When Patti Smith Called John Cale, Volatile Chemistry Created a Classic
The flirtatious girl on the telephone had been replaced by a female General Patton
By Dave Thompson
Arista booked Patti Smith and the band to go into the studio in August. For a time, there had been talk of them traveling down to Miami’s Criteria Studios to record with producer Tom Dowd, as he rode the success of his recent work with Eric Clapton and the Bee Gees. “I didn’t know anything about producers and just picked Tom Dowd because I admired him,” Patti recalled to Lucy O’Brien in the Independent on Sunday.
But then a more suitable choice crossed her mind: John Cale, the legendary cofounder of the Velvet Underground who had already stamped his mark on some of the most important recordings of the last few years. After contributing as a performer to the Velvets’ first two albums, he produced the debut LP by the Stooges and three albums by Nico. He handled what would have been the Modern Lovers’ vinyl debut, had the oil crisis not forced their record label at the time to dump them midway through the sessions. And, as if to complete the circle, he had almost formed a band with Ivan Kral shortly before the guitarist joined Patti.
None of which had anything to do with Patti’s decision to bring him on board. “My picking John was about as arbitrary as picking Rimbaud,” she told Dave Marsh. “I saw the cover of Illuminations with Rimbaud’s face, y’know, he looked so cool, just like Bob Dylan. So Rimbaud became my favorite poet. I looked at the cover of [Cale’s 1974 album] Fear and I said, ‘Now there’s a set of cheekbones.’ . . .
“The thing is… in my mind I picked him because his records sounded good. But I hired the wrong guy. All I was really looking for was a technical person. Instead, I got a total maniac artist. I went to pick out an expensive watercolor painting and instead I got a mirror.”
That discovery was still to come. For now, Patti was simply overjoyed to have obtained Cale’s services for the record — so overjoyed that when he first got a call from Patti and her manager, Cale was left wondering what she even wanted. In his autobiography, What’s Welsh for Zen, he recalled, “I said, ‘Does she want me to produce a record? Does she want me to get into bed with her?’” And Patti and Jane Friedman, on the other side of the speaker phone, roared.
Cale had seen Patti perform before, he told the Independent on Sunday years later, so he understood how much her act depended on both her physicality as a performer and her “use of language… the way images collided with one another.” As her producer, his first question would be, “How do I contain this energy? How do I capture it on a record?” Such dilemmas are the reason why live albums have a quality that studio discs can never attain, and why a great live act often makes a lousy studio band. Cale’s goal was to ensure that Patti made the transition more smoothly than most.
A few weeks before the first studio date, he had Jane Friedman book the group a show in Woodstock so he could see them perform away from their usual audience. It was an awkward request; he might have been curious to discover how the band functioned in front of a room full of strangers, but Patti and the band had no interest at all. Besides, Patti was adamant that she hated the countryside.
But that was only the first of their problems. A small and unsuspecting audience stared in disbelief as Cale missed most of the first set when he passed out at the side of the stage. He came to in time for the second set, but spent a lot of that throwing up. “That meant the second set was better than the first,” Cale excused himself afterward, but he clearly wasn’t overly concerned about endearing himself to the band or, at least, to the band’s sense of self-perception.
“How did you like them?” Clive Davis asked Cale at a meeting the following day. “I fell asleep,” Cale replied. “Jet lag, Clive, jet lag.”
“As soon as I got into the studio with Patti,” Cale wrote in his autobiography, “the flirtatious girl on the telephone had been replaced by a female General Patton.” But he was willing to put up with that. From the moment he heard her “electric voice” during that first telephone conversation, he’d known he wanted to work with her. He knew, just as his fans did, that some of his best work as both a producer and a recording artist in his own right was cut around the strengths of a powerful female vocal: Nico on the first Velvet Underground album and then across the three albums he had produced for her since then; Judy Nylon making a cameo on Cale’s own “The Man Who Couldn’t Afford to Orgy.”
Patti fell into the same orbit as those women, as Nico remembered. “John always reacts well to strong women. I don’t know what kind of relationship he had with them outside of the studio. But in the studio it is a physical thing, sexual, John pushing toward his orgasm and the woman pushing toward hers. On my albums we were like two lovers even when we weren’t lovers. You can hear it in the arrangements — we are fighting for our own satisfaction but pushing for each other’s as well.
“It was the same when he worked with Judy [Nylon would later become part of Cale’s live band] and Deerfrance [Nylon’s successor in that same group] and it was the same when he was working with Patti. They fought like animals, but the music sounded like they were fucking like animals as well.”
Patti “should have married John Cale,” Nico laughed to biographer Richard Witts. “They could live in a gingerbread house and make gingerbread children.” They didn’t, of course; there was never any possibility of that. But Nico’s words ring true regardless, when considered in light of both the final fruits of the recording sessions and the participants’ own recollections of the sessions themselves.
Cale began by observing that the band was playing out of tune “because their instruments were warped.” Before they recorded a single note, he suggested, they should replace their battered tools. Hardly surprisingly, the band agreed. “You had to make them feel that they were really good musicians to allow room for Patti’s poetry to come through,” Cale explained in What’s Welsh for Zen.
He was not certain, though, precisely “what persona this record was going to have until I had her improvise against herself. Then I could see how she had managed to make use of so much from Lou Reed and Dylan in the music.” The difference, he surmised, was that Reed’s improvisations “came primarily from psychological insights, whereas Patti’s were attuned to the rhythms of Welsh Methodist preachers” — an observation, of course, that only a Welshman could make. He also realized that if Patti was going to succeed with a record-buying audience, he would have to help her channel “her aggressive, challenging voice” away from the live stage and into the studio.
Patti herself stood in his way. “I knew nothing about recording or being in the studio,” she continued in that joint Independent on Sunday interview. “I was very, very suspicious, very guarded and hard to work with, because I was so conscious of how I perceived rock ’n’ roll. It was becoming overproduced, overmerchandised, and too glamorous.” Patti saw it as her duty to stem that tide, and she would eventually realize that Cale was on her side. “But I made it difficult for him to do some of the things he had to do.”
One night, she laughed, they drove Cale so crazy that he was falling asleep at the desk and banging his head on it in a bid to try to stay awake. But “instead of throwing his hands up or being pissed at me, John got even crazier and more obsessive. It was like having two crazy poets dealing with showers of words… There’s a certain beauty in it that wouldn’t have happened without John.”
Or as she put it to Susan Shapiro in Crawdaddy at the time, “He’s a fighter and I’m a fighter, so we’re fightin’. Sometimes fightin’ produces a champ.”
At other points, Cale’s influence was merely cosmetic. For instance, he convinced Patti to drop the mock-Caribbean tone she adopted when performing the reggae-inflected “Redondo Beach” in favor of a more lackadaisical but ultimately more convincing tone. He also suggested that they add strings to the record — such embellishments had worked on several of his own past albums, his love of the Beach Boys shining through a lot of his work (not least of all “Mr. Wilson,” on his last LP, Slow Dazzle) — but Patti refused to countenance such a suggestion.
She did, however, welcome the participation of several musicians outside her own band. Tom Verlaine was called in to supply the anguished guitar lines that highlighted his cocomposition “Break It Up.” And Allen Lanier, who penned music for two of Patti’s poems on the album, “Kimberly” and “Elegie,” would perform the languid tones of the latter, a poem written to mark the death of Jimi Hendrix, which Patti insisted be recorded on the fifth anniversary of the guitarist’s death: September 18, 1975.
That day was their last in the studio, and Verlaine had already been booked to record his part on the same day. According to Cale, the friction between Lanier and Verlaine was palpable (he credited it to Patti’s supposed romantic involvement with both men). The result was “one of the most explosive sessions” of them all, with an atmosphere “so tense it was frightening.” Frightening, that is, to everybody apart from Patti, who had what Cale called “a mother hen thing about getting all her boys together.” When Verlaine and Lanier inevitably sparked, “she thought that was very sexy.”
Contentious to the end, the Horses sessions finally wrapped. Straight from the studio, Patti and the band headed uptown to the City Center, to take part in a three-day convention for the Arista label. A host of their labelmates were also on display, at an event that Clive Davis had, rather brilliantly, decided to open to the general public as well as the industry suits who normally populate such happenings. Barry Manilow, Loudon Wainwright III, Martha Reeves, and Gil Scott-Heron were also on the bill, but it was Patti Smith who would be headlining, in the minds of both the assembled multitude and the label head himself. Those other acts would undoubtedly go on to sell plenty of records. But Patti was selling a lifestyle.
Patti’s set was short, just four songs — “Birdland,” “Redondo Beach,” “Break It Up,” and “Land” — plus an encore of “Free Money.” But the results of six weeks in the studio were clear to all. “Birdland,” in particular, had taken flight; already flirting with the ghost of Charlie Parker, now it consummated the marriage, and a lot of that was down to Cale. “There’s a lotta inspiration going on between the murderer and the victim,” Patti explained to Dave Marsh. “And [Cale] had me so nuts that I wound up doing this nine-minute [version] that transcended anything I ever did before.”
Tighter than ever before, the band and their vocalist had melded now into a seamless whole. Journalist Lisa Robinson, reviewing the evening, called the performance “stupendous, a truly exciting moment” — and coming from a writer who had seen Patti perform on so many previous occasions, that was high praise indeed. “Everyone connected with Arista records was ecstatic,” Robinson concluded.
That new cohesion, too, was Cale’s doing. “What John did for us was to make us aware of each other,” Patti acknowledged to Chris Charlesworth of Melody Maker. “He said that we were really nebulous and weren’t that close, and I thought we were, y’know? But, after that recording, we really broke past everything, got to know each other’s fragile stuff. We’re like brothers and sisters.”
When it came time to shoot the album’s cover art, another member of Patti’s artistic family was inevitably behind the lens: Robert Mapplethorpe. He photographed the four band members, of course, and their portraits were applied to the album’s back cover. But for the front cover image, Mapplethorpe took a portrait of Patti alone, her black suit jacket slung over one white-shirted shoulder, her hair a tangled mess, her expression not severe but not inviting, either.
It was simultaneously sexless and sexy, emotionless and exciting, deeply androgynous and irresistibly feminine. “The singer’s eyes pierce her compatriot’s lens,” wrote Amy Hanson in 2010, “and you can almost hear the lyrics to the album’s closing ‘Elegie.’ ‘There must be something I can dream tonight / The air is filled with the moves of you.’ She might have written those words for Jimi Hendrix but they are just as appropriate here.”
It was quite unlike any photograph that any “female musician” had ever displayed across the cover of a debut LP.
“People have made a lot of stuff about the Horses cover,” Patti reflected to journalist Michael Bracewell. “But a lot of what we do is bred on innocence. How people interpret it is up to them. I thought of myself as a poet and a performer, and so how did I dress? I didn’t have much money; I liked to dress like Baudelaire. I looked at a picture of him and he was dressed, like, with this ribbon or tie and a white shirt. I wasn’t thinking that I was going to break any boundaries. I just like dressing like Baudelaire…
“I know people would like to think that we got together to break boundaries of politics and gender, but we didn’t really have time for that. We were really too busy trying to pull enough money together to buy lunch.”
Clive Davis headed the long line of observers who loathed the photograph, and from his office at the top of the Arista hierarchy, he pleaded with Patti to change her mind about using it. She refused, and when Horses was released on November 10, 1975, it was Mapplethorpe’s portrait of Patti that gazed out from the record racks — and ultimately became one of the most revered images of the age. It would not only garner artistic acclaim, appearing high on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the top one hundred album covers, but also shape the way Patti herself was perceived — by audiences, by fans, by the still slowly unfolding “punk rock” scene that would embrace her, both musically and visually, as one of its most crucial, vibrant figureheads.
As for the album itself, it is nigh on impossible, from our current vantage point, to appreciate just how Horses divided the establishment upon its original release.
In America, the most influential voices seemed to like the record. Griel Marcus told Village Voice readers that Patti “has made an authentic record that is in no way merely a transcript once-removed of her live show.” John Rockwell of the New York Times warned that “it will annoy some people and be dismissed by others,” but insisted that it was “an extraordinary disc, and every minute of it is worth repeated rehearings.” Later, in Rolling Stone, Rockwell reiterated his praises, calling the album “wonderful in large measure,” and he had a high old time acknowledging the homage that Patti herself admitted was paramount in her music: “All eight songs betray a loving fascination with the oldies of rock.” Patti and her band might have been breaching musical frontiers toward which rock had never cast more than a passing, folk-inflected eye. But she had made a great record, simple as that.
Excerpted from Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story by Dave Thompson, published by Chicago Review Press. Available now in paperback from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other fine retailers.
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