, ofcourse, because people now had some notion of what to expect, but better attended.
Just days after that, she began packing her bags for her next trip to Europe. John Calder, one half of the London poetry press Calder and Boyars, was about to publish the first-ever British anthology of Telegraph Books writers, and arranged for Patti, Bockris, Wylie, and Malanga to visit London in the new year, to perform a reading for Better Books, the city’s premier underground bookstore.
It was an evocative collaboration. Calder was the first publisher to make William Burroughs available in the UK; Better Books was the first British venue ever to host a reading by Allen Ginsberg, in 1965. The store’s address of 94 Charing Cross Road was as familiar as any in the world of modern poetry, and seven years after writer and musician Tom McGrath predicted that Ginsberg’s debut would be remembered as a pivotal moment in the history of English poetry, and perhaps even England itself, so another turning point arrived as Patti Smith prepared to take the stage.
Or so Patti’s admirers would later say.
Calder booked a small but well-appointed Soho theater for the occasion; decked out in bright red plush, the venue was, as its address suggests, more familiar with the screening of porn films at that time, but its intimacy lent itself well to both the reading and the audience. Bockris would recall 125 people turning up for the event, including the English poet Michael Horovitz (not, as is often claimed, the American Michael Horowitz) and Eric Mottram, the editor of the British magazine Poetry Review. On the other hand, the possibly more objective British rock critic Nick Kent, who also attended the event, recalled there being no more than fifteen people in the room for Patti’s recital.
Either way, one suspects that Malanga’s association with Warhol was a greater draw for the audience than the unknown Patti Smith. Indeed, the greatest impact she had yet made on the country was the previous October, when a decidedly uncomplimentary topless still from Robert Having His Nipple Pierced appeared on the cover of the local listings magazine Time Out. In later years, similar images—the fruits of her early photographic sessions with Robert Mapplethorpe—would come tohaunt Patti, as would-be critics seized upon them as evidence of a less-than-salubrious past. At the time, however, the uncaptioned photograph of a heavily-made-up Smith, clad in a beret and wielding a hammer, barely even offered titillation to whoever picked up a copy.
But Bockris would proclaim her short (ten or so minutes) performance a triumph. He’d recall the lost-little-girl act with which Patti first seduced and then cajoled the crowd, and laughingly reflect upon the moment of panic that apparently racked her as she took the stage and announced that she’d forgotten to pack the one piece that she intended reading that night and would have to rely on her memory alone.
As Bockris remembered in Please Kill Me, “she told this poemlike story, and she said, ‘I haven’t finished writing this yet, but it goes like this. ‘The boy looked at Jesus as he came down the steps.’” Then, as if she recalled the effect that a similar confession had at her first St. Mark’s reading, she paused after six minutes to declare, “Gee, uh, I forgot it.”
By which time, Bockris reported in Patti Smith: An Unauthorized Biography, “she had the audience completely mesmerized. Afterward, some of the awed poets who stayed afterward told [us] that the Telegraph Poets, as we were billing ourselves, had changed the London poetry scene overnight.”
Reading through the British poetry press from the weeks and months that followed, one deems it highly unlikely that they had. British and, in particular, London poetry was a highly insular creature at that time, conscious of the impact that the likes of Ginsburg had had in the 1960s but anxious if not desperate to draw away from that influence, too—to establish itself as a separate creation that owed nothing to its American cousins. The idea that even the collective weight of Malanga, Smith, Bockris, and Wylie could redirect thought processes that were already so entrenched was one that only the most naive mind would entertain.
Nevertheless, the visit was victorious, and before it wrapped up, the crew indulged themselves with a photo shoot outside the home of poet Ezr
a Pound in Kensington. Patti also found time for an unscheduled reunion with Sam Shepard. Then it was back to New York City and Patti’s third assault on theater-land, at the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in March 1972.
The play Island was written and directed by Patti’s Femme Fatale director, Tony Ingrassia, and stage-managed by Leee Black Childers, and it essentially served as a large-scale reunion for one of the most controversial theatrical troupes of the day, the cast of Andy Warhol’s Pork. That play’s six-week run in London had granted the crew transatlantic notoriety, and now Geri Miller, Cherry Vanilla, Tony Zanetta, Wayne County, and Jamie Di Carlo were back on home soil to present Island, which Zanetta would later describe as “probably Ingrassia’s best play.” It was the story of a bunch of freaks having a picnic on the deck of a Fire Island beach house, at the same time that a US naval destroyer is making its way toward the island, apparently to arrest all the weirdoes besmirching that particular socialite paradise.
“As the play progressed,” recalled Cherry Vanilla in her memoir Lick Me, “the destroyer got closer and closer to shore, and the action got more and more chaotic. A luncheon scene with all fourteen of the play’s characters seated around a huge picnic table, ferociously eating, drinking, passing dishes, and delivering scripted lines amid a cacophony of improvised ones, though a bitch to enact, was a prime example of Ingrassia’s genius—or madness.”
Vanilla’s role was that of a sex-crazed hippie who fucked everyone in sight. County played a transvestite revolutionary (“a few of us were really typecast in Island,” Vanilla quipped), and Patti was cast as a wired and wiry speed freak whose lines revolved primarily around the fact that Brian Jones was dead.
It was a dry, brittle role, and somehow it seemed to fit her personality. Certainly Patti made little impression on her costars. “Maybe it was shyness,” Vanilla remembered on another occasion, “but she didn’t mingle with the rest of us at all, which was unusual for actors in a production.” There was, she continued, “no big negativity or nastiness, no big deal, no drama.” She just didn’t say much, so nobody said much to her. “I always gave her the benefit of the doubt, that she was just shy around us,” she concluded.
Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story Page 8