Last month–prompted by a Los Angeles Review of Books argufier who accused male rock critics of disregarding Patti Smith–another critic asked Greil Marcus for his “thoughts on [Smith] now”:
This is complicated. I was always put off by Smith’s toughness routine–“Jesus died for somebody’s sins…but not mine”–that Lou-Reed-in-his-worst-period pause, that melodrama, that preening. As time went on I was more than put off by her piety, her performing as some kind of saint, and the self-congratulation run amuck in Just Kids, which I couldn’t read for just that reason–I find that quality utterly unbearable in a writer. Her championship of Ralph Nader for turning the country over to George W. Bush made me ill–I realize that wasn’t her motive for supporting Nader, but it kept her pure and we all know what else it led to. I don’t understand why “People Have the Power” can be talked about as if it’s anything other than a lousy song, if it is a song, let alone, as with the beginning of the article you’re talking about, as if its composition is a kind of miracle about which sentient beings ought to know absolutely everything. I got so sick of her writing songs about dead poets and singers–it was like you weren’t really dead, whether you were Kurt Cobain or William Burroughs, until she wrote a song about you. She made a lot of records I love–“Pumping (My Heart),” Because the Night,” “Pissing in a River,” a lot of Trampin’, Twelve.
On the other hand, on the few occasions when we’ve met or been in contact, going back to the time of her first single to a few years ago, she’s never been anything but friendly and gracious.
But here’s what it comes down to for me. In March 2001, as part of the exhibition “Les anneés pop” at the Pompidou Center in Paris, Patti Smith, Nick Tosches, and I were brought together for a talk (me), poetry recital (Nick), and musical performance (Patti). We all spent an afternoon catching up–Nick and I were old friends–meeting people (for me, Gerard Malanga, who was as nice as anyone could be, regardless of his once-upon-a-time Exploding Plastic Inevitable whip dances), and then rehearsing.
That night I went on first. I was told I couldn’t use the podium Nick and I had rehearsed at, because it was for artists–Nick as poet–not critics. After an introduction from the curator Mark Francis, so fulsome I was almost more embarrassed than gratified, I began talking, and was interrupted by a guy coming onstage to tell me I was speaking too fast for the simultaneously English-to-French translation being offered. I slowed down, and was stopped again and told I was taking too long–I had been given 30 minutes, and had talked for about twelve–and had to wrap it up. I did, in about a minute. I was so furious I was ready to leave the hall–I mean, they’d invited me, not the other way around. I can’t remember being so angry. Then Nick got up, drinking and smoking, with one or two musicians behind him, and performed his poetry, including “A Cigarette with God.” There’s an album of his part of the night: Fuckthelivingfuckthedead. He was not exactly coming across, and he went on forever, which made me even more incensed. Then after a break Patti came on with two or three musicians–not her regular band, at least not Lenny Kaye. She began singing, playing (including saxophone on “Sea of Love”), spitting on the stage between songs, and she was magnificent. She was overwhelming. She erased everything that had come before and started over as if no one had ever sung a song before. She seemed possessed by an energy, purpose, dedication, and fervor beyond ken. When it was over and we all left I kept saying, My God! I was on the same stage as Patti Smith.
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A few days before the Q&A about Patti Smith at greilmarcus.net, a respondent there (in the “Ask Greil” section) wondered how Marcus was “first introduced to Robert Johnson,” which led Marcus to recall another aural revelation…
I wrote about this in a piece–originally a talk at a history class at Berkeley–called “When You Walk in the Room,” which I collected in my book The Dustbin of History. It was January of 1970, just after Altamont, in a little place called Record City, on Telegraph near Bancroft in Berkeley. I was flipping through blues albums. I was sick of rock ‘n’ roll, disgusted by what it had become, what I’d seen that day a month before–the violence, the passivity, the musicians’ preening, the idiocy of the fans. I didn’t want anything to do with it, didn’t want to listen to it. I saw an album with “From Four Until Late”–a song I knew from the first Cream album, which I’d loved. I thought I ought to know where Cream songs came from, so I bought the Robert Johnson album and took it home.
Bob Dylan, in Chronicles, writes more eloquently than anyone about the shock of hearing Johnson for the first time. A close second is Walter Mosley. But my experience, and that of countless other people, was the same as theirs. Suddenly, the world and everything in it–love, hate, war, peace, recording techniques, musical tricks, what a song is or could be–looks different.
I went back to Record City to hear more. It was the right time and the right place. I hadn’t known that since the early or mid ’60s, Berkeley had been ground zero for the cult of 1920s-30s country blues. There was a bar, the Albatross, where blues followers spent their time, and where many performers from those decades would perform. Chris Strachwitz, founder of the Arhoolie label, who had recorded many older blues players, was in Berkeley, as was John Fahey, a blues collector who with Bill Barth had found Skip James, as was the blues hunter Ed Denson, who wrote a music column for the Berkeley Barb and was the manager of Country Joe and the Fish. Most importantly, the principal label devoted to reissuing country blues (if not the only one), Origin Jazz Library, was located in Berkeley, and Record City had everything. Over the next six months, I bought and listened to everything, barely believing the sounds, the power, the subtlety, the whole cosmos at work in this music. I had the same kind of awakening Peter Guralnick describes having experienced quite a few years earlier in Cambridge, in his book Feel Like Going Home. And my fascination for that music has never left me.