Woman as warrior (Part 3)

[Pete Johnston <P.Johnston>]

Woman as warrior (Part 3)


 In the young Robert Mapplethorpe - then sexually confused and seeking his
artistic identity within that sexual confusion - Smith had found her soul
twin, spiritual brother and part-time boyfriend. They supported one
another's artistic ambitions, and evolved a relationship that was strong
enough to see them through the poverty and squalor of their earliest
attempts at forging careers in a city already weighed down with aspirant
poets and artists. This year, Smith will publish The Coral Sea - a
sequence of prose poems that chart her love and mourning for Mapplethorpe,
who died of Aids in 1989. She is disappointed by the appropriation of some
of Mapplethorpe's more explicitly sexual images by lobbyists with specific
sexual agendas.
 `Robert was really a true artist, a pure artist. He had a true artist's
calling, and I can say that with some authority since I knew him from when
he was 20 and saw the history of his development. If he's being used
politically right now, that won't endure - his work is being perceived in
a narrow way. Robert's concern was always with composition and light. That
was his pure motivation. Whether it was a picture of a man pissing in
another man's mouth, or of a flower, or a portrait, Robert had the same
motivation - he was looking at the composition and the lighting. He always
considered all of his work to be of equal merit and strength, no matter
what the subject.
 `When all the controversy happened after Robert died, people often asked me
what he would think about it. And I know, knowing Robert the way I did,
that if he had a photograph on the wall that offended most people - of the
distended organ of a black man, for instance - he would say, `All right,
take it down', and put up an equally offensive photograph of a rose.
Because all of his work was interchangeable. He was an artist, not a
politician.
 `When I started writing these sets of prose poems [The Coral Sea], I drew
on all of the different things I knew of him as an artist and as a human
being. It wasn't hard to write; I was grateful for being able to write it
because Robert had a very strong work ethic and our friendship was very
work-oriented. So to grieve for him in the form of work was a very blessed
experience.'  A chance meeting with Lenny Kaye (then a music journalist
who worked in a record shop) and the recruitment of Richard `DNV' Sohl
gave Smith the basis of a group to support musically her readings and
improvisations. In keeping with the informality of the underground, there
was no formal decision to start a group, but they did produce the single
Hey Joe in 1974, backed with Piss Factory. Smith used Hey Joe to retell
the story of the Patty Hearst kidnapping, and the whole project was funded
by Mapplethorpe.
 After a stint at CBGBs and a brief mini-tour of California, the basis of
the Patti Smith Group returned to New York, where they brought in Ivan
Kral and Jay Dee Daugherty. The buzz buzzed and they were offered a deal
with Arista, their first album, Horses, being produced by the former viola
player of the Velvet Underground, John Cale.
 Reviewing Tom Verlaine's group Television in the October 1974 issue of Rock
Scene, under the title Learning To Stand Naked, Smith had written, `In the
Sixties we had the Stones, Yardbirds, Love and Velvet Underground.
Performers moved by cold images. They didn't hide behind an image, they
were the image.' Now, with Mapplethorpe's stark, self-assured portrait of
her on the cover of Horses, the same could be said of Patti Smith. This
cover image was seen to shake rock's perception of gender, and - as much,
almost, as the record- came to define a super-cool punk androgyny. `People
have made a lot of stuff about the Horses cover, but a lot of what we do
is bred on innocence. How people interpret it is up to them. I thought of
myself as a poet and a performer, and so how did I dress? I didn't have
much money; I liked to dress like Baudelaire. I looked at a picture of him
and he was dressed, like, with this ribbon or tie and a white shirt. I
wasn't thinking that I was going to break any boundaries. I just like
dressing like Baudelaire.
 `And Robert liked taking pictures in natural light, and he had very little
equipment then. The Horses cover came from 12 photographs that Robert
took. He thought it had dignity, but he was also trying to take a picture
of a triangle of light that you can see on the image. He wanted me to look
good, of course, but he was a photographer first and foremost, and he was
trying to get the best picture of that triangle. Me? I just wanted to look
cool. I wasn't trying to do anything. I know people would like to think
that we got together to break boundaries of politics and gender, but we
didn't really have time for that - we were really too busy trying to pull
enough money together to buy lunch.' The rock industry (as much as any
other more conservative industry) had been notoriously sexist throughout
the Sixties and Seventies, expecting women to be the passive squaws of
patriarchal hippy men, and content in their roles as either `chicks' or
`ladies'. Smith, light years away from either the West Coast introspection
of a singer-songwriter such as Joni Mitchell, or the dirty blues
traditionalism of Janis Joplin, reinvented the role of women in rock by
bringing a new muscularity and mysticism that was possessed of a
confrontational glamour. This was summed up by the rumour that record
company executives at Arista were outraged by the visibility of a light
hair line above her lip on the cover of Horses, and were doubly outraged
by her steadfast refusal to allow the offending facial hair to be
air-brushed out. This was a woman as warrior and mystic - your average
marketing man's worst nightmare, when his ideal was the soft or the
pornographically sexy.
 In this sense, Patti Smith's rebellion through honesty - in terms of
denying the male control of her body as an image - resembled the bravery
of the body-builder Lisa Lyon, whom Mapplethorpe also photo-graphed
extensively, and who revolutionised the world of body-building by kicking
off the high-heeled shoes that women competitors in body-building had
always been made to wear to leaven their `unfemininity'. `That
collaboration between Lisa Lyon and Robert was brilliant. It was kind of
different to how I worked with Robert. I wasn't a very generous model, and
our photographs were based on a different kind of trust. I wouldn't dress
up for him; I wouldn't lie naked on a rock, covered with clay, like Lisa
Lyon did. We took very direct photo-graphs, almost completely based on
friendship. And the collaboration between Robert and Lisa was about a
different thing: him as an artist and her as a body-builder, and that
being her art. Being comfortable displaying her body, she was like clay
for him, dressing up in veils or fancy hats.' Smith's particular brand of
punk rock was a form of mystical theatre in which, as she famously put it,
`Three-chord rock merged with the power of the word'. While the Patti
Smith Group could play the fastest, most violent form of white-noise speed
punk doing the rounds in 1977, Smith's performances ranged from covering
The Who's My Generation to virtually speaking in tongues - thus mutating
the extremes of her religious upbringing to a kind of punk shamanism. Her
sexual ambiguity - singing Van Morrison's Gloria from the point of view of
the predatory male, or describing a suicide on the lesbian beach at
Redondo - was always secondary to her intense romanticism as a poet. Her
most impassioned monologues across the group's `field of sound' - captured
on Radio Ethiopia and later Easter - resembled a one-way shouting match
with God. She used the language of ecstatic religion within the theatre of
rock 'n' roll, crunching visions of teenage rebellion into snarled
prayers, or cooing accounts of spiritual communion through a cast of
misfits and outlaws. This was closer to Genet than Generation X.
 Pitched between bearing witness to a living God and proclaiming her violent
apostasy, Smith's records and performances can be seen as a struggle with
the faith she'd learned as a child - an acting out of the `expansive
territory' between her Christian mother and her doubting father. As the
American conceptualist and critic Dan Graham was to write of her in 1979,
in his essay Punk: Political Pop for the Southern California Art Journal:
`She speculated on a new definition of `female', redefining women's
subservient position in rock. Variously, she projected herself as lesbian,
androgyne, martyr, priestess, female God.' On the night of January 26,
1977, Patti Smith fell 12 feet from the stage during a performance in
Tampa, Florida, cracking two vertebrae in her neck. In Clinton Heylin's
book From The Velvet To The Voidoids, she is quoted as describing her fall
(and the word becomes a pun on its Christian usage): `I was doing my most
intense number, Ain't It Strange, a song where I directly challenge God to
talk to me in some way. It's after a part where I spin like a dervish and
I say `Hand of God I feel the finger, Hand of God I start to whirl, Hand
of God I don't get dizzy. Hand of God I do not fall now.' But I fell . .
.' For a woman whose first album had begun with the line, `Jesus died for
somebody's sins but not mine', it seemed as though Patti Smith had finally
got her answer from God. The fall marked the beginning of her retirement
from rock, and in June 1980, at a final performance in Detroit's Masonic
Temple, she bid her adieu by reading Chapter 25 of the Gospel according to
Saint Matthew, which deals with Christ's resurrection. And, even if one
dismisses Dan Graham's esoteric line that Patti Smith combines the
trance-like communing with God that was advocated by Ann Lee, the founder
of the Shaker movement, with the evangelical possession at work in Jerry
Lee Lewis, her role in punk rock is a long way from the English experience
of the Sex Pistols.