Soapbox Artist: Lyall Bush (hearts) Patti Smith

Soapbox Artist: n., an online column in which the artist sounds off on...whatever he wants.

written by Lyall Bush

Oh arthur arthur. we are in Abyssinia Aden. making love smoking cigarettes. we kiss. but it's much more. azure. blue pool. oil slick lake. sensations telescope, animate. crystalline gulf. balls of colored glass exploding. seam of berber tent splitting. openings, open as a cave, open wider, total surrender.

- Patti Smith, from “dream of rimbaud”

Where is she from, really? The first album cover says New York: the chalky walls, blank, are something against which you write yourself. She is animal in the photo, exposed, a Bowery Manet, droopy-lipped bookstore malingerer, starving, dark, and unattainable when you hear her sing “wild cord / In my sleeve.” She became a Jahwist confabulator with “Jesus died / For somebody’s sins / But not mine.” Then she said she was from the Jersey shore, born in Chicago, grew up in Philadelphia. She made Oprah’s best-dressed list, loved Rimbaud before it was cool to (for the picture on the back of a book). To the audience she recommended the mystics, the Symbolistes: Nerval, Paul Verlaine, Rilke. So she was from France, too: dirty, dark, gay Abyssinian France. Poete maudit

She walked out, after the introduction, a little like her hips hurt, older, heavier, cooler. She wore a white shirt and black coat and a blue designer toque. People at Benaroya were prepared to worship her, it seemed, but she interrupted our desire to make her something. She let her body be a body. At the same time she moved in an electric field. Two years ago Grant said she was like that in conversation, a regular girl reader who knew that a word like “because” threads back to Sumer.

Patti Smith at the Bowery Electric, January, 09 2009

Charles Cross, author of biographies of Kurt Cobain and Jimi Hendrix, introduced her, saying she was as important as Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan, and that he remembered the $2 ticket that got him into her show at the Paramount. He remembered listening to “Horses” over and over with his friends in 1975. Wild cord – the serpent – in her sleeve, she walked onstage, and after all these years she could maybe find that in her sleeves still. Many years ago she changed things. It was in a different white shirt, but whatever. She told us about how she met Bob – Robert Mapplethorpe – while wriggling out of a date with a science fiction writer. Both knew they were headed somewhere. Neither knew exactly where, or what shape they would take in the future. She was a poet who might become a songwriter, a singer. He was straight, leaning gay, and liked light. She urged him to take photos. They moved in together.  At the turn of the decade in 1970 they agreed that the 70s belonged to them. Who else did it belong to?

People at Benaroya were prepared to worship her, it seemed, but she interrupted our desire to make her something. She let her body be a body.

In the big hall she read passages from “Just Kids,” and when she came to the part about meeting Robert you could see that even after decades she still loved him. She apologized for not finding one passage fast enough, then said “sorry” again when she stopping a song to adjust her sleeve. “Take two,” she said. Her sincerity silenced everyone; people must have wished they could be as sincere. “Sorry,” she said, before she played a song on her amplified acoustic guitar. “I don’t play very good.”

Then after her last song she stayed at the mic while everyone stood and cheered, and maybe realized that she used to do that, too – read, then sing, read through singing. “It’s so corny to go off and come back,” she said. “I just thought I’d stay here.” Then she started an a capella version of “Because the Night,” encouraging us to sing the chorus with her: Be-cause / the night / Belongs to love-ahs.” Everyone sang, but some of us heard Gee El Oh Are Eye Ay-uh.

Lyall Bush is a writer and the executive director at Northwest Film Forum.