Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story
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It would have been so easy for reviewers to dismiss the record. What, they could have asked, did a returning Patti Smith have to offer that she had not already dispensed in the past? The same question, in other words, that is asked of every returning hero, from the latest vintage reunion (and the 1990s overflowed with such events) to the periodic returns to action of bands that had never really gone away (the Rolling Stones, for example).
But Gone Again received a far easier ride than anybody might have expected, borne aloft on a wave of generosity that bordered upon gratitude: thank you for returning, thank you for recording, thank you for remembering us. The fact that it deserved such largesse is of course immaterial; browsing today through the reviews that awaited Gone Again, one is still struck by the sheer love and affection with which Patti was received back into the arms of the critical establishment. When Rolling Stone featured Gone Again in its “essential recordings of the 1990s” poll in 1999, nobody would even think to question its inclusion.
Patti had continued teasing her audience with live shows through early 1996, as guest appearances and benefits again consumed far more of her time than full-on concerts. But when she did break cover with the band, the results were spectacular. Two nights at San Francisco’s Warfield Theatre, opening a weeklong Californian sojourn, brought the audience to its knees with both shocking revivals, as “Gloria” returned from her grave to round out both nights, and new surprises, such as Lenny Kaye’s renditions of “Love of the Common People” and Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water,” with the latter’s signature riff performed by Jackson Smith, Patti’s thirteen-year-old son.
Appearances on the FOX variety show Saturday Night Special in Los Angeles in May and Later … with Jools Holland in London in June brought out a driving “Gone Again” and a spoken “People Have the Power.” Then, back in New York City for two nights at the Irving Plaza, she gave The Late Show with David Letterman a triumphant “Summer Cannibals.”
She had much to celebrate. Not only had she made her musical comeback, but she had made a personal return as well, uprooting her life and family once again and coming home to New York City, to a brownstone in Greenwich Village. And now that she was there, it felt as though she had never left.
Yet she did not have long in which to unpack, and certainly no time to put everything away. In fact, she acknowledged, she might never do so. Thirty years before, sharing an apartment with Robert Mapplethorpe, she had driven him to distraction by leaving her art, her writings, her every thought scattered on the floor, as though the very act of dropping it was the only thing she created it for. Even now, she was still most comfortable amid the clutter of her creativity, in a tumbleweed tangle of manuscripts, photographs, paintings, and notebooks. Plastic toys and Polaroids. Favorite books and pop culture iconography. Newspaper cuttings and political tracts. And tour itineraries.
Her latest tour, so relaxed earlier in the year, was about to become far more grueling. She prepared for a return to Europe for the first time since 1979, with a schedule that seemed to pick up exactly where she left off in Florence. The reborn Patti Smith Group kicked things off at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark on June 30, and then it was on to the Paris Olympia and the Royal Albert Hall in London, and more shows all over the continent through July and August 1996. Next it would be America’s turn, with gigs through to the end of the year, and then, almost without a break, the band headed to Japan and Australia for Patti’s first-ever tours of those countries.
Patti had been driven to exhaustion by her schedule in the late 1970s, but now she was working as hard as she ever had. The difference was, she was doing it on her own terms. She was no longer competing for the attention of the marketplace, no longer driven by the need to keep up with the hit-makers of the day.
Through 1996, Patti’s live repertoire had, in the words of Neil Strauss in the New York Times, essentially been an autobiography: “Patti Smith opened her sold-out concert on Friday night at Irving Plaza with a 1974 poem about a 16-year-old escaping a dead-end job to come to New York City and ‘be somebody.’ She ended the two-hour show with ‘Farewell Reel,’ from her first album in eight years, a song about a 49-year-old woman recovering from the death of her husband and preparing to re-enter the world. In between these autobiographical sketches, an entire life unfurled.”
Now it was time to move ahead.
Peace and Noise, the album that Patti and the band began scheming shortly after returning from their Australian tour in January 1997, was the final fruition of the work that she and Fred Smith had been planning to pursue at the time of his death. After the release of Dream of Life, she told writer Margit Detweiler of the Philadelphia City Paper, “Fred and I had set about to do a more socially conscious record…. When he passed away I really didn’t have the heart to do that particular record. I focused on Gone Again as a remembrance of Fred, but as I strengthened, I decided to continue the work we’d anticipated for ourselves.” An issue-based album, she admitted to Jim Sullivan of the Boston Globe, “is not popular right now, but I don’t really care about that stuff.”
For all his influence over the proceedings, Fred Smith would receive no writing credits on the finished record. But the moods and topics were indeed those he would have prompted Patti to address, domestic issues that would range from the recent (March 1997) mass suicide of the Heaven’s Gate cult to the drowning death that same spring of Jeff Buckley, the so-talented and promising singer-songwriter who’d made such an indelible impression on Gone Again.
But the album was recorded beneath the shadow of an even more personal loss for Patti: the April death of Allen Ginsberg.
Like Dylan at the bedside of Woody Guthrie, as Ginsberg lay dying in a New York City hospital, Patti barely stirred from his side as he faded; she owed him so much, and she owed him that much. Less than two years had elapsed since Ginsberg pulled Patti out of her own trough of despair with the reminder that she needed to go on living so as to honor those she had lost. Now she needed to draw upon those same reservoirs of strength and purpose once more. “It was a peaceful passing,” she would tell the audience at the 1998 Tibet House benefit at Carnegie Hall. “Off he went.” Gone again.
But while Gone Again had matched Horses in intensity and strength, the album that she was now assembling was intended to push deeper. Her live performances, so tentative at the beginning, had developed an incandescence of their own; the very act of stepping out on stage, she said, helped propel her toward new extremes of performance. Returning to the studio could only amplify that feeling. And if, as several outside observers were suggesting, Gone Again had returned Patti to her poetic beginnings, then Peace and Noise would surely follow in the footsteps of Horses’ own successor, the once-reviled but now wholly rehabilitated Radio Ethiopia.
“The whole record is band oriented—everything is done by the band, except on ‘Last Call’ where Michael Stipe sings in the background,” she promised the Philadelphia City Paper. “Everything is also pretty much live; one cut is totally improvised.”
The album’s potential became apparent in April 1997 when, just hours after a moving appearance at Allen Ginsberg’s memorial at St. Mark’s, Patti was onstage alongside Tom Clark, a member of the High Action Boys, at Brownies in the East Village, in a gig that also featured Marshall Crenshaw and Jim Carroll.
It was a benefit for Clark himself, and the guest of honor played seething guitar from a wheelchair. He had been home in DeKalb, Illinois, to attend his father’s funeral; while attempting to move some furniture, he slipped and broke two bones in his leg. Clark was laid up for a month before Lenny Kaye drove out and brought him back to New York City. Now, as the guitarist faced medical bills, a rapacious landlord, and another five months before he could expect to stand again, Kaye and Dictators front man Handsome Dick Manitoba pooled their resources to lend him some support. The evening brought in some $5,000 for the beleaguered Clark.
Impressive as that sum was, onlookers were equally astonished to hear Patti pull �
��Radio Ethiopia” out of mothballs for the first time in two decades, segue it into a stylized version of “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” (the song she had performed at Ginsberg’s memorial), and unleash, too, Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love.”
In its naked form, “Who Do You Love” is a primeval rocker whose bayou-dark visions of rattlesnakes and human skulls might easily have been written with Patti in mind. Its spirit would soon infuse “Memento Mori,” the one song intended for the gestating new album that allowed the Patti of today to merge with the Patti of the now-mythic past. In a frenzied, soul-shattered resurrection, Johnny, the main character of “Land,” graduated from the locker room to the beaches of some faraway war. The full-band composition opened with a spectral recollection of the Doors’ “The End” echoing over the soundtrack to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (then and now the most effective use of a rock song in a movie ever). From there it lurched into the riff from “Who Do You Love,” Lenny Kaye and Oliver Ray—now a full member of the band, following the departure of Tom Verlaine—dueling like snipers over the hypnotic rhythm.
The track was taken note for note from eleven minutes of improvisation in the studio, Patti enthused to the Philadelphia City Paper. “We recorded in an old propeller factory/studio where there were these huge overhead fans that look like propellers. They reminded me of the tops of helicopters, like blades. I improvised on that. The piece is a remembrance of a boyhood friend of my late husband who was killed in Vietnam in a helicopter crash.”
Just as compelling were Patti’s personal recollections of a childhood spent far from the nightmares of modern life but locked within nightmares of another sort, a theme that ran through the track “1959.”
In 1959, she explained to Jeff Apter of NYROCK.com, she was a kid growing up in an eventful time. And thanks to the twenty-twenty vision with which we all look back on our childhoods, she claimed to remember it all—even the elements that she would not have experienced at the time. She may have danced to Eddie Cochran’s “Some-thin’ Else” and thrilled to the Chevy Impala, “this amazing thing with huuuuuge fins and all,” but she would not have recognized a Jackson Pollock or known then that it was the year Kerouac published On the Road. But no matter; the events of that year were all a part of her past now: Castro taking over Cuba, Buddy Holly perishing in an Iowa field, the Russians landing the first unmanned craft on the moon, and the forty-eight states becoming fifty. It was also the year of the failed Tibetan uprising against the Chinese occupation. “Looking back, I wondered how it was that we could survive World War II yet do nothing about helping Tibet.”
The song would earn Patti her first-ever Grammy nomination. Unfortunately, it would prove to be one of the few bright spots on Peace and Noise, an album that, for all its promise, lacked the magic Patti had been conjuring so effortlessly in concert. (The only song that came close was “Spell,” which borrowed affectionately from sundry Ginsbergian beat raps and his poem “Footnote to Howl.”) To many ears, the record was less a collection of songs than a succession of panegyrics and homilies, Patti making Patti noises, bereft of either substance or strength. Even the songs that touched upon her own life appeared less than convinced or convincing, an accusation that she scarcely seemed interested in rebutting.
Onstage at Irving Plaza the previous year, Patti had told the crowd, “I am so well-loved lately that I am turning into a walking Hallmark card.” Patti was fast ascending, and she knew it, to a position perched benignly somewhere between Earth Mother and Mother Superior: a gentle, almost grandmotherly figure whose life had been so touched by tragedy that audiences were prepared to be more forgiving of her frailties, more accepting of her lapses—and more open to her pronouncements. Too many people, in fact, looked to Patti to dictate their own feelings on a given subject; her recent performance schedules often read like a what’s what of worthwhile causes. And now, too much of Peace and Noise seemed to rejoice in that status.
Reviews were certainly harsh. Ben Ratliff of the New York Times deemed it “monochromatic … tame, unadventurous stuff”. Reviewers that praised the album’s electric punch, the fact that it was more “rock ‘n’ roll” than its predecessor, missed the point of course; if one musical truth rang through Patti’s entire songwriting career, it was that the songs that rocked the hardest were often the laziest, that she was at her strongest and most compulsive when all the rules were set aside and the musicians played to the beat of their own hearts. Patti herself was not satisfied with Peace and Noise—or, at least, she knew that it could have been better, and that the band that created it could have done better.
The band had gone back on the road, prefacing Peace and Noise‘s November 1997 release with four shows at CBGB before hitting the rest of the country. It was not, technically, a tour, Patti informed the Boston Globe: “I can’t really tour; I have two kids. I’m visiting certain places, being very choosy about where I go and basically playing places that have been supportive or I like for a particular reason. Boston has always been supportive and I’m going to Rhode Island because it’s kind of obscure. It’s one of the original thirteen colonies, isn’t it? I like supporting the original thirteen colonies.”
In fact, the serious business of touring would not begin until summer 1998, when Patti launched into a series of dates that catapulted her from the Bowery Ballroom in New York City at the end of July; across to Austria, Hungary, and Belgium; back to the United States; around the globe to Australia and New Zealand; back on the road in America until Christmas; and finally to two more shows at the Bowery Ballroom. In all, she made more than fifty public appearances in 1998, including tributes to Ginsberg and Kerouac, benefits for Tibet, and a guest spot with REM when they performed in New York City, in which she duetted that band’s “E-Bow the Letter” with cowriter Michael Stipe.
But once again, she was already looking forward to her next album. “I’m always writing,” she told New Zealand journalist Graham Reid when the outing touched down there, “but after we finish this tour we are going back to do an album, maybe a double album, with the same group of people … that created Peace and Noise. Oliver Ray and I wrote most of the songs on Peace and Noise and we’re still continuing to do a lot of writing, and have a lot of new songs and ideas. I am very excited about the next record, which I think will contain quite a bit of poetry as well as songs. I think it’s going to be very interesting work…. I think the next work will … be even more open with more poetry and experimentation. I’m really looking forward to that.”
Although the album would indeed be recorded with the same lineup that cut Peace and Noise, their work could not begin until late the following year. Although Patti performed only thirty-four shows in 1999, she continued to make a concerted effort, it seemed, to be everywhere she could, as often as possible. Appearances included another European tour, highlighted by a triumphant spot at England’s annual Glastonbury Festival, her first outdoor event in the UK since the Reading Festival in 1978; her first-ever appearances in Israel; and a headlining role at the Sixth International Istanbul Jazz Festival in Turkey.
Her schedule for 1998–1999 was as stuffed as any she could have kept in the 1970s. Patti had discovered, like Dylan before her (and David Bowie at around the same time), that although it’s possible to sit back and rest on your artistic laurels, as a true artist you need to be out among your people. The way to make a difference is not to dictate causes to them from on high but to connect with their lives, so that your art can either address or offer respite from the problems that concern them. Again like Dylan, she had become the only performing artist of her generation who both acknowledged and represented the needs of her audience, as opposed to simply speaking for them.
Her political concerns also gained focus as she looked toward her children’s futures and pondered the issues that would affect them as they grew older. And she drew inspiration from the past as well, as her father, Grant Smith, passed away on August 27, 1999, just a month after his eighty-third birthday.
A world in which freedom meant truly to be free, not just the puppet of one more violent regime.
It was the age of blame. In 1998, President Bill Clinton came under attack for his relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, in a sequence of events that swiftly swirled from rumor and innuendo to direct questions about Clinton’s ability to continue governing the country. For the first time since President Nixon masterminded the Watergate break-ins, a sitting American president faced trial, but not, as in Nixon’s case, for any criminal behavior. Clinton faced judgment over his so-called moral standards, a conflict that quickly moved out of the governmental realm to become a straight fight between right- and left-wing politicians over the standards of American life itself.
Patti was swift to respond, not to any perceived wrongdoing on Clinton’s part, but to the utterly disproportionate response that his behavior provoked. Speaking for a Rolling Stone feature called “The Clinton Conversations,” in which an array of cultural figures were asked to comment upon the ongoing circus, she sighed, “The Clinton thing is so insidious; what they’re unraveling—you could take any human being, start probing, and find their little private can of worms. We are becoming our own Big Brother by allowing all this to happen. If we are going to say it’s all right to take away the privacy of the person who has the highest seat in the land, how can the rest of us possibly be protected?”