Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story by Dave Thompson Page A
Authors: Dave Thompson
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, music, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Composers & Musicians, Individual Composer & Musician
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nationwide distribution allowed readers across America to experience Patti’s writing firsthand, and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore spoke for many when he recalled for Robert Matheu and Brian J. Bowe’s book Creem: America’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll Magazine, “The first time I ever heard of Patti Smith was in Creem … when they ran her poetry. Those pictures of her with the short Keith Richards hair and the cigarette—they completely made you stop in your tracks. What is that? It read so good and looked so good, it made me realize that that’s what I wanted to do. I want to go to New York and see that.”
She was writing occasional pieces, too, for Rock magazine, a monthly competitor to Rolling Stone that took itself very seriously indeed—certainly too seriously to entertain a writer who, dispatched to interview Eric Clapton, commenced her inquisition by asking him for his six favorite colors.
Finally, she received a call from tiny publisher Telegraph Books, run out of a storefront on Jones Street by writers Andrew Wylie and Victor Bockris. They wanted to publish the first collection of her poetry.
In his 1999 biography of Patti, Bockris outlined her appeal to Telegraph Books: that she provided, for the first time, a voice for a generation that was still attempting to adjust to the violence that had marked the end of the 1960s, violence that shattered the hippie dream that was the hallmark of the decade’s final years. The fatal stabbing at the Rolling Stones’ Altamont Free Concert in December 1969, the Manson murders that shocked the world earlier that same year, the continued war in Vietnam, the US government’s increasingly heavy-handed response to domestic protest, “the increasingly dangerous drug scene that had changed from something peaceful and friendly to something violent, dangerous, and criminal”—all of these things were battering a generation that had been persuaded, however fleetingly, to dream of a man-made utopia. Patti Smith, Bockris reasoned, was the voice that could help them survive the storm.
She may not, Bockris continued, have been aware of this calling, and may not have been prepared to answer it. But he and Wylie glimpsed her potential regardless, and they would do their level best to encourage her to answer it.
Gerard Malanga made the necessary introductions, although Bockris has also insisted that it would have been difficult for anybody on the New York City arts scene of the day not to be aware of Patti Smith. He wrote in Patti Smith: An Unauthorized Biography: “For a short time in the spring and summer of 1971, she was high on the list of New York’s ‘Hot 100’ who were going to Make It, and was turning down offers right, left, and center.”
This is probably an exaggeration. Yes, she had succeeded in her handful of public readings to date, before an audience composed largely of friends and associates. Yes, she was making some headway in the world of rock journalism. But they were baby steps at best, and if Patti’s personality was sufficiently urgent that the people she encountered were not quick to forget her, she was scarcely the first young up-and-comer to have that effect on people. Any offers that Patti was receiving at this timewere being made by would-be entrepreneurs who were in the exact same position she was: just starting out on the first rung of their chosen ladder and casting around for anybody who could help them move a little higher. Which is precisely what Patti was doing when she accepted Telegraph Books’ offer.
Fronted by an indelibly atmospheric black-and-white photograph taken by New Yorker Judy Linn (destined to become one of the young Patti’s most dedicated chroniclers), Patti’s first book of poems, Seventh Heaven, would emerge as a forty-seven-page collection of twenty-two poems, dedicated to actress Anita Pallenberg. It would be published the following spring as a limited run of fifty signed and numbered first editions, alongside a
She was writing occasional pieces, too, for Rock magazine, a monthly competitor to Rolling Stone that took itself very seriously indeed—certainly too seriously to entertain a writer who, dispatched to interview Eric Clapton, commenced her inquisition by asking him for his six favorite colors.
Finally, she received a call from tiny publisher Telegraph Books, run out of a storefront on Jones Street by writers Andrew Wylie and Victor Bockris. They wanted to publish the first collection of her poetry.
In his 1999 biography of Patti, Bockris outlined her appeal to Telegraph Books: that she provided, for the first time, a voice for a generation that was still attempting to adjust to the violence that had marked the end of the 1960s, violence that shattered the hippie dream that was the hallmark of the decade’s final years. The fatal stabbing at the Rolling Stones’ Altamont Free Concert in December 1969, the Manson murders that shocked the world earlier that same year, the continued war in Vietnam, the US government’s increasingly heavy-handed response to domestic protest, “the increasingly dangerous drug scene that had changed from something peaceful and friendly to something violent, dangerous, and criminal”—all of these things were battering a generation that had been persuaded, however fleetingly, to dream of a man-made utopia. Patti Smith, Bockris reasoned, was the voice that could help them survive the storm.
She may not, Bockris continued, have been aware of this calling, and may not have been prepared to answer it. But he and Wylie glimpsed her potential regardless, and they would do their level best to encourage her to answer it.
Gerard Malanga made the necessary introductions, although Bockris has also insisted that it would have been difficult for anybody on the New York City arts scene of the day not to be aware of Patti Smith. He wrote in Patti Smith: An Unauthorized Biography: “For a short time in the spring and summer of 1971, she was high on the list of New York’s ‘Hot 100’ who were going to Make It, and was turning down offers right, left, and center.”
This is probably an exaggeration. Yes, she had succeeded in her handful of public readings to date, before an audience composed largely of friends and associates. Yes, she was making some headway in the world of rock journalism. But they were baby steps at best, and if Patti’s personality was sufficiently urgent that the people she encountered were not quick to forget her, she was scarcely the first young up-and-comer to have that effect on people. Any offers that Patti was receiving at this timewere being made by would-be entrepreneurs who were in the exact same position she was: just starting out on the first rung of their chosen ladder and casting around for anybody who could help them move a little higher. Which is precisely what Patti was doing when she accepted Telegraph Books’ offer.
Fronted by an indelibly atmospheric black-and-white photograph taken by New Yorker Judy Linn (destined to become one of the young Patti’s most dedicated chroniclers), Patti’s first book of poems, Seventh Heaven, would emerge as a forty-seven-page collection of twenty-two poems, dedicated to actress Anita Pallenberg. It would be published the following spring as a limited run of fifty signed and numbered first editions, alongside a
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