Patti stood in the hallway looking at the murals and gold discs with which the studio was decorated. Suddenly she remembered standing in that same spot in 1975, with Robert Mapplethorpe taking pictures of her and John Cale. And at that moment, Lenny Kaye walked over, stood beside her and said, “Amazing, isn’t it?”
“It was like he could feel what I was feeling,” she told Ben Edmonds. “The first time we were back in the studio, just hearing those Lenny guitar tones and Jay on the drums, it … triggered so many memories.”
Chronologically, the new album was ignited by two songs drawn from Patti’s years with Fred. She had collected a stash of cassettes of her late husband’s songwriting ideas, but at first she found them too painful to listen to. It was Lenny who played through them and selected “Summer Cannibals,” a composition that Fred had had lying around since the early 1970s, and the punchy “Gone Again,” a song that would have been the title track to the couple’s next joint album, had Fred lived. “Gone Again” was also the last piece of music Fred had composed for the record, and now Patti needed to marshal all her resources to write the lyrics.
Some songs remained too personal. Patti had written “She Walked Home” in spring 1994, following the death of Jackie Kennedy; she read in a magazine that when the former First Lady heard she was dying, she took one final walk alone through Central Park. “She Walked Home” captured that image, and later in the year as Fred lay dying, he would often ask Patti to play it to him while he sang along. The song, she said, became Fred’s own. She would never record it.
Oliver Ray’s magnificent “Fireflies” was on board, and with it a liquid guitar from Patti’s old friend Tom Verlaine. Verlaine also appeared on “Wander I Go,” recorded at the same sessions but absent from the finished disc. A spectral throb, it added the visiting Jeff Buckley’s acoustic to Verlaine’s electric guitar. Buckley would become a constant presence in the studio, and Patti was delighted. As young lovers, she and Robert Mapplethorpe would “neck like high school kids” to his father Tim Buckley’s Goodbye and Hello album, Patti confessed in Mojo, and the son would make an equally indelible impression on Gone Again. Jeff harmonized high through “Beneath the Southern Cross” and asked for the session for “Fireflies” to be delayed so he could run home to grab his essrage, an Egyptian instrument that he knew the piece was crying out for.
Luis Resto was Patti’s collaborator on the sweet “My Madrigal”; Lenny Kaye resparked their old songwriting partnership on the fluttering “Beneath the Southern Cross.” But it was the songs that Patti alone composed that were destined to become the heart of Gone Again. Contrary to those reviewers who would later pick out the Fred-led rockers as the album’s highlights, tracks like “About a Boy,” “Dead to the World,” “Wing,” and “Ravens” gave Gone Again its most memorable flavor; over the drifting soundscapes, Patti’s lyrics resonated like the poems they might once have been, beautiful visions poised just on the musical side of improvisation, and built not around tune but around imagery.
“Gone Again is more personal than Fred and I ever wanted to do an album,” Patti would later admit to Jon Pareles of the New York Times. “I know that it’s a pretty personal piece of work to inflict on people.” But she didn’t care. She made it for herself.
Few of the album’s songs had been through the crucible of live performance; only “About a Boy,” “Farewell Reel,” and her super-stylized take on Bob Dylan’s “Wicked Messenger” had a firm place in her live set. Two decades earlier, her later work with the Patti Smith Group had suffered from a lack of live exposure, as had Dream of Life in 1988. This time, however, it was not a significant shortcoming, since Patti’s method of songwriting had changed. No more jamming for hours with her bandmates; no more extemporizing lyrics and rhythms onstage. “I practiced really hard and learned to write these little songs.” (She admitted, however, “I never learned to play anything but waltz time.” Consequently, Jon Pareles observed, “Gone Again is full of waltzes.”)
Patti’s first album in eight years would not be released until mid-1996. In the meantime, summer 1995 gave way to fall, and studio sessions were replaced with a slow dance of occasional concerts, one-off appearances, and benefits, most of which saw Patti still more confident reading than singing, and apparently stepping willingly into the role of spiritual guide to a growing array of musical admirers.
As her husband had insisted, Patti’s influence was inescapable. Though new revolutions had arisen during Patti’s years away, their figureheads were her devotees. Thurston Moore of New York’s Sonic Youth and Michael Stipe of Athens, Georgia–based college favorites REM both spoke glowingly of Patti as both an influence and an inspiration—and they would be rewarded with her friendship and collaboration.
“I didn’t know her,” Moore wrote in Bomb magazine. “I could only embrace the identity I perceived. I was impressionable and she came on like an alien…. I wanted to meet her and take her to a movie, but she was so unobtainable and fantastic. I could only entrust my faith to the future. The future would allow me to have a date with Patti Smith or at least hang out with her.”
He achieved that ambition in October 1995, when Patti and Lenny Kaye attended a celebration of Jack Kerouac in his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts. Moore joined them and was asked to play guitar on three songs. They played shows in “cool churches” in Lowell and Boston, spent a day sightseeing around Kerouac’s Lowell and another taking photographs—framed shots of Moore’s hand—for an exhibition Patti was planning. “I was friends,” he wrote, “with someone I had dreamed of being friends with for nearly twenty years.”
Next, Patti visited San Francisco, for two shows that she recalled as the two extremes of her new approach. She described the first show to the Philadelphia Weekly’s Ramsay Pennybacker as “conservatively structured. It was upbeat but more of a typical poetry reading with some music. And the second show, just an hour later, was kind of wild. The people were more energetic and more interactive, and the show sort of lost its structure and it’s like we were having a little party together with poetry and music.”
Over two nights at the end of November, the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth, Patti and her band took over Philadelphia’s Theatre of Living Arts for three shows designed to showcase her new material for the first time, but also to get Patti used to the idea of being on the road again. Weeks earlier, a surprise call from Bob Dylan had ended with her agreeing to tour for the first time since 1979.
The last time Patti had spoken privately with Dylan was on that day in 1975 when they bumped into each other on Fourth Street in New York City. He’d shown her the photo of the two of them on the cover of the Village Voice and asked her if she knew who those two people were. At the time she laughed and said no. Now she knew. They were two people who, twenty years later, would be talking on the telephone, one hedging about her hopes for a renewed career; the other insisting that the world needed her presence.
Lenny Kaye, Jay Dee Daugherty, Tony Shanahan, and Tom Verlaine lined up as Patti’s band. She knew that they were scarcely prepared to undertake any kind of tour, but she didn’t care. No matter that they could cram in no more than five hours of rehearsal time. The musicians knew one another; they knew the material. They would get by.
Michael Stipe, after years as a fan, joined the tour as their official photographer. Oliver Ray was along as well, not only in his role as Patti’s boyfriend but also to add his guitar to one song each evening. His appearances were brief, then, but they were scarcely unimportant. For the first time since Fred’s death, Patti was seen to be happy in public.
It would be only a short outing, ten dates in six cities, shoehorned into what Dylan fans were already calling his Never Ending Tour, and few observers doubted that Dylan arranged the gigs more for Patti’s benefit than his own. He rarely hit the road after Thanksgiving any longer, and he’d already thundered through over one hundred shows that year. But, as Patti would reflect to Neil Strauss in the New York Times once the tour was over,
“I thought the audience was basically Bob’s people, but they seemed real happy to see us because they know that I’m one of Bob’s people, too.”
The tour commenced on December 7, 1995, at the O’Neill Center in Danbury, Connecticut, with a set that was guaranteed both to please and to ease Patti back into the rigors of a full rock ‘n’ roll tour. To give the old fans something to cling to, Patti offered “Dancing Barefoot,” “Because the Night,” “Ghost Dance,” “Rock n Roll Nigger,” and, offering proof of its growing status as an anthem of sorts, “People Have the Power.” Heralding the new era were “Wicked Messenger,” “Walkin’ Blind,” the Rolling Stones’ “Not Fade Away,” and the epic “Beneath the Southern Cross.” You could see Patti enjoying herself, reacquainting herself with all that she had once loved about performing, and reveling in Dylan’s obvious concern and care.
The first night, she confessed to Ben Edmonds, was “pretty shaky.” But only the first night. By the second, she was “back in familiar territory.” And besides, she insisted that her sole intention on the tour was to set the stage for Dylan, to thank him for his faith in her by confirming his audience’s faith in him. “I think we did a pretty good job and I know that he was happy.”
And so was she. “I’m playing with one of my major influences, as a performer, writer,” she told the Philadelphia City Paper. “From a very early time, talking about Philadelphia, one of my big things was taking the bus to Sam Goody’s waiting for Blonde on Blonde to come out. Playing with him now brings a beautiful humor to the picture. It makes me think if I could just tap that girl, the dejected one on the bus, and tell her she’d be working with Dylan one day … It’s just wonderful.”
The tour was onto its third night, at the Orpheum Theater in Boston, when Dylan made the move he’d been waiting to make. One of Patti’s favorite songs of his was “Dark Eyes,” from his 1985 album Empire Burlesque. He’d rarely performed it since that time, and not once in the eight years of the Never Ending Tour. But tonight he did, sliding it in after “Mama, You’ve Been on My Mind”; Patti danced out on the stage to sing alongside him. “A lot of girls have come along since Patti started,” Dylan told the audience afterward. “But Patti is still the best, you know.”
They reprised the duet every night for the remainder of the tour, and on the final night of a three-gig stand at Philadelphia’s Electric Factory, she reappeared during the encores to join him on “Blowin’ in the Wind” as well. “Singing with him was just like being in heaven,” she told Mojo. “I was so happy.”
But as much as she loved celebrating and being celebrated by one of her idols, Patti didn’t necessarily relish being placed on a pedestal by society at large. “Our culture has shifted the purpose and the goal of music and all of the arts,” she later complained to Observer journalist Sean O’Hagan. “That’s why I don’t like MTV. Music television is all about the media-oriented version of what it is to be a rock star, it’s not about what Bob Dylan or Jimi Hendrix were about—which included great images, sure, but they had spiritual and political and revolutionary content, too. I believe their early goal was to do something utterly and truly great, or nothing at all. All of them insisted on the primacy of the work—the art, not the artist. This emphasis on style that we have today—the image, the video, the stylist, the game plan—that’s not rock ‘n’ roll at all. That’s careerism.”
She looked around at her peers on the comeback trail, patting their own self-satisfied backs with appearances on MTV Unplugged and VH1 Storytellers, “picking up their lifetime achievement awards.” But what, she asked, were they really doing? Nothing. She snarled at the very existence of a hall of fame for rock music, seeing it as just another way to make money, not simply commercializing art but bastardizing it as well, reducing passion to a plaque on a wall. She shared, too, her late husband’s loathing of any establishment operation that claimed, way too late in many cases, to be honoring the very same people it had done its best to ostracize in years gone by.
Rock ‘n’ roll did not need a museum. The fact that it existed was enough.
And yet there she was in January 1996, standing on stage at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City, inducting the Velvet Underground into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The same band whose first LP she had reviewed for Creem in 1974, knowing that even among the readers who had heard of the group, the number who had actually heard them was infinitesimally tiny.
That was how much things had changed since she’d been gone. Not that the Velvets were inducted, but that there was even a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for them to be inducted into. The antisocial little monster called rock ‘n’ roll that she’d spent her teens and twenties defending, convinced that it was the one thing left to youth that had the power to make things different or better—that little monster was now a responsible member of society, a rebel no longer. And she despised that.
Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, Maureen Tucker, and Nico. The Velvet Underground, she told the assembled suits, “opened wounds worth opening, with a brutal innocence, without apology, cutting across the grain, gritty, urbanic. And in their search for the kingdom, for laughter, for salvation, they explored the darkest areas of the psyche.” The Velvets were a triumph of the musician over the establishment, and the fact that people remembered their names proved that their victory was lasting. Could a Velvet Underground even form today, much less exist, much less make a difference?
Patti would change her tune about the Hall of Fame soon enough. Until then, she tried to remain optimistic. “I think things are a lot more open than they were in the ‘70s,” she had told Gerrie Lim a few months earlier. “The field is quite wide and I’m really proud of a lot of the things that the new guard has done, all these groups from My Bloody Valentine to Nirvana. My son likes Green Day. There’s a lot of energy in music right now.” She herself would be content to play the outsider, the returning revolutionary—perhaps even (in the eyes of a prospective audience growing more and more excited about her return) the woman who would turn around the opening oath of her old take on “Gloria”: to suggest that if Jesus wasn’t up for the job, then maybe she would die for rock ‘n’ roll’s sins.
At the Hall of Fame, however, she celebrated the past and then left the building at the first chance she was given, in tears of such vehemence that it was easier to fly home, which was still Detroit for a few months more, than spend another minute in its company.
Gone again.
16
A FIRE OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN
JUST AS PATTI was reintroducing herself to the world in mid-1995, one of her oldest friends was also garnering renewed public attention—albeit posthumously. Six years after the death of Robert Mapplethorpe, Massachusetts-born, Manhattan-based author and editor Patricia Morrisroe published her biography of the artist. It was a doorstop of a book, the fruits of some sixteen interviews between author and subject, and many more between Morrisroe and Mapplethorpe’s associates, and it reexamined his life in painstaking, and often painful, detail.
Patti had been happy to be interviewed for the starkly titled Mapplethorpe. She was not so happy with what she read in it.
“I gave [Morrisroe] what I thought was a good sense of what it was like to be an artist,” Patti complained to Hilton Als of The New Yorker. “I saw Robert go from an extremely shy misfit to an extremely accomplished person.” But that process was “represented in the book as one hustle after another.” When she remembered those days, she said, she recalled the joyfulness with which they approached every project, and the “youthful fervor” with which they completed it. They weren’t plotting to be famous, she swore. It was just that they had “a million ideas and lots of energy.” It was innocence, not calculation, that led them to lead the lives that they lived.
Just a year after the publication of Mapplethorpe, Patti released her own book in an attempt to eulogize her former partner. The Coral Sea was the piece Patti had begun writing on the day Mapplethorpe died. Its title was taken from one of his
photographs, of the aircraft carrier USS Coral Sea, but its imagery was pure legend—the legend of everlasting friendship, two kids growing together and staying together, no matter how much turmoil life had forced them to endure. The Coral Sea, she said, had taken on a life of its own; it had called upon her to draw from all that she knew about Mapplethorpe both as an artist and as a human being. The writing had been easy, too, developing swiftly into a set of sixteen interwoven prose poems whose very energy, she felt, echoed that with which they had lived their lives.
But for the first time since she embarked on her comeback, Patti found the critics were less than enthralled. Her romantic, allegorical, and sometimes almost biblical tribute to her friend was seen as naive at best, self-serving in places, and no match for the vision of Mapplethorpe that was conjured in the pages of Morrisroe’s biography. For the moment, Mapplethorpe was the account by which he was to be judged, rightly or wrongly.
It had been a long time since Patti had last faced up to public criticism, and longer still since it had hit her so hard. Respect was devilishly hard to come by, and shaken by the reception of The Coral Sea, Patti could be excused if she wondered whether her now-imminent comeback album, Gone Again, would suffer likewise—a victim not of outright dislike but of unfavorable comparison with a more imposing edifice. And whereas The Coral Sea was oft compared, absurdly, to Mapplethorpe, Gone Again was up against Patti’s own past work.
It would not be an entirely fair comparison. If one listened to music purely for its tunes, for the choruses that could be easily sung along with, one would be hard pressed to distinguish the best of Gone Again from that of either Easter or Wave; Patti herself acknowledged that. Her music remained as clear and uncluttered as ever. But those were not the records she was competing with. Instead, her new album would be judged against the two discs that preceded them—in particular, the one that announced her to the world in the first place, the twenty-one-year-old Horses, just as each of the records that followed it had been. The fact that so many years separated the two records would not make an iota of difference in the eyes and ears of the critics.
Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story Page 25