It might be hard for an alt-rock generation not yet born to realize the startling, riveting power of Horses when it appeared in November 1975. Patti Smith's debut album was like lightning in the night sky for outsiders everywhere and a waking thunderclap for a fading counterculture, a rock scene grown bloated and sleepy. Even the Robert Mapplethorpe cover, just the androgynous Smith against stark white, was outstanding on the LP racks of the local record store.
Most of us had never seen or heard anything exactly like Smith in 1975, and one strength of Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story (Chicago Review Press) is its ability to make readers hear the sound of her impact. Author Dave Thompson was a 19-year-old fanzine writer when he covered Smith's 1979 London concert, and one weakness of Dancing Barefoot is that he still sometimes writes like a 19-year-old. His prose is up and down, lapsing sometimes into press-release hyperbole. Sure, "Because the Night" was a great record, but why "an FM immortal"? At least in this country, the stations that played it are dead, and, perhaps thankfully, Smith was never condemned to an afterlife on "classic rock" formats.
Unlike the smarmier work of predecessors in chronicling the stars of New York's '70s underground music-art subculture, Thompson sets forth with a good agenda. Focusing on Smith's formative years in the '70s, he tries to place "events in the cultural context of the time" and avoid penning yet another tell-all. "I have steered clear of Patti's private life," he states with less than full fidelity; clearly, it's impossible to entirely separate art from life, especially in the freewheeling milieu of New York City when it was the capital of bohemia. Still, the emphasis is on Smith's music and poetry and how her determinedly outsider life influenced her performances.
Stay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.
Dancing Barefoot was composed from reading contemporary accounts in the rock press and by interviewing Smith and her circle. If Thompson sometimes places too much faith in his unreliable narrator, a woman who stole a page from Dylan's creative self-mythologizing, he also shines a cold, factual light on some of her claims. No, she never played the Fillmore West, which closed four years before Smith's first West Coast tour. When asked if he ever played drums behind her as she claimed, Jonathan Richman replied with a curt, "No."
Dancing Barefoot captures the energy of a time before punk rock hardened into a definition, when musicians as diverse as the Ramones, Television and Talking Heads gathered together outside the glare of the mainstream media, developing a method and a musical vocabulary that shifted the axis of pop culture. It's especially interesting for describing the process behind the recording of Horses and the vital role of producer John Cale as editor and subtle guiding hand.
