Bread of angels, p.10
Bread of Angels, page 10
Saluting the departed, Elegy was recorded on the fifth anniversary of Jimi Hendrix’s death. Flawlessly attentive, Richard accompanied me on piano. In the vocal booth I faltered and couldn’t help but wish I was a more accomplished singer, but John and the band encouraged me to continue. The music was written by Allen Lanier, a member of Blue Öyster Cult, who added his ethereal guitar lines. I had envisioned Chet Baker playing the last notes of Elegy, but we hadn’t the budget for his fee. Yet somehow the call of his trumpet remains within the silent ground of the unattained.
In sequencing the album, I strove, however abstractly, to present the illusion of a cinematic experience. I chose to open with our version of Gloria, claiming the right to create, without apology, from a stance beyond gender or social definition, but not beyond the responsibility to create something of worth. The liner notes served as a kind of poetic manifesto. In writing them I thought of my brother, equally torn between two genders. When young I had lamented that I wasn’t a boy. It wasn’t that I really wanted to be a boy; I wanted the choices that boys seemed to have, but as myself. I wanted freedom and as a child it meant wearing flannel shirts and blue sneakers instead of red, to dress and renounce as I wished. In adolescence, it meant shunning makeup, nail polish, shaving my legs, being groomed for suitable vocations. At twenty it meant defying any predetermined model of feminine behavior set up for us. That is what I resisted, and that is what I fled.
Todd’s conflict was quite different. His was the unseen dress. The first slipped from a sister’s closet and hidden beneath blue jeans and comic books, forbidden packs of cigarettes and baseball cards. In time a missing blouse and an unhemmed skirt, the dark blue one whose stitches unraveled and was in the sewing pile and then one day just disappeared. None of us were aware that his masculinity wrestled with itself. The pool player with his sports page and cigarette dangling, suddenly overcome with waves of anxiety, the need to slip into the garments of Rachael, the name of Deckard’s replicant love in Blade Runner, the name he chose for himself. Todd could not flee for Rachael was within him; her female heart beating beneath his ART/RAT tee shirt.
We were brought up in a humanist atmosphere, and the need for openness echoed our parents. I appealed to him to come to New York City, where a far more sympathetic community dwelled, and work with the band. He soon packed his bags and joined our small technical crew and for a time seemed much happier.
In finishing the album there were continuing challenges that were met head-on. There was concern about how I was presenting myself and the art department airbrushed Robert Mapplethorpe’s cover photograph, smoothing out my hair and touching up facial idiosyncrasies. I refused any such makeover and confronted Clive; Robert’s original image was quickly restored. Keeping an eye on all things I rewrote the ad copy to better suit the band: three chords merged with the power of the word, a phrase that was soon to be quoted as much as my lyrics.
I wasn’t ungrateful for the opportunity to record but had much to protect. The poet stands alone, but in merging with a band is obliged to surrender to the wonder of teamwork. I now had loyal allies, just as I had experienced when young with my sibling army. Our band had birthed a work together. Despite any failings we held to the desire to forge something new. I understood as we recorded it was not going to appeal to the mainstream, but I felt I could reach out and connect with the fringes of society which was also my society. We hadn’t made our record to garnish fame and fortune. We made it for the art rats known and unknown, the marginalized, the shunned, the disowned. It was for the girls grasping the banner, the neo boys of the future, those dropping in from Venus and Mars. I decided on the title Horses, taken from Land’s improvisation. The horses represented the stampeding current of the world, coming in from all directions, heralding the entrance of Johnny and all the pitfalls and possibilities of youth.
On October 10th we worked through the night mixing Redondo Beach, completing our task. As Lenny and I stepped out into dawn we could not help but reflect how far we had traveled from our first connection at St. Mark’s Church. Horses was to be pressed in Pitman, New Jersey, at the Columbia record plant where in 1967 I had been unsuccessful in securing a job. My mother’s closest friend called her from the plant to say she was slated to press my record. Unfortunately, an oil shortage triggered a vinyl shortage, and the album due October 20th, Arthur Rimbaud’s birthday, had to be rescheduled. Clive Davis called personally to inform me as he knew I would be disappointed.
–When will it come out? I asked.
–November 10th is the next available date.
–That’s fine, I said. It’s Rimbaud’s passing day.
–How did you do that!
–I didn’t, I laughed, Rimbaud did.
* * *
—
When I first headed to New York I sought to be an artist, but destiny led me to the precipice of public life. In this respect I felt chiefly a worker and believed our struggle a privilege. There were walls everywhere, the cracks were formed by others. All we had to do was kick with all our power, topple them, clear the rubble and create space for the neo rats that I already felt coming. Horses signaled freedom, the artlessness of an age. The fellows packed up the equipment, closed our practice room and we took to the road. Wake up! Wake up! Words circling the Earth uttered by another kind of Paul Revere. I had new dark glasses, charms, sweet angels stitched on my sleeve. The hyena was showing her wet teeth.
Dancing Barefoot
Always do what will cost you the most.
Simone Weil
It was the bicentennial year, 1976, the celebration of the Revolution. We were touring Horses riding straight into the future. It was a freewheeling time, hanging out with William Burroughs at his bunker on the Bowery, watching Television at CBGB, plotting a chaotic future with my brother Todd, and crossing America with a rock and roll band. Our country had its great failings, the shame of Vietnam, racial injustice, and sexual discrimination. But we reveled in America’s cultural contributions. Rock and roll, jazz, activism, Abstract Expressionism, the Beats. It was a time when I felt my own power and believed in our mission.
Touring Horses along the West Coast, we were accompanied by Paul Getty, and the French actress Maria Schneider. Maria, much adored for her performances in The Passenger and Last Tango in Paris, with intense black eyes and a mass of unruly dark hair, was a mirror in a white shirt and black tie. Paul was the grandson of one of the richest oil magnates in the world and the victim of a famously botched kidnap in Italy. William Burroughs had introduced him to me, a pale acolyte, the youngest passing through his portal of saints. I was quite fond of Paul with his wild red hair, freckled skin, and eyes like mine, slightly cast. William had asked me to keep an eye on him, which was virtually impossible, for Paul was brilliant, intuitive, and reckless. We found like-minded people in San Francisco then spent a few riotous nights playing the Roxy in Los Angeles. The ravenous scene was unique to L.A., devouring as much as it gave. Paul, Maria, and I must have appeared a curious triangle during the band’s stay in West Hollywood at the Tropicana Hotel. We all loved it there, it was cheap, gritty, and had seen all kinds of action since the days the Doors recorded L.A. Woman just across the highway.
On March 9, 1976, we kissed Maria goodbye and boarded a plane for our first concerts in the Midwest. I wore a black pleated silk dress that Paul had bought me at Bendel’s. It was the same dress that Sylvia Kristel wore in the film Emmanuelle, only hers was cream. It became my uniform, a five-hundred-dollar dress I paired with my black Horses jacket and combat boots.
We landed in Detroit on a windy Tuesday afternoon. The crew left for the Ford Auditorium to set up our equipment and the rest of us went straight to a welcome party hosted by the Detroit musician community at the Lafayette Coney Island. I didn’t particularly like parties, but I was lured by their legendary hot dogs and arrived with Paul and the band. The people were very welcoming. We stayed awhile, had their deservedly lauded hot dogs, said goodbye to all, and headed toward the door. That’s when I first saw him. He stood by a white radiator in a blue overcoat. I noticed the threads where a button was missing. That fleeting moment was to redirect the whole of my life. Lenny introduced us simply: Fred Smith Patti Smith, Patti Smith Fred Smith. He had lank brown hair and eyes like water. He placed the button in my hand, and I wordlessly declared it treasure. I felt a gravitational force; my being truly shaken, kindling my desire for the One, the better savage. Fate had touched us; I knew in that moment he was the one I would marry.
Soon after we checked into the hotel, Paul gathered his things and bid me farewell. When I asked him why he was leaving he looked straight into me and said you and that guy are meant to be together. I feebly answered that I didn’t even know him but truthfully could hardly protest. He smiled as he left, Paul with his pale freckled skin, one ear, and long tangle of red hair, a fallen clairvoyant archangel.
* * *
—
Fred Sonic Smith was born in West Virginia in his grandfather’s kitchen. His small and feisty grandfather, once a coal miner, delivered him because the midwife was unable to get there in time. Fred’s mother was intensely religious. His father was a rough and ready teamster who loved Bill Monroe and knew every Hank Williams song. Good natured and hardworking, he had harbored a mean streak; father and son often physically clashed from the time Fred was a boy.
In high school Fred was extremely athletic. His boxing coach was impressed with his defensive agility and long reach. But privately aware of his suppressed rage, Fred bowed out, fearing he might hurt someone. He was also scouted by the Tigers’ farm team because of his tremendous throwing arm. He was overjoyed but conflicted, for at the same time he was co-forming the band that was to become the revolutionary MC5. At sixteen he fled from home, school, sports, and the draft. Wielding his guitar as his weapon, Fred’s conflicting emotions dominated his playing. When we first met, I had no idea who he was, but I knew instantly he would be my life. Such is the terrible mystery of love, that draws us from all that we know.
Fred with his grandfather, West Virginia
I didn’t see him again until December, after our second concert in Detroit. Our band and crew joined local musicians at the bar in the Renaissance hotel. Fred took my hand, and we slipped away, entered the scenic glass and steel elevator, and he pressed the twenty-fifth floor. Those moments in the slow-rise elevator were our first alone together, and I can still recall the intense beating of my heart. With the panorama of the Motor City growing distant below, our far-off courtship began, one that would depend more on trust and patience than actual presence. Letters, telepathic wishes, and occasional phone calls at a time when long-distance calling was prohibitively expensive. On tour in some obscure town spying a phone booth, I would pocket everyone’s change, stop our tour bus by the side of a road, and call, even for a few minutes, just to hear his voice.
Though it kept us apart the opportunity to tour the world was a blessing for the penniless traveler. So many pages from Around the World in 1,000 Pictures turning. Yet nothing had prepared us for the response of the young in Brussels, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Germany, all over Europe. Lenny and I spent as much time as possible talking with kids that gathered outside our hotels, in the streets, or standing in line before a concert. We answered their questions, encouraging them to start their own bands. We happily collided with known and yet unknown members of rising new bands: Siouxsie Sioux, members of the Slits and the Clash.
Sonic’s Rendezvous Band was touring on the other side of the world. Fred and I saw each other when we could; in the early days of our courtship I would fly to Detroit, even for two days to be together. The closer we got the more he seemed to test my faith in him. When we left his car to have tires changed, we took a brief walk along the highway. He stopped and held out his hand. Do you trust me, he asked. Yes, I said, taking his hand as he led me halfway across the road. I let him take me in his arms, closed my eyes, and waltzed with him. Even as the traffic intensified, we continued to dance unharmed on the median. At an abandoned reservoir we navigated a stony path in the available moonlight. Looking up, Fred raised his hands toward the stars and seemed to rearrange them, bringing them closer, and turning them in his hands. These moments felt like hours, yet were mere seconds, our minds as one. We did not speak of them; we lived them. Fred could be abstract, futuristic, with the hands of a musician, a mathematician, a magician.
More than ever my writing life was usurped, living fiercely in the present, tour upon tour, a physical external time when the writer deferred to the performer, the pen to the electric guitar. For a time, I lost contact with language; my Fender Duo-Sonic spoke for me, moaning and screeching feedback in place of words. I felt somewhat conflicted at the sight of my journals, containing little else save scattered lyrics and abandoned letters to Fred. Rimbaud had proclaimed himself scourge and seer, advancing then intentionally shooting himself in the foot, then walking upright. My feet were riddled with imaginary holes. I felt a walking contradiction negotiating a desire to stand still yet compelled to race into the future. Todd was always by my side. Throughout childhood, he stepped back allowing me to take on the roles of hero, general, king, always being the dedicated first soldier, first knight.
I embraced my responsibility as the leader, but one who broke bread with her troops, accessible to the crew and the people. As the band evolved, Todd was declared HOC, head of crew; our years of play had prepared us for our roles. Todd carried out orders, transporting guitars, amplifiers, and delivering late-night reports. On our nights off I would watch with pleasure as he’d chalk the end of his pool cue, cigarette dangling, and with his ice blue eyes fixed on a ball, clear the table to the admiring curses of his opponents. On the road I carried the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, mapping out our campaign. Todd prepared my way, magnifying my position of the weary field marshal. We negotiated rapturous crowds, the swarms of kids calling to us outside our hotels at night. Sometimes after a concert we’d all gather in my room, laughing until dawn about nothing. It wasn’t happiness, but something at the time that seemed more intoxicating; it was abandon.
In between tours, we were called to take a break and make another record. I hadn’t banked on a follow-up to Horses and struggling to write lyrics for another album I laid out the things that were on my mind: famine in Ethiopia, the fate of a boxer, Rimbaud in Abyssinia, and the sonic language of the electric guitar. I received a letter from a girl named Andi Ostrowe, who had read that we were about to record Radio Ethiopia. She had recently returned from the Peace Corps serving in a southern rural village in Ethiopia. We met up and talked of the current revolution, the deposing of Haile Selassie, the destructive military coup, and the city of Harar where Rimbaud had been a coffee trader. She was small and sincere with dark hair and dark eyes. I was moved by her pictures and keepsakes from the country I had yearned to journey to and promised to invite her to the studio.
I chose Jack Douglas to produce the album believing he was a good match for both sides of the band’s personality. We could be unrestrained and at times incomprehensible yet benefited by Ivan’s relatable song structures: Ask the Angels was written for a thriving network of kids off the grid with a special nod to the youth of Los Angeles. The reggae inspired Ain’t It Strange was a confrontational invitation to an impossible dance. The emotional Pissing in a River swerved from referencing the past to interrogating the future. The greatest challenge was our title track which I envisioned as entirely improvisational, primarily driven by Lenny’s churning riff then veering into the seemingly unattainable. I urged the band to take the impassioned risks I so admired in the work of Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman. We made a few passes but not satisfied we all agreed to wait and try again.
On August 9th, Jack grounded us as a hurricane was fast approaching New York City. I paced the floor like a hemmed-in coyote feeling the effects of both the coming storm and the full moon and was swept by a premonition that we would get the title track that night. I called Jack and after a short standoff he headed to the city during the first throes of Hurricane Belle. Todd rounded up the band and I packed my Duo-Sonic, called Andi, and we all met at the Record Plant. Jack wedged towels under the control room doors in case the heavy rains caused flooding. At midnight, the deluge peaking, we plunged together into the well of our most ambitious undertaking. I had no words, just a mental map of the sufferings of a people, the death rattle of one of our greatest poets, and the desire for us to unleash a torrent of our own. Midway Lenny’s Big Muff pedal crashed, a true disaster as it was the core of his sound. It turned out that Andi played guitar and had a Muff; she braved the weather and saved the day. By three in the morning four inches of rain had come down flooding the streets, high winds had knocked over trees and power lines, and we had successfully added to nature’s chaotic touchdown. Twelve minutes of propelling distortion, Jay Dee’s thundering drums and splashing cymbals, Ivan’s pumping bass, and as my whining Fender Duo-Sonic drew altruistic swords with the mournful wailings of Lenny’s Stratocaster, Richard Sohl introduced an unexpected melodic shift creating the melancholic beauty of Abyssinia. Through it all the thread of our collective consciousness had not snapped as intentional babbling channeled famine in Ethiopia, the mallet and hard arms of the sculptor Brâncuşi, and the last words of Arthur Rimbaud.
