Horse Feathers

REMEMBER Patti Smith?

She was famous three months ago. Big stories in Rolling Stone, Time, The New York Times. And that album cover!

How easy is it to fall for somebody when you don't truly know what they stand for? A singer whose music you have never heard? The alluring glimpse of the pale square frame photograph of the girl with the switchblade thin elbows sticking out of a white shirt? Coat slung over her shoulder? Pale translucent cheekbones? Suspenders, providing that hint of a man's outfit? That casual elegance of the working man with sleeves rolled up--a takeoff on the cover of an early Frank Sinatra album? Coal black hair? The picture is all still, the energy curiously becalmed. A woman reed thin, when quiet just a sparkler in storage, but when she begins to sing or yell it's Bastille Day and all the pecan shops in Georgia have contributed M-80 cherry bombs to the chaos. The night sky fills with blue and pink pinwheels.

It's all hard to remember now, three months later, why everyone was standing in line on Boylston Street a half a block from the Jazz Workshop on Thursday January 8 at 7 p.m. in 16 degree weather hoping to earn the privilege of paying $4 to get into a crowded booze room to hear--what? Gender ambiguity?

The performer who recorded Patti Smith's Horses album is very different when she gets away from the vinyl. Backed by a very rudimentary R&Roll band with monotonous rhythms and very confined three chord 4/4 beat, with no electronic overtracking, overdubbing and overecho, she is very challenging and very real. She taunts the audience, she does battle with them, and she comes out ahead.

WORKING WITH no more pure vocal equipment than Dylan, she digs deep into her Pitman, New Jersey, garbage-cans-crashing-in-the-morning voice to come up with some sultry Piaf and sneering Jagger and belts it out with a kind of controlled epileptic frenzy. Gangfight scuzz. What's not so simple and brutal are the words. She is a poet and her rock and roll is all based on her poetry. A cultural groupie, it is clear that she has swallowed a lot of influences to have borne the devil child of her work. An article in Rolling Stone about her revealed a whole cast of romantics populating her attic.

Rimbaud. The Ronettes.

Renoir. Kenneth Anger.

Jimi Hendrix. Brian Jones. William Burroughs. Andy Warhol. Janis Joplin. Lou Reed. Edith Piaf. Baudelaire. Norman Mailer. Rastafarianism. Playwright Sam Shepherd.

Not a bad Whitmanian roll call.

As a child she was racked by scarlet fever, which spurred her imagination. She dreamed of whirlpools and premonitions of death. When she went to Paris in 1970, she thought she saw Jimi Hendrix and Brian Jones dying from regurgitation. She tried to warn them, but she wasn't famous enough to get through.

She returned to America, still an unknown, and carved her name into more small books of poetry. Seventh Heaven began with a lot of lesbian imagery. Then came another silver of a tome, this one more heterosexual bent. She hated her female body from the beginning.

Every since I felt the need to choose

I'd choose male.

I felt boy rhythums when I was in knee

pants.

So I stayed in pants.

I sobbed when I had to use the public

ladies room.

My undergarments made me blush.

Every feminine gesture I affected from my

mother made me blush.

* * * * *

bloated pregnant.

I crawl through the sand.

like a lame dog.

like a crab.

pull my fat baby belly to the sea.

pure edge.

pull my hair out by the roots.

roll and drag and claw like a bitch.

like a bitch.

like a bitch.

As a teenager she got pregnant back home in Pitman and gave the child up for adoption. She is now 29.

IN 1975, Clive Davis, former czar of Columbia now making a comeback with Arista Records, picks her out of the ruck of New York City cult figures and decides her rock and roll is worth the Big Play, assuming it's carefully cultivated like a wild plant in a hothouse. Her rock grew out of her poetry readings and it's angry poetic rock. About such prime time subjects as homosexual rape near deserted high school lockers to the tune of Land of a Thousand Dances. A whole herd of stud boys surrounds Johnny by the lockers and his head is getting slammed into the metal and pounds from the bleeding.

Suddenly Johnny gets the feeling he's being surrounded by horses horses horses

Comin in all directions, white', shinin', silver studs with their noses all in flames...

Do you know how to pony?

Is this the new singing cowgirl?

Patti Smith fell for Rimbaud because his picture looked like Dylan. Now Dylan writes liner notes on Desire about Rimbaud, and when Patti Smith sees it for the first time she laughs and giggles because not only had Dylan come to see her perform, but he must have been influenced by her appetites.

She is laughing at Strawberries record shop on Boylston Street on January 9 at noon. She has come to promote her new album Horses and sign autographs. Strawberries is hip. Somebody at the store has made an altar of Black Ken dolls, melted wax, plastic horses, alligators, kangaroos. Dirt. Ashes. All images in her poems. The altar stands in an alcove lined with an arch of over 200 of her albums. Photographers drain the juice on their electronic strobes as people shyly wait with pens. One kid, who stole Patti's "Braves" jersey the other night has come to return it.

PATTI COMES IN with long thin teardrop legs stuffed into jeans which are stuffed into boots. Wisecracking and cursing and strutting and smiling, she is not playing the sensitive artist. Davis had said he wouldn't give her the full promo treatment if she shrank from stuff like this. She is determined to have a good time. She says it's her birthday, and if true, she shares it with Richard Nixon.

After a half hour of taking pictures, one photographer can't resist buying Patti's record and getting her to sign it, even though he has no record player. "To Tim/Platinum nerves/" (plus a picture of an eye...) "p--tti smttth"

Standing out on the ice on that Thursday night in January, the people at the end of the line are getting anxious. They are not exactly worried whether or not Patti Smith is A Legend Before Her Own Time. More to the point, they wonder if they can be saved from frostbite. The guys at the door don't tell anyone what the limit will be. They are letting people in slowly, slowly, like a bloodletting. Two hundred and fifty people are allowed to challenge the fire laws before the last 50 are told to forget it. An hour and a half, where has Patti been all this time? The small house, of course, has been calculated to boost a rising artist who had to be seen selling out. Joe McGinnis knew about such tactics.

At 7 p.m. Patti Smith is lounging in bed at Howard Johnson Motor Hotel in Kenmore Square. She's wearing a "Rastafarian" t-shirt. Her pencil thin arms fly out of the round stove holes of the too big t-shirt as she talks to some Mr. Jones journalists wearing bow ties.

She is bored but open. Tired but quick. Rodney the Rimbaud freak has a lot of questions.

Q. Where would you put Rimbaud today?

A. I dunno. At a rock concert. In our band! Hey, you're Rodney, aren't you? Sure! You're the one with the yellow shirt from this afternoon. I remember your name from Peyton Place. You remember. "Is it up, Rod? Is it up real good? Then go stick it up Allison MacKenzie!"

Q. What do you visit when you go to the zoo?

A. Deer. Llamas. Anything with antlers.

Q. What inspires you?

A. Where? On stage? Screwing? In here? I guess the people I'm with. Me and the band have an inspire pact. People can be down but there's always someone to bring us all up. Lots of things inspire me. The landscape. Movies. Poetry. Beautiful classy expensive dressy things. Arabian rugs. Prayer rugs. Cool clothes like cashmere coats, platinum, mink. Sexy things. It's hard to tell which one. I'm inspired by Hendrix. A lot of dead people. But I'm also inspired by the designer of the classic Cartier tank watch...Jimi Hendrix had large hands. They were tremendous. And he had a big dick.

Q. What is your favorite thing?

A. Right now it's my guitar. A 1957 Fender Duo-sonic, black, with maple neck, Schaller heads, and original pickup.

Q. What do you want to do now?

A. Smoke dope all the time. Play rock and roll. Don't ask me about poetry. I don't want to talk about my childhood anymore. I just want to play rock and roll. Don't ask me about anything before 1974. We could talk about my guitar. I've started playing lead guitar.

Q. Would you like to do movies? Would you like to do anything based on your own writing?

A. Yeah. I'm definitely into movies. They're my next shot. What kind? I dunno. Roger Vadim. I'd do anything. I'd like to do "Redondo Beach" (a poem of two lesbian lovers, one drowns) with Maria Schneider.

Q. With Schneider as the victim?

A. Of course. I'm older than she is. And she's left a string of corpses in all her movies. It's time she got bumped off! Besides, I can't swim. I'd really drown.

Q. Where did you meet the band?

A. Lenny Kaye. Lenny's my age. We met a long time ago. Camden, New Jersey. In '64 we both went over the Delaware Memorial Bridge to see the Isley Brothers. Everyone else was all dated up. We were always stag. We must gravitated to each other, cause everybody else was there to see Johnny Mathis, and we were there to see this guy play out front for the Isleys. This guy played like a maniac and we both knew he was gonna end up being Jimi Hendrix. Green sharkskin suit, patent leather shoes--he was wearing a do-rag then. He played a Strat--old or fake?--Lefthanded. Custom. Remember when they did "Shout"? how maniac it was?

The strange thing is JayDee. He's 20 now. I used to babysit for him. One day we found him in Woolworth's cryin. He'd been lost for 20 minutes, and in that time he'd stolen about $18 worth of candy, games and marbles...all stuffed into his pockets. Then he grew up.

Who would thought it? One day I remember him. He was all wobbly on the roller rink. A maniac. He'd rush around, crash into old men who'd end up lying in the middle of the rink. And he'd wail. He'd always want to skate to 19th Nervous Breakdown.

It's weird. You get paid for watching a kid and then you turn around and you gotta pay him for watching out for you.

Q. What do you think of Rimbaud's quitting poetry at 20 to become a mercenary? Do you know he wrote some for National Geographic?

A. I don't know. He shed one skin to get another. I quit being a Jehovah's Witness at 13. That was pretty heavy.

Q. Anything you'd tell your fans?

A. (Suddenly quiet, tired and distant) Yeah. Tell em it don't matter if they can't hear the words. They don't mean anything. I'm not saying anything they don't already know