Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story

by Dave Thompson

  But there was more to her concerns than that. The past decade had seen American politics, if not Western politics as a whole, devolve from a conflict of political ideologies into a battle between conflicting moralities. For years, abortion had been the leading battleground; more recently, the ability of gays to serve in the military had come to the fore. Soon, the concept of gay marriage would be exercising the minds of the nation and dividing once again down political party lines.

  “When I look at the crucifixion of Clinton, I look at the crucifixion of my generation,” Patti continued. “They are finally nailing us for introducing new ideas about sexual mores, sexual freedom, personal freedom: ‘OK, you wanted sexual freedom, we’re gonna give it to you—to the point where it is going to saturate and sicken the whole planet.’”

  Patti’s private fury over the state of the world elbowed aside the personal pains that had preoccupied her for the past five years. Where she had once used her guaranteed audience to spotlight the issues that she and her husband held dear, such as the continued plight of Tibet, she now began to speak equally passionately about more overtly political matters.

  Gung Ho, the warlike title of which would seem more and more apt as time passed, is the album that confirmed her growing interest in politics. What’s more, it did so without any of the embarrassing grandstanding that normally accompanies an artist’s attempt to take a political stand.

  Patti had watched, doubtless as aghast as many other people, as a host of well-meaning pop stars and other public figures stepped forth during the 1980s and 1990s to deliver their personal solutions to any number of worldly problems, few of which were able to look beyond the view from the penthouse suite. The thirteen songs that made up Gung Ho, on the other hand, allowed the listener to make up his or her own mind on whatever issue Patti was putting over, and the ensuing openness permitted the album to become her most musically and lyrically satisfying since Easter.

  The year ended with Patti onstage at the Bowery Ballroom once again, ringing in the new century onstage with sister Kimberly, Tom Verlaine, and keyboard player Grant Hart. Much of the new album was already in place in the repertoire; no fewer than seven of the unheard record’s tracks were in the set, all already flexing their muscles in readiness for the album’s March 2000 launch.

  The following evening, Patti was at St. Mark’s for a brief reading. February brought her now-annual appearance at the Free Tibet benefit, and yet another Bowery Ballroom gig, an Internet broadcast previewing Gung Ho to the world. But she was also settling into the routine that would mark her course for the next decade: touring when she wanted to, recording when she felt like it, and speaking out when she needed to.

  Reviews of her most political record to date were kind. “It’s a fuller, more exhilarating effort than [‘Gone Again’] or ‘Peace and Noise,’” declared Seth Mnookin of Salon.com. “Smith sings, screams, moans, groans and roars about Mother Teresa, Ho Chi Minh, slavery, Gen. George Custer, Salome, war, redemption and honor … [and] veers from anthems to open-ended jams to downright funky ditties.”

  Jon Pareles picked up the thread in Rolling Stone. “With Gung Ho, she’s back to life, taking on the whole world. She belts manifestoes, plunges headlong into love, offers benedictions and hurls herself into history and myth. She casts herself as Salome in the slinky ‘Lo and Beholden,’ as the accusatory ghosts of African-American slaves in the tolling ‘Strange Messengers,’ as General Custer’s lonesome wife in the neo-Appalachian ‘Libbie’s Song.’”

  True, producer Gil Norton’s work may have been just a little too locked within the sonic pastures that had sounded scintillating when he first unveiled them with the Pixies a decade earlier. True, too, that the full Gung Ho experience may last a few songs longer than it needed to. But there was another Grammy nomination lurking within the album’s first single, “Glitter in Their Eyes”; sister Kimberly, son Jackson, Tom Verlaine, Grant Hart, and Michael Stipe all offered audible contributions; and if the album scarcely bothered the US chart, nodding in and out of the lower reaches of the Top 200, then that scarcely bothered Patti.

  Again, she wasn’t competing for a place within whichever hierarchy ruled the industry this week. She was simply allowing her voice to be heard in the places where she felt it was most needed.

  17

  SANDAYU THE SEPARATE

  IN 2000, THE United States faced a presidential election, and the upcoming tussle between George “Dubya” Bush, the mass-executioner governor of Texas and the son of outgoing president Clinton’s predecessor, and Al Gore, Clinton’s uncannily uninspiring vice president, was guaranteed to fill nobody beyond their own address books with joy.

  The result was a contest that aroused so much of the country to demand an alternative that when consumer advocate Ralph Nader put himself forward as a third option in the traditional two-horse race, a surprising number of people who might otherwise have considered themselves Democratic or Republican Party loyalists cast aside their allegiances to fight alongside him.

  Patti, however, had been a long-standing supporter of Nader’s Green Party. She would joke with Deyva Arthur of the party’s quarterly newspaper that her involvement probably dated back to when she “met somebody on the street, and they signed me up.” But she also acknowledged, “I’m really an independent person. I go where there is good, no matter where it comes from. Also I do a lot of work in Europe where the Green Party is really strong, like in Germany.” She threw herself wholeheartedly into Nader’s campaign. “Ralph Nader’s activism, in every sense of the word, is what attracts me. I gravitate toward people and ideology that is earth- and people-friendly.”

  She donated “People Have the Power” as a Nader campaign anthem, and the new album’s “New Party” too. She added The Wizard of Oz’s “Over the Rainbow” to her repertoire as further tribute to the hopes she believed Nader embodied. She spoke at his rallies, and as the November election day drew closer, she toured alongside the Nader campaign, performing at rallies in New York City, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.

  “I’m not an entertainer so to say,” she insisted. “I don’t really care about my career. I just want to do good work, and incorporating Ralph’s teachings in all our performances is part of doing good work.”

  Nader lost, inevitably, and with him fell the Democrats, their traditional support eroded just enough by the Green Party’s high-profile campaign to allow Bush to capture a slim majority of votes in the nation’s baffling electoral college system—and become the first president over a century to ascend to power despite the fact that a plurality of voters preferred his opponent. People clearly did not have the power after all.

  Patti’s live schedule through the first years of the new millennium remained packed. She dropped in and out of the highest-visibility venues as she saw fit, but was just as likely to wash up at a benefit, a reading, or simply an impromptu gathering as she was to book a two-night stand at a regular theater. Festival dates and opera house engagements were interspersed with small club appearances, and in March 2000 she even returned to the Waldorf-Astoria to induct the man who signed her to Arista records, Clive Davis, into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

  June 2001 opened with Patti playing three nights at the Village Underground in New York City and closed with her triumphing over the Roskilde Festival in Denmark. The following month, she moved from the Ocean club in London to the Fuji Rock Festival in Japan.

  And on October 3, with New York City still reeling from the terrorist attacks that brought down the World Trade Center three weeks previous, she was among the throng who turned out at St. Mark’s for the reading unequivocally titled New Poems to End Greed, Imperialism, Opportunism and Terrorism: Poets Respond to the September 11th Attacks and Ensuing Events. Alongside Ed Sanders, Edwin Torres, Cecilia Vicuña, Jackson Mac Low, Anselm Berrigan, Todd Colby, and many others, Patti added her shock, rage, and sorrow to the city’s outpouring of grief.

  Patti spoke further on the subject in a poem published in I
nterview magazine the following month. “Twin Death” was set over six days in September, beginning that first morning when she awoke to the sound of a passenger plane singing its end. awoke to the sensation of spirits—a purgatory of souls ascending the billowing smoke and ash filling the sky at the base of my street. The poem passed through the stages of vigilance (awoke to the sound off-15’s and helicopters circling above), anger (awoke to the cries of “usa! usa!”) and sorrow (it is a morning for mourning) and finally onto readjustment (for the first time since the attack, I enter a subway). Now she prayed that the government could make that same adjustment.

  But she knew that it wouldn’t.

  Patti shared in America’s revulsion over the attacks, and those feelings would never leave her. But they would be pushed to the back of her consciousness by her opposition to the events that followed. Over the course of the next year, the Western war machine swiftly assaulted Afghanistan—where the Taliban government had at least supported the terrorists’ aims—and then just as quickly diverted its attention toward Iraq, a country that had nothing whatsoever to do with September 11 but with whom the United States nonetheless had unfinished business. Like many other Americans, Patti questioned the evidence President Bush and his British ally Tony Blair were touting to justify a preemptive strike, and squirmed uneasily at the aggressive actions that were being perpetrated in their names.

  On September 11, 2002, the first anniversary of the attacks, Patti appeared at a WBAI New York event titled Patriots for Peace and Global Justice. The following day, she was alongside Louis J. Posner, founder of the electoral reform movement Voter March, protesting the slide to war with Iraq outside the United Nations Headquarters in New York City, while Bush was inside delivering his side of the story to the General Assembly. And on October 26, she was at an antiwar rally in D.C., leading 150,000 people through an impassioned “People Have the Power,” a song that was rapidly establishing for itself as potent a place in the new peace movement as “Give Peace a Chance” had occupied at the height of the Vietnam War.

  Of course, not everyone opposed the war in Iraq; Patti knew that her political activism would alienate some fans. But it would empower them too, to see beyond the media’s insistence that we need to turn to our leaders, in whatever field we perceive them, for the answers we’re searching for. Indeed, by setting herself up in opposition to what she was aware many of her fans deeply believed, she was delivering the lesson that she herself had learned when she stood by Jim Morrison’s gravesite all those years ago, when she realized that there was no room for heroes in the world that she was entering.

  You could listen to what they said and take inspiration from their actions. But ultimately, the final decision was yours to make, and only a fool would blindly follow others.

  Within this understanding lies the truth behind the public persona that Patti Smith brought to the first decade of the twenty-first century, a decade during which her own private life receded even further from the spotlight than ever before. She was living not the life of an artist, for that implies struggle and disappointment, nor that of a bohemian, for that brings with it its own heavyweight baggage. But somewhere in between those poles, a woman worked in a field that simply hadn’t existed before she created it, one in which she could say or do or dress as she wished, knowing that an audience was already out there for her, and that it cared.

  It cared when she released Land (1975–2002), a two-disc retrospective that included a dazzling selection of classics and rarities, as well as a newly recorded and highly remarkable cover of Prince’s “When Doves Cry.” It cared just as much when the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh staged Strange Messenger, an exhibition of Patti’s drawings, silk screens, and photographs, in September 2002. Quite simply, she was a part of America’s artistic landscape, as established an insider as it is possible for an outsider to be.

  Patti finally left the Arista label, and on October 20, 2002—Arthur Rimbaud’s birthday—she signed on with Columbia Records. Two years later, Columbia would release Trampin’, Patti Smith’s last album of the decade to contain any original songs.

  The band for this new project remained the same: Lenny Kaye, Jay Dee Daugherty, Oliver Ray, and Tony Shanahan. Patti and the band produced the album themselves.

  Daughter Jesse played piano on the title track, recorded live at the Looking Glass Studios, the house that Philip Glass built. “Trampin’” was a traditional gospel piece that Patti had been singing to herself for a couple of years, ever since she first heard it on an old LP by Marian Anderson, a key figure in the struggle for black artists to win recognition in pre–civil rights America. So liked it so much, she told Uncut, that “I asked my daughter if she would learn it on piano…. I’m very proud of her, I think she did a beautiful job.”

  That same mood carried over to the remainder of the album. Patti had now lost both of her parents; three years after her father’s death, her mother Beverly passed away on September 19, 2002, at the Underwood-Memorial Hospital in Gloucester County, New Jersey. But if their presence hung over Trampin’, it was lightly, gently; “Mother Rose” remembered her mother, but it was gratitude not grief that flavored it, she said. Likewise, she mused, tracks such as “Trespasses” or “Cash” were not about sorrow but “the result of seeing things in life.” Seeing things and knowing that there was not much that could be done to change them.

  It was not, overall, a strong record. It was, however, well intentioned. “Peaceable Kingdom,” her vision for a post–September 11 world that had already been trampled by politics and war, was her most overt reference to the causes that had devoured the last few years—and, perhaps, her weakest. It was, grumbled Rob Horning of PopMatters.com, “about as inconspicuous as anything you’d hear on a Sarah McLachlan record; it seems written to be NPR bumper music.” “Stride of the Mind,” Horning continued, was just “a straightforward rocker.”

  But then Trampin’ exploded, across the nine-minute call to arms of “Gandhi” and then through a cut that made even that look brief: the seething, twelve-minutes-plus “Radio Baghdad.” The latter song opened with the sound of children playing before slicing angrily into the warzone reality of their playground, with a frenzy that was as jammed as it was cohesive, structured improvisation forged in the same furnace of imagination from which “Radio Ethiopia” was cast, but shaped by rage and despair as well. More than anything else on the album, “Radio Baghdad” reminded us why Patti still made records.

  Trampin’ did not change the world. Neither did her loud opposition to Bush’s reelection campaign in 2004, or her appearances alongside Ralph Nader when he toured in opposition to the Iraq war later that year. And America did not accede to her impassioned demands that it indict Bush “for befouling our country’s name,” cried live to the nation via Sirius Satellite Radio on New Year’s Eve 2005.

  But she did not expect them to. Once—thirty years before, for instance—people seemed willing to have their minds changed, if the power of an argument was great enough. Less so today. Not at all so today. Patti acknowledged that sometimes modern activism could feel futile. “We were betrayed,” she later sighed to Time Out London, “by the media, our government, even the Democratic Party. Now I find it very difficult to be in my country.”

  Even so, she was hopeful. She would rail against the government because it needed to be railed against. And because, as she told writer Nick Blakey, “If you keep poking someone, they’re eventually going to bleed.”

  Despite her recent political activity, however, and despite a celebrated career that spanned three decades, it was still her first album, Horses, by which she would forever be judged and remembered. It was a touchstone that she was now about to revisit as she took over the organization of the 2005 Meltdown festival, the two-week-long celebration of arts, dance, and music hosted by London’s South Bank Centre (which comprises the neighboring Royal Festival and Queen Elizabeth Halls).

  In the twelve years since Meltdown’s inception, it had developed in
to one of the most eagerly awaited spectacles of the artistic calendar—in no small part because the flavor of each year’s event was decided not by the so-called experts that traditionally helm such festivals but by a specially invited curator. Among the notables to have operated past Meltdowns were Elvis Costello, Laurie Anderson, Nick Cave, John Peel, Scott Walker, Robert Wyatt, and David Bowie. Each one strove to present a program that not only reflected his or her personal tastes but also reached beyond his or her traditional fan base to embrace some often shocking extremes. Now it was Patti’s chance.

  Patti admitted to Tim Cooper of the Times that she was initially uncertain whether or not to accept the offer; she wasn’t certain whether she could even create one “interesting evening, not to mention two weeks of events.” She turned for advice to Morrissey, himself a past curator, and “he was very encouraging. He told me to just barrel on through because the Meltdown people shepherd you along. And it’s been true.”

  “This will be the most social experience of my life,” she told the Guardian’s Ed Vulliamy. “I don’t interact with a lot of people; I don’t know a lot of famous people. I work very simply. I spend my time with my children and my work…. I tend to be insular and opinionated. But for this, I want to, and will, work alongside people. I’ll perform myself, but if anyone else needs a bit of backing vocal, clarinet, or a shirt ironed, I’ll be there.”

  The guest list that she presented to London would encompass some of the most dramatic and dramatically flavored performers of the age. The event would be bookended by two performances drawn from Patti’s love of William Blake: Songs of Innocence, dedicated to the innocence of childhood, and Songs of Experience, dedicated to Jimi Hendrix. Blake would not be the sole poet incarnated for Meltdown; one night would be devoted to William Burroughs, another to Bertolt Brecht.