Patti Smith and I, Going Steady?

Christ was a man worthy to rebel against, for he was rebellion itself.

-Patti Smith

Patti Smith kissed me. Yes, I believe she did, but I can’t say for certain. It was chaotic. I am sure she was sitting in my lap. It’s a long story from long ago…

Patricia Lee Smith is… an artist who has won the “Nobel Prize of Music,” the Polar Music Prize. She is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, has won a National Book Award, was awarded the French Legion of Honor — and is a mother, just to hit the highlights. I’ve long imagined she and I have a sort of spiritual linkage. Our life paths have an incongruous parallel.

Her first album, November, 1975. Image created by her artistic soulmate, Robert Mapplethorpe.

She came into this realm Monday, December 30, 1946. On Saturday morning that same week, I showed up. She’s the oldest of four in a religious Irish heritage family. I’m the oldest of six in a religious Irish heritage family. Both our fathers are WWII veterans. We both grew up in South Jersey, within 10 miles without knowing each other. We both have Southwest Philadelphia family roots. It’s not likely we ever saw one another at a high school football game! We both had beloved younger brothers die unexpectedly in their forties. Parallels.

She graduated from a South Jersey high school in 1964. I dropped out of a South Jersey high school the next year. With her genuine talent, work ethic and devotion to art, she made herself a star. I took my modest talent and laziness and fashioned a life mostly mediocre in achievement. After high school, Patti went to work in a book factory. Patti Smith was not a factory girl, and so she enrolled in college. When college could neither contain nor nurture her outsize talent, she dropped out and went to New York City. Her moving description of leaving her family for a lonely bus trip to New York parallels my long, lonely trip from family to a military induction center in 1965. After some months of dragging her suitcase around the streets of that city, looking for work and shelter and food, she published and recited poetry and became a “rock ‘n roll star.” (Original: The Byrds) That’s the short (extremely) of it.

Patti and I came from a generation born of conformance and allegiance to recognized authority. You did what your parents and society told you to do. You went to school and got an education. You got a good job, got married, raised a family, watched loving grandparents dote on your children. The American Dream. To my father, nothing was more important than obedience. Defiance and rebellion were his mortal sins; he would not tolerate them. He had succeeded in life by doing what he was told, and he saw that as the sole formula for success. Neither Patti nor I embraced such a formula. We both had visions that renounced the bourgeois world of our parents’ generation. As she wrote in her book, Just Kids, “Christ was a man worthy to rebel against, for he was rebellion itself.”

In her song Birdland, a lyric line asks, …am I all alone in this generation? Discussing that in a 1979 newspaper interview, she said: “From very early on in my childhood – four, five years old – I felt alien to the human race. I felt very comfortable with thinking I was from another planet, because I felt disconnected.” Me too. I have often thought I have been sent here just to observe, and at the end to write a final report about what I’ve seen in this realm. I often say, I am with you, but I am not of you. This was never more clear than when after spending 15 years out West, I came home to be with my mother in the closing few years of her life. In the living room of her home, there were a hundred or so pictures — family, children, grandchildren, extended family. I was not in a single one of those pictures.

Released in 1979, this is the album being promoted by a concert I attended.

Patti’s life was art for art’s sake. Her focus and fire are clear in her book, Just Kids: “My sister and I returned to New York on July 21. Everybody was talking about the moon. A man had walked upon it, but I hardly noticed.” That was 1969 and one of the most significant achievements of human history had happened, but it couldn’t break her concentration. She was writing poetry and creating art.

Her dedication and hard work paid off. She achieved much deserved success and fame. Mine was a halting adventure veering in and out of the bourgeois, always following some inner navigation I’ve never fully understood. It’s well briefed in my Navigator Me. We came into this realm together in nearly identical circumstances. She followed her path; did what she felt she had to do. I followed mine and always did what I felt I had to do. Now we’re both old. I am content, satisfied and with a tolerable guilt over what I’ve done.  While I’ve never talked with her, Patti seems content and even happy in her life. I’m very happy for her.

Many people of my generation were enthralled by Rock music. I was not. I listened and liked some music, but I didn’t know one band from another and had little interest in collecting “albums.” I probably heard a Patti Smith song on radio around 1978, and naturally, it got my attention. It wasn’t the usual screeching inanities. I heard poetry and a serious intent. She was suddenly a Leonard Cohen inserted into a genre where lyrics such as this were considered sublime:

Get it on – bang a gong – get it on

You’re dirty sweet and you’re my girl

Get it on – bang a gong – get it on

-Marc Bolan, T.Rex Band

So I went looking for her albums. At the time I was writing/editing for a publishing company in Radnor, PA, a Philadelphia suburb. There’s a possibility this was the same “book company” where Patti had once worked.  I lived alone in a one bedroom apartment, furnished mostly with books lined against the walls and a sleeping bag on the floor for a bed. Books interested me, furniture did not. My undergraduate degree is English, so penetrating songs of a real poet in modern culture got my attention.

An events listing showing the concert I attended. The ticket prices of 1979 are laughable compared to prices now being charged.

Memory is imperfect, I know. History records a Patti Smith concert (promoting her Wave album) Sunday, May 13, 1979. What I remember is a Sunday morning reading the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper. I had spent the weekend listening to her Wave album. The paper said there was to be a Patti Smith concert that evening at the Tower Theatre. I’d never been to a rock concert; the conventions escaped me. I decided I’d go. My idea was that it would be like going to a movie – drive over to Upper Darby, park and get a ticket at the box office. That’s actually what happened, but I wasn’t ready for what came next.

I went into a packed theater, and an usher looked at my ticket. He told me it was down front and sent me down the aisle. At the front, another usher surprisingly took me into the orchestra pit where folding chairs had been set up. I suppose the normal seating was sold out, so they decided to make a few more bucks setting up chairs in the orchestra pit. I was in the front row, hardly a good seat, looking straight up at the stage — and only feet from the pounding, ear-drum crushing banks of speakers. It was shocking to see this woman whose deeply tender and sensitive poetry she had infused into the world of rock and roll, then a disruptive genre they were calling “punk rock.”

Night of wonder for us to keep

Set our sails, channel the deep

After the rapture two hearts meet

Mine entwined in a single beat

–Frederick by Patti Smith

I guess part of the artistry was reinforcing the fragility of poetry with the frenetic movements and screaming stage performance of rock and roll. Overall, I wouldn’t recommend the experience, and I never went to another rock concert. As I say, I’m with you, but not of you.

They performed two sets that night. It being Mother’s Day, Patti brought her mother, Beverly,  on stage between the two sets. Her mother handled fan mail and apparently was a sort of “Dear Abbey” to a lot of Patti’s fans. History records the first set as:

Privilege (Set Me Free)

Till Victory

So You Want to Be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star (The Byrds cover)

Mr. Tambourine Man (Bob Dylan cover) (lead vocal Lenny Kaye)

Citizen Ship

It’s So Hard (John Lennon cover)

Redondo Beach (Patti Smith song)

Poppies

Tomorrow (Charles Strouse cover)

Jailhouse Rock (Elvis Presley cover)

The second set:

25th Floor

Chain Gang (Sam Cooke cover) (brief chorus)

Kimberly (Patti Smith song)

5-4-3-2-1 (Manfred Mann cover)

Be My Baby (Ellie Greenwich cover)

Secret Agent Man (The Challengers cover)

Revenge

Dancing Barefoot

Because the Night

Frederick

Seven Ways of Going

Hymn

Gloria (Them cover)

Encore:

Pumping (My Heart)

My Generation (The Who cover)

The famous Tower Theater in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia.

My Generation is a screaming, pounding manifesto performance that often ended in those times with musical instruments being destroyed. Today, 81-year-old Bob Dylan critiques it as a song “…sung from the perspective of an 80-year-old man in a nursing home…” according to a review of his new book in The New York Times. Funny, Patti and I are now pushing 80. I don’t recall any guitars or drums being wrecked that night, but what I do remember is everlasting and more vivid than a nuclear blast. As that final song ended, Patti threw down her guitar, leaped into the air and right into my lap down in the orchestra pit. Maybe she recognized a kindred spirit. Maybe looking like a straight nerd type, she felt safe choosing me. As I said, I think she kissed me. I was literally terrified, and an inclination toward constipation probably saved an embarrassment in my pants.

For a typical fan, a Patti Smith lap dance would have been great fun and a great one-up story to tell between bong hits. For me, it both signaled and cemented a spiritual connection. Perhaps we’ve been going steady all our lives, and neither of us really knew it.  Several days later my hearing had mostly recovered; today my psyche still sizzles from that intimate contact.

Like railroad tracks that appear to almost touch on a distant horizon, our paths strangely continue to parallel. Patti’s sister lives here in South Jersey. When Patti visits, they sometimes go to a bookstore where I shop, Inkwood Books, in Haddonfield. I wonder if one day we’ll both be in the store at the same time. And I wonder what she would think if I asked her to go steady. Is it any crazier than her sitting in my lap?

Released in 1978, this was my introduction to Patti Smith. The women in my office were aghast that she not only had underarm hair, but that she was sticking it in everyone’s face on the cover of a record album! Outsider that I am, I was embracing the feminism of Susan Brownmiller! This image was created by Patti’s lifelong friend, Lynn Goldsmith.

Patti Smith, never a factory girl. Thank you for that.

And lastly, here’s a video of Patti being interviewed on a British show around 2016 — just a Jersey girl being the best Jersey girl she can be. And if you don’t fall in love with her, well, fie on you and your whole family!

Patti Smith on Nobel prize performance: – I was humiliated and ashamed | SVT/NRK/Skavlan