Lucking Out - James Wolcott [57]
—from my Village Voice piece “A Conservative Impulse in the New Rock Underground” (August 18, 1975)
My admission into the orphanage began as an assignment like any other, a pop-in/write-up of eight hundred words. The year before, the Voice sent me to review some poet-chick fronting a drummer-less rock band, a setup I pictured as some macrobiotic Beat type with bird’s-nest hair declaiming her lyrics from loose-leaf pages while a lot of noisy noodling went on in the background. How I drew this mental sketch on the basis of near-zero actual familiarity I can’t recall, although I did see the poet Anne Waldman read once in the East Village, standing on one leg like a stork as her voice ascended into incantation. What I can recall is that there was some pro and con among those with actual working knowledge of the downtown scene as to whether this rock-poetess was a true original talent, a magpie on the make, or something betwixt, a combination of thin-lipped calculation and burning vocation, like Bob Dylan after he had outgrown his Woody Guthrie britches and began playing his personas like a cardsharp. Shortly after entering below the awning of a bar and club with an initialed name, a place I’d never been to on a street that still looked like a Robert Frank photograph of raw, spilling night, I gingerly installed myself for a bar-stool view of the stage, which was stationed left of the aisle and barely large enough for a barbershop quartet. The atmosphere was most unmagical, worthy of a cheap paperback set on skid row. It had a palpable texture, this prosy ambience, a bit of World War I trench-warfare leftover aroma of dung, urine, and damp carcass, but it was the seventies and not a time to be picky. Then I saw this visage, this vision, shark-finning the length of the bar, and I knew this had to be Her. A scarf was knotted around her throat, and her hair was raven; her chin cocked directly at her destination point, doorward.
Patti—one of those performers whose first name alone was enough to spell it all—projected star quality, had willed it into being and possession with a bite of hauteur. What Madonna would master and Lady Gaga after her would embellish into jeweled armor, Patti Smith flashed like a blade: the crowned awareness that to become a true star is to act like a star from the moment of self-conception and let the world play catch-up. Even when chewing gum, she seemed to be chewing it for the ages. Patti looked formidable and imperious until she grinned, the sort of equine grin Pauline Kael treasured in Lily Tomlin but goofier, like a latch that allowed her whole body to hang loose.
That grin was retracted before Patti’s first set under a game face of gunslinger intent as she took the stage and wagged around, wiping her nose now and then with a sawing finger, while her musicians tuned up as best they were able. Her lead guitarist, who shared Patti’s sapling thinness, was Lenny Kaye, he of the Yeshiva-student spectacles, whose name was better known to me than Patti’s. I had been reading his articles for years in Hit Parader, Creem, and Rolling Stone (where he reviewed Exile on Main Street), and every rock cultist had a copy of Nuggets, his influential, indispensable double-album compilation of psychedelic hits and rarities, many of which sounded like garbled satellite transmissions from the weird beyond. On bass was Ivan Kral, on piano the nimbus-curled Richard “DNV” Sohl, one of those fallen angels with more room to fall. (He would die of a heart attack at the age of thirty-seven.) As soon as the band revved its engines, it was clear that this wouldn’t be bop prosody set to a bongo beat; the opening number, the Velvet Underground’s “We’re Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together,” came out of the corner punching, Patti hitting the word “shoot” in the Harlem heroin stanza—“Everyone shoot shoot shoot”—with a right-left combination