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By Root 865 0

as if the mike stand doubled as a sparring bag. (Patti’s brand of calisthenics would find its musical anthem in “Pumping.”) What other songs were in that first set? “Space Monkey,” to be sure, “The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game” (a Smokey Robinson cover in which Patti substituted “junta” for “hunter”), her tender tribute to her sister, “Kimberly” (how many songs then, before, and now have been dedicated to sisters?), “Redondo Beach” (“where women love other women”—a song and a descriptive phrase that led many young women of lesbian or bi inclination to believe Patti belonged to their sorority), “Piss Factory” (her first single, a prole lament and lyrical gesture of defiance), “Birdland,” and the expansive version of “Gloria” that seemed to camera-pan across the wide-screen horizon on galloping hooves. (It would provide the climactic set piece to her Horses album.) The band wasn’t as tight and motoring as it would become (especially after Jay Dee Daugherty joined on drums), but it also wasn’t the Fugs futzing around, and Patti already had her stage persona pencil-sharpened into a self-conscious, couldn’t-care-less wild child, playing with her zipper like a teenage boy with a horny itch, pistoning her hips, hocking an amoeba blob of spit between songs, scratching her breast as if addressing a stray thought, and, during the incantatory highs, spreading her fingers like a preacher woman summoning the spirits from the Père Lachaise graveyard where Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde were buried to rise and reclaim their former glory. It was one of those nights when the invisible partitions between you and the performance dissolve and you realize, This is something, even if you don’t know what that “something” is yet. There’s a knock at the door that you have to answer.

One thing I learned from Pauline was that when something hits you that high and hard, you have to be able to travel wherever the point of impact takes you and be willing to go to the wall with your enthusiasm and over it if need be, even if you look foolish or “carried away,” because your first shot at writing about it may be the only chance to make people care. It’s better to be thumpingly wrong than a muffled drum with a measured beat. Now, Patti didn’t need me championing her in the Voice—it wasn’t a rescue operation, like Pauline going to bat for Bonnie and Clyde after Bosley Crowther clubbed it in the New York Times; Patti’s breakout probably would have been able to hop from pony to pony no matter who supplied the initial press boost—but I needed to feel that I could write about something new and still forming that mattered, something that I could help make matter. Readers and fellow writers get a mean rise out of demolition work of overblown popularities or grandiose follies, but it’s the trail-scout discoveries that a critic cracks into daylight that make the difference after all the balloons have popped, whether it’s Edmund Wilson’s championing of his brother Princetonian F. Scott Fitzgerald or Randall Jarrell’s rescuing Robert Frost from the hayloft of platitudes and Yankee pith to which his poetry had been consigned; a critic remembered only for his damnings, however brilliant and left bleeding his victims, has failed, leaving behind little more than a patch of crabgrass with a few Easter eggs scattered around.

So, leaning on the throttle to hurry up the future, I reviewed Patti’s performance in the Voice (accompanied by a photo of what looked like Patti in a white Communion dress) with all flags flying:

She’s a knockout performer: funny, spooky, a true off-the-wall original. Like the character in Dickens, she do the police in different voices. One moment she’s telling an agreeably dopey joke about kangaroos (“… and Momma Kangaroo looked down and exclaimed, ‘Oh, my pocket’s been picked!’ ”) and in the next she’s bopping into the scatological scat of “Piss Factory.”

Because of her notorious poetry readings, her reputation is largely as a crazy-as-birds stage speaker, but it’s clear she’s going to be an extraordinary rock singer, maybe even a great