Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story

by Dave Thompson

The brilliant Czech guitarist Ivan Kral. THERESA K., WWW.PUNKTURNS30.COM

  The final piece of the jigsaw. Jay Dee Daugherty played his first gig with Patti the night she met Bob Dylan. THERESA K., WWW.PUNKTURNS3O.COM

  A classic Patti Smith bootleg, featuring the Keith Richards T-shirt Patti sometimes wore in performance. AUTHOR’S COLLECTION

  One of the most iconic images of the 1970s, Robert Mapplethorpe’s photograph of Patti stares out from the anniversary rerelease of her debut LP. AUTHOR’S COLLECTION

  One of the rarest of all Patti’s books, her collaboration with Television’s Tom Verlaine. AUTHOR’S COLLECTION

  Patti—dancing in another dimension. THERESA K., WWW.PUNKTURNS3O.COM

  Patti in full flight, Los Angeles, 1976. THERESA K., WWW.PUNKTURNS3O.COM

  Patti and Lenny Kaye in 1976—the Mick and Keef of the new wave. THERESA K., WWW.PUNKTURNS30.COM

  Patti starts a food fight at her infamous London press conference, 1976. IAN DICKSON, WWW.LATE20THCENTURYBOY.COM

  Ivan Kral and Patti in close harmony. THERESA K., WWW.PUNKTURNS3O.COM

  This is the sound of Radio Ethiopia. THERESA K., WWW.PUNKTURNS3O.COM

  Andi Ostrowe, roadie, friend, and confidante. THERESA K., WWW.PUNKTURNS3O.COM

  Ivan grins behind his shades. Keyboard player Bruce Brody wonders why!

  THERESA K., WWW.PUNKTURNS3O.COM

  Signing autographs—Ivan Kral, Patti, and the inevitable copy of Horses. THERESA K., WWW.PUNKTURNS30.COM

  The fabulous picture sleeve adorning the French “Ask the Angels” single in 1977.

  AUTHOR’S COLLECTION

  Patti’s breakthrough album—in a sleeve, she said, designed to give her fans something they could masturbate to. AUTHOR’S COLLECTION

  One of the most revealing of all Patti’s late 1970s interviews appeared in this 1978 issue of Britain’s best rock magazine.

  AUTHOR’S COLLECTION

  Patti and her longtime friend Jim Carroll share a stage in 1978. THERESA K., WWW.PUNKTURNS30.COM

  Hand on heart, Patti in L.A., 1978.

  THERESA K., WWW.PUNKTURNS30.COM

  I am an American artist. I have no guilt. THERESA K., WWW.PUNKTURNS3O.COM

  MC5, the original rock ‘n’ roll niggers, outside of society and beyond the law. Guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith (closest to the camera) never truly got over the band’s reputation.

  JORGEN ANGEL, WWW.ANGEL.DK

  Patti’s son Jackson, a regular presence alongside her onstage. THERESA K., WWW.PUNKTURNS30.COM

  Patti’s most recent book of poetry.

  AUTHOR’S COLLECTION

  Patti at the Chicago stop of the 2007 Lollapalooza tour.

  COURTESY CGAPHOTO, USED UNDER A CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE (CC BY 2.0).

  13

  BURNING ROSES

  PATTI HAD BEEN working her way up the ladder for close to a decade—longer than that if one wanted to consider the years she spent seeking her identity in the first place. In that time, she had lived as enthusiastically as she could have wished, never pausing for breath or even thinking of doing so. But now she was in her early thirties, in a field that still viewed an artist leaving his or her twenties with uneasy suspicion. The past was behind her. All that mattered was the future, a future that she was building around a change in style, a change in direction, a change in life.

  Her late-night telephone conversations with Fred had never been less than passionate. But in the past, it was a passion built around the impracticalities of their present and the dreams they could only glimpse of what might be to come. Not any longer. Now those dreams were in reach, waiting for her at the end of the next record, the next tour.

  So why did she still feel ill?

  Not ill as in “Get me to the doctor; I think there’s something wrong.” She had passed through those fires the previous year, and only the occasional pain and a drug regimen remained. This sickness was internal.

  In part, it may have stemmed from the events of December 9, 1978, when her brother, Todd, was injured in an altercation at Max’s Kansas City. Sid Vicious, the former Sex Pistols bassist, had only recently made bail after being charged with the murder of his American girlfriend Nancy Spungen in October. He propositioned Todd’s girlfriend, and when Todd reacted, Vicious attacked. He smashed a glass in Todd’s face, and as Vicious was arrested again, Patti rushed to the hospital, where doctors fought not only to repair the damage but also to save Todd’s eyesight. His recuperation was long and painful, and nobody could have blamed Patti if her thoughts sometimes seemed to be miles away with her brother. Todd’s scars would clearly mark her work over the next year.

  But Patti’s ill mood was about more than that. It was discontent and unhappiness; it was frustration and rage. The commercial success that had enfolded her in the wake of “Because the Night” should not have shaken her as much as it did. But it did, and she wasn’t certain why. Hindsight, ladled liberally onto her career by sundry historians and critics, has attributed Patti’s withdrawal from her original identity first, the entire machine soon after, either to her accident in early 1977, to her move thirteen months later away from the city that shaped her, to the love that drew her from the city, or to the realization that her “career” really did not mean as much to her as she once believed.

  In fact, it was all of these things. And it was the knowledge that she had a job to do and an audience to please, and she could not return home until it was finished.

  So maybe it was time to finish.

  The Patti Smith Group wrapped up 1978 with their now-traditional end-of-year residency at CBGB, three shows that took them up to New Year’s Eve. Just twenty-four hours earlier, John Cale had emerged from over a year’s worth of silence to play the same venue. With a scratch band built around Ritchie Fliegler and Bruce Brody (both veterans of his last live setup), Judy Nylon, and guests Ivan Kral and Jay Dee Daugherty, Cale turned in a short but cataclysmic set that seemed, and might even have been, part improvisation, part sheer brutality, and part mad genius. Nylon’s “Dance of the Seven Veils” might have acknowledged Patti’s influence in its collision of rock and poetics, but it was a savage invocation regardless, while Nylon’s duet with Cale through “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” was all spectral howls and sibilant whispers.

  Ivan Kral was at his best that night—he needed to be. And he was at his best again the following night, when Patti took the same stage. So why did he, and the rest of the band, feel so uneasy?

  Maybe it was the speed with which Patti insisted on recording their next LP, knowing full well that they really didn’t have much of anything to record.

  Joining the band at Bearsville Studios in upstate New York was keyboard player Richard Sohl, back in his rightful place after a year out of action while he fought illness and exhaustion. Patti also reunited with her former paramour Todd Rundgren, who would produce the new album. His involvement had already been described as the ideal way of recreating the successes of Easter.

  It wasn’t.

  “I thought that it would be nice to work with a friend,” Patti told the British magazine Uncut in 2004. What’s more, “I knew that he would contribute to the musical sense of the record. He was very good with using keyboards; he was a pianist himself and a lot of those songs evolved around that.” But “it was not an easy record to make.”

  The Patti Smith Group arrived at Bearsville in almost total disarray. Not only had they not had the opportunity to rehearse any new material together before the sessions began, but they had scarcely even written any. “They didn’t have material,” Rundgren lamented in John Tobler and Stuart Grundy’s book The Record Producers.

  “But they were committed to doing an album, and they showed up wanting to do one, but not really ready for it…. They left me with the responsibility of trying to turn it into something, and I really didn’t know what to do most of the time. I certainly can’t tell Patti how to make music, but at the same time, it wasn’t as if there was any there ready to be worked w
ith.” If he hadn’t been working with an old friend, he said, the entire situation could have become “very nasty” indeed.

  To Patti, the album “was a difficult record to make because we were out of the city, in the middle of winter in Bearsville, pretty much snowed in,” she told Uncut. But she already knew, or at least suspected, that it might be the last album she would ever make. “I felt that I had really expressed everything that I knew how to express. So there I had a lot of thoughts doing that record.”

  Joyful thoughts and relieved thoughts. The end was in sight.

  She handed over a couple of things she had written. “Frederick” was destined to become one of the album’s best-known songs, even before the sessions were complete. But the album’s other jewel, “Dancing Barefoot,” didn’t even exist until the recording was almost over and Rundgren demanded more songs. Kral produced a cassette tape of song ideas that he carried around with him. Rundgren listened and then came back to say which one he wanted them to work up.

  And so it was that the last song Kral wrote for the Patti Smith Group was one of the first he had ever written; the riff for “Dancing Barefoot” was one he composed back in Prague when he was thirteen or fourteen years old. Later, Rundgren would single out “Dancing Barefoot” as the song that came together most successfully.

  Kral’s gift for melody was visible, too, on two other songs, the hefty “Revenge,” with its Beatles-ish intro, and the punishing semiautobiogra-phy of “Citizen Ship”: There were tanks all over my city. They weren’t bad songs, either. Or, at least, they were the closest to what might have eased out of the band in earlier years.

  The scrabble for material continued. The poem “Seven Ways of Going” was reprised from so many years before. Later, listeners could extrapolate some kind of warning from its weary prose, Patti undulating in the lewd impostered night, before turning my neck toward home. But the portentous accompaniment that Rundgren layered around the distinctly straining vocal was a poor match for one of Patti’s most questioning works.

  She recorded a cover of the old Byrds’ chest-beater “So You Want to Be (a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star).” She’d first heard it from the artist Ed Hanson back in 1968, and at the time, she’d rebelled against the cynicism that permeates the lyrics, the notion that no matter how high one climbs, the ride is still a painful one. She knew better now.

  It would be left to the title track, like that of Easter, to truly place the new album in perspective. “Wave” was a hesitant conversation between Patti and a silent interlocutor, while cello, piano, bass, and organ washed around her voice. Haunting and almost hurting, it would become the final track on the LP—and listening to it, one could also take it to be the final song of her career.

  Wave to the children / Wave goodbye.

  Outside her music, it was not a sentiment she expressed publicly, nor did she confide in her bandmates. But to Rundgren she confessed it: she’d decided to retire once Wave had been waved off. “Patti wanted to record with me for a couple of reasons,” Rundgren told Tobler and Grundy. “One was that she knew at the time that she wasn’t going to be making any more records in the immediate future, and because we’ve been friends for a long time, she just wanted an opportunity for us to work together before she stopped making records.

  “The other reason was also because I was a friend—and this isn’t necessarily a good thing—they wanted me to pull together something that wasn’t there, to bridge a gap that was almost unbridgeable, because Patti was already halfway out of the business.”

  Rundgren had sworn not to tell Kral, Kaye, Daugherty, and Sohl what Patti had planned, well aware that if they found out, they would have one eye on their futures before a note had even been taped. But they figured it out anyway. They’d all been working with Patti long enough that even if they didn’t know exactly what she was thinking, they could still see the track that her thought train was taking. And, of course, she had provided one warning sign: when she’d up and left New York City.

  Prior to her departure, the Patti Smith Group had functioned around the principles of twenty-four-hour collaboration. That’s not to say that the musicians had spent twenty-four hours a day every day in one another’s company, but it did mean that if one should have an idea that required the input of his or her bandmates, the entire group could be brought together in one room in no time at all. That was no longer possible. On the road or in the studio, of course, they were still in the same close proximity as they’d always been. But the rest of the time, almost five hundred miles yawned between the musicians and their vocalist. Soon Wave would offer the listening public a grandstand view of the group’s creative dislocation.

  Even more so than Easter, which itself had disappointed as much as it exhilarated, Wave was the work of five players brought together to write as they recorded. There was no doubt that with the same opportunity for organic growth as the songs that marked out Horses and Radio Ethiopia, numbers like “Revenge” and “Broken Flag” could have developed into something truly memorable. Instead, they simply existed, neither statements of power nor explosions of energy; neither spiraling balls of sound and imagery nor tantalizing glimpses into some deep emotional labyrinth.

  Too much of the album was rushed and rapid, as if the band knew that its time was limited and just wanted to get one last album out of its system before pushing on with the rest of the musicians’ lives. None of the four band members doubted that they would continue on in their chosen careers once Patti admitted what they suspected she had decided, but of course they did not know what form those careers would take.

  The uncertainty, perhaps even bordering on mistrust, was agonizing. Almost a year’s worth of touring had been arranged for the album’s aftermath, back and forth between the United States and Europe until the fall. But would they actually play all the dates? Most of them? Some of them?

  Nobody doubted Patti’s professionalism. If she could fulfill her scheduled obligations, she would. But she was still under doctor’s orders as a consequence of the accident—still undergoing chiropractic treatment, still on medication. Add that to her barely disguised loss of interest in the things that had once intrigued her, and the increasingly resigned tone that she took when discussing music itself, and if a block of shows should be canceled, or even an entire season of them, nobody would be too surprised.

  As it was, they would march on for a little longer.

  It was in March 1979, with the album complete and the first dates of the Patti Smith Group’s next American tour on the horizon, that Patti gave the interview to William Burroughs that was later published in Spin magazine. In it, she laid out her own interpretation of the changes that had affected her over the past couple of years.

  “When I entered into rock ‘n’ roll,” she told her old friend, “I entered into it in a political sort of way…. I felt that rock ‘n’ roll, after the death of a lot of the ‘60s people, and after the disillusionment of a lot of people after the ‘60s and early ‘70s, people really just wanted to be left alone for a little while…. But when ‘73 came around, and early ‘74, it was just getting worse and worse, and there was no indication of anything new, of anyone regathering their strength and coming back to do anything. I felt that it was important for some of us that had a lot of strength to initiate some new energy.”

  She hadn’t aspired to be a star. If anything, as she had said so often in the past, she simply wanted to inspire other people to get up and do something, anything, that would rid their culture of the malaise of inactivity. “I feel that when I was a teenager, I was very lucky. I grew up out of the John F. Kennedy, Bob Dylan, Rolling Stones era, and there was a lot of food for thought in those times…. my mind was constantly fertile. And I felt that in the early-middle ‘70s, there wasn’t much happening at all to stimulate the minds of the new generations.”

  There still wasn’t. Writer Nik Cohn once warned that “this year’s anarchists are next year’s boring old farts,” and too few of the performers who rose up on e
ither the musical or the cultural tides of punk had lasted the pace with their vision intact. Among her own peers, Television had broken up under the pressure of, among other things, releasing a second album, Adventure, that could not compare with their first. The Ramones had developed into something that even Joey Ramone privately admitted exhausted most of its energy avoiding tumbling into cliche (“and we didn’t always succeed”). Richard Hell had all but turned his back on rock music altogether. Besides her own band, only Blondie and Talking Heads had truly survived, and Blondie’s future was debatable, as the boys in the band battled to be heard above the media pack’s demand for more and more Debbie.

  Patti had no intention of being caught in the same trap. “I didn’t start doing what I was doing to build myself a career. And I find myself at a time in my life when, if I’m not careful, that’s exactly what’s gonna be built for me.” It was 1979, she said, “and I’m still involved in this thing. But it’s come to a point in my life [where] I have to stop and say, ‘What am I doing?’”

  Once again, the Patti Smith Group’s itinerary commenced with a clutch of shows at the Second Chance in Ann Arbor, what was now Patti’s home territory. The opening portents were good. Three nights saw the band members reacquaint themselves with one another and with the new material, and it was sounding good. Ticket sales—and, apparently, record sales—were not harmed by the distinctly underwhelmed response that Wave prompted from the critics. (Even long-time supporter Robert Christgau, while remaining positive, could only describe Wave as being “quirkier than the more generally satisfying Easter.”)

  But the tour schedule was exhausting—some forty-two shows in half a dozen countries—and the longer it went on, the more it became apparent that Patti just wasn’t enjoying herself. With the stage dominated by the same giant American flag that had once ruled the MC5’s stage, and the live show dominated by the songs that seemingly demanded the least from the performers, there were times when it felt as though the band was almost courting the audience’s hostility simply to try to enliven the proceedings.