Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story

by Dave Thompson

  According to the NME, Patti fell firmly into the latter camp. Not in execution, of course, for Horses was as much a product of modern recording technology as any progressive rock marathon, but in attitude. It brought rock ‘n’ roll back from the abyss of overextended soloing with a basic four-piece band fronted by a lyricist with something to say. “First albums this good are pretty damn few and far between,” wrote NME‘s Charles Shaar Murray. “It’s better than the first Roxy album, better than the first Beatles and Stones albums, better than Dylan’s first album, as good as the first Doors and Who and Hendrix and Velvet Underground albums.” And why? Because “it’s strange, askew and flat-out weird. It’sneurotic and unhealthy and dank, a message in a bottle sent from some place that you and I have only been to in the worst moments of self-doubting defeated psychosis.” Horses, he concluded, “is what happens when the fuses blow and the light goes out.”

  But Melody Maker savaged it, complaining that Horses represented all that was “wrong with rock and roll right now…. There’s no way that the completely contrived and affected ‘amateurism’ of Horses constitutes good rock and roll. That old ‘so bad it’s good’ aesthetic has been played to death. Horses is just bad. Period.”

  How prescient those two opposing viewpoints were would become apparent in the months after Horses’ release.

  Jane Friedman lined up live shows to promote the album, and first the group returned to California for a clutch of gigs in Berkeley, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. In L.A., Don Snowden of the Pasadena Guardian pounced, complaining that at times “it was virtually impossible to decipher the lyrics over the roar of the band”—which was especially problematic, he pointed out, given Patti’s reputation as a poet. But “even on a bad night, her best moments showed Patti Smith to be a unique and provocative artist well worth checking out.”

  It was in L.A., too, that Patti earned the enmity of a band that was, in the eyes of her fans, the diametric opposite of all that she represented. The all-teen, all-sexy Runaways had stepped out of impresario Kim Fowley’s rehearsal studio and onto the stages of a world that wanted nothing more (or so Fowley hoped) than a taste of hard-rocking female jailbait.

  Ivan Kral was first to witness the Runaways in action, watching them perform at the Starwood and then walking into the backstage area just as Kim Fowley emerged with Robert Plant by his side. The following night, onstage with Smith, he made a point of wearing his newly obtained Runaways T-shirt, and all the Runaways wanted was to return the favor, and say hello to Patti and her band.

  So the quintet, led by singer Cherie Currie, wandered into Patti’s dressing room at the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach, and they hadn’t even opened their mouths when Patti, barely glancing up at the proffered handshakes, barked, “You girls. Out.”

  English journalist Chris Salewicz recorded the fallout in a 1976 interview with the Runaways. Currie set the ball rolling. “She was such a … LURRGHHHH. I mean, she was so disgusting with those saggy …”

  “Tits,” Jett said.

  “Tits,” Currie agreed.

  Like Blondie’s Debbie Harry, the Runaways theorized that they had fallen afoul of Patti’s desire to become the first, and biggest, female rocker in the pool. The Dead Boys’ Stiv Bators, a close friend of Joan Jett’s, declared that Patti “couldn’t stand competition. People talk about her as ‘a patron of the arts,’ with Jim Carroll and Tom Verlaine, but she blanked Richard Hell when she thought he was moving into her poetic territory, and she blanked Debbie and the Runaways because she wanted to be the only female rocker that anyone was talking about. She was merciless.”

  The band returned to the East Coast. Philly was next, and then it was back to New York City for three nights at the Bottom Line immediately after Christmas. It would be the faithful’s first opportunity to catch the live set that had fallen into place in California. The new set would prove that, already, Horses was behind them, as new material began jockeying for position in their show.

  It included the sinister dub of “Ain’t It Strange” and the paradoxically pretty “Pumping (My Heart),” neither of which would see vinyl until the end of the following year. They performed a beautifully stylized version of “Privilege,” former Manfred Mann front man Paul Jones’s theme to the dystopian rock movie of the same name, which would remain unreleased until 1978. They had even taken to playing a medley of the Velvet Underground’s “Pale Blue Eyes” and the old garage stomper “Louie Louie” that has never been officially released.

  A handful of Horses favorites remained on board, of course, but both “Land” and “Birdland” were as likely to become the backdrop to new improvisations and verse as they were to adhere to their vinyl incarnations. “Remember when I used to do this in the old days?” Patti asked as she unwrapped a new verse, “Nigger Book,” from her pocket. “Fresh off the acoustic typewriter?”

  Around them, past poems such as “Seventh Heaven,” “Snowball,” “Space Monkey,” “Seven Ways of Going,” and “Mafia” might be reprised; one night she pulled “Sally” out of her past, with a laughing “I can’t believe I’m going to do this one.” Some nights, Patti would drop into a few lines of Darlene Love’s “The Boy I’m Going to Marry,” or the almost painfully keening “Work Song,” with its I was working real hard lament.

  “It was important to us that we never stood still,” Sohl explained. “Even when we were touring all the time and we had no time to rehearse or even think about what we were doing, we knew one another so well that we could just go off on these completely unrehearsed tangents, knowing that they would work.”

  The group would be on the road almost constantly for the next five months, a full American tour that touched down occasionally in what would become Patti’s nests of strongest support—New York City and environs, Philadelphia, Boston, D.C., and Cleveland on the East Coast; the corridor from San Francisco to San Diego on the West—but ventured further afield too.

  Their support act was John Cale, whose Helen of Troy album had been released the same week as Horses—although you got the impression that he’d have preferred if it hadn’t been. Shortly before flying to New York City to work with Patti, he handed his label, Island, the demos for his new LP. From there, he headed over to Europe for a tour, then returned to London to find his demos on the release schedule. Furious and dismayed, he fled the UK, returned to New York City, and joined Patti in Jane Friedman’s managerial stable.

  Cale would appear onstage alone, with just his piano for company, performing a solo set of songs before Patti alone came out to join him. They would sing a couple of songs together, then as the full band appeared on stage, Cale would exit. But he would always return, running back onstage for the encore “My Generation,” thundering his bass line through Patti’s profanity-laced version of the old rocker and then, as Patti cried out her final incitement—We created it, let’s take it over!—waiting for Lenny Kaye to hurl himself across the stage and catching the guitarist in his arms.

  The first half of 1976 saw Patti and her band either hit their stride or reach their peak, depending upon one’s personal point of view. Richard Meltzer, writing in Creem, described their live show as “the best by a cunny since Billie Holiday and best by either gonad group since James Morrison’s prime,” and he was right. One of the most popular bootleg records of the year would be Patti’s Teenage Perversity & Ships in the Night, recorded at the Roxy in Los Angeles on January 30, 1976. It captures the band literally seething, even overcoming the unexpected appearance of Iggy Pop onstage to describe how he had “just been worked over for a week by a Transylvanian masseuse in San Francisco.”

  Not everybody was a fan, however. An unannounced show at San Francisco’s Boarding House in January prompted San Francisco Chronicle scribe John Wasserman to disguise his review as an open letter to Lily Tomlin, in which he asked outright, “Have you ever heard of Patti Smith? Well, she is a new comedienne…. I know that ‘imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,’ but I think this Patti Smith has gon
e too far. She is doing your act.” Robert Weinter of After Dark, too, found her antics difficult to countenance: “The emergence of ‘rock poetess’ Patti Smith as a potential superstar is the greatest hoax perpetrated on the American public since Andy Warhol’s soup cans and Patricia Hearst’s kidnapping. Encouraging her to disseminate her minimal art is like encouraging the local garbage man to go onstage to clang garbage-can tops.”

  As she toured, Patti attracted more such castigations. But one couldn’t help but feel that they were increasingly isolated voices in the wilderness. A lot of people might not have understood what Patti was doing. But those who got it really got it.

  Arista, too, was following the group’s progress. The label arranged for the show in Cleveland to be recorded in its entirety, then culled one track, the set-ending “My Generation.” It became the B-side to the band’s debut single, “Gloria,” which had served as Horses’ opening track. Arista expunged the expletives from “My Generation” with a high-pitched beep for the all-important UK release—all-important because the UK was already shaping up to be as fascinated with Patti as America, thanks to those first astonished reports filed in the New Musical Express and Melody Maker, and the occasional follow-ups since then.

  Talking to the British press, Patti was infuriated by her first taste of record company censorship. “You tell the kids that I say not to buyit,” she railed to Mick Gold in Street Life. “You tell them it’s against my wishes. In the States we fought and fought for that recording not to be censored. Just like the American government wanted to censor Bran-cusi’s sculpture Bird in Space. Brancusi had to fight to redefine sculpture and I’m fighting to redefine rock ‘n’ roll…. I would rather see somebody bootleg the American version and put it out the way it’s supposed to be. It’s not that I don’t care about money, but this is blood money. We fought for that record to be released.”

  Her words fell on deaf ears at Arista. But on the streets of Britain, it was the imported French and American copies that sold the fastest, as dealers placed ads in the classified sections of the UK music papers announcing their stock of the unexpurgated version.

  On March 9, 1976, the band arrived in Detroit, the evening’s concert preceded by a reception at the Lafayette Coney Island, a landmark hot dog and chili joint. A handful of local musicians were there, and Patti pointed one out to Lenny Kaye.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Fred Smith. Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith,” to differentiate him from their friend in Television.

  Even his name sounded like poetry.

  Born on September 13, 1949, Fred “Sonic” Smith was a native West Virginian, but he was Detroit through and through. It was there that he’d lived most of his life, and there in 1965 that he formed the MC5, joining forces with vocalist Rob Tyner, guitarist Wayne Kramer, bassist Michael Davis, and drummer Dennis Thompson in a band that was destined to become one of rock ‘n’ roll’s most incendiary, as well as one of its most unappreciated.

  A couple of early singles and a series of increasingly ferocious live shows kept the MC5 alive for the first few years, and then a meeting with countercultural activist John Sinclair twisted the quintet’s none-too-developed view of the world outside their rehearsal room into a firestorm of politicized rhetoric. By the time Brother JC Crawford came aboard as an onstage poet/commentator, spieling Sinclair’s revolutionary declarations over the cacophony of a rock band, the MC5 were an act of war, a declaration of hostilities.

  They railed against the system, but unlike a lot of the era’s other self-appointed rabble-rousers, they made it count. No weak-kneed trustfund kids who’d just thrown their toys from the stroller; when the MC5 spoke, people listened. They deployed the American flag as a backdrop to their barrage, and swore that one day they would take it back from the governments and corporations that had co-opted it and return it to the people. They were, wrote Sinclair in his memoir Guitar Army, “challenging the biggest death machine in the history of the world,” and the only flaw in their argument was that they didn’t realize just how far that machine would go to preserve the status quo. The police routinely closed or busted their shows.

  The MC5 released just one LP, the epochal Kick Out the Jams, before Sinclair was jailed and the group lost their way immediately. Two further albums came and went; Kramer followed Sinclair into prison. By the mid-1970s, with the MC5 just a memory, Fred Smith was playing in small clubs and friendly support spots with his Sonic’s Rendezvous Band. Few people even glanced in his direction.

  But Patti did. He was standing in front of a white radiator, she recalled to Lisa Robinson in 1988, “and the communication was instantaneous. It was more than that. It was mystical, really, something I never forgot.”

  She invited Smith to join her band onstage that same night, to add extra guitar to their “My Generation” encore, and she could tell by the way he played, she said, what kind of person he was—“better than me, stronger than me,” she told Patricia Morrisroe.

  He accompanied her back to her hotel after the show, and there the roots of a new song began to germinate, titled for the twenty-fifth floor of the hotel, where Patti’s rooms were that night. The two Smiths spent the night together, and then remained in touch after Patti’s tour moved on: late night phone calls, postcards, and letters that crossed America and then the ocean.

  On April 17, Patti Smith made her network television debut, appearing on Saturday Night Live to perform “Gloria” and a carefully restructured “My Generation.” The following night, the band made a special appearance back at Reno Sweeney. The tour was becoming a procession of highlights, but for the band, the most exciting ones were still to come.

  On May 10, they played two shows in East Lansing, Michigan. They then boarded a flight to London to commence their first European tour. And if anybody doubted how excitedly the country was awaiting her, the news announcement in the New Musical Express‘s April 17 issue wrapped up six months of anticipation into one single paragraph: “Patti Smith, New York’s queen of rock and arguably America’s biggest female cult phenomenon, is to make her British debut next month. Patti Smith was recently hailed by Rolling Stone magazine as ‘the best new solo artist since Bruce Springsteen.’ … Another leading U.S. cult figure, Tom Waits—sometimes described as ‘the male Patti Smith,’ is also in line for a British visit.”

  Their first engagement was an appearance on the Old Grey Whistle Test, the most important and most watched rock show on British television. More than anything else on the band’s schedule, this appearance was their chance to make a major impression. It would have been easiest, then, for Patti to lead the band through a couple of the songs they had been touring for the last six months, tight rockers that would catch the audience’s attention immediately. Instead, Kral recalled, she selected a song that the band had never even rehearsed, much less played together: “Hey Joe.”

  “When she said that was what we were going to play on Old Grey Whistle Test, it was exciting. We were in London, we were on TV, and we were walking a tightrope, playing an arrangement of a song we’d never played. And, apparently, it caused a lot of fuss.”

  Jimi Hendrix had been dead for almost six years, but in British rock circles, both his name and his legacy were sacrosanct. Artists who covered his material did so at their own peril. When Rod Stewart scored a UK hit with Hendrix’s “Angel,” there were reviews that condemned him for blasphemy, and he performed the song with almost touching attention to Hendrix’s original. Nobody could say that about Patti’s “Hey Joe.”

  The performance began with a passionate rampage through her own “Land,” with knowing nods to Oscar Wilde, Otis Redding, and, torn from that week’s newspaper headlines, the disgraced English politician Jeremy Thorpe. The leader of the Liberal Party was embroiled in the kind of sex scandal that only the truly righteous ever get mixed up in,a dizzying panoply of hunky male models, murdered dogs, and fevered denials.

  It was an astonishing performance, despite the cameramen simply not knowing what to focu
s on. According to the newspaper Sounds’ man on the spot, writer Jonh Ingham, “The broadcast, as usual, misses the great moments. As the pulsating intro breaks into [‘Land,’] she whips off her shades: missed. Suddenly she drops on her knees in front of Lenny, as though to eat his guitar: the cameramen leap wildly, but by the time they focus the exciting, mind-warp instant has passed. When they draw to a close there is an electric, tangible atmosphere—no-one moves or speaks…. Now that was television!”

  But the cameras caught enough anyway: Patti an androgynous wire at the microphone, cooler than cool but kinda geeky as well, exuding indifference but seething inside, knowing that she had just ten minutes in which to show England what it had taken four years to introduce to New York City. And she succeeded. The following day, everybody who saw the broadcast had something to say about it, though it generally wasn’t complimentary—all the more so since the show’s own production staff promptly swung from Patti’s live rendition of “Hey Joe” into archive footage of Hendrix performing it in 1968.

  That first engagement over, the band flew to the continent: to Copenhagen on May 12, then after that Brussels, Amsterdam, and two nights in Paris, one of which is preserved on a cassette recording that remains precious to everyone who hears it.

  It didn’t seem too promising to begin with. Patti’s voice was even more out of sorts than it normally felt, and as early as the second song of the night, “Kimberly,” the musicians sounded ever so slightly perfunctory, with only Ivan Kral’s lead guitar trying to hack anything fresh out of the rhythm and maybe push Patti into another dimension. Instead she made a hash of telling the audience a meandering joke, and things continued chaotic.

  An error-strewn “Redondo Beach,” a tentative “Free Money,” and a lazy intro to “Privilege” were all punctuated by lengthy silences—and then suddenly everything fell into place as Patti pounced onto the brutal reiteration of the Twenty-Third Psalm that she had inserted into that song.