Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story by Dave Thompson

Author:Dave Thompson [Thompson, Dave]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-56976-921-8
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2011-02-20T16:00:00+00:00

11

HIGH ON REBELLION

PUNK ROCK HAD yet to become a mainstream concern when the Patti Smith Group touched down in London in October 1976. Little more than a month had elapsed since the Sex Pistols–headlined 100 Club Punk Festival first alerted the media at large to the emergence of a powerful new musical movement, but another month would need to pass before the Pistols appeared cussing and cursing on nationwide television and turned an underground cult into an overground sensation.

The requirements of the explosion-to-come were still being streamlined. Not only was the design of the uniform that would mark someone as a punk evolving, but the stylizing of the musical nuances, too, were moving away from the sonic free-for-all that hallmarked the nascent movement’s first few months, toward the strict three-chord structure that today’s world knows as punk rock. And somewhere along the line, some time during the summertime that divided Patti’s first London shows from her second, she had been firmly placed on the outside looking in.

It was a development she surely had expected. A year and a half later, she would counsel British youth via Sandy Robertson of Sounds: “We’re only here to provide inspiration, and be a temporary life raft until you’re ready to do your own work…. I think that we must steal from masters, that we need teachers. Every great man has been an apprentice in his life, it’s how you pay your dues. I feel like I paid my dues to the Rolling Stones, and now I don’t need them. I still believe in them, though. I don’t feel any desire to say, ‘Fuck you’ to the Stones; they gave me a lot.”

But that, she discovered, was the difference between herself and many of her British fans. It would be an absurd generalization (although that has not stopped some commentators) to say that British youth rose up as one to say “fuck you” to the music of the previous decade and replace it with punk rock, to consign everything that had gone before to the dustbins of history. But a lot of them did, and in among all the discarded ELP, ELO, Rolling Stones, and Beatles albums with which the nation’s used record stores were now overflowing, there was a lot of more recent fare as well. Bruce Springsteen, Nils Lofgren, Graham Parker, Dr. Feelgood … so many names had risen up in the past year or so, haunted the headlines for a few glorious months, and then been cast aside as suddenly irrelevant.

Radio Ethiopia would not suffer that same fate, but not because Patti was immune to the culling. It would be overlooked altogether, left unsold on British record shelves as the full weight of the music press’s diatribes sank into the impressionable skulls of prospective buyers and the notion that poetry had a part to play in punk rock was abandoned.

Ticket sales for the UK leg of the tour were sluggish. Two shows at London’s three-thousand-plus-capacity Hammersmith Odeon suddenly seemed oddly ambitious, while

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.