Beauty walks a razor's edge

Interview, Feb, 1996 by Hal Espen

Prophets, those holy fools, don't make it easy on the rest of us, and we return the favor in all kinds of ways. We dismiss them, as Cassandra was written off, or we tell them to lighten up, as Jeremiah was supposed to do. We mock them when they deliver the truth ahead of time, we worship them when they hit the nail on the head, and we're quick to forget them when they wander into the wilderness, as they must. (No prophet has the power all of the time, and some of them are one-hit wonders.)

Among prophets, poets are the cruelest seers: We love them for channeling the zeitgeist, but they confuse us with their role playing, their mixture of sincerity and mystification, and their all-too-human intervals of stumbling in the dark like the rest of us. They talk in code, in parables, in incantatory modes, in obscenities, or in the naked, embarrassing voice of love. They shine light on our embrace of phoniness, of mere novelty, of consensus. "Look at what passes for the new," William Carlos Williams wrote, witheringly. "You will not find it there but in / Despised poems." And he continued, with the clincher:

It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

In the summer of 1988, after a nine-year break from recording, Patti Smith released her fifth album, Dream of Life. I became obsessed with two tracks: "The Jackson Song," one of the loveliest, most heartbreaking lullabies in the language, and "People Have the Power," a ridiculously idealistic anthem of political liberation that somehow managed to ignore the mountain of cynicism that stood between the '80s and the '60s. I played "People Have the Power" over and over for months, and I felt like an idiot. It was an infectious march, with a soaring chorus, and its optimism about disarmament and communal love and noble rebellion was ravishing. It made me feel great, but the song's unreasonable faith in the future also made me feel a little silly. In 1988, although there were a few cracks in the Cold War wall, and although the spirit of glasnost was continuing to slowly spread, only a mindless hippie or a Reagan revolutionary could think that the end was in sight.

No one in the White House or the Pentagon or the Kremlin had a plan that envisioned the miraculous flowering of nonviolent political action that transformed the world in 1989 and 1990. But Patti Smith had a plan. Suddenly, in China, courageous students and pro-democracy citizens created the brief utopia of Tiananmen Square. As in a dream, the rigid governments of Eastern Europe fell, and soon the freeways were open from Paris to Moscow. The impossible became ordinary, and the nuclear superpowers were standing down from the brink. I kept listening to "People Have the Power" throughout 1989 - on the day a lone student stood, unarmed, and stopped a column of tanks in Beijing, and on that amazing night when the holes were punched through the Berlin Wall - and on into the '90s. With each amazing turn of events, the song's punch grew stronger, teaching its beautiful truth: that hope isn't a luxury, but a necessity.

The Patti Smith of 1988 grew out of the Patti Smith of 1975, that La Passionara of punk who wove together a religion out of Burroughs, the French symbolists, the Velvet Underground, and hometown American surrealism. Under all these veils was a woman who had been a skinny, sickly kid from southern New Jersey; who had suffered through scarlet fever, tuberculosis, and an eye tremor that forced her to wear an eye patch for a time; and who loved black pop music and Bob Dylan. In her mid-twenties, living in the Chelsea Hotel with Robert Mapplethorpe, she wrestled with her artistic calling in near-psychotic bouts of drawing and automatic writing. She wrote remarkable declamatory poetry ("Dog Dream," "Piss Factory") and started reading her stuff accompanied by Lenny Kaye on electric guitar. She became a rock 'n' roll star but stayed a poet. Without Patti Smith (and, of course, Chrissie Hynde), girls with guitars would never have found that open door at the end of the '70s.

And Patti Smith, the poet/rocker, grew out of Bob Dylan, the greatest troubadour of the century. Dylan, about whom rivers of ink have been spilled, has never stayed still long enough to become a settled icon, has never had the decency to stop and become safely past tense. By universal acclamation, he is the one - the genius. But what does that mean?

Without Dylan, the '60s are unimaginable. So are the Beatles, the Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Neil Young, Bob Marley, Bruce Springsteen, U2, R.E.M., and about a hundred other musicians. Any hip version of folk, country, or punk - forget about it. No tribute is sufficient, and no single critic has ever been able to put his mind around the entire saga of influence.

Dylan has never really gone away the way Patti Smith did for a while. He has never stopped haunting our imaginations with all those gorgeous melodies and searing lines of lyrics. But what about all those mistakes, those lapses, those odd religious episodes? What about that impassive face he shows us these days, that thickened and unmodulated nasal twang he invariably sings with now? Will he write great songs again? The fact is, it would be crazy to count Dylan out as a vital force, and an ongoing threat.