Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story

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Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story Page 12

by Dave Thompson


  Within days, Mickey Ruskin had rebooked Patti for another twenty shows: two a night between August 28 and September 2, 1974, and eight more on the same schedule the following week, September 6–9.

  Meanwhile, Television was celebrating the release of its own first record, cut in stark emulation of Smith’s example. The band had been through the fires of record company interest, and had even been paired with Brian Eno for a handful of demo recordings. But Tom Verlaine was never satisfied with what other ears heard in the music he made, and when Richard Hell left for Johnny Thunders’s new band, the Heartbreakers, Verlaine resolved to forgo the record companies and release the group’s debut single under the independent label Ork Records, which Terry Ork formed specifically for that purpose.

  Recorded on a 4-track borrowed from the Mumps’ drummer, Jay Dee Daugherty, “Little Johnny Jewel” was hypnotically haphazard and arrogantly ambitious, with Verlaine’s strangled gulp of a voice as dislocated as the glacial riff. The track stretched to more than seven minutes in its original form, so it was sliced down the middle and spread across both sides of the record for single release.

  But, for all that future critics would compare Television to a new wave Grateful Dead, the song’s almost endless guitar noodles have more in common with Philip Glass than Jerry Garcia, and its appearance on 45 provoked gasps of disbelief from both without and within. Lou Reed asserted that it had no chance of becoming a hit (not long after Tom Verlaine was reported to have confiscated the batteries from Lou’s tape recorder at a Television gig). And Television’s own Richard Lloyd was so opposed to the release that he promptly quit the group. But he returned three days later—and “Little Johnny Jewel” went on to sell twenty thousand hand-bagged copies by word of mouth alone. It was the correct choice after all.

  Patti, needless to say, loved it. She also delighted in the fact that Verlaine had written one of her childhood nicknames, Winghead, into the lyric. The kids at school had called her that because her hair stuck out at strange angles, and she’d loathed them for it. Verlaine made it sound kinda sexy.

  In another echo of her past, a revival of Cowboy Mouth, the play she wrote with Sam Shepard back in 1971, was running in a small theater in the West Village, Unit 453 in Westbeth’s Exchange for the Arts. Across town, Patti was developing a reputation that in some circles rivaled Shepard’s own.

  Her name even traveled to the UK, as Melody Maker‘s New York City correspondent, Chris Charlesworth, warned readers, “She’s a bitch straining at the leash in most of her songs, all of which are prefaced by some kind of unusual story.” It was “her ability to hold the audience’s attention” that he perceived as “her main selling point: drift away and you’ll miss something you wish you hadn’t.” Testily, fans may have noted that Genesis, too, prefaced its songs with some kind of unusual story, but if anybody was expecting any further similarities before a Patti Smith performance, they were swiftly disabused.

  Patti’s new status was embodied in another piece of poetry from her past, lines from “The Ballad of Hagen Waker” that she might never have dreamed she would experience for herself: That capricornous fever / of being higher than the crowd / as for the crowd / they are ecstatic.

  You know, she had written, it’s often I’m glowing in the dark.

  Her schedule remained hectic. The trio staged their latest Rock’n’Rimbaud events, one at the Riverside Plaza Hotel in New York City on October 27, 1974, another within the palatial surroundings of the Roosevelt Hotel’s Blue Hawaiian Discotheque two weeks later. At the November 10 Rock’n’Rimbaud, the musicians were joined for the first time by a fourth member, folk guitarist Sandy Bull.

  Bull is widely proclaimed one of the fathers of world music, an incredibly eclectic musician whose talents stretched from riotous Chuck Berry covers to hypnotic Middle Eastern rhythms, from classical favorites to salsa and beyond, all played out on such instruments as oud, sarod, six-string bass, and pedal steel. He had been tremendously popular throughout the 1960s before a drug habit forced him into virtual retirement.

  An old friend of Bobby Neuwirth, Bull was just beginning to reemerge from his addictions when Patti, Kaye, and Sohl began considering augmenting their lineup even further. But he was never seen as a full-time recruit to the group; billed as a special guest for the evening, he joined them onstage for the opening “All the Hipsters Go to the Movies,” then disappeared until the final number, an impassioned “Land.” His presence, however, only hardened the trio’s determination to stretch out even further, a mood that their next adventure only amplified.

  Days after the Roosevelt Hotel gig, the trio flew to Berkeley, California, to play a show at Rather Ripped Records, the self-styled “best little record store you ever saw.” (The shop’s full name, quoted in its advertisements, was I’d Rather Be Ripped Records, but signage to that effect would not have sat well with the authorities around the Northside neighborhood.) Taking the stage in her white Keith Richards T-shirt, Patti drew the small crowd close and then closer still. “Kids are more maniac in Berkeley than anywhere else in America,” she told Lisa Robinson in Hit Parader in 1977. “Even more than CBGB. It’s just so incredible…. They’ll scream and do interpretative dancing. They don’t give a shit about being cool.”

  From Rather Ripped, the trio moved on to San Francisco and the Fillmore West—at least according to one of the most intriguing legends in their mythology. As the story goes, promoter Bill Graham offered them a spot at the Fillmore’s latest audition night, which the band celebrated by inviting Jonathan Richman, the Boston songwriter who was in California recording his first album at the time, to sit in on drums. Patti recites this same tale (with no more detail than that) in Just Kids. Unfortunately, the Fillmore closed its doors in 1971 and would not reopen until the 1980s. With nobody else appearing to have any memory of the occasion—Richman merely answered “no” when he was asked about it in the 1990s—this would seem to be one of those little legends that gets glued into history without anybody questioning whether it actually occurred. In this case, it probably didn’t.

  The group did, however, make it down to Los Angeles for a couple of shows at the Whisky a Go Go, opening for the British funk-rock band Fancy, which was launching its first-ever tour in the wake of the hit single “Wild Thing.” It was an experience that Patti would preserve within the ever-developing text of what was already being singled out as her landmark poem, “Land.”

  “Land” started life, she would tell Tony Hiss and David McClelland in 1975, as a poem about “a carnival of fools in a city where you can’t see the stars, but I gave it a New York ballad rendition—you know, let’s keep on laughing, let’s keep on dancing. Then, as I got more confident, it was Scheherazade: ‘Welcome to the Palace of a Thousand Sensations. It hopes you will lose it here, baby.’ Then it got real sadistic…. Then it was Arabia, Mexico, UFOs, razors, jackknives, horses, and in some notes I wrote last December 16—the 701st birthday of the great Persian mystic poet Jalaluddin Rumi—Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix.”

  Jim Morrison was added to the mix in response to Patti’s Los Angeles performance. “I felt the rhythms of L.A. and understood the Doors’ album L.A. Woman for the first time. So Johnny the hero of ‘Land’ became very intimately linked with Morrison,” she explained to Mick Gold of Street Life.

  “Johnny got in trouble, I was in trouble on the stage, Morrison had some trouble on stage. Kids used to scream at Morrison wanting himto do his hits. He was very torn apart and frustrated, because he felt himself to be a blues guy and a poet, but he was promoted more as a sex star. That’s cool too, but he didn’t know how to shift from one to the other. He didn’t want to sing ‘Light My Fire,’ he wanted to sing ‘Horse Latitudes.’”

  He was never able to make that transition. So she would make it for him.

  8

  NEO BOY

  “THE FIRST TIME I heard Patti Smith—and I’ve heard a lot of people, been in music all my life—she just had a magnetism,” CBGB propr
ietor Hilly Kristal recalled. “She may not have been a singer, but she sure sounded like one. She stayed on pitch, she bent the notes just right, she sang real well. She communicated. The life was simple for her. It was all new. She was doing something that she’d probably wanted to do all her life. She was excited by her own feeling that it was happening for her. She loved it. I heard the same performance over and over, and she was one of the few people I could listen to over and over.”

  Patti played her first-ever CBGB show at the end of December 1974, right around the time that a passing journalist asked if she still wanted to become a famous poet. She would prefer to be remembered as a great rock ‘n’ roll star, she replied, and she meant it.

  “Which,” said Ivan Kral, “is pretty much where I came in to the picture.”

  Ivan Král (he later dropped the accent from his last name) was born in 1948 in Prague, then the capital of the Iron Curtain nation of Czechoslovakia. Fifteen years later, in 1963, his parents Karel and Otylie left their homeland for a new life in New York, where Karel was appointed a journalist and translator at the United Nations. Ivan and his brother Pavel followed them in 1966, and, in the near-decade since then, the family had built an entire new life in the West. Because they could not return home.

  Karel had been among the most vociferous critics of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Now he was forever watchful of reprisals, and had been assigned an FBI guard to protect him from the still-vengeful Communists. Regularly, the mailman would deliver innocuous-looking invitations for him to speak at grandly titled European conferences, none of which existed as anything but a means of luring him back within reach of the Státní Bezpe?nost, Czechoslovakian secret police.

  He didn’t fall for their tricks, but other dissidents were not so lucky. Karel told his son about the Czech tennis player who was picked up while visiting his girlfriend in Romania and dragged back to Prague to try to lure his father out of hiding. And later, as Ivan’s musical career promised to take him back to Europe to tour, his father would have just one warning for him. “Do what you have to do,” the old man said. “But I’m not going to bail you out. If anything happens, you’re on your own. There’s nothing I can do for you.”

  Ivan had already tasted fame in Czechoslovakia, as a member of the teenage rock band Saze. The group’s “Pierrot” had topped the Czech charts shortly before he left the country. Now he was working in the mail room at industry mogul Allen Klein’s ABKCO empire—where the affairs of state revolved around the latest happenings in the world of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones—and spending his free time haunting the clubs and nightspots of New York City.

  He ran through a handful of small bands, then in 1972 formed Luger, a tight and glamorous group that was constantly being tipped for big things. Unfortunately, Kral reflected, his bandmates—guitarist Mister Paulin, bassist Jon Thomas, and drummer Shayne Harris—were too easily seduced by the modicum of local fame that had already come their way. “They thought they were stars; they would rather go to Max’s and pose than rehearse, so I decided to fold the band.”

  That was fall 1974, and he did not have far to look for his next project—or, at least, certainly not as far as he expected. He journeyed to the West Coast to see if he could make a fresh musical start out there, and worked for a time with Shaun Cassidy’s band Longfellow, but he soonreturned to New York City and promptly joined what was left of the Stilettos, as Debbie Harry, Chris Stein, Fred Smith, and drummer Billy O’Connor morphed into a new band, Blondie.

  It was a short-lived experience. The band recorded some demos for journalist Alan Betrock, but gigs were few, excitement was elusive, and publicity was minimal. While Patti Smith, Television, and the newly emergent Ramones were devouring local column inches, Blondie remained stubbornly unheralded and unknown. By Christmas 1974, Kral was desperate to find another gig.

  He played a couple of auditions for a new band that David Bowie’s old guitarist, Mick Ronson, was building with drummer Hilly Michaels, and that probably would have been a good fit. But then he heard that Patti Smith was auditioning, and that was all he needed to know. For months, he and his friend Jay Dee Daugherty, the 4-track-owning drummer with the Mumps, had been catching Patti’s shows and wondering why she didn’t just form a full band. Now she was, and Kral wanted to be a part of it.

  Richard Sohl shuddered as he recalled the auditions that the band held for a second guitar player, beginning a few days after Christmas 1974 and then continuing on the other side of Patti’s New Year’s Day appearance at St. Mark’s Poetry Project. “About fifty guitar players came down,” he said, and more than a handful of them impressed them.

  There was, however, always one drawback. Too many guitar players would spend their audition talking to either Kaye or Sohl, either ignoring Patti or, at best, treating her as some kind of adornment to the main business. Even when they learned that she not only sang but also wrote the lyrics, she remained an outsider in their eyes. Sohl remembered one player who, having thrilled everybody during the audition, then blew it all by taking the guys to one side and suggesting they lose the chick. His exact words were “She can’t sing and she looks like shit.”

  The audition itself was not an easy prospect. “Our thing then was to play ‘Gloria’ for forty minutes and see who dropped out first,” Sohl continued. “All of those guys didn’t understand what we were doing.”

  But then, Patti told Nick Tosches in Penthouse, “Ivan Kral came in. This little Czechoslovakian would-be rock star…. We did [‘Land’] andit went on so long I thought I was gonna puke. But Ivan was so nervous he wouldn’t stop, and we figured that was really cool.” What they appreciated most, though, was that Kral meshed so seamlessly with their existing sound, even as he enhanced it. They were a rock ‘n’ roll band at last—but they were still themselves.

  “I think my background helped us click,” Kral mused, an observation that Sohl was swift to acknowledge: “We all sympathized very strongly with the fact of Ivan’s exile. I think all of us felt in some ways that we were exiles; we played in that outsider status.”

  Patti also came to see him as the guardian angel of the group, someone who was constantly aware of her onstage needs and would do whatever he could to make her look good, even at the cost of his own performance. Patti had recently introduced a stylized revision of the Who’s “My Generation” into the repertoire, replacing the familiar Things they do look awful cold / I hope I die before I get old refrain with a bellowed I don’t need that fucking shit / Hope I die because of it; Kral had a crucial guitar part to worry about, she marveled, but he’d always take the time to make sure her microphone was ready.

  Days after Patti’s latest appearance at St. Mark’s (where the audience was made privy to, among other jewels, her uproarious description of ancient Egyptian soothsaying), the January 30, 1975, edition of the Soho Weekly News announced Kral’s arrival into the band in the kindest terms: “The very talented Ivan Kral, formerly of Luger, has joined Patti Smith’s band on guitar and bass.” The following week, the group was in Philadelphia, opening for ex-Animal Eric Burdon at the Main Point.

  Nobody in the band doubted that they were rising fast. Even though they still weren’t earning much more than five dollars each a night, every show they played was swamped with curious journalists; every time they opened a magazine, there was another mention of Patti.

  The gang of four—Patti, Kaye, Kral, and Sohl—were all but permanent residents of CBGB. They would hang in the audience to witness whatever was unfolding on the stage or take the stage themselves, then depart for other hot spots to see and be seen. Four nights coheadlining CBGB with Television, February 13–16, were followed by a reception for the Blue Öyster Cult, whose Tyranny and Mutation album was aboutto be released. Smith’s “Baby Ice Dog” was one of its highlights. And when Kral and friend Amos Poe decided to capture New York City underground on film in spring 1975, inevitably they went to CBGB to shoot. They emerged with Blank Generation, one of the crucial cell
uloid documents of the age, a flickering black-and-white record of every key act to call CBGB home.

  The accolades continued to pour in. Bruce Springsteen ambled up to Patti one evening to announce that he’d fallen in love with her from her picture in Creem. Creem itself was mourning Patti’s decision to quit writing for the magazine because she simply no longer had the time. Her final article, “Jukebox Cruci-Fix,” would appear in the June 1975 issue, looking back on rock ‘n’ roll’s dead from Vladimir Mayakovsky, the anarchist poet, through Johnny Ace and Buddy Holly, and on to her account of visiting Jim Morrison’s grave. But it ended with the pledge that we don’t look back, and a hand-scrawled postscript: “This is my last article.”

  Patti even earned the admittedly dubious honor of a hilarious parody by Wayne County, onstage at Max’s one night, just days after her own appearance there on April 1. Donning Patti’s trademark stage wear, a white shirt and suit pants, and riffing loosely on her signature work “Land,” County launched into a merciless roast not only of Patti’s love of Jim Morrison but also of the song’s enigmatic equine references (Horses! Horses! Horses! Horses!). County raged, Wildebeest! Wildebeest! then slipped into a set of poetics that might not quite have been up to Patti’s usual standard but left no listener in doubt about their inspiration.

  Jim Morrison is in the bathtub.

  The water is soapy, the water is soapy.

  And Jim, he stepped on a bar of Ivory Soap, and it’s hard when

  you step on a bar of Ivory Soap.

  And he slipped and he fell and he hit his head on the soap dish,

 

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