Lucking Out - James Wolcott [59]
And her body is as eloquent as her voice. Scrawny and angular in repose, it becomes supple and expressive when the music sways. Dressed in black jeans, black coat, and loose T-shirt, she dances with a smooth sassiness, her boyish hips tenderly pistoning, her bamboo-thin arms punctuating the air for emphasis. The performing area at CBGB is as tiny as a bathroom tile so it’ll be interesting to see her hit her stride on a larger stage.
… Rock fans are going to be enraptured making all the allusive connections in her work; one of the best songs—which begins with the entrance of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse and ends with a burial in the horse latitudes—is a surreal fusion of rock mythos and horse/heroin imagery.
So would it be too awful to say that Fame is her steed if Patti Smith chooses to mount? Well, the horse might be the perfect emblem for her career. “I ride the stallion thru the dust storm” is the way she begins a poem entitled “Mustang.” “Get off your mustang, Sally, is what the women told her at the Piss Factory.” But Patti didn’t listen, Patti said screw it, and skinny schizzy Patti is on her way to becoming the wild mustang of American rock.
Okay, true, granted, I slapped a bit of mustard on that fastball, especially in the last sentence (“schizzy” was a pure Pauline-ism). But it was the last great hurrah period of rock-crit tell-it-from-the-mountain epiphanies, and few of us were immune. Only a year earlier a pop music critic high on the totem pole named Jon Landau had pronounced, “I saw rock & roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen” (Arise, ye faithful!), and when Springsteen (with Landau now serving as his record producer and horse whisperer) went on to make the covers of Time and Newsweek the same week, an unprecedented coup, I muttered to myself at the newsstand: “I have seen the future of rock, and now we’re stuck with him.” It wasn’t that I disliked Springsteen—how could you dislike a scrappy car mechanic of a singer-songwriter-showman so driven, enthusiastic, passionate, embracing, and earnest? It’d be like ragging on Thanksgiving. But it was his very earnestness, his eager-to-serve sincerity, that dulled the tips of my nerves even when I was riveted by one of his legendary performances at the Bottom Line in 1975, the stint that has lived in the annals of Bruciana. I remember checking myself during one of his big rousers with the question, “This is incredibly exciting, so why am I not excited?” It just seemed too smoothly assembled from every rock fan’s dream kit of salvation. Eight hundred years later, he’s still never awakened me, his husky voice intoning like something chiseled on Mount Rushmore now, an august chunk of Americana.
When my review hit the pages of the Voice, Patti was happy, the band was happy, her manager, Jane Friedman, was happy, CBGB’s was happy, I was happy, everybody was happy, and it was nice not feeling like the bad guy in print for a change. Normally, I would have pocketed that happy outcome and moved on to the next target spot, but I kept returning to CBGB’s to catch Patti’s sets, sometimes two a night, chatting with Patti and Lenny, the neon beer signs lined above the bar, the click of pool balls, and the smell of wood, beer, urine, sweat, mop water, and time ill spent reminding me oddly, fondly, of the American Legion hall where my parents did so much of their drinking while I fed the pinball machine. A former Hells Angels hangout, CBGB’s still hosted the occasional Angel or three. Word was that the owner, Hilly Kristal, and the Angels had an arrangement in which they could drink for free and in return wouldn’t kill any of us, which seems fair and reasonable. Their arrivals and departures were still intimidating, in particular the entrance of one glowering, fur-bearing boulder