Read Online Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story by Dave Thompson - Free Book Online

Rimbaud stayed there, and that was not very long in the life of a Parisian hotel. “I’m sure I slept in the same bed,” she told writer Scott Cohen in Circus. “It was like in the movies when they go into the haunted house and they hit everything andthere’s tons of dust and spiders and the bed is shaped like bodies. It was a tiny bed on a metal ramp. You could see the outline of bodies where the people had slept.”
    Patti and Linda pounded the Paris streets, seeking out the tiniest references to the poet’s visits to the capital, and unearthing other treasures too. Paris in spring 1969 had had a year to recover from the headline-making riots of the previous summer. It remained, however, a hotbed of political dissension and agitation, as worldwide opposition to the American war in Vietnam continued to grow against a backdrop of increasingly horrific news images.
    The Smith sisters steered clear of the areas where the students gathered more volubly; Patti has since confessed that even on campus in New Jersey and Philadelphia, she had nothing to say about the war, and no real awareness of it beyond the occasional glance at the headlines. Years later, with her political activism a burning passion, she would revise her memories somewhat, but at the time, neither apathy nor complacency explained her disinterest. She simply had not paid attention. But attempting to explain that to an overexcited audience of hyper-tense French students—for that was the fate of every American who wandered onto the south bank at that time and made the mistake of speaking aloud—was not a task that either woman relished.
    Instead, they spent their time drifting through historic Paris: the graveyards, the boulevards, the sites and scenes that they had only read about back home. At l’Église Saint-Germain-des-Prés, they visited Picasso’s Portrait of Dora Maar in the garden. Patti was, she said later, too shy to enter the church itself. “Paris to me is completely a city of images,” she told Penny Green in 1973. “I always felt that I was in a black-and-white 16 mm film.”
    The pair paid their way by taking part-time jobs in cafes and restaurants; for a time, they worked as street entertainers, joining a ragged posse of musicians, jugglers, fire-eaters, and mimes and collecting whatever coppers were thrown their way. Linda sang and danced; Patti beat out rudimentary melodies on a toy piano.
    She also started to write.
    Inspiration struck on the morning of July 4, 1969, when Patti and the rest of France awoke to the news that guitarist Brian Jones had diedthe previous evening, drowned in his swimming pool while, apparently, a party full of friends looked on. Patti had, she later said, just emerged from a five-day immersion in French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard’s documentary One Plus One, a revolutionary tract that included some fabulous footage of the Rolling Stones recording “Sympathy for the Devil”—five days during which the faces of the five Stones were seared even deeper into her mind than they already had been. Now those Stones were four.
    She remembered the first and only time she’d ever seen Jones in the flesh, when the Rolling Stones played Philadelphia on November 6, 1965. The band was off and running by then; “Satisfaction” and “Get Off of My Cloud” had proved Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to be as capable songwriters as Lennon and McCartney, only with better-sounding records. Fans of the two bands, the Beatles and the Stones, had already divided themselves down fiercely antagonistic lines: clean or dirty, sweet or savage, “Yesterday” or right now. And the only common ground was the screaming little girls.
    Patti had not intended screaming, and when she took her seat in the auditorium with the rest of the audience, all had seemed calm and orderly. Then the Stones came out and pandemonium erupted, the entire room pushing toward the stage, and Patti was pushed into the stage, crushed against its hard wooden