Lucking Out - James Wolcott [87]
Sophomore jinx isn’t just for baseball pitchers, and the second albums of both Patti Smith and Television got a more mottled reception than their rapturous firsts. Radio Ethiopia sounded like a clogged exhaust fan to some reviewers, especially its title track, ten minutes of electronic dental flossing, and the opening lines of “Pissing in a River”—“Pissing in a river/Watching it rise”—led to wiseacre remarks about the huge holding capacity of Patti’s bladder. Television’s Adventure had some stunners—“Glory,” “Ain’t That Nothin’,” the tidal roll of “The Dream’s Dream”—but the title song sounded like a TV-jingle sea chantey (“Adventure/I love adventure”), and Marquee Moon’s tight grip of tension escaping through a clenched fist was missing, the curtain-parting sense of eventfulness dissipated into too much immaculate musicianship. The critical reaction was a shower of petals compared with the welcoming from the uninitiated. When Television toured with Peter Gabriel (the founder of the group Genesis gone solo) to promote Adventure, they were met onstage by a hard rain of objects hurled at them from an unappreciative audience that was unappreciative before the first guitar chord was struck, that is, on ignorant principle. In theory, Gabriel fans should have come from a more refined stratum of rock enthusiast; in practice, they were just as happy as your subaverage heavy-metal fan to exercise their throwing arms. With his analytical dispassion exercised at a dreamy remove, Verlaine described to me what it was like to be under grenade attack from an assortment of bottles, cans, and small batteries. “There was no time to duck or react, because the stage lights were so bright that you couldn’t see what was being thrown until it broke through that bright screen, materializing out of nowhere, as if the darkness itself had thrown it.” He might have been an astronomer describing a shower of space debris, except that this debris was fired on purpose with his name on it.
Patti, she fell into the darkness, a black hole just waiting beyond the edge. Touring after the release of Radio Ethiopia, she was opening for Bob Seger in Tampa, Florida, when, during “Ain’t It Strange,” she danced herself off the stage and hit the concrete floor of the orchestra pit fifteen feet down, breaking neck vertebrae and putting herself out of commission for a year, which was preferable to some of the alternatives. A fall like that could have been fatal. During her recuperation I visited Patti at the airy apartment of Blue Öyster Cult’s Allen Lanier at One Fifth Avenue, where Patti was still getting used to swiveling around with a neck brace that seemed to hold her prisoner. She wasn’t in bad spirits, considering, but each movement involved precautionary effort that you sensed her gauging inside her head, measuring in increments, which was sobering after seeing her spirit-glide in flowy half circles around the stage before. At one point she asked me if I’d seen anything lately I liked, and I went into a rhapsody about Twyla Tharp’s dance Push Comes to Shove, starring Mikhail Baryshnikov at his most Guys and Dolls quick-cool, and after I described the stop-start vocabulary