Read Online Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story by Dave Thompson - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Dave Thompson
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, music, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Composers & Musicians, Individual Composer & Musician
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lip and feeling herself being dragged down by the weight.
Desperately she reached out for something to hold onto, to pull herself back to the surface. Her hand connected with Brian Jones’s ankle. “I was grabbing him to save myself,” she told Thurston Moore. “And he just looked at me. And I looked at him. And he smiled. He just smiled at me.”
If she had had any doubt as to who her favorite Rolling Stone was before that night, there was no question any longer. And now Brian Jones was dead, and as if that was not nightmarish enough, there was the sense that somehow she might have saved him. For in a vision, or a dream, or a premonition, call it what you will, she had sensed that Brian Jones was in danger, that Brian Jones was hurt, that Brian Jones was about to sink beneath the surface, just as she herself was going under at that concert.
And just like her, his hand was outstretched for something to grab on to. She had grasped his ankle and pulled herself to safety. He had reached out and she wasn’t there.
The night after Brian Jones died, the day that she learned he was gone, Patti set to work on what would become the first poem she wrote in her own true voice, a rock ‘n’ roll mass set to a rock ‘n’ roll rhythm. It wasn’t anything she’d ever heard of anybody else having done. Maybe Dylan and Van Morrison had come close occasionally, and the Doors’ Jim Morrison—at that moment, probably the biggest star in American rock—might have strayed even closer. But she wouldn’t have cared if the whole world had pulled it off before. “I wasn’t trying to be ‘innovative,’” she told Lisa Robinson in 1976. “I was just doing what I thought was right, and being true to Brian.”
And she was being true, whether she would have seen it this way or not, to the nature of the hall of fame that still hung in her mind: the idols who died before their time, the artists for whom the weight of art was far too grand to bear. Two years ago, in her first days in New York City, John Coltrane had died. Next year, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin would join him; the year after that, Jim Morrison. Patti would eulogize them all, and then add them to the arsenal of imagery that she was slowly, and only half-consciously, constructing around herself.
It was late July 1969 before the Smith sisters returned to the United States from their Parisian sojourn—pulled home, said Patti, by a series of increasingly portentous dreams about their father. The pair had scarcely communicated with their family all the while they were in Paris, the occasional letter or postcard drifting leisurely across the ocean to wash up at the American Express office, maybe a collect phone call or two. Patti had written and received far more letters from Robert Mapplethorpe than from her family, but that did not mean they were out of her mind completely. She had ignored the visions she’d had of Brian Jones; she was not going to make the same mistake again.
The women returned home just days after Grant Smith was taken into the hospital, the victim of an unexpected heart attack, and just as the doctors delivered the news that he would survive.
So, Patti had decided, would she. The broken heart that Mapplethorpe had sent her away with was repaired by now, and he, too, was back in New York and regretting the precipitous manner in which their relationship had shattered. The day Patti turned up on his Delancey Street doorstep was the day he broke up with his latest boyfriend—and the day, too, that the pair decided that they had wasted too much of their lives already, struggling along amidst decay and indecision.
They quit Delancey Street after a neighbor was murdered just across the hallway from them, and moved on to the Allerton Hotel on West Twenty-Second. Down among the druggies and the derelicts, it was about as low as any hotel could go, but Patti and Mapplethorpe had somehow sunk even lower.
Never too careful about his health, and especially
Desperately she reached out for something to hold onto, to pull herself back to the surface. Her hand connected with Brian Jones’s ankle. “I was grabbing him to save myself,” she told Thurston Moore. “And he just looked at me. And I looked at him. And he smiled. He just smiled at me.”
If she had had any doubt as to who her favorite Rolling Stone was before that night, there was no question any longer. And now Brian Jones was dead, and as if that was not nightmarish enough, there was the sense that somehow she might have saved him. For in a vision, or a dream, or a premonition, call it what you will, she had sensed that Brian Jones was in danger, that Brian Jones was hurt, that Brian Jones was about to sink beneath the surface, just as she herself was going under at that concert.
And just like her, his hand was outstretched for something to grab on to. She had grasped his ankle and pulled herself to safety. He had reached out and she wasn’t there.
The night after Brian Jones died, the day that she learned he was gone, Patti set to work on what would become the first poem she wrote in her own true voice, a rock ‘n’ roll mass set to a rock ‘n’ roll rhythm. It wasn’t anything she’d ever heard of anybody else having done. Maybe Dylan and Van Morrison had come close occasionally, and the Doors’ Jim Morrison—at that moment, probably the biggest star in American rock—might have strayed even closer. But she wouldn’t have cared if the whole world had pulled it off before. “I wasn’t trying to be ‘innovative,’” she told Lisa Robinson in 1976. “I was just doing what I thought was right, and being true to Brian.”
And she was being true, whether she would have seen it this way or not, to the nature of the hall of fame that still hung in her mind: the idols who died before their time, the artists for whom the weight of art was far too grand to bear. Two years ago, in her first days in New York City, John Coltrane had died. Next year, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin would join him; the year after that, Jim Morrison. Patti would eulogize them all, and then add them to the arsenal of imagery that she was slowly, and only half-consciously, constructing around herself.
It was late July 1969 before the Smith sisters returned to the United States from their Parisian sojourn—pulled home, said Patti, by a series of increasingly portentous dreams about their father. The pair had scarcely communicated with their family all the while they were in Paris, the occasional letter or postcard drifting leisurely across the ocean to wash up at the American Express office, maybe a collect phone call or two. Patti had written and received far more letters from Robert Mapplethorpe than from her family, but that did not mean they were out of her mind completely. She had ignored the visions she’d had of Brian Jones; she was not going to make the same mistake again.
The women returned home just days after Grant Smith was taken into the hospital, the victim of an unexpected heart attack, and just as the doctors delivered the news that he would survive.
So, Patti had decided, would she. The broken heart that Mapplethorpe had sent her away with was repaired by now, and he, too, was back in New York and regretting the precipitous manner in which their relationship had shattered. The day Patti turned up on his Delancey Street doorstep was the day he broke up with his latest boyfriend—and the day, too, that the pair decided that they had wasted too much of their lives already, struggling along amidst decay and indecision.
They quit Delancey Street after a neighbor was murdered just across the hallway from them, and moved on to the Allerton Hotel on West Twenty-Second. Down among the druggies and the derelicts, it was about as low as any hotel could go, but Patti and Mapplethorpe had somehow sunk even lower.
Never too careful about his health, and especially
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