Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story

by Dave Thompson

  A handful of hecklers arose from the stalls. Early on, reacting to the Odeon’s all-seated policy, one voice demanded, “Next time, make it the Roundhouse.” But as they grew more virulent, Patti responded with the staccato signals of “Radio Ethiopia,” an eternity of feedback, riffing, and caterwauling that only slowly resolved itself back into anything the audience might recognize—a motorvatin’ guitar and harp riff—and then snatched it away again with a furious “Rock n Roll Nigger.” And then they were into the home stretch: everyone hailed a swaggering “Gloria,” and you may never have heard “Land” reduced to an audience clap-along before, but it didn’t seem to phase Patti any. Shame that the cassette tape that preserved the evening for posterity should run out before the song did, but it was still a great rendition.

  The following week’s reviews passed sneering commentary on Patti’s attempts to smash her guitar at the end of the performance, raising it above her head and bringing it down on the ground repeatedly. She failed, and the guitar remained resolutely intact. But Kral revealed a secret: She didn’t really fail. She didn’t intend to break it, and by the time it was finally granted retirement, that little old guitar was still in one piece.

  As they had back in May, the Patti Smith Group also fanned out to sightsee, shop, and take in some other concerts around London. For Kral, the highlight was getting a ticket to see his childhood idol Cliff Richard. For Patti, it was the chance to hightail it down to the ICA to catch the Clash, another of the bands rising up on punk’s first wave, and join them onstage for a knockabout thrash through their own “I’m So Bored with the USA.”

  Suddenly, it seemed, Andy Paley was recalled to America by other commitments two shows from the end of the tour. As feared, the Manchester and Edinburgh shows were canceled.

  Home by the end of the month, Patti took in Bruce Springsteen’s latest New York City performance, at the Palladium on October 30. She joined him on stage too, for a head-spinning collision of his “Rosalita” and her “Land.” She had danced onstage with him in the past, but tonight’s collaboration between the king and queen of the New York City streets, as tired journalists had already dubbed them, was something special, so special that when the Patti Smith Group returned to the city after a short jaunt to California, Springsteen would appear both in the audience and on the stage. So would John Cale, whose recent bandmate Bruce Brody had replaced Andy Paley on keyboards.

  The band was playing a full week of shows at the Bottom Line, dynamic evenings in which absolutely nothing could be accused of conforming to a script. One night, when Kaye leaped into the audience during “Ain’t It Strange,” Patti followed him, and the pair embarked on a crazy game of chase, leaping onto tables before she dragged him back to the stage. “It was just a lot of this adolescent energy and anarchy,” Kaye recalled to Patricia Morrisroe, “and there was something very liberating about it because we were pushing the edge of the envelope.”

  The repertoire matched the mayhem. Back on home turf, Patti slipped guilelessly between rock and verse, often opening the shows with a succession of rapid-fire verbiage even before “We’re Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together” brought the band into view. Old British Invasion covers flew out of the memory banks; improvisations wrapped around the most familiar album tracks; Dolly Parton’s country classic “Jolene” rubbed shoulders with “Ballad of a Bad Boy.” Patti was in her element, and when Springsteen leaped onstage on the fifth night, turning up at both the early and late shows, a raucous “Land” became a hypnotic “Not Fade Away,” “Radio Ethiopia” merged with “Rock n Roll Nigger,” and if anybody ever questioned whether a year on the road had reduced the Patti Smith Group to a regimented pile driver—another of the accusations that were spit out by the UK press—this was their response: a series of shows so loose and unstructured that the only thing that could ever have kept them together was the instinctive connection Patti and her musicians had shared since their earliest days as a band.

  The anarchy continued. The day after the Bottom Line residency ended, on November 29, Patti was scheduled to speak at a twenty-four-hour “Hungerthon” being arranged by WNEW radio and hosted by the genteel singer-songwriter Harry Chapin. It was Chapin who was charged with the task of asking Patti to moderate her language, as there was no time delay, and he who received her withering on-air response. WNEW prided itself as being an alternative to traditional rock radio, but how alternative was it really, Patti demanded to know, if “the first thing that happens when I walk in is that you tell me you don’t have a bleep machine and to watch what I say?”

  Her tirade went on, and while it echoed in part the disaffected cries of the punk rock generation, it also spoke for every concern Patti had ever voiced through her own work. “Rock ‘n’ roll is being taken over by the people again. By young kids who don’t want to hear about your digital delay. They don’t want to hear about any of this stuff. They don’t want to hear that they can’t do an Eric Clapton solo. They just want to get out there and just get down on a rhythm. They want to crawl like a dog or they want to rise up. They just want to feel something.”

  She weaved in a message to match the fundraiser’s own aims. Demanding that the rich West use its power to feed the hungry of the world rather than worry about “what color they are, or … what they’re listening to on their radios”—or, as the undercurrent of her conversation made clear, any of the other questions or conditions that the West seemed to employ whenever a Third World nation went cap in hand for aid. But neither Chapin nor Metromedia, WNEW’s owners, were amused. Plans for the station to broadcast the Patti Smith Group’s New Year’s Eve show at the New York Palladium were abandoned.

  In March 1977, the Yipster Times would publish Patti’s page-long defense of her actions and denouncement of her critics: “We believe in the total freedom of communication and we will not be compromised…. They are trying to silence us, but they cannot succeed.” And, paraphrasing Jim Morrison, “We Want The Radio And We Want It Now.” The article was accompanied by French photographer, artist, and singer Lizzy “Lyzzy” Mercier Descloux’s famous photograph of Patti seated on a sidewalk in Paris, cigarette in hand, beneath a single graffiti-scrawled slogan, Vive l’anarchie.

  Other broadcasters were less squeamish. On December 7, the Patti Smith Group recorded two songs, “Ask the Angels” and “Free Money,” for the Mike Douglas Show.

  They then set out on one of the most oddly mismatched tours of their entire career. Nobody seems certain what genius it was who thought the Patti Smith Group could ever share an audience, or anything else for that matter, with Sparks, the hyper-ironic California siblings who had spent the last two years as superstars in Europe but whose American profile seemed doomed forever to languish against a wall of humor-free apathy.

  Hilly Michaels, Sparks’ New Yorker drummer, was astonished by the pairing. “Sparks and Patti Smith on the same bill for a good dozen shows? Fellini couldn’t have thought up something that weird. It was like a grandiose traveling musical oddities tour for a while, and there was a lot of friction between the Patti Smith Group and us.” Some nights, Sparks were not even granted a sound check before the doors opened.

  Only Ivan Kral offered Michaels any respite from the hostility. Michaels had been playing alongside Mick Ronson when Kral auditioned for the guitarist’s band just before he joined Patti, and Michaels recalled, “He was a super-nice guy and my only warm relief with a friendly ‘hi’ to me when we all toured together.”

  One concession was made to the distinctly different audiences that the two bands could expect to attract: an agreement to alternate the headline slot. Michaels continued, “Depending on the city, either she or we would open first. We had our pockets of places where we were stronger, where the crowd went absolutely wild when we took the stage, and Patti had hers.”

  In Montreal, Canada, a solidly Sparks-loving crowd was making so much noise before the show started that Patti, having agreed to open that evening, was too nervous to even come out of her dressin
g room. At the Masonic Auditorium in Detroit on December 12, on the other hand, a fanatically devoted Patti audience greeted Sparks on stage with a hail of abuse that swiftly graduated to flying bottles.

  Another night, Michaels confessed, brought one of the scariest experiences of his entire onstage life. Again Sparks faced a loyal Patti Smith crowd, and as they ran out onto the stage, the entire venue erupted into a chorus of catcalls. “There was this thunderous ‘boooooooo’ resonatingfrom three-thousand-plus people, just as we were getting ready to start. We were all a bit paralyzed by that! It was an uphill struggle from the get-go, and we had to perform our asses off for every single show.”

  It was with some relief that the two bands finally parted company following a show at Seneca College in Toronto, Canada, on December 19. The Patti Smith Group headed back to New York City, to wrap up a tumultuous year with a tumultuous performance: their New Year’s Eve gig at the Palladium.

  Robert Christgau reported on the show for the Village Voice, marveling at an audience that rushed the stage “like KISS fans,” and then celebrating the performance’s climax by describing it as “the true ‘My Generation.’” The song began with Patti wrestling a guitar away from her female roadie, Andi Ostrowe, “and ended with [her]—joined eventually by Ivan Kral—performing the legendary guitar-smashing ritual that the Who gave up in the sixties.”

  Patti, too, would soon be giving up that sort of ritual. But whereas the Who, and all the other acts who had set themselves up in opposition to the status quo of the day, eventually retired from the battlefield, mission unfulfilled—because how could it be fulfilled with Tommy around your neck?—when Patti retired, it was because her job was done.

  Six weeks after her last London show, the Sex Pistols appeared on British television and cursed their way into tabloid immortality. Punk rock was confirmed as the musical fashion of the next two years and was set to become the father of most of the others that followed. Even today, more than thirty years after punk came to life, it remains an underground current, one that has survived every effort to tame, blame, or merely contain its energies.

  Its birth was not painless, and there were moments when it felt as though the infant might never live to adulthood. But Patti kept a close eye on her child all the same, and today when you ask her what punk rock means, her answer is unhesitating. “I think it doesn’t necessarily have to take any specific form of music, because it’s really a spirit,” she told Gerri Lim of the Singapore magazine Big O in 1995. “And what the spirit is, I think, it removes itself or tries to repurify things whenthings get too convoluted or when they get too commercial. There’s this resurgent spirit that people call punk that purifies everything again….

  “It’s the new guard coming in to purify, to let things renew and begin again.”

  12

  THE SALVATION OF ROCK

  THE STAGE WAS as dark as a well-lit stage could be. Shadowed by amplifiers, blocked by her bandmates, and surrounded by the accoutrements that the headlining act deemed essential to their well-being, Patti was performing in near-total blackness.

  Or so it seemed to her as she whirled around the tiny space she had been able to claim for her own, as she spun deliriously to the music that her bandmates were making, as she reached for the microphone in mid-twist, then tumbled, tripping over a monitor, black in the blackness at the lip of the stage.

  And she fell.

  The Patti Smith Group’s berth as opening act on the latest Bob Seger tour had begun in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on January 21, 1977, and moved down to the Hollywood Sportatorium in Broward County, Florida, the following day. Tampa was next, and then onward. Beyond the current tour, the group was scheduled to appear at the Nassau Coliseum outside New York City with the Ramones and the Blue Öyster Cult before moving on to West Germany and France in March. But then came Patti’s accident and everything was canceled.

  They were onstage at Tampa’s Curtis-Hixon Hall, six songs into a set that had already bedazzled the Seger crowd with “Land,” “Ask the Angels,” “Redondo Beach,” “Free Money,” and “Pumping (My Heart).” Now they were pulsing through an extravagantly protracted “Ain’t It Strange,” Patti spinning around the stage—forgetting, perhaps, that their allotted space in Seger’s domain was considerably less than she was accustomed to using. With the stage in darkness, she had either forgotten or not even noticed the monitor that lurked between her feet and the microphone. They were six, maybe seven minutes into the song and suddenly she tumbled, backward over the monitor, to the concrete floor fifteen feet below.

  For a moment the band played on; from behind the drum riser, Jay Dee Daugherty thought, “She’s either dead or she’s gonna jump back up onstage,” he remembered in Please Kill Me. He was wrong on both counts. The musicians slowed, and then halted; from the audience, there were a few cries of alarm, and even more of puzzlement. “Did she fall?”

  It felt as though she were in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, she said later, those frozen moments as a character steps out over a cliff and keeps walking in midair until he suddenly realizes there is nothing holding him up. But she could afford to joke. Although she had not, as some reports were quick to claim, broken her neck in strict medical terms, she had suffered two cracked vertebrae and a handful of breaks in the bones of her face.

  She was bleeding from wounds that would require twenty-two stitches, and as she was maneuvered out of the venue by a team of paramedics from Tampa General Hospital, her bandmates simply stared in mute horror at one another. The gig was over, that was for certain, and maybe the tour as well. But what else was going to fall victim to Patti’s crash?

  “I felt myself going and I said—GET BACK HERE! I gripped my consciousness by the throat … the biggest battle was in my head, and I won.”

  She’d just written a poem for Tapper Zukie, she told Sounds’ Vivien Goldman soon after. “It’s called ‘Tapper the Extractor’ [and] it’s the best poem I’ve written for a real long time. Tapper’s poem kept me from losing consciousness; it’s all about ‘the thread of return.’ … Yeah, the thread of return kept me here.”

  One does not hold the key, she told herself; he extends it.

  Lying in the hospital, she could already hear the whispers; convalescing, she heard them louder. There were rumors circulating that she hadbeen drunk or stoned. That she had jumped, even. She would refute them all. If she was in any kind of state, it was a spiritual one—the music and the moment woven into one, driving her to a delirium in which her surroundings ceased to exist. Until the moment they demanded her attention.

  She was still daydreaming as she was rushed into surgery. The nature of her injuries demanded that she not be placed under anesthetic immediately, so the first hours of her treatment were a wall of pain. But as the surgeons sewed up the gashes, Patti simply closed her eyes and imagined herself to be wounded on some Civil War battlefield. “I pretended I was Robert E. Lee.”

  The cracked vertebrae were not her only serious injury. Her eyesight, too, had been compromised by nerve damage, and for a short time there were genuine fears that her legs might be paralyzed. Spinal surgery was suggested, together with a punishing regimen of physical therapy, but for the moment the best thing that she could do was wait out the immediate injuries with bed rest and sufficient drugs to make her feel normal again.

  That’s why the first reports from her sick chamber appeared so positive. Lying there in a cast, a brace, and traction, she answered every inquiry with a smile and a nod: “I’m feeling great. Oh, yeah, I’ll be back.” She continued giving interviews, informing the world that she was fine. “I’m so lucky,” she constantly repeated on the phone with Vivien Goldman. “The doctors can’t believe it!”

  Even the West German promoter of her next European tour put the telephone down convinced that the group’s scheduled gigs were still on, after a few minutes of conversation with Patti.

  Months later, in her April 1978 interview with John Tobler, she had a clearer perspective. “I couldn’t
move and I was saying, ‘Yeah, everything’s cool, I’ll be in Germany in a couple of weeks.’ I got my agents and everybody in a lot of trouble ‘cos I was feeling great; meanwhile I couldn’t even get out of bed. Also I’d never been injured before, so I didn’t understand. To me it was like having the chicken pox.”

  But she could not truly rest, of course. Four years had passed since the publication of her last full book of poetry, Witt. Since then justone further collection had appeared, The Night, teaming eleven of Patti’s poems with eleven by Tom Verlaine. It was originally intended to be followed by a second collaborative effort, Independence Day, but that never materialized; Patti’s only new publications since then were the Gotham Book Mart’s editions of her poems “A Useless Death” and “Ha! Ha! Houdini,” the former a three-page chapbook, the latter eight pages bound together with a tiny padlock.

  Now, however, she had time to think, and to consider a proposal from publisher G. P. Putnam’s Sons that she curate a retrospective edition of her verse. It would be titled Babel.

  Roadie Andi Ostrowe took dictation at Patti’s bedside, while entertaining the invalid with recollections of her past life in the Peace Corps. The two women’s friendship dated back to the day Ostrowe turned up at one of Patti’s Radio Ethiopia recording sessions and handed her a letter franked with some Ethiopian stamps. Now she sat and talked of her own experiences in Ethiopia, while Patti volleyed rapid-fire questions back at her. Such distractions, Patti said later, proved essential.

  All the same, Patti laughed, Babel was born under the influence of the pain pills that she was constantly in need of and that plunged her into “a very subliminal landscape.” i have been lying here for a long time in stillness, she wrote in “Penicillin.” sick, immobile. i can’t get a grip or feel.