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Nothing Personal
The prose of Hackman, the passion of Hillary
Gene hacks out novel without a ghost; Hotham Clinton? First lady's old boyfriend says she was a wild thing. Plus: Scary Spice scares the bejesus out of reporters.
By Amy Reiter
[11/08/99]

People Feature
The Maharajah of poontang
John Stagliano, the video mogul behind "Buttman," is a dirty-movie powerhouse, and either the scourge or savior of an unabashedly sordid business.
By David Segal
[11/08/99]

Nothing Personal
Munsters, UnderGore and, uh, cow lube?
Eddie and Grandpa are baaack; when the going gets tough, the Gores get literal; Farrakhan's calypso days; readers riot over bovine nipple grease. Plus: Washington's pundits and pols kick out the phat comedy jams.
By Amy Reiter
[11/06/99]

Rogues' Gallery
Steppin' in it. Woof!
Who breaks a Chihuahua on the wheel? Wall Street Journal gets medieval.
By Douglas Cruickshank
[11/06/99]

Nothing Personal
Meet the fundits
At the Funniest Celebrity in Washington contest, pundits and pols kick out the phat comedy jams ...
By Amy Reiter
[11/05/99]

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By Greg Villepique

Nov. 9, 1999 |She was a weird icon from the start, a girl who dressed like a boy, a poet with Keith Richards' hair and a strut copied from Bob Dylan in "Don't Look Back," a white woman who called herself a nigger, a darling of the avant-garde who hit the pop charts in 1975 without modifying her vision in the slightest, then abdicated her stardom when she found better things to do. Her first album, "Horses," came out nearly a quarter-century ago and is commonly short-listed as one of the greatest rock albums of all time, but you're unlikely to hear any of it on classic-rock radio: In the mental jukebox of the populace, Patti Smith is represented, if at all, by her one hit single, "Because the Night" -- naturally, the most conventional song of all her '70s output.

When I was in high school in the suburbs, in the early-'80s, Patti Smith was no kind of icon. Musically, she didn't jibe with buzz-saw punk, ominously danceable new wave or pasteurized FM radio rock; she evaded the jury-rigged radar of adolescent rebellion. Teen rebels, of course, generally want an existing "countercultural" pack to join, complete with wardrobe and hairdo guidelines. Even if Patti Smith had not recently stopped making records (and even if we'd known to listen to the ones she had made), she was too much of a misfit for the misfits to embrace.

In the summer of 1984, I was 18, renting an airless furnished room in the Rochester ghetto, making less than a living and feeling, in depressive-undergraduate fashion, alienated from everyone. One day the eerie silver photo on the cover of Smith's "Radio Ethiopia" beckoned from a used-record bin -- she's sitting in profile on a tenement floor, lips parted, and the portrait challenges her own description of Television's Tom Verlaine as having "the most beautiful neck in rock 'n' roll." By the time I bought it, she'd already been out of the music business for five years, but I didn't know that, and it didn't matter. The album opens with a blast of guitars and Smith's one-word call to arms: "Move!" It's not an incitement to dance, make out or fight in the streets, but to emerge, to indulge, to question, to live: "Ask the angels who they're calling/Go ask the angels if they're calling to thee"; "Everybody wants to be reeling/And baby baby I'll show you the way." She was unclassifiable, but she blasted that room open by suggesting all kinds of freedom.

Patti Smith was born in 1946 and grew up in working-class South Jersey. A bout with scarlet fever at age 7 left her with recurring hallucinations. She pursued religion for much of her childhood but never caught it -- her problem was not with God, but with the constrictions imposed by organized faith. In her teens, she instead embraced Dylan, the Rolling Stones and, pivotally, the visionary poetry of Arthur Rimbaud. She didn't know yet that she was going to be a poet, much less a singer.

After a brief stint working in a toy factory, two years in college and a timeout to have a baby, which she gave up for adoption at birth, she moved to New York in 1967, with the intention, she later said, of becoming an artist's mistress. The artist she found was Robert Mapplethorpe, also young, hungry and determined to make his mark. Following a period of Brooklyn squalor, during which she drew and painted, Smith spent a few months in Paris, then moved with Mapplethorpe into hipster central, the Chelsea Hotel.

Though she and Mapplethorpe soon broke up (his homosexuality was presumably a stumbling block), they remained close. She began writing poetry, acted in absurdist theater, collaborated on the play "Cowboy Mouth" with Sam Shepard, became increasingly well known on the downtown poetry circuit, published books, wrote swashbuckling rock criticism and, over the course of several years between 1971 and 1974, gave readings at which she was accompanied by guitarist Lenny Kaye, eventually adding pianist Richard Sohl and second guitarist Ivan Kral.

Much of Smith's poetry is in the Jack Kerouac vein of spontaneous bop ephemera. Her streams of lowercase "babel" tend toward self-indulgence -- on paper. See her live. In Central Park three years ago, she came onstage late, apologizing that we'd been waiting for her mom to show up. Patti Smith is a lot funnier than her records would lead you to believe. She flipped through her book "Early Work" for a while, but couldn't find the right page. Somebody shouted out a number. She dutifully looked, then rolled her eyes: "That page is blank. You trying to tell me something?"

My friends and I were charmed and apprehensive; we weren't there to listen to poems. She found her page and, while the band waited, gave a purely electrifying rock 'n' roll performance of "Piss Factory," from her first single, recorded in 1974. It details with giddy venom her hatred of the factory grind she experienced at 17. She won't accept this life, she's taking the next train to New York City, she's going to be a big star; her voice rises steadily in pitch, grows faster, angrier; she concludes defiantly, "Oh -- watch me now!" (David Bowie had ended "Star," his 1972 statement of purpose, with the same words: The language of ambition is reductive.)

Next page | Punk was not a single style, but a boundary-crashing attitude