Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story Read Online Free PDF Page B

something else to comment upon, some performer who caught his eye for good or bad. But this week it was destiny.
    they put the touch on me, Patti wrote in a 1973 essay in Creem magazine. I was blushing jelly. this was no mamas boy music. it was alchemical. I couldn’t fathom the recipe but I was ready.
    No more than a year into their career, and still coming to terms with the English media’s insistence on demonizing them (“Would You Let Your Daughter Marry a Rolling Stone?” was one of the year’s most memorable British headlines), the Stones were miming to two songs, “Around and Around” and “Time Is on My Side.” But it was the visuals that Patti found so vivid, not the music: Mick Jagger, white turtleneck and tight black trousers, still looking like the slightly hip economics student that he used to be, but all the more alluring for the snatches ofshyness that hung around those deep-set eyes. Keith Richards and Brian Jones, besuited and suave, one skinny-legs and moddish, the other haloed blond, and all but ignored by the Sullivan cameras, so you hung on the edge of your seat in the hope of anything more than a long-distance glimpse.
    That was my introduction to the Rolling Stones … my brain froze. Watching that performance today, with the mind’s eye stripping away the baggage that the succeeding decades have piled upon both our perception of the Stones and the liberation of television, it is still possible to see how these five unknown young Englishmen created such a stir, in her loins and in several million others’.
    Later, as she heard and saw more, my pussy dripped my pants were wet and the Rolling Stones redeemed the white man forever.
    The Stones and Bob Dylan may seem a poor fit for Patti’s grim collection of idols. But we should remember that at the time Dylan was widely regarded as an imminent casualty and would indeed come within a hair’s breadth of fulfilling that prophecy when he crashed his motorbike in 1966 and was forced into seclusion. And every time the rock press compiled its latest list of rock’s most likely next fatality, Keith Richards was usually at the top of the pile, even if it was Brian Jones who ended up dead first. Long before Patti had formulated the ambition that would snatch her out of academia, her eye for icons was already trained upon those artists who were, for want of a less cliched expression, too fast to live. Unfortunately, you are never too young to die.
    In 1965, Patti was seduced again by a living tragedy: Edie Sedgwick, the superstar consort to artist Andy Warhol, captured in Vogue magazine.
    Sedgwick, scion of one of New England’s wealthiest families, struck Smith immediately. “It was like seeing a black and white movie in person,” she recalled to Scott Cohen in Circus. Elfin and boyish, wide-eyed and bubbling with innocent beauty, Edie was irresistible. “Twenty-two, white-haired with anthracite-black eyes and legs to swoon over,” mooned Vogue magazine; “she didn’t mess around,” Patti echoed. “She was really something…. She really got me. It was something weird.”
    After death took Edie, too, just six years later, Patti would eulogize her in the pages of author Jean Stein’s book-length obituary: “Living in South Jersey, you get connected with the pulse beat of what’s going on through what you read in magazines. Not even through records. Vogue magazine was my whole consciousness. I never saw people. I never went to a concert. It was all image. In one issue of Vogue, it was Youthquaker people they were talking about. It had a picture of Edie on a bed in a ballet pose. She was like a thin man in black leotards and a sort of boat-necked sweater, white hair and, behind her a little white horse drawn on the wall. She was such a strong image that I thought, ‘That’s it.’ It represented everything to me … radiating intelligence, speed, being connected with the moment.” A decade after she discovered la Sedgwick, Patti and