Chapter 32
I saw Patti Smith live tonight, supporting Bob Dylan in the hideous structure out back of Bullshit Beyond that someone had the hide to call the Entertainment Centre. But I'll be damned if she didn't restore my faith in the power of creativity, the power of the world. Fuck.
I mean, this is a woman who's been through several heavy loads in the washing machine of life. Burnt out on hallucinogenic visions, poor as all bejesus, she winds up in all places at Robert Mapplethorpe's dive in NYC and eventually launches both their careers off the trampoline of artistic expression. Here's a chick who on her first album says it straight and clear, like a speeding bullet aimed right at America's hypocritical heart: "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine." Amen to that I say.
And then, four albums later, after breaking her neck by falling off a stage then rising back up like a holy Lazarus, stronger, more poetic, more prophetic than ever, she just says "Nup, goodbye, I'm giving it all up for love. I'm pissing off to be there for my family" . Be damned what they said at the time but to me this is Fucking-A-Feminism, practice made perfect. She did what she wanted to do.
But then, as if almost dying once and coming back
and then leaving just like the circumcised one in
the ole N. T. did wasn't enough, in one frigging
foul swoop the crow-blood angel of death took
from her those she loved the most -
Mapplethorpe, Fred Smith, great guitar god of
MC5 and the Sonics himself, and her brother
Todd. Wam, bam, you lost ma'am. Three strikes
for you and you're all out.
Anyone else would've kicked it in, given up the game of life itself, tossed it and its stinking shit load right off the Brooklyn Bridge, set deep in a pair of concrete Nikes for good measure. But no, not Patti. Instead, she raises one almighty middle finger towards the hand of fate and fortune, hits the road with the only other worthy prince of prophesy, Robert Zimmerman himself, then rips out of all the pain, the gut wrenching grief that must've twisted her body night after god damned lonely night, and out of all that horror comes "Gone Again" , an album that scares us with it's pure utterance of truth about life, death and the empty spaces in between.
And while Ginsberg went off into his holy night, Bukowski bumped off his final bloody mary and Burroughs, the man, the only man who I thought was immortal, choked on his naked lunch, Patti is still going, night after night offering hope purely by example of her existence, creating music that is worth waking up for in this putrid pisshole of daily drudgery.
Religions are dangerous things. Idols even more so. But tonight as I listen to her howling "Have you seen death singing?", all I can say is "Thank God for Patti."