Clothes Shopping With Patti Smith

On the Verge With 'Radio Ethiopia' 1976

A few months after writing my last post about Neil Young's "Tonight's the Night" for Creem magazine, I was settled back in New York as the pop music writer for Newsday, then a Long Island-only paper with daily circulation of 550,000 and Sunday of more than 600,000. Many of the arts writers worked in a small Manhattan office, and I lived in a fifth floor walkup on E. 26th Street near Lexington. It was a medium walk or quick bus ride down to CBGB, the cool core of a developing scene that would become known as punk rock. I was there at least two or three nights a week, catching the developing acts such as the the Ramones, trio Talking Heads, bands as various as the hard rockabilly Tuff Darts to the intense flights of guitar ecstasy of Television. I wrote a cover story about the businss of punk in the Sunday Jan. 4, 1976 Newsday, the Ramones on the cover. (Click the red to read the Substack Jan. 29, 2023).

The Patti Smith Group was at the nexus of this then-marginal marginal neighborhood also rooted in bohemian literature, poetry, the visual arts, performance art, and off-off Broadway theater. Smith had visualized herself as a rock star before she ever sang a note, and she and her guitarist, erstwhile rock critic Lenny Kaye, added a self-conscious awareness of rock history to their developing sound. (See the Q&A with Lenny Kaye about his book about rock scenes, Lightning Strikes.)

I was so sold on Patti Smith and her band that I insisted on a big Sunday arts section story after the debut album "Horses" was had been released by Arista Records in November, 1975. For that story, which appeared earlier in 1976, I had done a sit-down interview with Smith in the stylish apartment she and Allen Lanier shared on a fashionable corner of lower Fifth Avenue near Washington Square.

But a few months later, my editors had also tuned into Smith and wanted another story. Most likely working with Smith's manager Jane Friedman, she and I thought we'd do something different. With some money in her pocket with the Arista advance and success of "Horses," Patti Smith and I made a date to go shopping. I have added the first person details of our visit to pricey Henri Bendel's on 57th Street that I withheld from the original story, because I wanted to show my editors that the former Creem guy could write with the restraint required by daily newspapers at the time. No first person.

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FROM RIMBAUD’S ABYSSINIA TO HENRI BENDEL’S WITH PATTI SMITH

Adapted from Newsday Sept. 19, 1976, with fresh commentary

A FEW weeks ago, the Patti Smith Group, which visits Hofstra University for two shows Thursday, played an unannounced and unadvertised midnight show at the Ocean Club in lower Manhattan. From the crowds that pushed and pummeled toward the showcase area, you would've thought the concert had been advertised on every FM radio station in the metropolitan area. 

Patti Smith news travels fast on New York's artsy-craftsy rock and roll grapevine, and the audience was replete with admirers, curiosity seekers and semi-celebrities like poet Gerard Malanga, artist Larry Rivers, J. Paul Getty III (Paolo to friends), musician John Cale, who produced "Horses," and Smith's boyfriend of six years, Allen Lanier of the Blue Öyster Cult. [Lanier also contributed to Smith's early albums. A lifelong smoker, he died in 2013, age 67].

Handsome Dick Manitoba, the singing would-be wrestler from the Dictators, and his tag team partner, rock and sports writer R. Meltzer, indulged in baiting Punk Magazine's Legs McNeill, while McNeill howled at French speaking guests of Larry Rivers, excoriating them for being "foreigners." 

In other words, it was the kind of crowd Patti Smith feels comfortable with — loose, rowdy and a little rude. It is the kind of crowd that allows her to indulge her self-image — "part Piaf, part Jagger, and part Johnny Carson," vamping, bopping and ad-libbing. "This is the last time I make an asshole outta myself for being mediocrely clever," she said at one point. "Last night was a really underground night. It took us three hours and we still didn't finish one song." 

It's comforting to know that success hasn't changed Patti Smith much. A year after the release of last year's most memorable debut album, Horses, Smith's audience has expanded well beyond the downtown city lights.

She and her increasingly proficient band — guitarist Lenny Kaye and bassist Ivan Kral, pianist Richard Sohl, drummer Jay Dee Daugherty — have been well received throughout America and Europe. After the Hofstra gig, the Patti Smith Group will begin a months-long European tour which begins in Helsinki, Finland, and continues through Scandinavia into Germany, France and Britain.

The response in France is likely to be especially warm, since Horses won the prestigious Grand Prix du Disque award for 1975, the fourth rock album (others: The Doors' L.A Woman, Jimi Hendrix' Electric Ladyland, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon) to achieve that distinction. 

Despite Horses' rough edges and Smith's reputation as a New York cult phenomenon, the album has sold more than 150,000 copies in the United States, which is extremely respectable for a debut album. That mark is likely to surge when Arista Record releases Smith's second album, Radio Ethiopia, in early October. [It did not crack the Billboard top 200 album chart, a temporary setback before the resurrection of Easter in 1978, led by the Bruce Springsteen/Smith co-write of hit single Because the Night].

The Patti Smith Group will support the release with a grueling November-through-April U.S. tour that will include Thanksgiving week (November 22-29) at the Bottom Line. A New Year's Eve show at an undetermined theater in the New York-New Jersey area will be a double celebration, for on that day, Patti Smith will be 30 years old. 

"For my birthday, I want a spread in Vogue," Patti Smith said while trying on clothes at fashionable Henri Bendel's on 57th Street. "I was such a loser as a teen — I had the world's longest adolescence, and I still get pimples — that I figured the only way I was gonna make Vogue was as a rock and roll star." 

Smith was in Bendel's, a deluxe department store mostly for women, to pick up a sleek leather jacket that was being tailored for her. While we waited for the jacket, we looked at the clothes in that section and both grabbed for a pair of unisex pants. They looked to be real velvet. They had two-tone vertical stripes, the kind Brian Jones or Keith Richards would have worn for a Rolling Stones photo shoot. We each grabbed a pair from the rack and retreated to our respective dressing rooms.

Smith emerged disappointed; the pants were baggy and hung awkwardly on her slim frame that no amount of tailoring could fix. Patti was all smiles when she looked at me in the same pants: Though pret-a-porter, they looked bespoke. A perfect fit.

We considered this with appropriate respect and anguish for a few minutes. The cost was a stumbling block: $110, which was almost a month's rent for me at the time. Accounting for inflation, that would be $608 in 2024: Too rich for my blood, then and now. Smith was starting to do OK, but not that kind of money.

She looked at me and said: "If I was Elvis, I'd buy 'em for ya."

We looked at each other and laughed, both touched by the sentiment. We kept grinning because we both knew she meant it.

Smith seems well on her way toward achieving her goal — if not the spread in Vogue, then at least to be recognized as a rock and roll star. 

It hasn't been easy. The band's premiere in a major New York concert hall, at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center in April 1976, was premature for a band that at one point got as much mileage from its concept as its execution. "Technically, we weren't ready," Smith said of that strange, spaced-out show. "We did the best we could. We were still new, green, raunchy and raw. It wasn't the right place for us." 

To counteract the rawness of Horses, and to strive for a more commercial sound, the Patti Smith Group chose as a producer for Radio Ethiopia Jack Douglas, the man responsible for the production on the last three of Aerosmith's four million-selling albums. 

"John Cale was an artist," Smith said of her first producer. "Cale inspired and taught me. Jack is a total technician. He made the band sound terrific — he brought the band to the next level." 

The title song shows Smith's continuing fascination with a mystique that grew from her idolization of the 19th Century French impressionist poet Arthur Rimbaud, who is said to have contracted a fatal dose of syphilis in what was then known as Abyssinia. The Ethiopian connection has been reinforced recently by Smith and Lenny Kaye's absorption in Jamaican reggae music and the associated Rastafarian religious cult, which holds the late Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie, to be a deity. (A recent listen to Radio Ethiopia suggests that a producer like Lee Perry or Augustus Pablo would have been a better choice than Jack Douglas, and the album could have been done as Jamaican dub.)

Smith is aware that the frequent invocation of Ethiopian consciousness can come across like condescending radical chic. To counter that, she is trying to develop some kind of program to raise money for those victimized by recent famine in that land. "If I'm gonna indulge this romantic calling, I'm gonna have to deal with its reality too," Smith said. 

The new album consists of all original material, which may be something of a disappointment to those who've admired Smith's recorded renovations of rock classics like 'Gloria' on the Horses album, and her limited edition single 'Hey Joe', a devotion to Patty Hearst. 

In concerts this year, Smith has frequently opened with and included such unlikely but triumphant reworkings as 'Let's Twist Again', 'The Hunter Gets Captured By the Game' and 'Today I Met the Boy I'm Gonna Marry'. But one can hardly blame her for wanting to fit as much of her own strange cargo on the album as possible. 

Besides the title cut, which Smith describes somewhat cryptically as "13 minutes of ocean" recorded the night of Hurricane Belle, there is 'Poppies', which she calls her "tribute to opium, Edie Sedgwick, and women in general": 

"Every woman is a vessel "Every woman is a-vase-ive" 

Also on Radio Ethiopia is 'Pumping', long a staple of Smith's live show. It is the opening part of side 2's "Heart Trilogy" (the others: 'Distant Fingers' and 'Radio Ethiopia'). Smith said the song was "originally written for Bob Dylan" when she first met him. The refrain to 'Pumping', which used to be "free the Hurricane," is now "baby gotta dance." 

"The best advice Steve Paul [manager of Johnny and Edgar Winter, former entrepreneur of the Scene, and one of Smith's earliest supporters] ever gave me was, 'You gotta write a dance.' Me and Lenny made up this dance for 'Pumping' in France. We started movin' like boxers. Not everybody's a good dancer but everyone can get into a boxer. The idea of dancing is to look cool. And to have release. 

"I wanna be a big fan of myself," Smith said. "I started realizin' 'Gloria' was not the best song to dance to. I heard it in a club and all of a sudden everybody left the dance floor. Nobody leaves the dance floor when the Stones come on. I realized 'Gloria' was meant to dance to in front of the mirror. Now I want do songs beyond the mirror. That's what we shoulda called this album — 'Beyond the Mirror'." 

© 1976, 1996, 2024, Wayne Robins. Thanks to the Rock’s Back Pages library of London for digitizing so much of my early and recent writing.