Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story

by Dave Thompson

  Like so many other writers and artists of the past fifty years, Patti was ranked among the Gotham Book Mart’s most regular customers, not necessarily because she bought a lot of books there, but because she spent as much time as she could browsing within that narrow, crammed space, pouncing upon titles that she may never have heard of—or titles only she had heard of, for the Book Mart’s specialty was rarities and limited editions.

  The artist Edward Gorey was another familiar face there, his darkly sinister cartoons strangely at home amid the friendly tumble and jumble of the Book Mart. Gotham would publish many of Gorey’s best-loved works, particularly toward the end of the artist’s life. Brown worked with Patti, on the other hand, at the dawn of her career, lining her up alongside the other poetic giants that crowded the Gotham catalog: Allen Ginsberg (who once worked as a clerk there), Edith Sitwell, W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, and so forth.

  The volume was Witt, and it featured twenty-two poems that remain among Smith’s best known. Scarcely surprisingly, given its impact that spring, “Rape” was included; so were “Georgia O’Keefe” [sic] and “Prayer.” Another piece, “To Remember Debbie Denise,” would so enthrall boyfriend Allen Lanier that he would soon be setting it to music and, in 1976, recording it for the Blue Öyster Cult’s Agents of Fortune album.

  But Witt, like the volumes that preceded it, was never destined to see anything remotely approaching a mass market. All Patti’s books had been produced by small presses, with the emphasis on “small”; in those days, when word of mouth was by far the most effective marketing tool for any aspiring writer, their circulation was limited to no more than any “fan club” the author had already accrued. Both Witt and kodak had initial runs of no more than one hundred copies. Patti’s renown remained no more than a whisper, even down those corridors that acknowledged poetry as a force to be reckoned with.

  Within her sphere, however, she was slowly gathering a very vocal following, including author Nick Tosches. By the time of Witt, he wrote in 1976, she was “feared, revered, and her public readings elicited the sort of gut response that had been alien to poetry for more than a few decades. Word spread, and people who avoided poetry as the stuff of four-eyed pedants found themselves oohing and howling at what came out of Patti’s mouth. Established poets feared for their credence. Many well-known poets refused to go on after Patti at a reading, she was that awesome.”

  The source of this fascination lay in her delivery, a sense of timing that did indeed have far more in common with rock ‘n’ roll than with the studied metier even of the so-called rock ‘n’ roll poets, Jim Morrison paramount among them. For they were still attempting to add a rock vibe to poetic delivery—to shoehorn their poetic vision into musical surroundings, while retaining what they regarded as the individualist purity of both forms. The result was often stultifying, usually laughable, and ultimately little more than a hollow impersonation of the original.

  Patti threw off such constraints. Perhaps because she never intended to create a hybrid, when one coalesced regardless, it did so organically. There was no sense that she was trying to push boundaries or force theaudience of one medium to accept and appreciate the other. She was, simply, writing, and if her upbringing as a child of the rock ‘n’ roll years informed her words with a rhythm that was not normally associated with unaccompanied verse, then that was because she spoke to, and for, herself.

  Even as her fame became palpable, even as audiences at the shows she opened suddenly seemed to comprise almost as many Patti Smith fans as anybody else, still she adhered to the writing and performing process that she had marked out at her first reading, and only honed and purified in the two and a half years since then.

  A sense of self-consciousness was creeping in, however, together with the knowledge that, having isolated the beginnings of an audience, she needed to expand its horizons while at the same time encouraging it to extend its own expectations. That was what prompted her to title her next performance Rock’n’Rimbaud, a play on words that would come to the aid of any number of lazy headline writers as the next few years unfolded.

  Appearing with Kaye at Le Jardin in the Hotel Diplomat on November 10, Patti turned in her longest performance yet, a marathon of twenty-four poems that looked all the way back to “Ballad of a Bad Boy” and forward to “Rape,” and concluded with two dedications to Rimbaud. The reading was punctuated by snatches of song: the Julie London chest-beater “Cry Me a River” and the old Hank Ballard lament “Annie Had a Baby.”

  It was these moments that caught a lot of people’s attention. The future Richard Hell saw her, and though he watched the performance in astonishment, the audience, too, astounded him. “They just would go nuts for her,” he recalled in Please Kill Me. “Patti would just reel this stuff out and it was so hot and she was so sharp, but she was so sweet and vulnerable at the same time. She was the real thing, there was no mistaking it.”

  Not everybody agreed with him. Chris Stein, guitarist with the bar band the Stilettos (but soon to form Blondie with the Stilettos’ Debbie Harry) was one of many who were prepared to write the Smith and Kaye duo off as a novelty act or at best some kind of humorous deconstructionof conventional rock ‘n’ roll. Kaye rarely allowed the volume of his guitar to disturb him, even when it was clearly drowning out Patti’s voice; she in turn thought nothing of turning around in midflow and telling him to turn it down. It was anarchic, primitive, and, if you were so disposed to think in those terms, amateurish, a joke performance that had nothing in common with the more earnest endeavors taking shape elsewhere around the city.

  For New York City was beginning to stir, the Dolls’ death-or-glory assault upon the hearts and minds of America prompting any number of other young rockers to reach beyond the tried and tiring conventions of the big-time music industry, in search of something different, something real. Richard Myers and Thomas Miller, a pair of poets toying with the notions that would see them reinvent themselves as Messrs. Hell and Verlaine. The Stilettos and Luger. Wayne County and that other Pork graduate Cherry Vanilla, stepping out from the shadows of her new role as David Bowie’s publicist to thrill Max’s Kansas City with her own vision of Oz.

  Such stirrings were far from Patti’s playground, yet the duo continued to receive bookings that nudged them deeper into those bands’ territory, culminating in their own debut at Max’s, six nights opening for folkie Phil Ochs. The shows ran from the day after Christmas to New Year’s Eve, and included a benefit for activist Abbie Hoffman midway through the run.

  At Max’s, Kaye now remained onstage for the entire performance, and Patti took full advantage of his presence to press home the musical qualities of her voice. Looking back at these early performances in 1976, New York Times columnist John Rockwell would describe her as “a chanting poet who lifted her words beyond language with the power of music. From the first, she used the idiom of rock, but she wasn’t so much a rocker as a poet-shaman who used rock to make a statement.” It was a reference that Doors fans in particular might have viewed with either fascination or disdain; Jim Morrison had certainly received similar notices from awestruck admirers.

  But at the time, not every observer was so impressed. After Dark magazine’s Robert L. Weinter suggested that Patti should remain in herliving room and entertain her admirers there. But Rockwell would have one final rejoinder to make: “The art was raw, bizarrely theatrical, populist. But it was art, nonetheless.”

  And it was becoming artier, because it was also at Max’s that Patti embraced the final piece of her jigsaw.

  Lenny Kaye had recently been commissioned by Jac Holzman, the head of Elektra Records, to create a two-LP study of garage Americana. The Nuggets compilation was destined to become one of the most influential collections of its (or any other) ilk; its subtitle, Original Arty-facts from the First Psychedelic Era 1965–1968, scarcely does justice to the music and energies wrapped up inside. Kaye would now be inserting those same energies into his and Patti’s repertoire.

 
; With Nuggets by their side, both the finished album and the pages-long wish list of songs that didn’t make the final cut, Patti and Lenny “chose songs that were basically three chords, so I could improvise over them. ‘Cause I didn’t wanna just do ‘songs.’ I didn’t wanna do lame approximations of songs,” she explained to NPR’s Terry Gross. “We did what we called ‘fieldwork,’ so we’d pick songs that had basically three chords, and just sort of used ‘em as a springboard.”

  Later, writing the liner notes for her first album, Patti would seize upon the notion of “three chords merged with the power of the word.” If there was any single recipe for what she and Kaye were creating in 1973, that was it.

  Three chords merged with the power of the word.

  7

  HA! HA! HOUDINI

  PATTI WAS BACK at Reno Sweeney on December 9, 1973, where journalist Lisa Robinson awaited, poised to pen the first review to deliberately accentuate Smith’s femininity over any other aspect of her performance.

  Of course, Robinson made reference to a set list that was deliberately tailored for the cabaret audience (a tribute to Ava Gardner, “Speak Low”; a dedication to Frank Sinatra, “I Get a Kick Out of You”). But she also commented upon Patti’s dress—a black satin pantsuit and white satin blouse, topped with a black feather boa—peculiar observations to make of a poetess. Few people, after all, ever commented on Adrienne Rich’s outfits when she gave public readings. But they were appropriate too, a reminder of just how close, and how swiftly, Patti was moving toward both a rock ‘n’ roll audience and a rock ‘n’ roll sensibility, and of the new pressures that she would face once she did.

  It is both tedious and cliched to look back today with disapproval on what in the early 1970s the media still termed “women in rock.” Any criticisms of the period can be made only with the benefit of hindsight; it was what it was. On the American mainstream, the all-female band Fanny was still being regarded as something between a musical novelty and a four-headed sex toy; in Europe, Detroit rocker Suzi Quatro was turning out in leather catsuits and being patted on the head for showing that girls could look tough. There were more scathing performers in theunderground, of course, but there was a very good reason why they were still in the underground. Because the overground simply couldn’t wrap its head around the fact that an artist could be a performer first and a woman second, and it didn’t particularly want to.

  Patti was aware of this, but right now she had no intention of fighting against it, and may even have been aware of the futility of attempting to do so. Ingrained opinions can rarely be altered by words alone; a fighting example alone can effect change. And that is what she and Lenny Kaye set about creating, consciously or unconsciously, when they began spreading the word that they were looking for a piano player to join the act.

  It was not an easy decision to have made. The idea of allowing a stranger entry into their world was anathema to the approach that had served them so well so far: the pure, organic growth of friends helping out, drawing in their own friends, the word of mouth spreading through a tightly knit circle and then reaching out through their recommendations to recruit like-minded spirits. Advertising for a new face meant throwing the duo’s own vision open to the scrutiny and suggestions of any number of strangers, most of whom—Kaye knew from his experiences auditioning musicians for his own past bands—would be drawn less by any awareness of what he and Patti were doing and more by the assumed glamour of simply “joining a band.”

  It would be a difficult slog, and they had done their best to avoid it. The first advertisements only went out once they exhausted their own circle of friends and acquaintances and finally admitted that the easiest of alternatives, a friend of a friend named Eric Lee, simply wasn’t going to work out. He sat in with the pair for a week, and he was a great pianist. But he was uncomfortable with the sheer weight of sexuality that clung to Patti’s words.

  The search began. Patti was back from a short vacation in Mexico, and manager Jane Friedman had offered them audition space in the Times Square office of her company, Wartoke. But auditions turned up nothing but one barrelhouse boogie boy after another, all wandering in with much the same ambitions: a would-be Elton John, a wannabe Keith Emerson, an imitation Billy Joel. Some even arrived bearing their own portfolios, packed with the songs that they could bring to the nascentgroup. All of them, Patti recalled in her 1976 Penthouse interview, seemed to glaze over the moment that she and Kaye started talking “all this cosmic bullshit to them, like ‘Well, what we want to do is go over the edge.’”

  “Fine,” the latest applicant would reply. “Do you wanna hear me play ‘Rocket Man’?”

  The process was hopeless, and as it wore on, the pair began to doubt whether they would ever find what they were looking for. Certainly they were under no illusions when a devastatingly pretty boy named Richard Sohl walked in, togged up in a sailor suit. (It was a look, amusingly, that Russell Mael of Sparks had experimented with during that band’s earliest days but discarded quickly enough.) Sohl looked, Patti and Kaye giggled to themselves, like Tadzio from the movie Death in Venice.

  At least he arrived with recognizable credentials. He was Danny Fields’s lover, and it was Fields who suggested he look in on the audition. He was also, Patti recalled, “totally stoned and totally pompous,” and when Kaye delivered the “big cosmic spiel” that even he had grown tired of repeating, the newcomer just looked at him through hooded eyes and snapped, “Look, buddy, just play.”

  “We felt like we were the ones getting auditioned!” Patti continued in that monumental Penthouse interview. “So Sohl said, ‘Whadya want? Ya want some classical?’ He played a bunch of Mozart. ‘Ya want some blues?’ He played a bunch of blues. The fuckin’ guy could play anything! So we started talkin’, and it turned out that he’d been raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, which I had been, too. We’d both rebelled against the same shit, and that helped. So we just brought him in.”

  The audition behind him, Sohl would not wear the sailor outfit again—but the Death in Venice association stuck. His new bandmates rechristened him DNV, for the movie’s (almost) initials.

  DNV was born Richard Arthur Sohl, on May 26, 1953, in New York City. Intensely private and touchingly frail, by 1974 he was already beset by the heart problems that would see him pass away before his fortieth birthday. But he was indeed as prodigious as Patti recalled, as a player and as a personality, and when he played, as she wrote in the verse that she dedicated to him, “Sohl,” it really was as if a cluster of glories erupted from his skull.

  He certainly brought an entire new dynamic to the act, a stately musicianship that was equally capable of weaving pretty melodies beneath the rant and scratch of his bandmates and leading them into new realms of discordance and dissonance. Classically trained but forever bucking against that discipline’s strictures, he really could play anything they asked, and if they didn’t ask, he’d play something different regardless, just to see what might happen.

  Rehearsing through the spring at the Wartoke office, the trio developed an almost psychic bond with one another, an understanding that did not even require eye contact to be transmitted between them, a fire of unknown origin, sweeping through the hallway like a lady’s dress … riding down the highway in its Sunday best.

  But it was not just their own musical compatibility that sparked the trio’s creativity. The outside forces that Patti had first witnessed converging around the twin centers of Max’s and the Mercer were continuing to swirl, only now they were centered upon a newly opened club called CBGB OMFUG (Country, BlueGrass, and Blues and Other Music For Uplifting Gormandizers).

  When it came to location, CBGB had nothing whatsoever going for it. It was simply a bar on the Bowery, as rundown as every other storefront in that then-blighted district, and as likely to be lined by the area’s indigenous homeless as it was any cash-paying customers. An earlier business on the same site, recalled English journalist Mick Farren, was renowned for possessing “the worst dra
g queens on the planet”; they had since moved on, to be replaced by cheap drinks and great burgers, but still CBGB was little more than a long, thin closet, its dimensions further constricted by the bar and tables that hung on either side of the alley-like dance floor.

  Even Patti, who came to love the place, called it “basically a hole in the wall,” and the first night she visited, she recalled, the audience was more of a trickle than a flood. Within weeks, however, CBGB would be flooded with both onlookers and participants.

  “The sense of self and new energy was instantaneous,” Patti enthused, recalling the venue’s heyday for David Fricke in 2006. “The confidence it inspired was strong, and the sense of community was immediate. WilliamS. Burroughs lived down the street. He came all the time. We gave him a little table and a chair, and he’d sit there. All of our friends came—Robert Mapplethorpe, Jim Carroll. CBGB was the neighborhood—the artists and poets and musicians—and we all inspired each other.”

  In years soon to come, the phenomenon that inspired so many at CBGB would be christened punk rock. That first night that Patti was in attendance, though, it was something else entirely. It was art, it was anger, it was boredom ricocheting from arena to club, it was even (as owner Hilly Kristal was wont to tag the music oozing from his establishment) street rock. But it wasn’t punk rock.

  That term, if you went by the pages of the music press, was reserved for the snotty singer-songwriters who’d been emerging elsewhere on the sub–big time mainstream. Hindsight might be outraged, but there are writers around the United States who still remember (and were maybe even responsible for) the point when Nils Lofgren was called “punk,” Bruce Springsteen was “punk,” Graham Parker was “punk,” and the unfathomable racket leaching from the underbelly of New York City was just the out-of-tune strummings of so many no-name wannabes. It was only when you dug a little deeper that you realized just how many of them there were, and just how stylistically different they all were.