Welcome to Invisible Hits, a column in which Tyler Wilcox scours the internet for the best (and strangest) bootlegs. Tyler also blogs at Doom & Gloom From the Tomb. This time, he digs up recordings of Patti Smith's epochal early shows at Max's Kansas City.
“You play guitar, right?”
“Yeah, I like to play guitar.”
“Well, could you play a car crash with an electric guitar?”
“Yeah, I could do that.”
This brief exchange between aspiring poet Patti Smith and rock critic/musician Lenny Kaye (as it appears in Smith’s memoir, Just Kids) kicked off a very fruitful and long-lasting creative partnership. But these two were in no hurry: Their first collaboration took place in early 1971 and Smith and Kaye wouldn’t unbridle the epochal Horses LP until late 1975. Thanks to the magic of audience tapes, though, we can trace their progress and listen in on their earliest moments onstage together.
Smith had been living in New York City since the late 1960s, immersing herself in the hothouse scene at Max’s Kansas City, a club populated mainly by Andy Warhol’s minions. At the same time, she was caught up with Anne Waldman’s Poetry Project, which hosted readings at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery; poets in the series included Allen Ginsberg, Ted Berrigan and Robert Creeley.
Providing the necessary Max’s/Poetry Project connection was Gerard Malanga, who had worked extensively with Warhol (famously as a dancer during the Velvet Underground’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable) but had also made a name for himself in NYC poetry circles. He was scheduled to read at St. Mark’s in February of 1971, and agreed to let Smith open the show for him. But Patti didn’t want to just read her poems. “My goal was not simply to do well, or hold my own,” she wrote. “It was to make a mark at St. Mark’s … I wanted to infuse the written word with the immediacy and frontal attack of rock and roll.” Enter Lenny Kaye and his car-crash electric guitar.
The crowd that assembled at St. Mark’s on February 10, 1971 must have been a thing to behold with such luminaries as Warhol, Lou Reed, Todd Rundgren, Sam Shephard, and Robert Mapplethorpe all in attendance, alongside a host of Warhol “Superstars” and East Village scenesters. “The atmosphere was charged,” Smith recalled. “I was totally wired."
On the 43-year-old tape, you can still hear the excitement. Smith and Kaye start with a wobbly-but-charming version of “Mack the Knife” in honor of Bertolt Brecht’s birthday, and then the poet delivers rapid fire solo versions of “Dedication” and “Oath” (the latter of which would be incorporated into Smith's version of “Gloria” a few years later). But the real prize here is the concluding “Ballad of a Bad Boy.” As Smith intones a tale of a self-destructive youth, Kaye slashes violently at his guitar with a vigor that looks back to 60s garage rock (Kaye was at the time putting together the seminal 1972 Nuggets compilation) and forward to the clanging dissonance of no wave. “Bad Boy” builds in intensity until Smith cuts the narrative off abruptly. In Just Kids, Smith remembers some jeers from the audience, but everyone sounds pretty into it on the tape.
An auspicious beginning, to be sure, but it doesn’t seem to have occurred to Smith and Kaye to make their collaboration a regular thing. The next evidence we have of them performing together is a brief recording in an unknown NYC location in 1973. On “Oath”, Smith sounds as if her confidence as a performer has grown with leaps and bounds since the St. Mark’s reading, while Kaye’s guitar has gone even further into a skronky, no-wave direction. It’s riveting stuff, but it’s hard to imagine record labels at the time clamoring for more. Smith and Kaye would have to take their music in at least a slightly more mainstream direction.
Which is exactly what they did in 1974. With pianist Richard Sohl filling in the edges around Kaye’s guitar work, Smith began playing regular shows at Max’s Kansas City. The trio wasn’t quite a rock band, but they were getting close. There’s a washed out but fascinating black-and-white video of what was likely a typical set at Max’s, with fiery versions of “Piss Factory”, “Hey Joe” and the Velvet Underground’s “We’re Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together” showing off the group’s raw onstage chemistry. The rail-thin Patti in particular looks and sounds the part of a rock'n'roll frontwoman, snarling her vocals and trying out some Jagger-esque moves. Even though she would soon align herself with the burgeoning punk scene down at CBGB, the set also includes some torch song side trips on “The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game” and “I’m Wild About That Thing”, which suggest some kind of punk-cabaret road not taken for Smith.
CBGB’s siren song proved too powerful, though, and Smith, Kaye and Sohl, with the added help of drummer Jay Dee Daugherty and bassist Ivan Kral, spent the remainder of the decade pursuing a singular vision of poetic (and eclectic) punk rock. That “car crash” created in a tiny East Village church in 1971 still resonates today.