Lucking Out (17 page)
Patti was the first draw at CBGB’s and the first to break out of the pack. I interviewed her in her studio apartment a block up from St. Marks Place, which looked as if it had been tossed by narcs given a bad tip on a drug stash and not bothering to tidy up afterward. It was hot, as I recall: no air-conditioning, Patti tugging on a bra strap that seemed to be chafing. In the sink a Lone Ranger mask floated in a glass of water. Before we went up to the studio, I met Patti at a coffee place in the East Village where, prominently on the table, was a brick-heavy copy of a dictionary of symbolism. I got the impression that she used it to interpret the symbols in her own lyrics, explore the Jungian range of their profundity, and when I mentioned this reference book being displayed for my benefit to someone later, he found it posey and pretentious. I found it the opposite. A truly pretentious artist would have disavowed any scholarly knowledge or curiosity about the symbols in his or her work, regarding them as mysterious effusions from the etheric realm that it was up to each listener to unriddle—oh, don’t ask me to explain, it’s up to you to explore the ambiguities while leaving my precious artistic integrity intact. “We murder to dissect,” and all that. Patti didn’t treat her creative apparatus as a tamperproof black box with a secret password. Patti was an unabashed autodidact. That was one of the most admirable things about her. In a decade with so much fatalistic derision stocking the pantry, her hero worship was unfashionably uncool, her faith in the pantheon unshaken. Our idols are our instructors, and revelations without knowledge are just pieces of dreams with no assembly kit. William Blake, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Rimbaud, Edie Sedgwick, Isabelle Eberhardt (who dressed as a boy and adventured in Arab lands, her memoir one of Patti’s touchstones), her friend Robert Mapplethorpe, Robert Bresson, Carl Dreyer, they constituted the geometric points of the constellation she aspired to join. I was present when one of her cryptic idols paid a call, and I wrote it up for the
Voice
as if witness to a superpower summit:
A copy of
Witt
was slid across the table to Patti Smith. “Would you sign this for me, please?” “Sure,” said Patti, “what’s your first name?” He told her. “Like in New Jersey?” Patti asked, and he said no—with a z. “Well, I’ll draw you a map of Jersey,” and so on the inside page Patti scratched its intestinal boundaries, in the middle labeled it Neo Jersey, signed her name, and passed the copy of
Witt
back to Jerzy Kosinski.
The night before, after the second set at the Other End, the greenroom door opened and the remark hanging in the air was Bob Dylan asking a member of Patti’s band, “You’ve never been to New Jersey?” So, all hail Jersey. And in honor of Dylan’s own flair for geographical salutation (“So long New York, hello East Orange”), all hail the Rock and Roll Republic of New York. With the Rolling Stones holding out at Madison Square Garden, Patti Smith and her band at the Other End, and Bob Dylan making visitations to both events, New York was once again the world’s Rock and Roll Republic.
Patti Smith had a special Rimbaud-emblematized statement printed up in honor of Stones week, and when her band went into its version of “Time Is on My Side” (yes it is), she unbuttoned her blouse to reveal a Keith Richards T-shirt beneath. On the opening night she was tearing into each song and even those somewhat used to her galloping id were puzzled by lines like, “You gotta lotta nerve sayin’ you won’t be
my
parking meter.” Unknown to many in the audience, parked in the back of the room, his meter running a little quick, was the legendary Bobby D. himself. Dylan, despite his wary, quintessential cool, was giving the already highly charged room an extra layer of electricity and Patti, intoxicated by the atmosphere, rocked with stallion abandon. She was positively
playing
to Dylan, like Keith Carradine played to Lily Tomlin in the club scene from
Nashville.
But Dylan is an expert at gamesmanship, and he sat there, crossing and uncrossing his legs, playing back.
Afterwards, Dylan went backstage to introduce himself to Patti. He looked healthy, modestly relaxed (though his eyes never stopped burning with cool-blue fire), of unimposing physicality, yet the corporeal Dylan can never be separated from the mythic Dylan, and it’s that
other
Dylan—the brooding, volatile, poet-star of
Don’t Look Back
—who heightens or destroys the mood of a room with the tiniest of gestures. So despite Dylan’s casual graciousness, everyone was excitedly unsettled.
And there was a sexual excitation in the room as well. Bob Dylan, the verdict was unanimous, is an intensely sexual provocateur—“he really got me below the belt,” one of the women in the room said later. Understand, Dylan wasn’t egregiously coming on—he didn’t have to. For the sharp-pencil, slightly petulant vocals on
Blood on the Tracks
hardly prepared one for the warm, soft-bed tone of his speaking voice: the message driven home with that—Dylan offhand is still Dylan compelling. So with just small talk he had us all subdued, even Patti, though when the photographers’ popping flashbulbs began, she laughingly pushed him aside, saying, “Fuck you, then take
my
picture, boys.” Dylan smiled and swayed away.
The party soon broke up—Dylan had given his encouragement to Patti, the rest of us had a glimpse from some future version of
Don’t Look Back
(but with a different star)—and the speculation about Dylan’s visit commenced. What did his casual benediction signify?
Probably nothing, was the reasonable answer. But such sensible explanations are unsatisfying, not only because it’s a waste of Dylan’s mystique to interpret his moves on the most prosaic level, but because the four-day engagement at the Other End convincingly demonstrated that Patti and the band are no small-time cult phenomenon. Not only was Patti in good voice, but the band is extending itself confidently. Jay Daugherty, the newly acquired drummer, provides rhythmic heat, and Lenny Kaye has improved markedly on guitar—his solo on “Time Is on My Side” for example moves Keith Richards riffing to Verlaine slashing. The band’s technical improvement has helped revivify the repertoire: “Break It Up” is now more sharply focused, “Piss Factory” is dramatically jazzy, and their anthem, “Gloria,” ends the evening crashingly. Missing were “Free Money,” and “Land”—the Peckinpahesque cinematic version of “Land of 1000 Dances”—which is being saved for the forthcoming album.
Something is definitely going on here and I think I know what it is. During one of her sets Patti made the seemingly disconnected remark, “Don’t give up on Arnie Palmer.” But when the laughter subsided, she added, “The greats are still the greatest.” Yes, of course! All her life Patti Smith has had rock and roll in her blood—she has been, like the rest of us, a fan; this is part of her connection with her audience—and now she’s returning what rock has given her with the full force of her love. Perhaps Dylan perceives that this passion is a planet wave of no small sweep. Yet what I cherished most about Patti’s engagement was not the pounding rock-and-roll intensity but a throwaway gesture of camaraderie. When Lenny Kaye was having difficulty setting up his guitar between numbers, Patti paced around, joked around, scratched her stomach, scratched her hair—still Kaye was not quite ready. “I don’t really mind,” she told the audience. “I mean, Mick would wait all night for Keith.”
Keith was a frequent comparison point for Patti, who once lamented that she had to go onstage and perform even when she had her period—“Keith doesn’t have these problems.”
I actually left the sanctity of studio apartment and black cat to catch Patti on out-of-town appearances, at a time when audience reception for a New York poet-rocker was a roll of the dice, the dominant bands being mega-hair arena rockers who bombasticized everything they flagellated and drew upon what the poet Philip Larkin once derisively called the “myth kitty,” invoking the combination of Nibelungen, Camelot, and Satan’s barbecue pit that Spinal Tap would turn into a tacky arcade. By contrast, the Patti Smith Group looked like a scarecrow outfit with aspirations that would barely form a bicep—abjuring the Nietzschean hard-on of heavy metal and scratching an artier, jazzier upward path, “arty” and “jazzy” being what so many mid-seventies rock fans most wanted to avoid when they went out at night to get laid and wasted, as hormones and Kiss intended. But by now the Patti Smith Group had added a drummer, Jay Dee Daugherty, and acquisitioned its own rogue force and demolition expert, albeit with impeccable avant-rock credentials: the grinning volcano that was and is John Cale, whose mood swings you didn’t want to get in the middle of. A classically trained musician born in Wales who had once taken part in an eighteen-hour piano performance with John Cage, Cale was a founding partner of the Velvet Underground with the singer-songwriter-scowler Lou Reed, his viola sawing away moodily on the Velvets’ “Black Angel’s Death Song,” a shredding, assaultive La Monte Young dissonance and groaning industrial drone that seemed to rise from the bowels of the subway system. He also played keyboards, his electric organ propelling the Velvets’ improvisatory epic “Sister Ray” like a runaway calliope. He and Reed had an unamicable parting, unamicable partings being one of Lou’s specialties, and he recorded a number of solo albums with literary-minded song titles (“Hedda Gabler,” “Graham Greene”) and others of savage candor, such as the cuckold’s tale of “Guts,” with its pulp-novel opening. He also produced albums, including the desolate masterpieces by his fellow Velvets castaway, the imperiously beautiful and opaque ice sculpture Nico (whose handbag rattled wherever she walked, holding a bootleg pharmacy), and he was chosen as producer of Patti’s debut album,
Horses.
He and Patti’s manager, the shortcake Jane Friedman, were living together, and Cale would join the band onstage for their encore cover of the Who’s “My Generation.” He also was billed as a solo artist in concert appearances in which Patti headlined (sandwiched between Television and Patti on one halcyon occasion), injecting songs with a haunted-sanitarium psychodrama punctuated by primal screams that outdid John Lennon’s on his Plastic Ono Band album—Cale’s had more grizzly volume, less sinus infection. Crooning Elvis’s “Heartbreak Hotel,” he would miserabilize, “I get so lonely/I get so lonely I could …
DDDDDIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!
” That woke up the dead. It was common info that the recording sessions for
Horses
had been “stormy,” and Cale was capable of generating thunderclouds even without a lot of ego friction in a collider chamber like the recording studio.
Drinking brought out his daredevil demons, as if a concert pianist suddenly Incredible Hulk–ized into Oliver Reed. Once at a club date in Washington, D.C., that I attended that already had its surreal aspects—a double bill with Garland Jeffreys, who wore masks onstage as racial signifiers and Brechtian devices—and joining Patti and crew onstage for the “My Generation” finale, Cale was possessed of the whim to poke out one of the overhead stage lights with the spear end of his bass; he thrust the neck of the bass upward, missed by inches, and the momentum carried him over the lip of the stage onto a table that overturned, creating an interesting cascade. A couple of Patti’s bandmates, along with a roadie or two no doubt, carried Cale backstage like one of the wounded warriors from the rugby field in David Storey’s meaty spectacle
The Changing Room.
As they carried him backstage, they passed Jeffreys, who may have been wearing one of his voodoo masks, at least that’s how it’s been lacquered into memory all these years. “Lucky he missed the light,” someone said of John backstage—“he might have been electrocuted.”
I flew once to San Francisco, my first visit, to see Patti perform. I must have had money and time to burn, though I don’t recall it. After the encore Cale laid his bass on the stage floor near an amplifier, and a foghorn roar of feedback was the result. A stagehand, presumably doing what he would have done under all similar circumstances, zipped from the wings and moved the instrument away from the amp and set it upright on a stand, as if tidying up. He failed to factor in that to an avant-gardist of the research-and-development wing of rock, droning feedback was a design element, one of the votive sounds in the church of noise. Irked in the extreme by this intrusion, Cale bit the helpful roadie on his jeaned butt. No damage, but he got the point across. And these were incidents I witnessed firsthand. There may have been others. Once, after Patti returned from an out-of-town appearance, I asked Jane Friedman how John had behaved. “He was great,” she said. “G-r-a-t-e.”
I had my own run-in with Cale’s wolfman side one night at CBGB’s when I offered to buy him a beer. What kind? I asked. “Mossuh,” he said, the word hard to pick out from the din coming from whoever was playing. What? I asked. He raised his voice, but somehow what came out of his mouth managed to be even less decipherable. “Moses?” I asked. And his hands were suddenly around my throat and he barked,
“MOLSON!”
With exquisite dry irony, Merv the bartender said, “John’s requesting a Molson’s,” as he proceeded to uncap a cold bottle, John’s considerable grip receding from my throat now that his request had been properly translated. I didn’t take it personally, and there was no repeat performance. In fact he was unfailingly genial and chatty whenever I ran into him, and his presence on the scene, despite the sporadic aggro-surges, cast a more generous corona than that of his former co-pilot, Lou Reed, whose cool-as-shit sarcasms seemed to come out of a private loop of Bob Dylan’s surlier moments from
Don’t Look Back
projected on the inside of his sunglasses. Lou was an infrequent drop-in at CBGB’s, likely preferring the familiar discomforts of Max’s Kansas City—the Algonquin Room of Andy Warhol’s Factory—but perhaps he acted disgruntled there too, his look of disgruntlement being the little parasol he carried wherever he went. The first time I saw Lou at CBGB’s he parked himself at a table in the back; at the table directly in front of him were a couple of rock chicks who were acting a trifle feisty. One of them, the more lubricated of the duo, began clapping along to whatever song was being played with the floppy enthusiasm of the temporarily uncoordinated. It was mildly annoying but also amusing, as so many things are in life, but Lou was not amused, his public amusement expressed mostly by a smile on a tight leash, easily mistaken for a sneer. “You’re clapping off the beat,” he told the girl, who paid him no never-mind, too far gone into the woolly interior to register a reprimand, even one from one of the founders of our country. “Clap on the
beat
, cunt,” Lou said, as she persisted in clapping as if trying to kill a fly in midair. Curiously, “cunt” didn’t come across as an offensive slur when Lou said it; it had the flat tone of an impersonal insult, just another nail he happened to be hammering. And CBGB’s wasn’t like the
Village Voice
, where the wrong word could set the entire playground into Balkan upheaval; a former hangout for the Hells Angels didn’t lend itself to an atmosphere of heavy self-policing, language- or otherwise. Thwarted in his efforts to make the girl desist in her infernal flapping, Lou left the table like a diner who flings his napkin on the table and exits in a huff, only Lou and his huff didn’t leave, simply shifted to another table, conceding this round to an oblivious amateur.