PATTI SMITH - 50 Years Ago This Week

Fifty years ago this week I met up with Patti Smith at a rehearsal studio on New York’s West Side to interview her for Melody Maker. We already knew one another. Patti was a fixture in the downtown clubs where musicians and their friends, and writers like me, liked to hang out until late, and her guitarist Lenny Kaye and I were introduced by mutual friends just after I arrived in New York in 1973. I'd also seen her on stage, at CBGBs and The Bottom Line, so I knew where she was coming from well before Horses, her debut LP, was released.

Because NME latched on to punk before Melody Maker, MM has been accused of being a bit stick-in-the-mud but I think this is unjust. ‘Punk’ seems to have become a catch-all phrase for young bands that emerged in the mid-seventies whose modus operandi was a bit DIY. They put anarchic emotion over technical skills, they disdained arena rockers like Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, they wore their hair short and spiky and dressed in hand-me-downs. Over in New York I was writing about these bands as early as 1974, when I first met Debbie Harry and Chris Stein, and reviewed The Ramones and Television. It happened in New York well before London and I think this was well before NME cottoned on to it. 

Either way, I was quick to recognise Patti, who belonged to the same genre. Horses made a big splash in New York, just as it did earlier this year when it celebrated its fiftieth birthday. This called for an interview, and here it is, unedited, among the first interviews with Patti that appeared in the UK press. It was headlined Poetry In Motion and appeared in MM dated 29 November, 1975. 

Last month they caught Patti Hearst — and so ended the biggest man (or woman) hunt in the history of the US.

        All this is history now, of course, but it’ll probably be the subject of at least two best-selling novels in the near future, not to mention a major screen movie.

        But perhaps the first outside view of the Patti Hearst case was provided by New York’s sparrow-like poetess Patti Smith, then a struggling personality in the underground rock scene of the city. With considerable difficulty she raised one thousand dollars and headed for Electric Ladyland Studios in Greenwich Village and recorded a version of the traditional Hendrix classic, ‘Hey Joe’.

        The inspiration for this move was provided by the words of Randolph Hearst who, on seeing the picture of his daughter holding a rifle, exclaimed to the anxious ears of America: “What are you doing with that gun in your hand?”

        Patti Smith’s version of ‘Hey Joe’ was a bitch of a record. Opening with a poetic dialogue about the Hearst situation, it gradually flowed into the regular song. It was chock-full of atmosphere and, for topicality, it really couldn’t be beaten. Had it received more exposure, I’m sure that Patti Smith would have been an overnight sensation.

        It didn’t, though, and it never will. About 1,000 copies of Patti’s ‘Hey Joe’ were pressed and made available by mail order through her management company and selected record shops down in the Village. According to Patti’s manager, Jane Friedman, the project lost around 3,000 dollars, even though the singles were sold at $2.50, a mark-up of over 50 per cent on the regular singles’ price.

        Today it’s a collector’s item, and no more are available.

        Also today, Patti Smith stands on the brink of success after a long, hard struggle. This summer she signed with Arista Records, and her debut album is out in the states this month.

        Thanks to Clive Davis, the boss of Arista, she is only the second of many artists in this (New York) fringe rock fraternity to be recognised by a record company. The first, of course, was the New York Dolls, whose recording career slumped after two albums.

        But Ms. Smith cannot be placed in the same category as the Dolls, or any rock band, for that matter. Some may call her a singer, but she is really an improvising lyricist whose performances rush with crazy momentum as each song, or poem, unrolls. She recites with a musical backdrop, frequently breaking into song as the energy spirals, criss-crossing between the two and, more often than not, making up the words as she stumbles headlong forward.

        Her band has been increasing in size over the years. Four years back it was just Patti and her guitarist Lenny Kaye, an occasional rock journalist and walking encyclopaedia on the last two decades of pop in America. Kaye, who three years ago, incidentally, compiled the Nuggets album of relatively obscure US singles for the Elektra label, might be described as a free-form guitarist, as he plays random notes at will according to the prompting of Patti’s dialogue. They understand one another and, as such, it’s doubtful whether any orthodox guitar player would fit.

        Pianist Richard Sohl is a similar performer. Like Kaye, nothing he plays can be predicted beforehand.

        Recently two other musicians have been added: a second guitarist, Ivan Kral, who, like Patti, bears a striking resemblance to Keith Richard, and drummer Jay Dougherty. There is no bass player — Patti feels a drummer is ample rhythm.

        John Cale was brought in to produce her first Arista album, Horses, which is released this month. It was on this topic that we began what turned out to be a very lengthy conversation last week.

        “It’s a live album,” she announced, squatting on the floor. “There’s hardly any overdubbing at all. We just went in and did the songs straight away. In the studio we went through hell. I asked John to do it for me, I begged him to, and we had nothing but friction, but it was a love-hate relationship and it worked. At first I wanted an engineer producer, somebody like Tom Dowd, but Atlantic wouldn’t let him go, so I figured I’d get a top artist producer who would act as a mirror. The whole thing in the studio was us proving to John that we could do it the way we wanted, so we fought a lot but it was fighting on a very intimate level.”

        The result is an album that’s actually far more melodic than the half dozen or so occasions I’ve watched Patti perform in various clubs in New York. The inclusion of a drummer — Dougherty was brought in immediately before the sessions began — tightens up Patti’s style no end. Before, it was often shapeless and without discipline of any kind. Now you can even dance to Patti Smith, or at least some of the tracks.

        Even words were improvised in the studio, she says. “I’m not into writing songs. I find that real boring. All our things started out initially as improvisation, but doing them over and over again got them into a formula.

        “I can’t play anything at all, so Lenny and I work out tunes as they go along. I have words and know how I think they should go, so we just pull it out and pull it out further until we get somewhere.”

        She and Kaye first got together in 1971. This followed a period of Patti’s life when she lived at the Chelsea Hotel, writing poetry and spending time with rock musicians in what she describes as a “tequila split life.”

        Before that she was at art school, which followed work in a factory in New Jersey, where she was brought up. It was Dylan sidekick Bobby Neuwirth who introduced her to the changing musical inhabitants of the Chelsea Hotel. (Neuwirth is currently playing on Dylan’s tour of New England with Joan Baez).

        “Neuwirth recognised my poetry and immediately introduced me to everybody he knew in rock and roll and kept pumping me to work at it. I studied Rimbaud, too, but being surrounded by these rock and roll rhythms the two moved simultaneously.”

        It wasn’t until 1972 that Patti started making regular appearances in New York. In 1973 Lenny Kaye appeared following a reading Patti gave on the anniversary of Jim Morrison’s death, and from then on things accelerated. Pianist Richard Sohl joined the ranks and gigs followed at anywhere manager Jane Friedman could book them.

        Which just about brings us up to where we began: the ‘Hey Joe’ single recorded at Electric Ladyland. It was a deliberate choice of studio, for Patti strongly allies herself with Hendrix, another artist who took his art beyond contemporary strictures.

        “We had three hours of studio time, but I just did it like we were on stage. Eventually we had ten minutes left and no ‘B’ side, so I recited this poem and the musicians just joined in and we had it done.”

        According to Friedman, that ‘Hey Joe’ chapter lost about $3,000 as so many copies were given away to friends instead of being sold. Part of their deal with Arista was a clause that no more could be made, so it’ll remain a collector’s item for ever.

        Clive Davis’ interest in Patti stems from his days with Columbia, when Patti wrote the lyrics to two songs recorded by Blue Oyster Cult, a CBS act. The deal with Arista is for five albums over the next three years, and meanwhile she has branched out from New York, playing concerts in California for the first time. In the coming months she will embark on her first proper tour, mainly visiting colleges across the country.

        “We’re a group now,” she said. “We’re together and that’s it. I’m in rock and roll now and I’m proud to be in it.”

* * *

There is a rather sad postscript to my friendship with Patti. About a year later a New York underground newspaper called The Planet printed several topless photographs of her with cheesy captions written in the style of top-shelf magazines. Predictably, she was livid and the whole lurid business was the talk of the town in rock circles. As Melody Maker’s man in New York I felt duty bound to mention the vexed issue of Patti and the topless pictures in the news column I sent to London every week. Patti saw it and wasn’t amused. The next time we collided with one another she let me have it. In vain did I try to explain that I wasn’t endorsing the actions of The Planet but that it was my job to report everything, good and bad, that occurred in the NY music world. Patti wasn’t having it and she never spoke to me again.

YOU’VE GOT MICHAEL: Living Through HIStory – A Memoir By Dan Beck

Jackson, that is, and to have ‘got’ Michael was something of a poisoned chalice as Dan Beck, senior product manager at Epic Records in New York, would find out over the five years they worked together. What’s more, after reading his book, it somehow comes as no surprise that one of Jackson’s many managers played the role of gangster Tuddy Cicero in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. 

This is not to say that Jackson’s entourage and wider circle of business associates were all gangsters, just that the ruthless methods they and Epic employ, as portrayed by Beck, somehow reminds me of organized crime – or how food chains and clothing manufacturers market their product. 

Take how Walter Yetnikoff, boss of Columbia, Epic’s parent company, reacts when MTV decline to show Jackson’s video for ‘Billie Jean’: “Yetnikoff, who was livid, called a senior executive at MTV,” writes Beck. “‘Listen,’ he said, ‘You know those Journey and Bruce Springsteen and REO Speedwagon videos of mine that you guys like to play so much? Pack them all up. Put all the masters in a box and send them back to me. Because we are no longer in business together… unless you play [‘Billie Jean’].” We were thrilled to have the moral high ground! It was a place of integrity a major label rarely, if ever, enjoyed.”

Although Dan Beck’s book focuses on his role as Jackson’s go-to man at Epic and, primarily, his part in the marketing of HIStory, Jackson’s 1995 compilation-plus album, it’s really a memoir of his 20 years working for the company that exposes – if that’s the right word – the way in which major labels operated during a period when cash flowed into the record business like the Mississippi in flood. Beck’s in-tray features other artists besides Jackson but the revenues generated by Michael, most especially Thriller and albums either side of it, make the Jackson 5 star his number one priority. 

As might be expected, dealing with those who surround Jackson means Beck must walk on tiptoes. “Most superstars had a manager, an agent, an independent PR person and perhaps an influential road manager,” he writes. “It generally didn’t take long to engage that artist’s team and learn how to work with them. As product managers, we had to understand their strengths (and often their dysfunctions) to help them succeed with the giant multinational corporation to which they were signed. When it worked, the results could be nearly unimaginably great. When it didn’t, it could be a disastrous nightmare. Michael Jackson’s world was entirely different. By 1991, still only three albums deep into his solo career, his organizational structure was a sprawling maze of powerful experts, creative collaborators, well-meaning friends and a few questionable hangers-on.” 

In many respects the book is the inside story about the issues surrounding Jackson during a period when his career soared before hitting choppy waters brought about by what Beck judges to be naïveté. Thriller became – and remains – the undisputed best-selling album of all time yet at the same time its success posed an insurmountable dilemma in how to better it. Subsequent releases that sold less could, of course, be considered failures even if their sales figures exceeded 20 million, a figure 99% of acts would kill for. 

Beck wrestles with this and other problems over the five-year period in which he was product manager for the self-styled King of Pop, by then the world’s most famous entertainer. His biggest problem seems to have been a reluctance on the part of those surrounding Michael to be decisive. Better make no decision at all than to make the wrong one. 

        “As his own CEO, he had a disregard for costs that was legendary,” Beck writes. “The immediate need, as I perceived it, was to find the decision-makers and the people who could answer questions so that we could move swiftly and decisively on Michael’s behalf… We often had critical deadlines that would require his personal attention. Since we had to be able to get approvals and quick action, I was concerned that the fiefdoms in Michael’s orbit would be inclined to hold up decisions in fear of making the wrong ones.” 

Beck quit Epic in 1996, and thereafter watched sadly from the sidelines as Jackson’s career and public image plummeted. “I still couldn’t fully fathom the idea that he could commit the despicable crimes for which he was charged. I knew a Michael Jackson who was stubborn. I knew a Michael Jackson who could tell a fib if he felt it was necessary. But I also knew a Michael Jackson who had a certain core of honor. I had challenged and tested it, and he had never betrayed it. Had his naïveté led to his legal woes? Had the side of him that was socially awkward compromised him with the wrong people? Then again, how well did I know him? The magnitude of that trial emphasized just how minor my role and relationship were in his huge life… I was just a cog in the wheel for a brief time.

        “I liked Michael,” Beck concludes. “He was always polite. Almost always smiling. He was so often excited and enthusiastic… And while he understood every nuance of a dance move, he did not always grasp the subtleties of public opinion. In fact, there were times when he had difficulty seeing the obvious, such as ignoring our strong advice to curtail photo ops with children. He even seemed puzzled by it.”

        You’ve Got Michael is published by Trouser Press Books, has 290 pages, and is fully indexed. It includes an eight-page photo section featuring several shots of the author with Jackson and one with the manager who played that role in Goodfellas. He certainly looks the part. 

BARRIE WENTZELL: SHOULD’VE BEEN THERE… A Rock’n’Roll Retrospective 1965-1975

“The Kinks always hated photo shoots,” says Ray Davies. “When we first came into the music industry, photographers were strictly old school, with collars and ties and suits. It wasn’t until photographers like Barrie Wentzell sussed out that it was easier to dress like one of the band to find themselves included in the new era of rock’n’roll. He managed to be absorbed by the band. We talked about the music we wanted to make and he could reflect that in his shoots.” 

        Barrie wasn’t simply the first music photographer to look and dress like his subjects, he was the first dedicated, independent rock’n’roll photographer in the UK. Until his arrival, the photographers who took pictures of the acts in the charts also took pictures of politicians, film stars and sportsmen and women, anyone who was newsworthy. They worked for newspapers or agencies; John Lennon today, Harold Wilson tomorrow, or maybe an afternoon on the boundary at Lords snapping cricketers.

        Barrie, on the other hand, came from somewhere else entirely. His background was in design and he was interested in creative, artistic photography. He played the guitar well, dressed in faded jeans and wore his hair long. Somehow, one day in 1965, he was invited to a Diana Ross press reception at the BBC and he took his camera along. He photographed Ms Ross and took his pictures of her to Bob Houston, then assistant editor of Melody Maker, who used one on the following week’s front page. Barrie had found his vocation.

        The fruits of that vocation – ten years as MM’s staff photographer – are to be found in Should’ve Been There, a new book of Barrie’s remarkable work, 392 pages featuring everyone who was anyone in rock’n’roll during the decade spanning 1965-75. They’re all here: wonderful shots of Beatles, Stones, Zep, Who, Dylan, Bowie, Faces, Elton and many more. Most of these shots haven’t been seen for years because unlike most R&R photographers Barrie saw no reason to commercially exploit his work to any great extent in the decades that followed his retirement. Some might be familiar to older readers of MM – he and I logged a bit of time together, of course, and, indeed, I helped with the editing of this book – but what we have here is a treasure trove that in actual fact represents a tiny proportion of his work. 

        Barrie worked in an era before digital or mobile phones with built-in cameras, so Barrie took hundreds of pictures that weren’t used, all of which are on contact sheets. Below is a contact sheet of shots of Robert Plant in a limousine being interviewed in 1970 by Richard Williams, MM’s assistant editor. He has hundreds of similar contact sheets at his home in Toronto. 

        It’s important to realise, too that Barrie’s photographs gave Melody Maker a look that all the other music papers would have envied. Before he joined MM’s editorial team all the music papers, MM included, used either photographs supplied by agency photographers, record labels or PR companies, so the same shots appeared everywhere and were used over and over again. Barrie not only supplied MM with original shots but his personable nature and empathy with musicians enabled him to visit them off duty, often at their homes, and achieve results not seen elsewhere. 

        The photographs in the book are accompanied by Barrie’s story in his own words, his take on what it was like to do what he did, and captions in which he recalls his thoughts on the musicians he photographed. Some, Jimmy Page and Pete Townshend – “Fucking amazing work,” says Pete – amongst them, offer their thoughts on Barrie’s work too. 

CC with Barrie, Lincoln Festival, 1972. 

Photo by Jill Furmanovsky. 

        Barrie lost his appetite for taking rock shots after a Rolling Stones concert in 1973. “At this gig Mick announced that that photographers would only be able to shoot the first three numbers and then they’d be thrown out,” he writes. “The band had an official Rolling Stones photographer, so as to control their image. This practice seems to have become standard now with photographers being restricted to, in some cases, taking picture of only the first song or even less. Shame, as nowadays the audience has become the photographer: freely taking videos and pictures with their cell phones, while professional photographers are restricted. Thanks Mick! 

        “When I first started taking photos at live shows, I was sometimes the only photographer there. But by 1975, there were dozens of photographers vying with each other to get shots of the artists and bands… access was becoming more difficult, uncomfortable, and unpleasant.”

        Disenchanted with the profession that he can claim to have invented, Barrie moved to the Isle of Wight to run a greengrocers’ shop with his brother. 

        Should’ve Been There is published by Rufus Publications. Here is a link to a video all about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fNKoPslqxs

NORTHUMBRIAN BLUES: The Lost World of Big Pete Deuchar by Colin Harper, Volume 1: 1933-60.

No, I’d not heard of Big Pete either, not until Colin Harper sent me a copy of his book which, as labours of love go, might rank alongside Mughal emperor Shan Jahan building the Taj Mahal as a mausoleum for his dead wife, albeit not quite so time consuming as Shan needed almost 20 years to finish the job.

Colin’s skills as a tenacious researcher into the nooks and crannies of modern music first came to my attention in 1998 when I read his Mojo feature on Anne Briggs, the high priestess of British folk music. To come up with 6,000 words on a singer whose determination to leave society behind and take up residence on a remote Scottish island demonstrated extraordinary resolve, and the same can be said for this strangely moreish book about a little-known banjo player with broad shoulders, a moustache and goatee beard who died in 1988.

Colin came across six foot four inches tall Big Pete while researching Bathed In Lightning, his biography of guitar maestro John McLaughlin who, aged  17, long before fame and Mahavishnu beckoned, played New Orleans jazz alongside Big Pete in The Professors Of Ragtime up in the north east of England. This is little more than a footnote in McLaughlin’s career, of course, but Colin delved deeper and discovered the extraordinary life that Big Pete led in and out of the jazz music he loved, so much so that he couldn’t fit it all into one book. He’s working on Volume 2 as I write. 

Quite who’ll be inspired to buy this book is anyone’s guess, but it’s an astonishing tale, partly hinted at in the subtitle ‘Lost World’. It’s not so much pre-Beatles – though the Fabs will make a cameo appearance in Vol 2 when Pete encounters them in Hamburg – as pre-rock and roll, an era when even jazz, its precursor, was looked upon with deep suspicion by the authorities. Those who preferred this kind of music over the ‘light entertainment’ offered by the BBC, let alone performed it in public, were heading for a life of criminality, at least as far as right-thinking people were concerned. “There was still, two years into the 60s, a lingering frisson of seediness, doubt and debauchery about jazz and those who peddled it,” writes Colin his introduction.

This didn’t faze Big Pete. He was born into money, a Scottish dynasty of brewers and pub owners, but it was a dysfunctional family with upstairs cavorting with downstairs and the posh boarding schools to which he was sent didn’t suit his temperament. Indeed, Pete’s childhood reads like a gothic horror story from which he escaped with little more than a banjo and a bicycle, both of which he put to good use as he set about promoting jazz evenings on Tyneside and, in the fullness of time, pedalling across whole continents. 

        The band with which he was most associated, the Vieux Carré Jazzmen, was formed in 1954, lasted until 1976, was revived in 1991 and is still going strong. The venues at which they played were seedy and the rewards meagre but Pete swam against the tide, a bit of a hero who was both loved and loathed by most of those he encountered. Through scouring the local press, Colin has researched scores of gigs that in some way wouldn’t have happened had it not been for Pete’s energy, flair and, it has to be said, cussedness. Pete also had a fondness for the product on which his family’s fortune was secured which, coupled with a rather wanton disregard for authority, led him into trouble with the law. Amusingly, Colin is equally assiduous in detailing Pete’s many appearances in the dock at the local courtroom. 

        An outsize personality, Big Pete made enemies too, including a few ex-girlfriends and, as Colin traces his life up to 1960, he paints of picture of a resolute nonconformist in an era when it was deemed right and proper to stand in cinemas while the national anthem was played after a film’s closing credits. In 1957 he visited New Orleans where he encountered his idol, the clarinettist George Lewis, with whom he performed, on banjo, in the UK in 1959, recordings of which have been made available on the Danish Rarities label and 504 Records.

        As a convert to pure New Orleans jazz from the early part of the 20th Century, as espoused by the more celebrated and equally uncompromising Ken Colyer, it will come as no surprise that Big Pete was no fan of British trad, a vanilla variant performed by men in funny hats with striped waistcoats who, briefly and inexplicably, found themselves popular in the doldrums years leading up to the arrival of The Beatles. Nevertheless, he embraced trad somewhat reluctantly before turning his attention to R&B with His Country Blues band, but there we must take a break until the arrival of Vol 2 in which we will learn of the fate of Sally Stevens, Pete’s younger half-sister, a session singer who emigrated to California. Sally, a charismatic familial link to Big Pete, owned a copy of his ultra-rare self-published, largely autobiographical, 1981 novel Half A Chance. Regrettably, however, less than a year after Colin interviewed her, she died from bronchial pneumonia. 

        Northumberland Blues, published as a limited edition by Jazz In Britain Books, contains 24 pages of photographs, among them one of Sally with Jackson Browne, scores of foot- and endnotes and an unreliable index. It’s a fascinating read, a valuable history of the evolution of jazz in Britain outside of London. I’m filing it alongside Pete Frame’s Restless Generation.