Before reading this memoir, I always knew that Patti Smith spent a lot of time kicking around New York’s art and music scene before recording her debut album. I knew she’d written rock criticism for Creem and Rolling Stone. I knew she was connected to Sandy Pearlman and contributed songs to Blue Oyster Cult. I knew she’d published poetry. I knew she happened upon becoming a rock star by reading poetry while Lenny Kaye played guitar. But reading about how it all happened has been revelatory, surprising, and ultimately inspirational.
I had no idea of the extent of the different activities Patti was engaged in during this period. In addition to the above, she also acted in plays at the Factory. She posed as a model for Robert’s photographs and others, even doing runway fashion modeling at one point. Before Blue Oyster Cult, she’d also written songs with Bobby Neuwirth and others. Together with playwright Sam Shepard, she improvised a play into existence out of sheer nothingness.
It was during this last endeavor that Patti says she found her key to improvisation, a key she has “accessed [her] whole life.” In the act of spontaneously creating this play together, Patti and Sam develop characters that invent their own poetic language. In a scene where they need to argue, Patti panics that she will be unable to improvise the argumentative poetry correctly. Sam tells her that it’s impossible to make a mistake when improvising. Patti says she’s worried about messing up the rhythm. Sam replies, matter-of-factly. “It’s like drumming. If you miss a beat, you create another.”
For me, that really does seem to sum up this period in Patti’s life. On one level, she just seems to be trying things out, the proverbial throwing of things up against a wall to see what sticks. Yet it’s this very experimentation that yields such productive fruit for her. A casual comment about how she looks like Joan Baez causes her to cut her hair to look like Keith Richards in an effort to “say goodbye to the folk era.” This immediately results in opportunities for acting and songwriting.
In his classic book Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Dick Hebdige discusses how youth act as bricoleurs to spontaneously and experimentally construct an (accidentally) coherent cosmology of meaning out of the various clothes and hairstyles and pop cultural commodities that they have available. Their stylistic choices reflect a refusal to accept, and a revolt against, culturally dominant notions of meaning, especially related to race, class, gender, and sexuality. Above all, they express a right of youth to make their own culture out of the detritus that’s handed to them, rather than passively accepting the culture others wish to impose upon them. Patti’s deliberate attention to her hair and Robert’s carefully constructed outfits strike me as being engaged in exactly this sort of bricolage. Indeed, it is not surprising that her Keith Richards haircut signified that “I miraculously turned androgynous overnight.” Similary, Robert’s art works in this period are beginning to take on more and more of a stance that challenges notions of masculinity and gay sexuality, both from the mainstream and from the various subcultures that were emerging.
For Patti, I can’t help but notice a seeming paradox in her personality as she experiments. On the one hand, she reads in these pages as a shy, unassuming, humble, somewhat naïve, almost chaste person. She still seems to dread being dragged by Robert through the inner circles of the art world he so wanted to enter, taking little pleasure in the socializing and performance of it all. She does not use drugs (at least on purpose, and detests the hallucinations she experiences when dosed unknowingly), despite their ubiquity among her friends. She claims to not understand the plays she performs in, nor her roles in them. She seems content to stay in the background most of the time, awkwardly uncomfortable when too much attention is thrust upon her.
This personality is somewhat difficult to reconcile with her eventual public persona, one of sheer arrogance and direct confrontation. What else can you call someone who shows up at her first poetry reading in black snakeskin boots, with Lenny Kaye to accompany her on electric guitar, spouting lines like “Christ died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.” This is the Patti Smith music fans are familiar with, most certainly (especially as a slightly different version of that very line opens her debut album). But it’s a somewhat jarring contrast from the personality that seems to lay behind it in these pages. She mentions that even Robert is worried that her work is too confrontational.
Yet in the context of the experimentation and bricolage, it’s a paradox that makes sense. Patti had earlier said that she found the poetry readings she’d attended to be boring, and she promised to herself that if she ever did read publicly, she wouldn’t be boring. This desire to make a mark, this determination to make her own culture, was more powerful than her perhaps personal reluctance to grab the spotlight.
But even here in this triumphant moment, her humility wins the day. My jaw dropped as I read about how she rejected the initial recording contracts and offers of fame that came her way in the wake of this performance. She could not accept them because she said they came too easily. Nothing came easily for Robert, and nothing came easily for anyone that she admired. So she wouldn’t let anything come easily for herself either.
(At this point, I’m tempted to take on the persona of the grumpy old curmudgeon who complains about the “kids of today” who seem to latch onto their quick success as if it’s their birthright, without actually making any of their own real culture that matters first. I’m tempted, but I don’t want to be that guy.)
In a keynote address at last year’s South by Southwest music festival, Bruce Springsteen closed his remarks by giving advice to young artists. “Don’t take yourself too seriously,” he said, “and take yourself as seriously as death itself. Don’t worry. Worry your ass off. Have ironclad confidence. But doubt. It keeps you awake and alert. Believe you are the baddest ass in town. And…you SUCK.”
It is this paradoxical mixture of arrogance and humility, of ambition and diffidence, that I read into Patti’s personality at this point in her life. It’s what undergirds her experimentation and ensures it is so much more than just throwing things at a wall to see what sticks. And it seems to be the reason she survives the continuing stream of deaths that seem to surround her. This section of the book ends with her and Robert deciding to go their separate ways on one level. But she says they kept their vow to stay together until they were able to stand on their own. May we all stand as confidently, and as awkwardly. If we miss a beat, we’ll create another.
I, too, was struck by the fact that while Patti Smith seems to be surrounded by art and artists who are really doing things, she isn’t so much creating her own work as she is participating in the work of others, and searching for the right thing for herself. She certainly sees herself as an artist, and wants desperately to be one, but has not chosen her medium yet. She seems to have a very distinct idea of what an artist should be – an artist should struggle seems to be both a mantra and defense mechanism – and is playing into this image until she finds her own space. I think this is especially evident in Patti’s claims not to understand the plays she was in and her removal from the work of her friends. She reads, to me, as pretending to be an artist, surrounding herself with artists and hoping, through association and exposure, to become one of them. Clearly this worked out for her eventually, but it was a risky strategy. In Patti’s case, she seemed so different from her contemporaries because she had her own kind of genius, but at this time in her life she seems like a Plain Jane who sat down with the cool kids one day and stuck around, quietly, eventually becoming one of them. Arguably, she became better than them. Because, by virtue of her difference, she lacked the life threatening vices of the scene she was surrounded by. Perhaps it is this that allowed her to have such long-standing success while so many of the surrounding young talents burnt out in tragic, young deaths.