Patti Smith's Horses (9 page)

When the infinite servitude of woman shall have ended, when she will be able to live by and for herself; then, man—hitherto abominable—having given her his freedom, she too will be a poet. Woman will discover the unknown. Will her world be different from ours? She will discover strange, unfathomable things, repulsive, delicious. We shall take them, we shall understand them. (Rimbaud to Paul Demeny, May 15, 1871; Rimbaud, 1957)

Toward the end of the year, Middle Earth books had issued a second selection of Smith’s poetry. Titled
Kodak
and limited to a hundred copies, this slim volume is notable for its inclusion of an early version of the lyrics to “Redondo Beach.” Resuming the themes of criminality, violent death, and gender ambiguity that had marked her work since the first St. Mark’s performance, Smith concludes the collection with a poem called “balance.” Rejecting narrative continuity for a scattergun
collection of images and impressions, the speaker of this poem seems constantly on the move. No sooner is a position arrived at than it is passed over, exchanged for yet another subject position. The “I” of the poem, the sole letter granted the privilege of capitalization, is nevertheless “a surface skimmer,” never identical with itself, but fixed only for an instant in the image to which it is attached. Like a Kodak photograph. Eventually, shedding her “genet-skin,” the speaker bursts, seeking the “olympic formula” that will release her from the burden of imposed identity. Taking Rimbaud’s words to heart, Smith ponders the nature of her freedom; knowing “a chance must not be missed” (Smith, 1994), she stands on the cusp, ready to make her leap.

Toward the end of 1972, Patti Smith published a third book of poetry,
Witt
(pronounced white). With the help of a booking agent, Jane Friedman, she was now making regular appearances, for which she was paid $5 a night, at the Mercer Arts Center, where the New York Dolls, the gutter saints of sequins, satin, and platform boots, were the house band. The decision to allow a poet to open up for a rock ’n’ roll act was bold, to say the least, but Smith’s raucous New Jersey delivery, hollered through cupped hands for want of a microphone, combined with her unusual appearance and the often shocking subject matter of her verse, went down well with the trash rock scene. In interviews from this period she compares herself with Vladmir Mayakovsky, the flamboyant early-twentieth-century Russian poet who chanted provocative poetry through a megaphone, making crowds riotous. Key to Smith’s success at the Mercer was a sophisticated
grasp of stagecraft, honed during her time as an off-Broadway actor. Using techniques similar to those devised by Antonin Artaud, she learned how to affect an audience at a subliminal level, creating “a powerful dramatic tension by alternately scaring and eliciting protective feelings from the audience” (Hiss and McClelland, 1975). Impressed with Smith’s ability to win over the Dolls’ crowd, Jane Friedman agreed to act as her manager, a decision that in retrospect would be of crucial importance as the artist made the transition from poet to rock performer.

Nineteen seventy-three was very much a pivotal year in the history of American popular culture. In a pop scene dominated by Laurel Canyon winsomeness and supergroup bombast, cutting-edge groups like the New York Dolls were in a minority, and even then, their appeal was largely reactive, a self-conscious throwback to the primal joys of early rock ’n’ roll. Near the beginning of the year, Patti Smith expressed her disillusionment with the rock scene in a review article for
Creem:
“Rock n roll is a dream soup. what’s your brand? mine has turned over. mine is almost at the bottom of the bowl. early arthur lee. smokey robinson. blonde on blonde. its gone. the formula is changed” (1973a). Typically, when a cultural form reaches exhaustion, artists turn to satire, parody, and homage. Thus the Dolls could be read, variously, as a camp parody of the Rolling Stones
and
as an attempt to rekindle the fire of the 60s. In any case, as Smith acknowledged, in an industry given over to the production of homogeneity, only the dirty, the dangerous, and the knowing could be trusted to lead the way. What was needed, then, was a “formula” that would enable the artist to negotiate disillusionment without succumbing either to depression or to unfounded optimism.
Initially, at least, Smith, like many underground artists of the period, found a way forward in the cabaret tradition. With its mixture of reverence and mockery, self-reflection and self-display, cabaret enabled the performer to work on a variety of levels, providing an outlet for expression while avoiding nostalgia and naivety. In the absence of the new, cabaret at least provided a means for the artist to work through his or her malaise. In Smith’s case, this would involve negotiating a sequence of stark oppositions: the raw power of rock ’n’ roll vs. the subtleties of theatrical song; the pure,
id
-enjoyment of comedy versus the ethical import of tragedy; the spontaneity of oral delivery versus the precision of the written word; and the comfort of conventional narrative technique vs. the disorientating effects of symbolism, “cut-up,” and other avant-garde practices.

Over the coming months, Smith began to explore this new formula. Influenced as much by Johnny Carson and Muhammad Ali as by Brecht and Rimbaud, she began to interweave satirical social and political commentary with readings from her poems and renditions of jazz standards, the latter performed to the accompaniment of a toy piano. Occasionally styled in black satin and feather boas, this new act paid homage both to the
Sprechstimme
tradition and to the beloved torch singers of her mother. The 1972 musical film
Cabaret
, loosely based on Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin stories, may also have been an important influence. With America in the grip of post-Watergate paranoia, rising oil prices, and economic meltdown,
Cabaret’
s depiction of a doomed love affair, set in a romantically decaying Weimer republic, could not have been more apposite. In particular, the world of
Cabaret
held up a mirror to the lost souls of early 70s New York City.
With Andy Warhol as their emcee and
Interview
magazine as their guide, the creative underworld eschewed the threadbare profundities of modernism and embraced instead the postmodernist cult of celebrity, with its emphasis on surface, style, and effect. Now, as Richard Hell would put it in an article for
Hit Parader
, the “greatest talent is for attracting media attention.… The art-form of the future is celebrityhood” (Bockris, 1998). In the same article Hell also writes of the increasing “self-consciousness” of contemporary culture; rock ’n’ roll, in particular, is singled out for its “studied” and “careful design,” its stress on “image” and “allusion.”

But at the core of the postmodernist response to social decay, there was a darker, elegiac mood. On Lou Reed’s
Berlin
album, for example, released at the close of the previous year, the flip superficiality of his 1972
Transformer
set has given way to almost unbearable sense of loss. True, the presidency had been revealed as a farce and the Vietnam War as a tragic embarrassment, but the prevailing mood of sardonic self-consciousness was underscored by feelings of sadness, fear, and anxiety. It seems significant then that Smith, whose comic monologues segued seamlessly into the fraught interior dramas of poems such as “rape,” “star fever,” and “lono lord,” should be hired as support for the New York Dolls. With her complex mixture of coyness, bardic wisdom and cool, nervous wit, the poet performer highlighted the emotional instability residing within the three-chord dementia of songs like “Personality Crisis,” “Vietnamese Baby,” “Frankenstein,” and “Trash.” But while the titles of the Dolls’ songs conveyed the period’s sense of fragmentation, outrage, monstrosity, and waste, Smith would come to embody this sense, albeit in a minor key, via her participation in the Saks Fifth Avenue
fashion show. As she recounted to Penny Green, in Warhol’s
Interview
magazine:

An image is an image. I thought the whole Saks show was a great honor. To me it was like Midsummer Night’s Dream, all of those costumes. In order to be a successful part of that I had to get into that rhythm. After the show, I sang a little song with this fur boa wrapped around me. I dropped my velvet coat to the floor and was wearing a long, ratty tee-shirt and all the women gasped. I modelled it just like they did. I knew that in some aesthetic, in some vein, I looked good.… I did the song “Baby’s Insurance.” (Green, 1973)

Beneath the velvet and furs, the hobo, beyond the boom, the bust. By stripping away the trappings of wealth to reveal the “ratty tee-shirt” below, Smith had exposed the vertiginous rhythms of capital, causing the midtown women to gasp in recognition as, in verse—“babies insurance” is the first line of the poem “gibralto”—from
Witt
, she outlined the pathos of their economic servitude.

Smith’s growing awareness of the possibilities inherent in performance was beginning to feed back into her writing.
Witt
, for example, is distinguished from her earlier collections by its use of dense, Burroughs-like prose formations and a preference for Whitmanesque extended lines. The effect, in poems such as “translators,” “dream of rimbaud,” and “judith revisited,” is simultaneously conversational and declarative; reminiscent, as the critic Kate Ballen (1977) notes, of “the hebraic rhythms” in Allen Ginsberg’s
Kaddish
(1961). Less constrained by the 4/4 rhythms of her previous “rock ’n’ roll” poems, the new work lent itself well to public performance, enabling the poet to adapt her delivery to suit the prevailing
mood. Asked by Penny Green if she had “found her rhythm” Smith replied, somewhat elliptically:

The stuff I wrote for my first book,
Seventh Heaven
… what I was dealing with was rhythm. That’s how I got the reputation as being a rock poet. The rhythm was banal, rock and roll was what I knew best. Now my work is completely different. I found a certain rhythm which finds his rhythm, can either defy nature or commune with it. He can go anyway he wants, because he has a solid rhythm. (Green, 1973)

The demotic tone of the “song” performed at the climax of the Saks fashion show (“you ask for love you get horseshit. you get too much you don’t get any. sooner or later everyone takes a rap in this racket”) conveys the sense in which Smith, at this time, was allowing her voice to discover its own rhythm, choosing in the instant whether to slow down or increase the pace of a line, adding or deleting emphasis as required. But while this new voice was liberated, in formal terms, from the predictability of rock ’n’ roll, it was also, in its way, becoming more musical. Partly through her interest in free jazz, and partly as a result of her ongoing fascination with torch song, Smith was learning how to measure a phrase, how to stretch or compress a syllable in order to convey a certain effect. She was also becoming more adept at improvisation. By working herself into a dreamlike state where language could, as it were, speak for itself, Smith was tapping directly into the primordial, myth-generating part of her mind. As a poet, she had drawn stimulation from playing certain records repetitively:
Aftermath
(1966),
Blonde on Blonde
(1966),
Electric Ladyland
(1968). But to realize this technique in performance would require a more adaptable form of musical accompaniment; a band would
be needed that could respond to her verbal flow. With Jane Friedman’s encouragement, Smith began to seek out backing musicians.

She didn’t have to look far as, not long after the Saks show, she renewed her friendship with Lenny Kaye. The journalist, Amy Gross, writing in
Mademoiselle
in September 1975, recalls seeing one of the duo’s early shows at the cabaret club Reno Sweeney’s on West Thirteenth Street. For this performance, Smith took pains to emphasize the darker aspects of her work, directing her anger, once again, at the contrasts between threat and vulnerability, midtown and downtown, rags and riches:

Black energy, black clothes. A skinny black jacket. A black shirt buttoned up to the neck. Black peg pants. Black hair, shaggy, coarse. Her face was white and hollowed.

I took only a few notes. “I’m a bad boy”—a line from a song. “A woman with every vice divine”—a line from a poem.… A song in praise of cocaine—the rhythm was an itch, speed itself.

Mid-act [possibly during a version of “Paint It Black”], she dropped her jacket, stripped off her shirt. Stripped down to a white T-shirt, stretched-out and ripped, exposing one bare skimmed-milk white shoulder—disconcertingly vulnerable. Her hands were vulnerable too—frail fingers squeezed white on the microphone, waving in the air like seaweed, the nails bitten far down.… A last poem—a violent fantasy of sex with “Judith Revisited” in a football stadium: “I kick her again, again …”

Nice ladies behind me squirmed in discomfort. I felt both ravaged and exhilarated. And, like I said, shocked—not by
what she said but by the fact that she actually said it In front of all these nice, these nicely dressed people. She was a woman who dared to get up on stage and not smile—not aim to please. She was a dare: be bad, let it out, do it (Gross, 1975)

Following a “Rock ’n’ Rimbaud” performance in November at Le Jardin, at which the duo reprised their St. Mark’s numbers together with new songs, such as Hank Ballard’s “Annie Had a Baby,” Smith and Kaye began to perform regularly together, ending the year with a four-night stand at Max’s Kansas City in support of the protest singer Phil Ochs. Still very much an “act,” rather than a fully fledged musical outfit, the duo continued to explore the possibilities of the spoken word, alternating the songs with poems from
Seventh Heaven, Kodak
, and the recently published
Witt
.

A recording attributed to this period, featuring Lenny Kaye on guitar and Patti Smith on vocals and, conjecturally, on overdubbed clarinet, features renditions of three early poems: “Brian Jones,” “Prayer,” and “Oath.” Kaye’s distorted, atonal guitar playing anticipates the feedback collages of Lou Reed’s
Metal Machine Music
by a good year, but it is the poise and assurance of Smith’s vocal performance that most impresses. In contrast to the somewhat gauche, if appealing, performance delivered the previous year at St. Mark’s Church, her voice is confident and assured, the reading of “Oath,” with its Rimbaudesque “shit on god” motif, being especially effective. In this case, however, the Rimbaud influence is detectable not only in the lyrical content, but also in its noisy accompaniment. Refining still further the interest in presymbolic or a-signifying aspects of sound, the duo’s performance may thus be read as an actualization of the “whistling,” “rumbling,” and “hissing” that Rimbaud, in
the poem “Being Beauteous” (1886), identifies as the “hoarse music” of “the world” (Rimbaud, 1957; see Jaurès Noland, 1995). In a related sense, it evokes also Nietzsche’s emphasis on “musical dissonance” as a mode of Dionysian, or tragic, delight (Nietzsche 1956), a proposition that we will reconsider in further detail in
chapter 5
.