Lucking Out - James Wolcott [65]
Something is definitely going on here and I think I know what it is. During one of her sets Patti made the seemingly disconnected remark, “Don’t give up on Arnie Palmer.” But when the laughter subsided, she added, “The greats are still the greatest.” Yes, of course! All her life Patti Smith has had rock and roll in her blood—she has been, like the rest of us, a fan; this is part of her connection with her audience—and now she’s returning what rock has given her with the full force of her love. Perhaps Dylan perceives that this passion is a planet wave of no small sweep. Yet what I cherished most about Patti’s engagement was not the pounding rock-and-roll intensity but a throwaway gesture of camaraderie. When Lenny Kaye was having difficulty setting up his guitar between numbers, Patti paced around, joked around, scratched her stomach, scratched her hair—still Kaye was not quite ready. “I don’t really mind,” she told the audience. “I mean, Mick would wait all night for Keith.”
Keith was a frequent comparison point for Patti, who once lamented that she had to go onstage and perform even when she had her period—“Keith doesn’t have these problems.”
I actually left the sanctity of studio apartment and black cat to catch Patti on out-of-town appearances, at a time when audience reception for a New York poet-rocker was a roll of the dice, the dominant bands being mega-hair arena rockers who bombasticized everything they flagellated and drew upon what the poet Philip Larkin once derisively called the “myth kitty,” invoking the combination of Nibelungen, Camelot, and Satan’s barbecue pit that Spinal Tap would turn into a tacky arcade. By contrast, the Patti Smith Group looked like a scarecrow outfit with aspirations that would barely form a bicep—abjuring the Nietzschean hard-on of heavy metal and scratching an artier, jazzier upward path, “arty” and “jazzy” being what so many mid-seventies rock fans most wanted to avoid when they went out at night to get laid and wasted, as hormones and Kiss intended. But by now the Patti Smith Group had added a drummer, Jay Dee Daugherty, and acquisitioned its own rogue force and demolition expert, albeit with impeccable avant-rock credentials: the grinning volcano that was and is John Cale, whose mood swings you didn’t want to get in the middle of. A classically trained musician born in Wales who had once taken part in an eighteen-hour piano performance with John Cage, Cale was a founding partner of the Velvet Underground with the singer-songwriter-scowler Lou Reed, his viola sawing away moodily on the Velvets’ “Black Angel’s Death Song,” a shredding, assaultive La Monte Young dissonance and groaning industrial drone that seemed to rise from the bowels of the subway system. He also played keyboards, his electric organ propelling the Velvets’ improvisatory epic “Sister Ray” like a runaway calliope. He and Reed had an unamicable parting, unamicable partings being one of Lou’s specialties, and he recorded a number of solo albums with literary-minded song titles (“Hedda Gabler,” “Graham Greene”) and others of savage candor, such as the cuckold’s tale of “Guts,” with its pulp-novel opening. He also produced albums, including the desolate masterpieces by his fellow Velvets castaway, the imperiously beautiful and opaque ice sculpture Nico (whose handbag rattled wherever she walked, holding a bootleg pharmacy), and he was chosen as producer of Patti’s debut album, Horses. He and Patti’s manager, the shortcake Jane Friedman,