Patti Smith's Horses Read online

  Why the fascination with the aesthetics of crime? In the week prior to the performance, Charles Manson and three female accomplices were convicted in Los Angeles of murder and conspiracy in the 1969 slayings of seven people, including the actress Sharon Tate. The Beatles song “Helter Skelter” was played at the trial. Meanwhile, as the American bombing of North Vietnam intensified, Army Lt. William L. Calley Jr. was convicted of murdering at least twenty-two civilians in the 1968 My Lai massacre. Closer to home, in 1967 in New York, incidences of violent crime totalled 75,000; by 1971 this had increased to 145,000, with murder rates up by fifty percent. Living in downtown at the notorious Chelsea Hotel, Patti Smith would have been familiar with the prostitutes and the pimps, the hustlers and the junkies. Her take on New York life in this period, although undoubtedly romanticized—“On the sidewalk, Sunday morning / lies a body oozing life” (from “Mack the Knife”)—is rooted in knowledge and experience. It is, moreover, via the references to Jesse James and Brecht, linked with a sense of political agenda. This is the year of Tricky Dicky, of secret tapes in the White House, of accelerating antiwar protest, and of bomb explosions in the Capitol and Senate buildings. It’s also a time when popular entertainment and politics become curiously intertwined, from Elvis’s meeting with Nixon, to the broadcast of Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner” on Radio Hanoi. The polarization of these events brings to mind the distinction Walter Benjamin makes in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1968), between the arts under fascism and communism: where the former renders politics a cultural activity, the latter responds by politicizing culture. One course leads to domination, the other to freedom.

  Whether or not Smith is aware of Benjamin, she performs tonight with an acute sense of how easily art can be used to sustain, as well as critique, the lust for power. She knows that since art appeals to the eudaemonic or pleasure principle, it can be used as a tool of oppression, as well as of liberation. Thus, while Brecht speaks for the people, his creation “Mack the Knife” occupies a more uncertain position. It’s worth recalling that MacHeath, in The Threepenny Opera, is a tawdry gangster figure, and the opera as a whole is a satire on capitalism. What most singers take from the opera, however, is not Brecht and Weill’s socialism but the perverse appeal of its target. Thus Bobby Darin, in his well known version from 1959, presents a highly stylized MacHeath, successful and glamorous, the epitome of the fifties American dream. In this somewhat sanitized performance there is little sense of the biting irony evident in the original performance, sung in 1928 by Kurt Gerron, and sustained in Louis Armstrong’s and Lotte Lenya’s 1956 recording.

  What Smith restores to the song is a sense of both the danger and the allure of the gangster figure. In her rendition, MacHeath is presented as both an object of desire and as a symptom of capitalist unease. What Smith conveys brilliantly throughout her show is the sheer enjoyment of criminality, the perverse pleasure that drives entrepreneur and outlaw alike. With a glance toward the Manson killings as crimes that exposed the wickedness at the core of the Hollywood dream, Smith shows that she understands how transgression straddles political and moral divides, rendering left and right, good and evil, as perverse shadows of the other. This notion is sustained in her dedication to the novelist Jean Genet, whose fantasies of explicit gay sex within gaol walls highlight the close relations between transgression and taboo. We cannot, in other words, have one without the other. As Paul writes in Romans 4:15: “where there is no law there is no transgression.”

  Perhaps this explains the significance of Smith’s blasphemy in “Oath.” At a time when New York seemed in the grip of a religious revival, with George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” dominating the airwaves and the massively successful musicals Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell about to premiere on Broadway, it takes chutzpah to claim that “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.” Smith, in this instance, is not denouncing Christianity, but rather its insidious transformation into a safe cultural commodity, a salve for the conscience-stricken children of the 60s. The technique of detournement or reversal, borrowed from the radical French Situationists, is a device that Smith will deploy throughout her career to highlight the vitiating effects of mass culture. When finally, in “The Ballad of a Bad Boy,” Smith turns to the perverse relationship between a mother and her son, the blurring of the death and life instincts is symbolized in the destruction of that archetypal symbol of American freedom, the car. Here, again, the capitalist obsession with pleasure is taken to its logical extreme: a violent rending of that primary moral absolute, the incest taboo.

  Tonight, then, is an opportunity to assault the complacency of early 70s America. With each song, Smith presents a sort of photographic negative, her characters inhabiting a shadow version of the land of the free. What she illuminates is the hidden complicity between good and evil, how that which we should despise becomes an object of fascination. Smith’s hipster audience must have lapped this up. It would have appealed, in particular, to the Warhol crowd, absorbed in their own version of late American decadence. But also, in more immediate terms, it would have marked Patti Smith out as a fellow artist, someone worth paying attention to. In recent years, Smith has downplayed the significance of the St. Mark’s event, claiming that much of its significance comes down to “who happened to be there” (Delano, 2002). This is true, for when the roll-call of those in attendance on this night, from the worlds of music and literature, is properly considered, it is clear that Patti Smith’s reputation, and her eventual fame, are as much the product of her acceptance within an artistic milieu as they are of her innate genius. Once again, therefore, our grasp of the meaning of this performance is related to our understanding of how culture is produced, disseminated, and consumed. It is, as they say, all a matter of history.

  But not merely of history. When we turn to look in detail at the circumstances that shaped Patti Smith’s attempts to forge herself as a power in the world of letters, we will have cause to think again about the importance of cultural networks. Specifically, we will consider how the contacts and alliances made around the time of the St. Mark’s performance enabled Smith to make the transition from poet to singer, at the same time creating a climate of opinion that would ensure a positive reception for her work. But while Patti Smith’s fame can be traced to her strategic place in a chain of makers and shakers, her vision remains unique, a product not merely of her times, but of the shaping spirit of her imagination. As we shall discover, the standard histories of this period, which unearth the roots of the mid-70s New York punk scene in the trash aesthetic of the New York Dolls and the Stooges and in the politics of the MC5, fail to take sufficient account of the importance of the underground arts scene and, specifically, of theater, cabaret, and poetry movements. For as much as Patti Smith is motivated by the spirits of Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison, her deepest love is reserved for the dead poets, the cracked actors, and the darkling chanteurs.

  Chapter 2

  South New Jersey, 1946–1967

  Self-Life-Writing

  In “Autobiography,” a poem published in the rock magazine Creem in September 1971, Patti Smith writes:

  I was born in Illinois … mainline of America …

  beat to shit … Chicago tenement

  big eye rats in the night … dead rats to tease at night

  morning … I waited for the organ grinder

  with my nickel for the monkey’s tin cup

  gingerbread man … cotton candy man

  bad girl setting fire to the oil cans

  run like hell escape on the iceman’s truck

  I was a limping ugly duck

  but I had good luck

  Mama filled me with fantasy …

  The first claim, “I was born in Illinois,” is true. To be precise, a girl named Patricia Lee Smith was born on December 30, 1946 on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois. From here on, however, the facts of Smith’s “Autobiography” become less secure. Who or what was
“beat to shit”? Who teased the “dead rats at night”? Who set fire “to the oil cans” and escaped “on the iceman’s truck,” and when, exactly, did this happen, if it happened at all? Did it really happen to Patricia Lee, the child of Grant and Beverly Ann Smith, the one-, two-, three-, four-year old girl who lived in a South Chicago tenement from 1946 to 1950? The stream of consciousness style forbids easy understanding, in willful defiance of autobiographical convention.

  Now another account, this time from the 1998 Patti Smith Complete: Lyrics, Reflections, and Notes for the Future:

  The first song I remember singing is “Jesus Loves Me.” I can picture myself singing it while sitting on a stoop in Chicago, waiting for the organ grinder to come up the street with his pet monkey. I can hear the songs that were in the air. “Day-O” and “Shrimp Boats” and “Heart of My Hearts.” I can hear my father whistling “Deep Purple” and the voice of my mother as she sang us to sleep.

  This seems more convincing. We can believe that a four-year-old child would sing a popular hymn while sitting on the stoop, it seems right that she would absorb the simple “songs … in the air,” and it is fitting that she should be lulled to sleep by the voice of her mother. Less fragmented than the first account, more respectful of grammatical, syntactical, and temporal logic, the latter account convinces because it tells a familiar story. The child in this version waits, listens, and receives. Her world, like the sentences she inhabits, is regular and precise. There are details, tailored to the child’s unique experience, but the portrait that emerges is conventional. Patti Lee is every-child, a working class girl in postwar America, fashioned by the forces of language and of history. But still, something is about to happen, and from a narrative point of view the realism of this description is no less contrived than the romanticism of the first. To be precise, the event that will disrupt the predictability of these early childhood rhythms is “the birth of rock and roll” and, as we shall see, the 1998 account works hard to convey the effects of this on an impressionable young mind. So in the end, which of these stories should we trust: the disruptive self-fashioning of the first, or the contrived authenticity of the latter?

  The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan writes cryptically: “A certificate tells me that I was born. I repudiate this certificate: I am not a poet, but a poem. A poem that is being written, even if it looks like a subject” (1979). Patti Smith has always distrusted the idea that human beings possess a fixed or stable identity, but even more than Lacan she would dispute the notion of herself as a subject. Subject to what? To gender, to sexuality, to history, to class? As Smith states in “Autobiography,” “I paraded in thirty disguises”: the ugly duckling, pirate Jenny, the sergeant major, the wicked witch, the tom boy, the vamp, the goof ball. … In an important sense, Patti Smith then, as now, made herself up as she went along, writing herself as a poem, as “Autobiography,” even, the literal meaning of which is self-life-writing. But note the insistence here on agency: even as Smith embraces the freedom afforded by the donning of multiple personalities, the standard notion of a fixed or unified self is smuggled in through the back door, for Smith, in this scenario, is always the poet, never the poem: “I paraded in thirty disguises.”

  Yet to commit to writing, even self-writing, is, in a sense, to lose oneself. For even at the most formal level, the “I” is not identical to itself but is split between an “I” who writes and an “I” that is written. Indeed, as Lacan goes on to claim, the first-person pronoun is no more privileged than any other sign; its meaning is not intrinsic but is a product of its difference from and relations with other signs in a signifying chain. Thus Smith, even as she wrests control of her many “disguises,” remains subject to the differential nature of language. Yes, she is a poet, and she is a poem that is written.

  In light of these comments, what I propose to do over the following pages is to look carefully at Smith’s re-presentations of her formative years. The aim here is to fashion a critical biography, not for the purposes of sifting out fact and fantasy, but rather to assess the extent to which fact and fantasy are mutually informing. Since at least two songs on Horses are directly inspired by real life events (“Redondo Beach” and “Kimberly”), while others are rooted in dreams and waking fantasies, the significance of autobiography ought not to be dismissed. At the same time, however, I wish to resist the notion that the meaning of an artwork can be traced back to its author’s intentions. A life story is constructed retroactively from the point of view of the writing or speaking present: the “I” as it exists in the now. But this “I” is informed, in turn, by traces of previous self-representations, by fantasies forged in the past. Thus, to take one example, the pirate Jenny figure, adapted from the Lotte Lenya character in The Threepenny Opera, is used by Smith to refer to the figure she cut as a child when, due to the effects of a wandering eye, she was forced to wear an eye patch. Yet it is surely this memory, in its raw state, that feeds into her identification in later years with the Brecht and Weill character.

  In a general sense, the evocation of poets, playwrights, and painters is manifest throughout Smith’s life and work, and any biographical account must take note not only of the significance of formative events, but also of the influence of key artistic figures. To read an artist’s life as the unequivocal origin of their work is to ignore the extent to which the life itself is fashioned as an artwork, and indeed, such is the proximity of art to life in Smith’s career that the attempt to distinguish one from the other will necessarily lead to misrepresentation and misunderstanding. For this reason, I will pay close attention to several significant literary influences, most notably the French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud, whose provocative life, art, and opinions provided a model for Smith’s own self-fashioning.

  Literature, however, is only one factor in Smith’s biography. Aside from the visual arts, music is the most obvious and, for the purposes of this book, most pertinent influence in Smith’s life. “Autobiography,” significantly enough, is studded with repeating invocations to “rythum” (sic) and “rock ’n’ roll,” its fractured, telegraphic phrasing recalling the percussive outbursts of Little Richard, James Brown, MickJagger. But to understand how rock music takes its place as the key influence in Smith’s life we must look more closely at the world in which her life was fashioned.

  Without Contraries Is No Progression

  The South Side of Chicago, Illinois, is a district forged in rhythm, slaughter, and steel. In the late 1940s it became home to thousands of African Americans, the majority of whom were economic migrants from the South, and to servicemen returning from the Second World War. Smith’s father, Grant, was a soldier who had found work in a factory. A photograph on the cover of Gung Ho (2000) depicts him in full battle dress. Married to Beverly, a counter waitress in a drugstore, Grant Smith developed a taste for esoteric literature as a reaction to the mental and physical toll of shift work. Smith remembers him as a commanding, aloof presence, an atheist with a passionate interest in the Bible and UFO stories and a fondness for gambling. Beverly, a Jehovah’s Witness, was also possessed of a rich inner life, her tastes leaning toward theology and fantasy. In later years, Patti Smith would embroider her parents’ origins with tales of her father’s years as a tap dancer and track star, and her mother’s career as a jazz singer with a “cigarette tan.” But as Nick Johnstone comments in Patti Smith: A Biography (1997), the Smiths “were not mystics or beatniks or artists or tortured poets; they were regular working people.” Regular or not, there is no doubt that Smith’s parents provided their daughter with an unusually culturally receptive environment.

  Music was another important presence in the Smith household. Beverly’s tastes leaned toward white jazz artists like Chris Connor and June Christy, Artie Shaw and Judy Garland, but opera by Verdi and Puccini was also played, as was the country music of Hank Williams. Like many households in this period, the Smiths’ introduction to rhythm and blues, and later to rock ’n’ roll, would come via their children. Chicag
o, however, was not to be the setting for this introduction, as by 1950 the family had relocated to a veteran’s house in the Germantown region of North Philadelphia. With two additional children to care for—Todd was born before the move and Linda shortly after—the Smiths had little time to expend on cultural pursuits, but music still remained a vital part of their lives.

  In 1955 the family moved for the last time to the rural New Jersey suburb of Deptford. Smith, by now a tall, skinny eight-year-old with a wandering eye and thick glasses, felt the loss of city life keenly. By contrast her father, now working for the Honeywell Corporation, seems to have adapted well to life in the suburbs; the relative isolation of the family’s single-story ranch house enabled him to retreat further into silence and solipsism, cultivating new interests in Bertrand Russell and the mythologist Joseph Campbell. But as Grant Smith fortified his country retreat, growing huge hedges around the house, his firstborn looked outward. And what she saw was the untamed landscape of her own mind: “there were thousands of fireflies outside my window and a pig farm was nearby. There were six-foot black snakes coming into our yard from the swamps. There was the smell of skunk cabbage. … There was a black barn across the street filled with bats and owls. There were deer” (Delano, 2002). Something, it seems, was about to break in.