PATTI SMITH
Her irresistible rise, punk rock, Dylan and Hendrix, by bandmate Lenny Kaye. An extract from his new book about rock’s most incandescent flashpoints.
LENNY KAYE’s new compendium of rock’s seismic outbursts includes one he helped ignite. In this extract from Lightning Striking, he relives the rise of PATTI SMITH, her Group and New York punk: high art amid the low life. “We have our own agenda,” he writes from the eye of the storm, “which is to stay true to ourselves.”
ICAN’T HELP BUT NOTICE HER ON THE INBRED NEW York circuit, sometimes stepping into Max’s Kansas City late at night, or with her boyfriend Robert Mapplethorpe near the Chelsea Hotel. She’s friendly with Steve Paul, impresario of the Scene up on W. 46th St., though he’s shuttered it – the mob wants him to pay protection – by the time I’m ready to enter its afterhours dominion. I’ve gone to witness Pink Floyd there, or Jerry Lee Lewis, but only the early show, before they clear the house for late night hi-jinks.
I’ve seen Patti Smith in a play at the off-off-Broadway La Mama Theater in May 1970, Jackie Curtis’s Femme Fatale. She plays a tough-talking speed freak, all bones and slashed black hair and unfettered attitude, no distance between her role and self. I have an instant crush, and when I watch her and Robert across the room later in Ratner’s, next door to the Fillmore East, a Jewish dairy restaurant that still gives the East Village a shtetel flavour, he in fur vest, skull necklace, rockabilly curls, she in the same thin cotton blouse knotted at the midriff she wore in the play, I can only look on in admiration.
’M BETWEEN APARTMENTS, LIVING WITH THE WRITERS Richard and Lisa Robinson on the Upper West Side. One day, the phone rings. “Hi,” says a small, almost shy voice, introducing herself. She’s got the number from Steve Paul, to tell me she’s read an article I’ve written – “The Best Of Acappella” – for Jazz & Pop magazine and how it touched her. Patti is from South Jersey, pretty close to my central Jersey, and she knows the music I celebrated, the heartbeat behind it. We both lived close enough to Philadelphia to hear Jerry Blavat on late night radio, The Blue Notes’ My Hero or Maureen Gray’s Today’s The Day. We knew how to do The Strand.
I’ve been working behind the counter at a record store called Village Oldies for Bleecker Bob and Broadway Al for about a year now, 10 dollars a shift and all the records I can filch, rummaging through the stacks to cull cuts that might fit on a compilation called
Nuggets that Jac Holzman of Elektra has asked me to assemble,
from albums that have that one special track. He has a title, and I invent a subtitle, Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic
Era, that defines my own coming of age as a musician and writer, though I don’t realise this at the time. I’m still becoming, the histor y so recent I’ve only begun to grasp that an era’s ended and another is on the way.
After the call, Patti started stopping into the store, sometimes with her sister Linda. I’d put on our shared discography and we’d do the Bristol Stomp when things got quiet. One night she came in with a strange request. She’d heard I played a little guitar, and might I back her in a poetry reading at St. Mark’s Church she wanted to shake up. Could I do a car crash? Free jazz had taught me that. She was hanging out with playwright and Holy Modal Rounder drummer Sam Shepard at the Village Gate who suggested she might recruit the guy at the record store across the street. I went over to her loft on the second floor over the Oasis Bar, overlooking W. 23rd St., bringing my Fender Champ amp and a Gibson Melody Maker, the last equipment I had left after a particularly larcenous summer (O! Where is my Fender VI now?). She chanted poems and I followed along, watching how she breathed. Simple chords, all I knew.
On February 10, 1971, Patti opened for Gerard Malanga at the weekly Wednesday reading sponsored by the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. Being Bertolt Brecht’s birthday, we began with Mack The Knife: Lotte Lenya and Lenny. Patti dedicates the night to “all that is criminal, the great pit of babel… the petty thief, the whores of mexico… the rhythms of prison, the pirate saint, the masters of russian roulette…” and reads poems typed out feverishly on her red
Remington, finding swagger in words and imagery that don’t have time for capitals, that proclaim arrival and a mutinous seize of the helm. It won’t be the last time I will hear Oath’s opening line of “christ died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” There is a tender Cry Me River for Robert and her sister Linda that catches at the throat, and then the music. We offer a quasipop song that almost has a chorus – Picture Hanging Blues, about Jesse James and Billy The Kid and the woman who goads them into a duel over her; a languorous minor key blues called Fire Of Unknown Origin; and the immolation of Ballad Of A Bad Boy, “wrecking cars is my art… fenders hot as angels they blazed inside me… that boy is evil he’s too bad for parole… his mama killed him, his papa grieved for him, his little sister annalea wept under the almond tree…”.
It was only supposed to happen once.
ON EASTER SUNDAY, 1974, PATTI AND I leave a preview screening of Ladies And Gentlemen, The Rolling Stones, at the Ziegfeld Theater on W. 54th St., get in a cab, and travel to a newish hole-in-the-wall on the Bower y where a group called Television is playing.
I’ve met Richard Lloyd in Max’s. He’s told me he’s a guitarist in a group called Crossfire, and so that’s how I nickname him, even though he’s now joined Television. Richard Hell, once Myers, has invited Patti to see his band, also Television. They’re playing Sunday nights on the Bowery. I’ve never been to CBGB – initialled for Country, Bluegrass, and Blues – but they’ve convinced the owner, Hilly Krystal, to let them have a stage
“SHE’D HEARD I PLAYED A LITTLE GUITAR, AND MIGHT I BACK HER IN A POETRY READING AT ST. MARK’S? COULD I DO A CAR CRASH?”
once a week, on Sunday nights after Ed Sullivan. Come on down.
We’re a band as well. Sort of. Actually, we’re more suited to the folk circuit and cabaret, now a trio with Richard Sohl on piano, the first keyboard player who looks as if he might last more than one gig. As we merry-go-round the Metro and back again to Reno Sweeney’s, our set takes on contour. Patti declaims her poetry, we segue into song, and then she sings her poetry, making it up as she goes along. Richard and I follow her persona-shifting, up volume, down volume, slowing, speeding, dark, light. She is learning to be a singer. Sandy Pearlman had asked her after the St. Mark’s reading if she wanted to sing with Blue Öyster Cult. Steve Paul similarly offered his Blue Sky record imprint and possible collaborators. But Patti is just beginning to see how to make it her own.
We are aware of the effect we’re having on an audience, not just localised friends and hangers-on, but curiosity seekers won over and mesmerised though they – like us – aren’t quite sure why. Writing and performance, Patti understands both; her poems clear, accessible, funny, sexy, shocking, redemptive, and then she inhabits them. It is uncanny to watch the audience fall under her spell, hypnotically following a trail of thought as she spirals outward, and then reels the tangent back to earth to reprise a final chorus.
We’re practising almost ever y day, up four flights of stairs behind a movie billboard on the west side of Times Square at 46th St., in an empty office down the hall from our manager Jane Friedman’s PR firm, Wartoke Concern. There is a piano there, and we spend afternoons trying out songs we like: Smokey Robinson’s The Hunter Gets Captured By The Game, Bessie Smith’s I’m Wild About That Thing, The Velvet Underground’s We’re Gonna Have A Real Good Time Together, and those we’re beginning to write. Richard has a moody keyboard piece we call the Harbor Song. Picture Hanging Blues has taken on formal structure and Ballad Of A Bad Boy closes our set with enough noise to declare our intentions. We set to music Piss Factor y, Patti’s escape from South Jersey as metaphor and mission: “james brown singing I lost someone/georgie woods the guy with the goods and guided missiles”. Richard gives it a rolling underlay, and I jazz along.
ON JUNE 5 WE BOOK A SESSION AT ELECTRIC LADY Studios to see what we sound like on a record, with its own imbalanced relationship, where you sing to yourself and hope it’s heard beyond the microphone. I’ve been dabbling in record production, tried my hand with a Boston band called the Sidewinders signed to RCA. Robert Mapplethorpe stakes us to the tune of a thousand dollars and we’re ready to press play.
It’s 9pm in Studio B of Electric Lady, in the back, 8-track, and we won’t use all of them. Five years before, Patti was sitting on the stairs of the newly-opened W. 8th St. recording studio designed by Jimi Hendrix, in the space where a hoedown club called the Village Barn sub-basemented since 1930, too shy to go into the party, when Jimi walked up the stairs, on his way out the door, off to the Isle Of Wight, not much more lifeline left. He told her of his dream of an abstract universal musical language, beyond key and tempo. Now we’re attempting to crack its code. Because Richard and I are key and tempo, we bring Television’s Tom Verlaine with us to provide abstraction. “Hi Jimi,” Patti whispers into the microphone before we begin his slowed version of Hey Joe (through Tim Rose) that we are attaching to Patti’s poem, now called 60 Days: “Sixty days ago she was just a little girl/And now here she is with a gun her hand.” When it’s Tom’s turn, we encourage him to spiral as far outré as he can go, mixing his two takes together for a maelstrom of double helix. With 15 minutes left in the three-hour session, Patti recites Piss Factory, me and Sohl tap-dancing beneath her, emphasising the “never return and I will travel light” and the “be somebody”, which, at least in recorded form, we are now. At midnight, Tom and Patti take a ride on the Staten Island Ferry, marrying our bands.
At the end of July I drive to Philadelphia to pick up 1,500 copies of Mer 601, black label 7-inch with silver print, a small swan as
logo. The disc is slightly pie-plated, and I can tell by looking sideways at its rim that the pressing plant has used recycled vinyl, its greyish tinge a clue to tell the original from future bootlegs. By August it resides on Max’s upstairs jukebox, where Piss Factory seems to be a hit, where we will begin, on the 28th, a one-week extended-to-two stand with Television as co-headliners. It speaks to our – and their – escalating audience, many well-meaning friends but also those drawn by word-of-mouth, or the not-so-underground press (the Soho Weekly News and the Village Voice, and national publications like Creem), or the records we’ve dropped off at bookstores and record stores, never getting around to pick up the proceeds, or Patti’s ability to hypnotise both herself and the audience.
OUR MANHATTAN-CENTRIC REPUTATION HAS grown to the point where our “Rock And Rimbaud III”, held in the incongruous tiki-bar setting of the Hotel Roosevelt’s Blue Hawaii Room up by Grand Central Station, has a line wrapped around the block in early November of 1974. The virtuoso guitarist Sandy Bull opens for us, accompanying Patti on the oud for All The Hipsters Go To The Movies. We kick off with another Hank Ballard song, Let’s Go, Let’s Go, Let’s Go and have added new craftings still figuring out destinations: Free Money, beamed to her, as Patti says, when she looked into the ice blue eyes of a Husky dog; Birdland, a poem derived from the Peter Reich memoir of his orgone-proselytising father Wilhelm being taken from him by extraterrestrial visitation; and a version of the archetypal Gloria that began when Richard Hell sold us his Danelectro bass for 40 dollars. Patti strapped it on, hit a low E note and as it vibrated, intoned the opening lines of Oath: “christ died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” There is only one song that can be communioned with, and I’d been playing it since 1966: Gloria, in excelsis deo.
We leave for our first official road trip the next morning, on our way to California. Jane Friedman has booked us a week at the Whiskya-Go-Go, opening for a band called Fancy from England that has a one-hit wonder with a remake of Wild Thing, and then a trip up to San Francisco. While the dressing room overlooking Sunset is filled with various well-wishing Stooges and garage-rock aficionados who scrawl on the wall, and the shows go over well, myself and Richard are straining to keep up with the way the songs are developing; to pace Patti’s sense of headlong discovery of who she can be.
She’s singing more, enjoying the room she has to move on stage, and we’re hearing the need for another musician, overtone and scaffold. When we land in the Bay Area, we debut in a record store – Rather Ripped – in Berkeley, play a club called the Longbranch with Eddie Money, and finish our run on a Tuesday audition night at Winterland. Jonathan Richman of The Modern Lovers sits in on drums during our set (I’m exasperatingly out of tune throughout, in these last moments before guitar tuners are invented): Gloria, Piss Factory, and Land. He’s our first percussion, though we’re not ready for that yet. We’re looking for a bridge.
Back in the practice room in mid-December, we sift through the guitarists who have come to audition from our classified casting call in the Village Voice. On the third day, as we’re despairing of finding someone suitable, Ivan Kral comes by. A Czech refugee with a Kafkaesque moodiness and a love of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, he has an appealing accent, good bone structure and haircut, and plays bass and guitar. When we embark on Gloria he resolutely follows, unflinching, steadfast, and we realise how other guitarists altered our approach. Ivan enlarges it, so we still sound like ourselves.
JANE BOOKS US A GIG AT THE MAIN POINT OUTSIDE Philadelphia, opening for Eric Burdon, our first as a quartet, and then we move into CBGB, two sets a night, swapping turns on stage with Television. We bring our art-crowd to CBGB, and the club starts to fill, gathering momentum beyond the bands and their followings. The night-after-night allows us freedom to explore, to embark on patient journeys within the songs – especially those with a story to tell. Each night takes on individual sheen, to see what Patti can draw from the shimmering air and the silence that comes over the room when she begins to dreamscape.
We have new songs, and with the expanded line-up we can enhance them. Redondo Beach is a poem from Patti’s small-press book Kodak, set to a reggae beat. Distant Fingers is an imagined song title from Nick Tosches, who writes a semi-fictional profile of Patti for Penthouse and cites that as one of her hits. Break It Up, from a dream Patti has of Jim Morrison rising from his grave, is enhanced by Tom Verlaine’s guitar aviary. Kimberly grows from a Booker T. And The M.G.’s riff into a backdrop for the cataclysmic birth of Patti’s youngest sister.
Off-stage is a record contract, and there is interest. ESP-Disk
“IT IS UNCANNY TO WATCH THE AUDIENCE FALL UNDER PATTI’S SPELL, HYPNOTICALLY FOLLOWING A TRAIL OF THOUGHT AS SHE SPIRALS OUTWARD.”
offers its universal language (it was begun as an Esperanto label), and though tempting to be on the same roster as Albert Ayler, The Fugs, Pearls Before Swine, Patty Waters, and Sun Ra, we do have a mainstream streak. RCA Victor gives us an in-house audition, but before they have a chance to make up their querulous minds, Clive Davis of newly-founded Arista Records comes to CBGB. He knows of Patti, has just begun a label that needs a maverick presence; he also respects performance, and believes an artist must give all and more on stage, regardless of where they slot on the pop spectrum. All we ask is creative freedom. Signed. By the end of our April stay at CBGB, they’re turning people away over weekends.
In June 1975, CBGB sound system supervisor and Mumps drummer Jay Dee Daugherty joins us in the practice room, and is made official when we play the Other End on June 26, the Bleecker Street folk mecca, once the Bitter End. In the audience is the prime number of the Village folk scene, the infidel Bob Dylan. He comes backstage, is photographed joking with Patti, an acknowledge that we are going electric at last, a rock’n’roll band, as we always desired, on our own terms.
WE SPEND THAT SUMMER INDUCTING JAY DEE INTO our midst, though the adjustment goes both ways. We are used to blurring the beat, slowing and accelerating and staggering. He is the beat. It’s not all we’ll have to get used to. Keeping tempo in the upcoming recording sessions will be our choice of producer, John Cale, picked for artistic sensibility, radical edge, confrontation and urban chaos. He will forcefully be all that, though we have our own agenda, which is to stay true to ourselves.
He’s never heard our music, and so we take him to the Joyous Lake in Woodstock to show what we can do. On the way up, in my red ’64 Chevy Impala, we listen to reggae, an accompanying soundtrack.
“That sounds like Radio Ethiopia,” says John, fulfilling a producer’s job of paving a path ahead even while the present is yet to be accomplished.
On September 2, we move our equipment into Electric Lady’s Studio A. Interstellar space murals surround us, the recording chamber lit by the glowing dials of the control room with its navigational mixing board, like the prow of a solar ship. We’re on the night shift, arriving after dark and staying ’til the sky lightens. As the clock tolls 12, we press play on Gloria, try our hand at Redondo Beach. Begun.
Early on, we had to decide how much of a record to make: ie. to layer and edit and cross-fade in the quest to represent a perfect illusion of a live performance, or try to catch the incandescence-ina-bottle that is live performance on the fly, a document as it happens in the moment, as if you are there. “As if ” is the tricky part.
The best records can be both. We were determined to keep freestyle improvisation at the forefront for songs that called for it. Our more structured material, like Redondo Beach, Free Money, Break It Up, even Gloria itself, which had evolved into a sculpted arrangement, could be tracked and overdubbed. Others in our repertoire had little but a starting point. We wanted to see where the adrenal energy of songs like Land and Birdland might voyage as they took flight in a room with science fictional murals of space travel on the walls. “There’s a little place/A place called space,” sang Patti, as we made ready to explore the cosmos.
There is a narrative arc to Horses, a vision called forth in the album’s making, enhanced by the presence of Jimi’s ghost in Electric Lady, its spectral appearance at the end of Land, lying “between the sheets” following “a long Fender whine to a sweet young thing humping on the parking meter leaning on the parking meter,” returning to the start of the record as if asking to be played again. Elegie, a memorial tribute to Hendrix, music written by Blue Öyster Cult’s Allen Lanier, closes the album, the departed remembered and honoured, and an acknowledgment of the long line of rock’n’roll chronology in which we had somewhat presumptuously placed ourselves. We had wanted Chet Baker to play a trumpet solo over its coda, but were unable to afford the fee his manager asked. Some things are best left to the imagination.
As mixing and final touches to Horses spilled over into October, we ran out of studio time. The record was due out in America on November 10, the passing day of Arthur Rimbaud. I remember waking at two in the morning to head to Electric Lady, working until the next session was due in, then trying to catch a few hours sleep.
On the morning of October 11, we mixed a final version of Redondo Beach. As dawn broke over Lower Manhattan, we walked up the stairs, out of the studio, into the future.
Lightning Striking by Lenny Kaye is published by White Rabbit on November 16.