"The time has come to take this moment."

Early in 1978, Patti was poised to break through with Because The Night. All she needed was a national TV spot…

IN 1977, Jimmy Iovine was doing double-duty at the Record Plant in New York: producing Patti Smith’s third album, Easter, at the same time he was engineering Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness On The Edge Of Town. When Springsteen decided to shelve an unfinished love song from his sessions, Iovine took it to Smith, who added lyrics about her new romance with future husband Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith. As Iovine said later, “I knew a girl singing that song, to a guy, was the sexiest thing in the world.” Released in March, 1978, Because The Night became a Top 40 hit. Patti soon got an invitation from Dick Clark, the rock’n’roll-TV impresario, to perform on The American Music Awards. “Dick Clark called my house,” she says. “I guess he got my number from Clive [Davis, the head of Arista]. It was a very big show, really exciting. He was telling me the parameters and said, ‘They’ll get the master [tape] from Clive.’ I said, Oh, no, we can play that song perfectly. He said, ‘You have to lip sync.’ “I said, No, I can’t lip sync. He said, ‘Yes, you can.’ I said, I can’t and I won’t. Mr Clark, I am an artist, and I can’t do that. He said, ‘I’m a businessman, and if you don’t do that, you’ll probably see everything slipping away.’ He wasn’t threatening me. He was simply telling me the facts.” Smith refused to lip sync; Clark produced the show without her. Because The Night – a thundering pledge of devotion fusing the theatrical dimension of Springsteen’s writing with Smith’s explosive sensuality – stalled outside Billboard’s Top 10, at Number 13, with lasting repercussions. “We didn’t get a second single [from the label],” she says. “Things were more difficult in America. That’s OK. I went to Europe. We played for 80,000 people in Italy. In America, Because The Night was a big-enough hit for me. But in terms of airplay and record-company support, in terms of consciousness, that album didn’t take us where one probably should have gone.”