Every relationship goes through a tricky do-we/don't-we patch. For me and Lucy it was Spring and Summer 2004, and Patti Smith unwittingly provided a soundtrack. It started on a road trip down to Dartmoor, where I bought this CD along. It starts off at a cracking pace. Dancing Barefoot and then when Babelogue segues into Rock'n'Roll Nigger, well, it still gives me goosebumps.
A few weeks later I found Lucy had bought a copy of the album for herself. Hmmm, how to read that in the context of our discussions about living together?
The two CDs stretch to nearly two and a half hours, half greatest hits and half rarities and footnotes. I can't remember hearing beyond the first half of the first CD, before the adrenaline wears off.
A few months ago Guy wrote a shrewd critique of Patti's full-on aesthetic in a review of a recent gig.
I’ve always had a fascination for the art of postwar USA, whether it’s the paintings of Rothko and Johns, the poems of Ginsberg and Berryman, or the music of Cage and Glass. But what these have in common is a seriousness, an austerity, about their vocation that borders on the solemn and quasi-religious.
Now you can argue the toss about how 'the muse', artistic inspiration and discipline share much with spiritual belief and practice, but the world of postwar metropolitan modern art in America seems to me a strangely humourless place, peopled by artists whose apparent distaste for the real, grimy world often led them either to severe austerity or headlong into hedonistic enjoyment of what 'the streets' had to offer.
We in Britain had little of this ethos, not only because postwar Britain was grey and relatively dull, but also because of the ingrained British habits of self-deprecation, mocking humour and a real fear of being seen to be pompous. And there is something ever so slightly pompous about Patti's name-dropping — Blake, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Ginsberg and the rest — but it's also quite touching… I'd go so far as to say it seems to be a defence mechanism, with Patti holding up cherished books as fetish objects against the ugly philistinism of American consumer culture.
I don’t think for one moment that Patti needs to be defensive about her art — it’s just that I think she sees her important work differently. I love the rant of Piss Factory, for instance, but much of Patti's strident poetry leaves me unmoved, as do (whisper it softly) many of her songs. Her anecdotes, observations, stories and memoirs, however, are a different matter: pertinent, emotional, personally brave, funny, beautifully written and shining with the simple ring of truth.
(Sidenote: Guy's also written the best thing I've ever read about Jim Moray.)
A couple of months later Lucy and I had tickets to see Patti at Brixton Academy. We'd just got back from a 'difficult' holiday in Spain, and it was the closest we've come to breaking up. Lucy decided not to come, and I had an uncomfortable evening. The one detail I remember was being annoyed by people chain smoking all around me. Ah, ancient history.
Eight days later, she moved in with me.
MusicBrainz entry for this album
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