Well Kasim has been around – Blue Oyster Cult, Patti Smith, Joan Jett, Cars, Meat Loaf, Hall & Oates………….. He normally plays bass but here he was acoustic and on his own.
It sounded a bit like Cars to me.
Americans at the British Folk? Folk? Well once again it didn’t sound too much like Folk to me.
Here’s a few photos:
I have been listening to some early concerts of Patti’s where she was reciting poetry, setting up rapport, relating and reacting to the audience. There was real power, connection and something so dynamic. She captured the spirit. New York in the mid seventies was a cauldron of energy and she writhed in it. She was immersed. She brought together the Beat Poetry, Sixties Rock, Art, photography and the new Punk ethos and rolled it into one great new entity. Patti rocked. She created like nobody else. She spat vitriolic rhetoric and protest. She identified with Dylan, Hendrix, Doors, Beatles, Stones and Who but captured that rebellion and brought it to a new level. Her tongue flamed.
That creative spark was present in everything she touched – the music, the poetry, the look, the art, the attitude and Robert’s photography. It was her life. What strikes me is that there was no separation.
For me Patti is a fulcrum point, a connection. She joins a number of worlds together into one. Patti wasn’t trying to be Punk; she was Punk. She was riding the moment. But unlike the others she did not divorce herself from what had gone before. She was welded into that rebellious tradition. She did not deny it.
Patti was really a child of the sixties. She loved Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Stones, Beatles and Them but she delivered her stuff with such passion and energy that she readily fitted into the New York Punk Scene. Her poetry was so hot it scorched your neurons. I’d play her ‘Piss Factory’ regularly as I made my way into work. It filled me with idealised energy.
Patti was a fiery poet and performance artist living with the controversial photographer Robert Mablethorpe in the Chelsea Hotel in the early seventies. She set up with th guitarist Lenny Kaye to put her poetry to music and form a band. They did covers like Them’s ‘Gloria’ and the Who’s ‘My Generation’ as well as her own stuff and gained quite a reputation for her incandescent intros about Patty Hearst, the rich girl who got involved with a terrorist group, and Jesus.
The single ‘Hey Joe’ complete with the Patty Hearst snarling intro and B-side ‘Piss Factory’ set the tone. She was a defiant lady who was going to do things on her terms and was not to be messed with. The album ‘Horses’ with its classic version of ‘Gloria’ continued the same vane.
With her androgynous look and tie hanging half-mast she had a completely new image. Everything about her shouted Art and Style.
It wasn’t until the album ‘Easter’ with the single ‘Because the Night’ which she co-wrote with Springsteen, that she broke through into commercial success. There was little sign of the industry having mellowed her. The album was just as full of expletives and energy. It was more that the time of Punk had caught up with Patti.
The albums followed as did her marriage to Fred Smith from MC5 (That great protopunk band) and the stance remained unaltered. Patti was the leading-lady of Punk.