Patti would even perform, for the first time in its entirety, The Coral sea.
More than a decade had elapsed since the volume’s publication, but as she confessed to Spencer Tricker of PopMatters.com, “I had tried to read it publicly, but could never sustain reading the entire piece.” Appearing at the New York Public Library on May 28, 1996, she had seemed tearful even before she commenced to read.
In 2005, however, she found a collaborator with whom she could ease the entire piece into a complete performance. Kevin Shields was the English guitarist who had led the ultravisionary band My Bloody Valentine to short-lived but lasting glory at the end of the 1980s; Patti had missed seeing or even hearing the band when it was in its pomp, but she caught up with their music later and immediately fell in love with it. And now her collaboration with Shields “gave me an all-encompassing landscape in which I could explore the emotions that drove me to write it.”
Patti and Shields premiered The Coral Sea to the world at Meltdown on June 22, 2005. “We didn’t rehearse,” Patti confessed afterward to Mark Paytress of the Guardian. “We simply talked about our expectations and improvised.”
This time around, reviews were unanimous in their enthusiasm. Observer critic Molloy Woodcraft adored the performance. “Shields, surrounded by effects pedals, rings great sheets of sound from expensive-looking electric guitars beneath and, occasionally, above … Smith’s declamations as we move around an imaginary ship. It becomes quite mesmerizing at times, Shield’s characteristic bending notes making you feel like the room is moving out of shape. The pair finish up side by side on the sofa as the sound dies away, heads down, lank hair over their eyes, Smith grinning madly. When they depart hand in hand, they look for all the world like mother and son.”
They would repeat the performance the following year, and release a CD of both shows in 2008. The liner notes would encapsulate Patti’s feelings about the events: “I believe we produced together a fitting memorial to Robert, who was, when I was young, my bloody valentine.”
Around their first performance, meanwhile, the rest of Meltdown unfolded. John Cale was there; so were the reformed Television. Yoko Ono, Marc Almond, Tori Amos, and Sparks numbered among a cast list drawn from the furthest extremes of the music scene, reflecting Patti’s personal vision of who and what an artist should be. The Brecht evening, in particular, offered wild variety, as she called a dozen or more different acts to take the stage and sing a song or two. Another night, titled Peaceable Kingdom for the Trampin’ track, dwelt on Patti’s role as peace activist.
“This may be the most self-referential Meltdown there’s been,” Glenn Max, producer of contemporary culture at the South Bank Centre, told the Guardian’s Faisal al Yafai. “Even though there are big ideas here … there’s a lot of her in this show. There’s a real political view to this.”
But there was also nostalgia. Nobody, least of all Patti, had forgotten that 2005 marked the thirtieth anniversary of the release of Horses. In 1975, critical opinion as to its merits had been sharply divided. But how thoroughly the positive opinion had won out over the negative would be revealed by the reception for Horses’ rebirth at Meltdown.
Tickets for the night, June 25, 2005, sold out immediately, while good seats for the other nights were still readily available from the box office. “I was overwhelmed,” Patti admitted to journalist Simon Reynolds of the Observer. “To tell the truth, it brought tears to my eyes. Horses pretty much broke as a record in England. I always think of us as a semi-English band because we were so maverick in America and then we went to London and played that first date … and the response gave me my first sense that ‘wow, we’re really doing something.’”
As for why she was recreating the album, beyond the notion that a recording of the show would make a neat addition to the upcoming thirtieth anniversary reissue of Horses itself, “I wanted to do it while I’m still physically able to execute it with full heart and voice. I had nicer hair back then, but my voice is actually stronger now!”
Following in the footsteps of David Bowie, the Cure, and Sparks, all of whom had taken to recreating entire classic albums in concert in recent years, Patti would open the show with Horses side 1, track 1, “Gloria”; close it with side 2, track 8, “Elegie”; and then follow the most recent CD reissue by encoring with the bonus track, the live “My Generation” that had appeared on the B-side of “Gloria.”
The band was as close to the original as death and politics would permit—Sohl and Kral were both sadly missed. But Tom Verlaine expanded his original contribution to the record by remaining unobtrusively onstage throughout the performance, and Red Hot Chili Pepper Flea bounced enthusiastically around on bass.
“Improvising randomly,” Tim Cooper would enthuse in the Independent, “injecting her songs with love, tenderness, passion and fury, Smith’s restless spirit of invention and sheer passion for her art ensured this was more, far more, than mere nostalgia. It was, as it always was, sheer transcendence.” “Gloria” opened, as defiant as it ever was. “Elegie” closed, and as elegiac as it sounded, it was as somber and beautiful as any song could be. As it ended, and she sang the final line, Patti glanced to the side of the stage, sadly, remembering the friends “who can’t be with us today.”
“This was rock as exploration, adventure, freedom, transcendence,” swore Andrew Perry in the Daily Telegraph. “Hearing it so thrillingly brought to life, one wondered why young rock bands today refuse to uphold rock’s questing ideals, happy merely to copy old post punk records.”
But most dramatic of all was Pete Clark’s review in the Evening Standard. “It was as if a punk tear had opened up in the space/time continuum: Patti Smith stepped through it, arriving on stage in black jacket, white shirt, black tie and skinny, ripped jeans, and it was 1975 all over again.” Except if time really had been torn open and turned inside out, it was not 1975 that Patti Smith was reincarnating that night at the Royal Festival Hall. It was 1976. May 1976, and she was on her way to London, to oversee the birth of British punk rock.
18
BABELOGUE
JUST WEEKS AFTER Meltdown, Patti was in France, where the Ministry of Culture bestowed on her the government’s highest honor given to an artist or writer, naming her a Commandeur dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Back home, however, her own government continued to disappoint her.
By 2006, the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan had settled into sub-Vietnam campaigns of attrition and repression, and she continued to speak out against the administration’s misdeeds—which included some of the most flagrant abuses of process that any modern democracy had ever openly admitted to.
“I spent all morning yesterday writing a song about Guantanamo Bay,” she told the Guardian’s Mark Paytress in September 2006. “Without Chains” was inspired by the story of Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish national living in Germany who was arrested in Pakistan in late 2001 and held at Guantanamo for the next four years. “He is the same age as my son, Jackson,” she elaborated in an interview with Louise Jury of the Independent. “When I read the story, I realized how I would feel as a mother if my son had been taken away at the age of twenty, put into chains, without any hope of leaving, without any direct charge.”
She’d been affected, too, by the story of a Lebanese village that had been hit by an Israeli air strike that July, killing dozens of civilians. She dedicated the song “Qana” to their memory. This kind of anger, she told the Guardian, “isn’t any different than the outrage I once felt about Vietnam or civil rights. My blood is still burning.”
Yet if the fires of past convictions still burned strongly within her, so too did the knowledge that time changes everything, an inexorable process that reached a claw into her own history with the news that CBGB was closing. And shortly after 1 A.M. on October 16, 2006, Patti Smith would sing the final notes of her final song, “Elegie,” to conclude a three-and-a-half-hour show marking the end of music at the club that had nurtured her to fame thirty years before.
/> A victim of the city’s skyrocketing rents and the rapacious landlords who uphold them, CBGB had first run into trouble more than a year earlier, when the Bowery Residents’ Committee billed owner Hilly Kristal for $91,000 in back rent, based on a rent increase that Kristal himself declared he had never even received. In early August 2005, it was announced that CBGB would close its doors for the final time on September 1—but the race was on to gain a reprieve. A series of nightly benefit shows at the venue was organized, while Steven Van Zandt, of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, began arranging a rally and concert (headlined by Blondie’s Debbie Harry and Chris Stein) in Washington Square Park.
Kristal himself had remained defiant. “We are doing whatever we can to stay here which includes encouraging people who are in a position to do something about it,” he told the BBC. New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg decried the loss of one of the city’s best-loved institutions and offered to mediate in the dispute. “It’s part of our culture,” he said. “[CBGB] bring[s] a lot of business here. I don’t think they belong anyplace else other than New York City.” Kristal replied, “I just hope that he can back up what he said. I pray that he will.”
Ultimately, the best concession that could be won was a final fourteen months of occupancy, and so Kristal began planning to go out in style.
The last weeks of the club’s existence were a nonstop festival of remembrance. The acoustic Debbie Harry/Chris Stein act and the Dictators celebrated CBGB’s 1970s prime. The hardcore combo Bad Brains stepped up to replay the 1980s. Avail and the Bouncing Souls remembered the venue’s role in breaking the alternative acts of the 1990s and beyond. But the final night was turned over to Patti, for a set that promised to be far more than a simple remembrance service.
“It was an honor to be the last group,” she told Rolling Stone’s David Fricke, “and I really thought about what that meant, what kind of responsibility that was. I thought about all the people that played there and that we lost—about Hilly and the whole history. I just wanted to do a night like any other night, sort of like the nights at the beginning but without being nostalgic.”
She recalled her last appearance at CBGB, in 1997, and before that, in August 1979, warming up for that final Patti Smith Group tour of Europe. She remembered, too, the earliest days at the club, the nights in 1974–1975 when CBGB was the womb that nurtured a city’s worth of talent. But most of all she recalled the club’s role in bringing her back from the half-dead in 1977, as she recuperated from her accident but still needed to play. To live.
Perusing her repertoire almost three decades later, she looked for material that she felt related specifically to CBGB: “We Three,” for instance, written with (and about) Tom Verlaine: Every Sunday I would go / Down to the bar / Where he played guitar. She sought out songs that had long since fallen from her usual stage repertoire but were an intrinsic component of her own CBGB experience. “The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game” was the first song she ever performed on that stage. The Velvets’ “Pale Blue Eyes”—“we did that too. And I wanted to build up to the last piece of the first set, which was ‘Birdland.’ That was a song that started as a poem, and through several months at CBGB, went from one place to another, morphed and grew. To me, ‘Birdland’ is the quintessential CBGB song.”
But there were so many others, and she cast the net wider, forgiving or forgetting even the past conflicts that had once separated her from the rest of the CBGB regulars. Blondie’s cover of the old reggae classic “The Tide Is High.” The Dead Boys’ “Sonic Reducer.” A string of joyous Ramones numbers. Television’s “Marquee Moon” and “Little Johnny Jewel,” with Richard Lloyd sitting in on lead guitar.
And finally, “Elegie,” with Patti reciting a list of the musicians who had passed away since they last played at CBGB: Richard Sohl, Fred Smith, Stiv Bators, Joey Ramone, Dee Dee Ramone, Johnny Ramone. Less than a year later, Hilly Kristal himself would be added to that roll call; the grand old man of New York City punk died of complications of lung cancer on August 28, 2007. Two years later, Jim Carroll would pass away. And, in between, John Varvatos, the high-end men’s fashion designer, opened a retail store on the site of CBGB.
New York City was changing all the time. As the Dead Boys’ Cheetah Chrome put it to Jennifer Fermino of the New York Post, “all of Manhattan has lost its soul to money lords.” But some alterations still took your breath away.
And some foes could never be vanquished. But they could be confronted. Eleven years had passed since Patti welcomed the Velvet Underground into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; eleven years since she condemned it as a crass commercial venture. Now it was Patti’s turn to be recognized. And while she admitted to Jessica Robertson of Spinner.com that “I’ve never been pro-institution in terms of rock ‘n’ roll,” still she understood that it was an honor to be selected, and she accepted it with grace and gratitude.
She certainly couldn’t complain about the company she would be keeping. Bob Dylan had been inducted in 1988, the Stones in 1989, Jimi Hendrix in 1992, Jim Morrison and the Doors in 1993. The Velvets were in and so was Bruce Springsteen. Maybe, if she thought about it, she could bristle over the fact that the Ramones and the Talking Heads made it in before she did—five years before, in fact. Blondie had been honored the previous year.
But the MC5 and the Stooges were still waiting, and Television too, although 2007’s inductees also included Grandmaster Flash and Van Halen, together with “my good friend Michael Stipe and REM,” she told Spinner.com, and the Ronettes, the early sixties girl group whom “I always loved…. I think it’s a really diverse year. I’m very happy.”
She confessed, however, to one small element of sadness. It was not the first time she’d been nominated for the Hall of Fame—almost a decade has passed since her name was first put forward—and she regretted that “my parents, who really looked forward to this, have both passed away since my first nomination.” She added, “I’ll have to accept in their spirit.”
Theirs and so many others’. There was certainly some controversy when it became apparent that Patti alone was being inducted, without the sidemen who had blazed alongside her: Oliver Ray, Tony Shanahan, Jay Dee Daugherty, Ivan Kral, Richard Sohl—not even Lenny Kaye, who had played with her for more than thirty years.
Patti knew who ought to be there, though, and so they were. “Rock ‘n’ roll is collaborative,” she told Spinner.com. “You don’t do anything by yourself.”
So it was strange that neither her guest list nor the event’s own included the name Ivan Kral. The guitarist was forced to purchase his own ticket for the event, not only for the privilege of watching somebody else play the guitar lines he’d created but also to hear Patti include in her acceptance speech a sad reference to “the late Richard Sohl and Ivan Kral.” Generously, he put it down to a slip of the speechwriting pen.
There was no room, either, for Oliver Ray, her near-constant companion for more than a decade. With neither fanfare nor publicity, for that is how Patti now operated, he slipped out of both her life and her band; she performed now with the unadorned trio that had accompanied her for much of the past decade: Lenny Kaye, Tony Shanahan, and Jay Dee Daugherty.
Patti was inducted by Rage Against the Machine front man Zack de la Rocha, but she also received the praise of a fellow inductee, Van Halen’s Sammy Hagar. “I’m really happy about Patti Smith … who really had such a short, intense career,” he told Joel Selvin of the San Francisco Chronicle. “She did it so cool. She really deserves it for being such a rebel and being a girl at that time…. I think it’s cool that they honor those kinds of people. Some awards shows don’t. They go with the most commercial. Half the people don’t know who Patti Smith is, but I think it’s awesome. She was a true artist, a Neil Young kind of artist, where, shit, man, you do it my way or forget it. I like that.”
Patti’s set kicked off with the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter.” “Because the Night” followed, and then came a song that the Internet message
boards had only dreamed she might perform, and that she prefaced with the story of her mother doing the vacuuming to it: “Rock n Roll Nigger.”
“My mom was the main person in the world who wanted to see me in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,” she’d told Nick Blakey. “Before my mom died, literally the day before she died, [she asked] if I ever made it, please sing a certain song for her.” That was the one.
Patti was back onstage again with REM to perform the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog”—a little too politely, with Stipe looking and sounding like a high-class waiter. It was a little disorienting, too, when it looked as though Patti was going to don her spectacles to sing the chorus. But it was vicariously thrilling regardless, and it climaxed with guitarist Peter Buck slinging a monitor off the stage and almost crushing a few onlookers’ feet.
And then it was into the ceremonial finale: Patti led the traditional all-star band through a pulsating “People Have the Power,” with Keith Richards and Stephen Stills dueling guitars behind her, and Sammy Hagar, Eddie Vedder, Michael Stipe, and Ronnie Spector sharing her vocals.
But it was her Hall of Fame performance of “Gimme Shelter” that had provided the first public indication of Patti’s forthcoming new album, a dozen-strong collection of cover songs titled Twelve.
She had talked of making such a record for years. Even at the height of the original Patti Smith Group, she had kicked back and relaxed into the idea of recording an album of her favorite songs. She still possessed one of the early track listings, too, scrawled on the endpaper of her copy of Jean Genet’s The Thief’s Journal sometime in 1978. Every time the live set bristled with another cover performance, it appeared that the idea’s day was dawning, and by the late 1970s, the Patti Smith Group’s repertoire had regularly thrilled or astonished audiences with its dips into a shared cultural jukebox.
Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story Page 28