Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story Read Online Free PDF

with writers’ lifestyles. Rimbaud’s lifestyle. I was in love with Rimbaud for being a mad angel and all that shit.” She thought of Rimbaud as a boyfriend, she joked to Thurston Moore, laughinglydemanding, “If you can’t get the boy you want, and you have to daydream about him all the time, what’s the difference if he’s a dead poet?”
    Young minds often associate poetry with death. Perhaps this is because many of the now so-called classic poets—Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats—succumbed to tragically early and romantic deaths. Byron died of fever at age thirty-six while fighting for Greek independence; Shelley was thirty when he drowned while on a boating expedition; Keats was just twenty-six when he was snuffed out by consumption. Add to these sad statistics their heroically tragic lives and the long shadows that such events cast over their work, and an active imagination can easily connect the dots between torture and art.
    Patti also fell for the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, murdered by Nationalists in 1936 at the outset of the Spanish Civil War. Under the spell of his floridly avant garde writing, and entranced, too, by his professional associations with the painter Salvador Dalí (which bled, with poetically misbegotten passion, into a wholly unrequited love), Patti began composing her own lengthy romances. Most of them, she confessed to Nick Tosches in Penthouse, involved “men in love with their dead wives … kneeling in the dirt, trying to get their dead wives to show them some warmth.”
    Only in death, she believed, could true love be revealed.
    She was seduced by the ways of life of her poets and performers— and of her artists too. She remained the “cosmic mistress” of Amedeo Modigliani, another tragic victim of the tyrannical hold that a calling to art, no matter how poorly paid, can hold over its victims—the penniless Italian artist died from tubercular meningitis in Paris in 1920. She was fascinated, too, by painter Chaim Soutine, an Eastern European Jewish emigrant who, living in Paris when the Nazis invaded France, somehow evaded the attentions of the Gestapo for three years, only to die from a perforated ulcer in 1943.
    But there were exceptions. For Patti, while there was Rimbaud, there was also Bob Dylan. “It was a relief,” she confessed to Thurston Moore, “to daydream about somebody who was alive.”
    When she looked back at her late teens, Patti never seemed certain of when she had first encountered Dylan. It might have been an afternoonin late 1964 when her mother returned home from work and handed her an LP called Another Side of Bob Dylan. “I never heard of the fellow,” her mom said, “but he looks like somebody you’d like.” Or maybe it was at a Joan Baez show a year or so earlier, when Baez introduced a special guest. “She had this fellow with her, Bobby Dylan,” Patti told Moore. “His voice was like a motorcycle through a cornfield.” Or maybe it was an afternoon when, on a day trip to Manhattan for kicks, and sitting in a cafe in the Village, Patti looked over toward a red door a few houses down and Dylan stepped out.
    Maybe it didn’t matter where or when she first discovered him. All that matters is that she did. Barreling after the Rolling Stones into her private pantheon of cultural touchstones, Dylan’s 1965 hit “Like a Rolling Stone” became one of the first white rock records that ever made her feel alive. But only one of them.
    Patti’s musical tastes had been rooted almost exclusively in black music, because that, she believed, was where music kept its soul. Now she was discovering otherwise, although it wasn’t Dylan who had changed her mind. It was the Stones.
    She was at home with her parents on the evening of October 25, 1964, when her father called her into the front room with the incredulous insistence that she had to “look at these guys!” Grant Smith always watched The Ed Sullivan Show, and always found