Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story
Page 22
And, as too many reviewers reported, concertgoers were often left bemused by the number of oldies that had made their way into the group’s show. What to make of the Who’s “The Kids Are Alright,” Manfred Mann’s “5-4-3-2-1,” Presley’s “Jailhouse Rock,” John Lennon’s “It’s So Hard” and “Cold Turkey,” Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower,” or the Yardbirds’ “For Your Love”? Only one oldie, Patti’s increasingly bitter cover of the Byrds’ “So You Want to Be (a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star),” seemed to belong, because it was the one that most seemed to reflect her mood. Scarring the melody with her thrashed and discordant guitar interludes, scything through the sentiment with world-weary vocals and claustrophobic sarcasm, she would spit the song out nightly. Ah, the promise of the night just swirls around you. So you wanna be a rock ‘n’ roll star? Well, have fun with that.
As always, there were moments of high passion—“Privilege” seldom failed to draw the old shaman out of the shadows—and high camp—whatever were they thinking as Lenny Kaye took over lead vocals for “Pumping (My Heart)” while Patti worked out with a skipping rope? There was high drama, too, the “Star Spangled Banner” feeding back out of the amps as Patti launched into her familiar rant: I am an American artist. I have no guilt. I have no truth but the truth inside you. All together we can know all there is to know. She paused and the band ripped into a scathing “Rock n Roll Nigger.”
There was the April night that she broadcast live across West Germany, Patti reminding the Rockpalast audience that it was an honor for her to be speaking to so many millions of people at once “because we’ve been banned live in America.” The same night that the warrior queen became unexpected peacemaker, quelling a fight in the front row. “Settle the fuck down. Stop acting like assholes and settle the fuck down, man.” So there were high points as the tour wandered on. But they relied on chance rather than intention.
Several times across the crippling itinerary, Patti would accept bookings for poetry readings, no matter how far out of her way they took her. A short gap in between American shows in June saw her fly to West Germany and Switzerland for a couple of readings; a day off in September, bookended by shows in Amsterdam and Paris, would be spent flying to Italy to present a reading after a screening of the movie More American Graffiti. Why make such an effort? Because it was different, it broke the chain, it made a change.
In August, Fred Smith was alongside her as she played a pair of benefit concerts to raise money for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. That month in San Francisco, the band made an unannounced and unexpected return to the Boarding House, the same small club where she’d played unannounced back in the Horses era. This time, she joked and laughed her way through “The Boy I’m Going to Marry” and Debbie Boone’s “You Light Up My Life,” a ghastly hit ballad Patti took a liking to the previous year. With Daugherty and Sohl on joint keyboards, the performance felt much like her earliest shows all those years before, when fame still seemed as implausible as it was inessential, and audiences were drawn largely by the promise of the unexpected.
But the feeling didn’t last. In London in September, journalist Chris Bohn came away from the band’s Wembley Arena show mourning, “This is not meant to be a crucifixion. I hoped for a resurrection and saw only a willful martyr.” His words would prove truer than he could have imagined: as Patti moved on to Italy for the final two shows of the tour, she offered herself up in the middle of a political riot.
The first Italian gig took place in Bologna, in the same kind of soullessly vast and infinitely echoing football stadium into which so many of the tour’s performances had been cast. The local Communist Party assumed for itself a role similar to the one the Hell’s Angels had been assigned at Altamont a decade earlier, prevailing upon the venue’s promoter to allow it to provide security for the show. This arrangement essentially transformed the venue into a free-for-all, with admission fees waived by the simple expedient of removing the fences. Backstage security was placed in the hands of whoever wanted to stand around in the bowels of the stadium looking threatening, and the audience was raised to such a pitch of excitement that even the local police seemed content to simply watch from afar.
The band was exhausted before they hit the stage, worn out from trying to impose even a little sanity onto the proceedings. By the time the show got under way, all five musicians would have been happy to throw in the towel. Somehow they got through the performance; somehow, an eighty-thousand-strong audience seemed to be enjoying what it heard. But the stage was under constant siege from would-be dancers and hangers-on, and Patti’s road crew, too, was worn down by the events of the day. The show, everybody angrily agreed, was a farce.
Add to that the pressure of an Italian media that insisted on dogging Patti’s footsteps everywhere she went, and the crowds of teenaged girls who hung on every corner, all clad identically in the outfits they borrowed from Horses’ front cover, and it was touch and go whether the following night’s concert, at the Stadio Comunale in Florence on September 10, would even take place. It did, but it would be the last one.
She had predicted the moment in Babel. In a prose piece titled simply “Italy (the Round),” and dedicated to Pasolini, she envisioned the fluid muscle of the crowd. the hot lights. action as a blade that cuts another slice…. nostalgic ruins in/ruin.
the films are disintegrating … the heroine removes herself from the fading aura.
Again the American flag flew proudly, at a time when the United States’ relations with the borderline-Communist Italy were at a postwar low. Again the crowd rioted, unrestrained by either the venue’s security or any sense of personal responsibility, whipped to a frenzy not by the band’s performance (which, as so often on the tour, was merely adequate) but by the mere presence of the band on stage. And tonight, as the band swung into the last phase of the set, the roiling hysteria exploded. Part of the audience invaded the stage; the remainder seemed intent on destroying the venue.
The band returned to the hotel, shaken and still shaking, and all eyes were on Patti as the group commenced the inevitable postmortem. But Patti’s announcement rendered it moot. After keeping her own counsel all tour long, after dodging any suggestion that she might be considering some kind of break in the aftermath of Wave, Patti finally told the band what had been on her mind for so long.
She recalled the conversation years later, talking with the Australian’s Richard Jinman. “We were on the edge of success, particularly in Europe. I could smell it. We were getting into the area where people accept anything you do and it was time to reassess myself as a human being and an artist.”
Onstage that night, as she sang “Gloria” for the final time, she had made one lyric change. Most people didn’t even notice it, but it meant something to her. Jesus died for somebody’s sins—why not mine?
“I didn’t even think of it as retiring,” she told Ramsay Pennybacker of the Philadelphia Weekly. “It’s a very stable thing, which I tried to explain to people, but sometimes they found it unacceptable. I mean, I’ve read everything—that I burned out, that I was on drugs—which was totally untrue. I was actually at the top of my game. In Europe, the last show we did was without an opening act. We played before seventy thousand people in Florence. And we were very successful in Europe. And that was the last job I did—for seventy thousand people and it was just our show.
“But the reason I left was because I had met a man who I deeply loved. Who had been through all of that. Who wanted a quiet life, to raise a family.”
The Patti Smith Group was finished. Patti was off to Detroit to raise a family with Fred, and though they weren’t quite the last words she ever shouted from a stage, the last words of “My Generation” still hung unanswerable in the air, just begging for somebody to paraphrase them.
She created it. Let somebody else take it over.
14
THREAD
FROM ITALY, PATTI flew directly to Detroit. It was her home now—she had no doubts about that. But it takes
time to get used to a strange place. It takes even longer before you start feeling comfortable there, and for the locals to treat you like one of their own.
It takes time before they will say hello.
“I did miss the light of [New York City] and how good it had been to me and my friends,” Patti mourned to Lisa Robinson in 1988. “But I never for a moment had any regrets, or thought that ‘I could have been a contender,’ or any of that stuff. That doesn’t mean that certain aspects of adjusting weren’t difficult, but for me the most important things are the people that I care about and my work.”
Fred “Sonic” Smith, too, was difficult to get to know. Although nobody would question his contribution to the history of American rock ‘n’ roll, he remained unheralded for much of his lifetime, and throughout the brightest years of his career, he was at best an underdog and at worst a victim.
He was one of that select band of musicians whom the authorities, for whatever reason, single out as deserving of the harshest treatment that can be meted out to them. The MC5 were pariahs in their own time, regular victims of police harassment and worse. In his Guitar Army memoir, band manager John Sinclair recalls how he and Smith “were brutally assaulted, beaten, MACEd, and arrested by members of the National Security Police, the Oakland County Sheriff’s Department, and the Michigan State Police while performing at a teen-club in Oakland” one night—and that was just one incident among many.
If their treatment at the hands of law enforcement engendered a persecution complex in the band, the behavior of the music industry in general only furthered the sense of martyrdom. No matter that the band was signed, during its lifetime, to two of the most influential record labels in the country, Elektra and Atlantic. Wayne Kramer told author Nina Antonia, “[The record industry] despised us because of an anarchistic behavior and militant political stance. We came out of Detroit with our big Marshall amplifiers and spangly clothes, and we leaped around like some unholy version of James Brown on acid, playing free jazz and screaming ‘Kick Out the Jams, Motherfuckers’ at a time when they were just learning to market three days of peace and love. The last thing anybody wanted was a gun-toting, high-volume rock band from Detroit.”
If Fred or his bandmates came out of that experience with a chip on their shoulder, nobody could blame them—even if they had remained bitter for years to come. Because the MC5’s reputation did not fade with the passing years. If anything, it became exaggerated, and with that came a sense that the band’s members could never be forgiven for the sins of their youth. Detroit radio not only ignored the MC5; it also seemed to have disowned them.
Fred pretended not to care, disguised his hurt beneath a gruff exterior. In 1978, Sonic’s Rendezvous Band had visited the UK as the backing group for Iggy Pop. As his bandmates happily entertained all comers in their London dressing room, Smith alone had glowered in the corner, the very air around him defying fans and autograph hunters to disturb him.
“Fred was the artist in the band,” MC5 front man Rob Tyner explained. “He was the one who was always pushing us to make a musical statement as loud as the political statements.” And whereas the rest of the 5 reveled in their outlaw status, Smith was the one who always asked why people didn’t just listen to their music. “He was like a hermit,” Tyner continued. “Not physically, because he could party like the rest of us, but intellectually. He wanted to be taken seriously as an artist and he cut a lot of himself off from a lot of people because he didn’t think they would understand him.”
Patti understood him—understood, too, that eight years after the death of the MC5, her boyfriend was still hurt by the group’s failure. Even their eventual adoption as one of the unquestioned pioneers of the punk movement meant nothing to Fred, for he had seen the band in the tradition of Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, and the great modern jazzers. As Kramer told Addicted to Noise, “when he started writing his own songs and guitar breaks, he had his own whole musical vocabulary.”
It was that vocabulary he intended to teach to Patti. He had long given up hope of resuming a musical career of his own. Sonic’s Rendezvous Band issued just one solitary 45 during their lifetime, “City Slang”; no record label would touch them, and he had abandoned hope that any ever would. Without ever thinking of Patti as some kind of mouthpiece for his own work—for who could ever see his soulmate as such?—Fred was nevertheless aware on some level that if the world was to hear what he had to say, it would be through the art of another great artist.
Six months after Patti’s return from Europe, on March 1, 1980, she and Fred Smith were married.
Her calendar for the months that followed was clear. There was just one final show for the Patti Smith Group to play, another benefit for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, but even that performance was fragmented. Patti opened the show alone, reading her poetry. Sohl joined her for a gentle “Hymn,” before Fred took his place for an abstract sound painting, accompanying a movie of Jackson Pollock at work. Patti played clarinet, Fred played sax, and an unmanned guitar squawked feedback throughout. Only when that was over did the full band appear, to roar through an improvised jam, and then it was over.
Briefly back in New York City a few weeks later, Patti called her bandmates together at their accountant’s office and told them they should find themselves a new band.
Because she had.
For much of the next fifteen years, Patti would remain out of the public view. She would still write, and she and her husband would make music together. But they would not perform, they would not speak to the press, and with just one exception, they would not release any of the songs and sounds they created.
That was not always their intention. Indeed, their first attempt to step out of their silence took place within a year of Patti taking leave of the stage, as they laid down the first steps toward a new Patti Smith album.
It promised to be a departure from her past. Under Fred’s tutelage, she was becoming a proficient clarinet player, and the pair would be up late into the night improvising. Or he would talk to her about her singing, encouraging her to make more use of her voice than she ever had in the past, composing songs that he knew would help her reveal her finest qualities.
But with just five songs complete, Patti discovered that she was pregnant with the couple’s first child, Jackson Frederick, and all work halted. A couple of years later, she and Fred cut another couple of songs, and then they stopped again. And when they resumed once more in 1986, that too looked like another false dawn.
“We began to rehearse and things with friends,” she recalled for Mary Anne Cassata of the Music Paper. “We felt we had something worthwhile to share, so we went ahead and started working on the album. Right in the middle of recording I found out I was going to have another baby. That was a surprise. We did as much as we could. We recorded until it was too strenuous for me.”
But there may have been another reason for the cessation of these sessions. The faintest of rumors circulated at the time, insisting that no less a figure than Clive Davis had intervened to ask whether Patti needed to work so closely with her husband. Could she not instead reconvene the old band or build a new one to accompany her? It was just a rumor; nothing that has been said or written in the years since then has offered even a hint of substance to it. But if a whisper of it had reached Fred’s ears, the bitterness and, perhaps, insecurity that he had already amassed could only have been set ablaze afresh.
The sessions halted, then, not only until the baby was born but through daughter Jesse Paris’s first months too, because “there’s no job harder than being a wife and a mother,” she told Neil Strauss of the New York Times in 1995. “It’s a position that should be respected and honored, not looked upon as some sappy alternative. It’s much more demanding, and required much more nobility than the other work I did.”
In her youth, she recalled to Richard Jinman, she’d lived as an artist, bordering upon a vagabond, sleeping wherever she could find a quiet spot (“subways and graveyards”), and fore
ver wondering where her next square meal might come from. Now she was learning the other side of life, cooking and cleaning, changing diapers, “an endless, difficult, but honorable task” that forced her, she said, to work harder than she ever had in her life.
“I don’t mind being called a housewife,” she insisted in her New York Times interview. “Though I didn’t disappear to be a housewife. I disappeared to be by the side of the man that I loved…. I think nothing greater could have happened to me at that time. I learned a lot of things in that process: humility, respect for others…. I developed my skills and hopefully developed into the clean human being that I was as a child.”
She read, immersing herself in authors that her rock ‘n’ roll stardom had forced her to abandon or never even investigate. She got hooked on the cable network USA’s Kung Fu Theatre, and rewatched Route 66. She started painting again, and lost herself in the world of sixteenth-century Japanese literature. She returned to her poetry, and broached another discipline, writing novels.
They were not for the eyes of her public, however. She wrote to amuse herself, to satisfy her urge to create, to place her thoughts and imagination into some kind of permanent form. And she wrote for Fred.
It was strange, her friends admitted later, to see the woman who had once been so vivaciously self-reliant suddenly turn around and allow herself to become so subsumed in another person’s personality. Fred became her sounding board, not only for her writing but for her desires as well. In other lives, other relationships, he could even have been seen as manipulative and controlling. But Patti saw only beauty. In 1996, she told Lisa Robinson, “Fred’s philosophy was that you create art in the world, but we could also create art just for ourselves. I suppose that’s somewhat selfish, but I can assure you it was beautiful.”