Even so, she was rightfully proud of all that she was able to accomplish: sixty-two titled pieces tracing Patti’s evolution as a writer and poet, harking back as far as “k.o.d.a.k.,” “Georgia O’Keefe” [sic], “Edie Sedgwick,” and “Marianne Faithfull”; hovering in the present day with “Ain’t It Strange” and “Babel Field”; and, although she was not yet aware of the fact, looking forward to her recovery and return to action, with “Easter,” destined to become one of her best-loved songs.
She also drove into the heart of her own increasingly carefully constructed mythology. The opening piece, “Notice,” outlines the requirements of a heroine: the artist. the premier mistress writhing … the freedom to be intense … to defy social order and break the slow kill monotony of censorship. Little that Patti has written before or since has better encapsulated her own vision of her place in the arts.
Friends dropped by, and occasionally she wrote with them. Richard Hell sat by her bedside and they passed the typewriter back and forth, reading what each other had written and then hammering down the next thoughts of their own. Tom Verlaine was there, fresh from recording Television’s debut album, and so was Jane Friedman, her manager.
Both of those relationships would be severed before Patti’s convalescence was through—Verlaine by Patti’s love for Fred Smith, Friedman because it seemed that much of her time was now being dedicated to John Cale, as he set up his Spy record label. Lawyer Ina Meibach would handle Patti’s affairs from now on, but only as far as anyone could do that. Patti was her own boss and she always had been, and you stepped on her toes at your own peril. You could ask her doctors about that. Or her bandmates. Apparently the first thing she told them when they came to see her was not to join Linda Ronstadt’s backing band.
With Lenny Kaye she hatched the reemergence of Mer, the label they had birthed with their debut single “Hey Joe.” It had flickered only once since then, with the American release of Tapper Zukie’s Man Ah Warrior, but they would fund new operations by leasing the reissue rights for “Hey Joe” to Seymour Stein’s Sire label. Patti was already outlining her intentions for Mer: a home for performers she and Kaye believed had promise that needed to be nurtured. There would be no long-term contracts or long-time aims. Mer was interested only in an artist’s first work, or special projects that perhaps no other label would touch; Patti spoke of producing, and playing guitar on, an album of extracts from the novel The Wild Boys by its author, William Burroughs.
That wouldn’t happen, and the Mer project itself was stillborn. But Patti had still more ways of keeping herself occupied. She was arranging for gallery showings of her drawings across New York City and then in West Germany, and she threw herself into physical therapy as though she were Muhammad Ali preparing for a title bout or Mr. America getting ready to take on the world. In fact, those were the examples she named when anyone asked if she should really be pushing so hard. And, when she told her doctors that she had targeted Easter Sunday as the day she would return to performing, even the skeptics among them knew that she would probably succeed.
That, she said later, was why that one new poem, “Easter,” was so important to her. It was the day that she would rise from the dead.
Patti’s return was a week behind schedule. Easter Sunday fell on April 10, and nine days later she was recording a performance for the Mike Douglas Show, stepping back to the poems “Work Song” and “Prayer,” the latter of which she had reworked as “Keith Richards Blues.” The Rolling Stone was still awaiting the outcome of a Toronto drug bust two months previous, and there were very real fears that he would be jailed.
Patti’s onstage resurrection would not take place on schedule either, but the lines outside CBGB still snaked around the block when she returned to action on May 4, 1977. The occasion was a benefit for Punk magazine, the stylishly anarchic chronicle of New York City’s underground culture.
Returning to CBGB was the best thing she could have done. She remembered how she had to be carried on stage at the beginning of the residency, so weak was she from months in bed and a body full of medication. “I had them put a chair on the stage,” she told William Burroughs in an interview published in Spin magazine. And then, she told ZigZag in the aftermath of that memorable show, “I got on the stage, plugged in my amp, grabbed my guitar, and immediately raped my guitar, immediately kicked in my amplifier, immediately was jumping out.”
Although Patti’s set was short that night, it was impressive regardless. She sang “Kimberly” and “Pissing in a River,” pulled out the old Spencer Davis Group garage classic “Gimme Some Lovin’,” Sam Cooke’s “Working on the Chain Gang,” and the Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend.” Then she turned to the Velvet Underground’s “I’m Waiting for the Man,” and Lou Reed leaped onstage alongside her, to duet with a triumphant Patti. The night, she insisted to Burroughs, was “the best therapy that I had,” so good that she promptly arranged an entire season of further shows, to commence at the end of the month.
She took some precautions, of course. Large swaths of the set were gifted to either Kaye or Kral, who rehearsed the band through some favorite oldies and then took lead vocals on them as well.
But the precautions proved unnecessary. “I didn’t do everything good at first, but every night I got stronger,” she told ZigZag. “I feel crazier now than ever. The strength I now have compensates for the mania I’ve developed. I didn’t learn my lesson.” By the end of that residency, she wasn’t only back on her feet; she had even taken off her neck brace, rejuvenated by the power of CBGB.
“Easter” moved into the set, and as spring turned into summer 1977, far from bemoaning her absence from what was elsewhere proving to be one of the most exciting years in recent New York City musical history, Patti reveled in her freedom to simply kick back and enjoy it.
All of the bands that had strained behind her in the early days of CBGB were driving hard now. The Ramones, having delivered their debut album in summer 1976, were already looking toward the release of their third. Both the Talking Heads and Blondie had issued their first LPs; Richard Hell was working toward his maiden set, and Television were now celebrating the release of theirs, that epic maelstrom of icicles and angles called Marquee Moon.
Looking back on the unity that once bound together these groups and so many others, Patti could grow nostalgic for an age that would never return. But that was also the nature of art—and the thing that she loved about it. Performers were united for however long they needed to be, and then the greatest moved on to new pastures.
It made her laugh to think of Blondie and Television now treading the same boards at London’s Hammersmith Odeon that she had visited six months before. Doubtless, she laughed even harder when she recalled the November 1975 issue of the New Musical Express in which English journalist Charles Shaar Murray had deconstructed Blondie as “a garagetype band” fronted by “this cute little bundle of platinum hair with a voice like a squeaky bath toy.” But the very fact that a bunch of kids and early-twenties from a club at the lowest end of New York City’s spectrum were now headlining a theater at the top of London’s—that justified everything they had all fought for in the years when they were nobodies.
Patti was still convalescing, but she was of course already considering her next move. A new album—that went without saying. But even before she breathed a word about it, she knew that it would swerve as dramatically away from her last LP, the miasmic glory of Radio Ethiopia, as that album had swung away from the skeletal beauty of Horses.
The album would take shape around “Easter,” her prayer of rebirth and rejuvenation. It would nod to the past by clearing up some of the most deserving old soldiers in the group’s live repertoire: “Rock n Roll Nigger” (her original choice for the new LP’s title), “Space Monkey,” and, at long last, “Privilege.”
And it would speak publicly of her long-distance romance with Fred. They scarcely ever got to see one another, and they had the long-distance phone bills to prove it
. But “25th Floor” and “Godspeed” spoke of the love that was growing between them, and the mood of the music would broadcast that sentimentality even further. (Meanwhile, a new poem in Babel, “Thread,” would speak to the domesticity that Patti felt when the pair were together: i was sitting by the window holding your button. i wanted to sew it on your coat.)
But Easter would also be constructed around an awareness that after two albums that were already being spoken of as “cult” favorites, fans and Patti’s label alike expected her to finally step out into the commercial daylight. The pressure was exacerbated by, of all people, her old rivals Blondie. Signed to the small Private Stock Records label at the end of 1976, the group had transferred to the major Chrysalis in early 1977, and with their first, eponymous album picking up excellent results and fair sales, all indications were that the group would be breaking through—in Europe, if not the United States—with their second album, Plastic Letters.
That set was being recorded around the same time that the Patti Smith Group went into the studio themselves, on November 7, 1977, to begin work on Easter. Producer Jimmy Iovine would oversee the sessions; Patti selected him because she liked what he’d been doing with Bruce Springsteen. Iovine had been engineer on Springsteen’s 1975 album Born to Run and had just wrapped up work in the same capacity on the long-awaited follow-up Darkness on the Edge of Town.
The Easter job was a big deal for Iovine. Although he’d known Patti for over a year now, since they met at the Record Plant studios in 1976, he also knew that she could have worked with any producer she wanted. Instead, she called in a guy who had just one major-label credit to his name: Flame, a band he formed with singer Marge Raymond that was backed up by sundry members of Springsteen’s E Street Band.
Iovine realized that the Patti Smith Group would require careful handling. Not in terms of personality; he got along famously with all of them. But he needed to point out that he was a producer, not a miracle worker, and listening to the group’s outlines of the album, some people had already started wondering if a miracle was what they actually required.
The gigs that the Patti Smith Group had played since her return from injury were a very different beast from those that preceded it. Patti herself acknowledged that the songs had become a lot shorter and faster. There was still room for improvisation, such as that magnificent inconcert moment when the hard-riffing (and, to be truthful, somewhat pedestrian) “25th Floor” lurched into “High on Rebellion,” the self-defining snatch of Babel that answered so many of her musical critics while at the same time it offered them further ammunition to use against her: here I am struggling and filled with dread. But even “Privilege,” for so long a touchstone for lyrical flights of fancy, could be accused of having settled down, although the blasphemies that were so much a part of it, the cries of goddamn that rang through the coda, would soon be outraging radio all the same.
It was the clutch of new songs that would be accompanying the band into the studio that really documented how far the band had shifted from its earlier improvisational roots. They simply didn’t pack the manic edge that was once the hallmark of Smith’s writing. Some of them had not even seen a live stage yet, and as the new album unfolded across the winter, any analysis of its progress could not help but acknowledge how unfulfilled those songs felt. “Till Victory,” “We Three,” even the chanted mystique of the fan favorite “Ghost Dance”—all could have benefited immeasurably from a few months of road work, and the possibility that Patti was leaning hard toward her record label’s desire for a solid commercial success, rather than another album of cult appeal, had never seemed so probable.
Lenny Kaye tried to play down the commercial sheen, by looking toward the future. The band had just flipped its modus operandi, that’s all, recording songs before they performed them live. A few months on the road would soon roughen them up. And when journalist Sandy Robertson repeated the suggestion that they were chasing a hit record, Kaye was adamant: “There was no conscious drive to sell records, that was like our last thought.”
Or was it? Even Patti may not have thought it through yet, but a hit record does more than elevate its makers into the echelons of pop stardom. It can also be a nest egg for the future, for a time when an artist cannot (through injury—a bad fall, for example) or will not (for personal reasons—a new love affair) continue performing.
Patti had already acknowledged that there might come a time when she would no longer be working, and the songwriting credits on the new record were designed to offset that shock for her bandmates, at least in financial terms. On Radio Ethiopia, Ivan Kral had been her most frequent songwriting partner. This time, he shared only as many writing credits as Jay Dee Daugherty—that is to say, one. Patti explained that the decision to spread the credits around was made in the name of democracy. But democracy now? Or democracy for the future?
Despite Patti’s and Kaye’s protestations, Jimmy Iovine was under no illusions as to what was expected of him. The album was moving along nicely, but Iovine had yet to hear a solitary song that struck him as a potential hit single, and that was what Arista was calling for.
Iovine had already pulled two live recordings onto the disc: the medley of “25th Floor” and “High on Rebellion” and a reading of the poem “Babelogue.” The latter would segue dramatically into the seething “Rock n Roll Nigger,” a song that the label was already eyeing with considerable trepidation. The notion that the most explosive word in racism could be reclaimed as a label for all outsiders was not a new one; John and Yoko Ono had planted the same seed five years ago with “Woman Is the Nigger of the World.” And one only needed to read Patti’s lyrics to understand that she was making a similar point. But the analogy remained an obscure one, and Arista knew that anytime anyone heard that word, they were immediately going to bristle.
Not for the first time, Patti’s guarantee of complete artistic control, which was one of the hooks that had pulled her onto Arista in the first place, struck the bosses as one freedom too far. But the suggestion that the lyrics be altered was not one that anybody would broach, eitheropenly or surreptitiously. That meant there was no way that the strongest and most commercial song on the LP so far could ever be released as a radio-friendly 45.
Which was why Iovine called up Bruce Springsteen one day to ask whether he had any plans for a demo that had been gathering dust on the shelf following their most recent album sessions. Springsteen had completed only the chorus, but Iovine thought it might be just what the Patti Smith album needed.
Still, when Iovine passed the demo on to Patti, she accepted the gift with something less than wild enthusiasm. She had no compunction about allowing other writers to share in her songwriting credits, but only because they supplied the musical palette that she was unable to create. The idea of, essentially, collaborating on her lyrics, too, was not one that she had ever considered, nor one that she welcomed now. For a time, the song sat more or less unplayed.
But one evening, waiting for Fred Smith’s now all-but-nightly call, she popped the cassette into the player, listened once, and then listened again and again. Iovine had told her that he loved the idea of a woman singing from a man’s point of view; Springsteen added that the song was written in her key. Now she realized that both were correct. “Bruce … gave me the music, and it had some mumbling on it,” she told John Tobler in October 1978, “and Bruce is a genius mumbler, like the sexiest mumbler I ever heard. I just listened to it, and the words just tumbled out of me.” Long before the phone finally rang, she had drafted the lyrics that would soon become an anthem.
“[Bruce] wrote the tag, Because the night belongs to lovers,” she added, “which was in between the mumbling; he’d say that every once in a while. He said I didn’t have to keep that bit, but I thought it was really nice—I always write the lyrics to my own songs, unless they’re covers, but I respected his lyrics, and I thought it was a very nice sentiment, so I built the rest of the lyrics, which are obviously mine, around his sentimen
t.”
“Because the Night” was recorded and slotted into the near-complete album just days after Patti finished writing it. She was already convinced that she had her hit single. To make room for the newcomer, Patti dropped “Godspeed” from the track list, and set it up to be her next B-side instead.
It was time to consider the album cover. Patti wanted something sexy, something sensual—something that she could jerk off to, she laughed. “I thought if I could do it as an experiment, then fifteen-year-old boys could do it,” she told Rolling Stone’s Charles M. Young, “and that would make me very happy.” Photographer Lynn Goldsmith delivered. Patti dismissed the inevitable criticism: “People say to me, ‘aren’t you afraid of becoming a sex object?’ Especially a lot of writers are obsessed with making you feel guilty or upset because you might become a sex object. Well, I find that very exciting. I think sex is one of the five highest sensations one can experience. A very high orgasm is a way of communication with our Creator.”
Easter was complete. It was scheduled for release in March 1978—just in time for Easter. The single “Because the Night” would follow close behind.
Patti remained busy. Her art exhibitions in New York City, including one at the Gotham Book Mart, were both huge successes; so was another at the Galerie Veith Turske in Cologne, West Germany. She flew to that city to give a reading in October 1977; then, back home just days later, the full band performed a phenomenal set at a benefit for the Hayden Planetarium.
Deliberately, though, they kept the new album’s contents under wraps. Not until the first night of their year-end three-day run at CBGB, on December 29, would the Patti Smith Group offer up any hint as to what Easter portended, as half the album’s contents were drip-fed into the set list. It would be twenty-four hours more before she finally premiered “Because the Night,” with coauthor Springsteen joining her on stage to help the song along.
Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story Page 19