Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story by Dave Thompson Page B

with permanent reminders of their romance: a lightning bolt for Smith, the Native American symbol of a hawk moon for Shepard. And just to ensure that permanence, Sandy Daley filmed the entire process.
    Days they spent discussing their work; nights would see the pair descend upon Max’s, “have a lot of rum and get into trouble. We were hell-raisers.
    “Sam loved my writing more than anyone I ever knew,” Patti told Patricia Morrisroe. “He made me value myself as a writer.” He also encouraged her earliest forays from poetry into song. “It had never occurred to me to sing,” she told Ramsay Pennybacker of the Philadelphia Weekly. “You know, he asked me to write song lyrics to one of his plays, Mad Dog Blues. I said, ‘I don’t know how to write song lyrics.’ And he said, ‘You write them all the time!’”
    He bought Patti her first guitar, a 1931 Gibson acoustic, and she taught herself to play along to a handful of Dylan songs. Meeting new people, especially musicians, she would ask them if they wanted to see a really neat guitar, then bring it out to show them. That guitar has probably been tuned by more famous fingers than any other instrument on earth. Even Bob Dylan would get his hands on it one day.
    Shepard now encouraged her to take the next step—to make her debut as a performing poetess. Throughout the summer of 1970, Patti had delivered impromptu poetry readings to whoever cared to stop and listen as they passed through the lobby (and other rooms) of the Chelsea. In February 1971, she booked her first official event, at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project’s regular Wednesday-night reading.
    The performance might have gone quite differently had she not met guitarist Lenny Kaye just a few weeks before. Interviewed on the Rocktropolis network in 1997, Patti recalled, “I read an article he wrote about a cappella music in 1970 and was so taken with it, I called to thank him for writing it and we became friends.” Soon she was showing up every Saturday night at the Village Oldies record store on Bleecker Street where Kaye worked. He would crank up the oldies, the Deauvilles and the Moonglows and company, and the two of them would simply dance. “So that’s how we got friendly,” Kaye reflected in Please Kill Me.
    Born three days before Patti, on December 27, 1946, Kaye was the nephew of songwriter Larry Kusik, composer of “A Time for Us” from Romeo and Juliet and “Speak Softly Love” from The Godfather. With connections like that, Kaye’s musical career had started promisingly: under Uncle Larry’s tutelage, Kaye cut the single “Crazy Like a Fox,” released in early 1966 under the pseudonym Link Cromwell. Unfortunately, his star had been in decline ever since. There was no follow-up, and Kayewas now performing around the bars with a band, the Zoo, and supplementing his income with freelance music journalism. He broke into Rolling Stone in May 1969, with a review of the oddball Lothar and the Hand People’s first album, a smorgasbord of theremin-led lunacy; now he was writing reviews for Fusion and Crawdaddy too, and editing the music column for the men’s magazine Cavalier.
    Patti, too, was looking to break into music journalism, and their early conversations revolved around the introductions that Kaye could bring her. But he was fascinated by her other writing as well, and as he looked through her treasured notebooks of poems, and felt the rock rhythms that percolated so naturally through her verse, a crazy notion began to coalesce.
    Her poetry reading was already scheduled, and Patti knew that it would be the easiest thing in the world for her to just get it over with, take the podium and spout her poetry, one more in the long line of hopefuls who haunted St. Mark’s. Or she could perform —and what better way to brush away the cobwebs than to elevate her poetry to the plateau she envisioned when she wrote it?
    Would Kaye be interested in accompanying her on three or four poems? He