FEBRUARY 1976

PATTI SMITH

IN CLEVELAND

HIGH GEAR

by Donna Minkler

2401

Excessive and ecstatic, an abundance of Patti Smith's performances whether on stage or on paper, strike you with vivid raw materials and questional finese. Slimy, skinny, stringy, greasy, she arrives leather boots knee high swade and sassy. Her arms flag at her chest in an attempt to stop an emotion from speeding down the runway past her accessibility to feeze it for a moment in a poem or a song, in an expression.

Dropping a sash incidentally in all her blue jean queen aifectation, she provokes the decency of obscenity to speak beyond the tatoo on the bathroom wall. She yields and penetrates till it "comes like a flood."

Yet behind this feverish free lance Patti never pretends allegiance to one style, one form, one mode. Her images are spiked with sexy alliterations that contain what one suspects is her initial attempt to suspend gender.

In 1946, the heat of South Jerwelcomed Patti Smith to its landscape. The eldest of four children, she was the proud daughter of a waitress and facory worker. Describing herself as a "gawky, shy, spaced out school girl," Patti went to a predominantly black school and expeditiously learned the streets.

During the 60's she was "out of touch with hippiedom; hating

categorizations of any kind." Her flirtations and affairs included Jim Morrison, a mysterious woman/lover? Judy Lynn, the poet Rimbaud, and sour religious trips through Catholicism and Jehovah's Witnesses. (Note Genesis 11).

You can't help but sense that her love poetry was written with Smith doubled over in pain. Indeed, is she a lesbian, a straight male persona, or even a transexual? Or does it really matter?

"Ever since I felt the need to choose, I'd choose male. I sobbed when I had to use the public ladies room. My under-garments made me blush. I ran around with a pack of wolves. Growing breasts was a nightmare. In anger I cut off all my hair and knelt glassy eyed before god. I begged him to place me in my own barbaric race, the male race..."

And what she says in between the portals of her skeletal juju Imagery is thick with a sentiment most would miss for its disguised in desire:

"I'll never forget how you melled that night like cheddar cheese melting under lourescent light." From Witt. And through the maze of uncapitalized prophecy Smith rummages from woman to man from yric to lust from rhyme to crime and back to the violence of sex she'll climb, injuring nothing but eaving in her wake a confusion.

Yet beyond the piety that she holds in her hand like a

screaming tendril is the tatement of a relentless wolan's victorious flight from the well that is silence. As she explains in Translators also from Witt, Patti sees "all words as amputees... no arms... arms akimoo... invisible arms... dying to be seen... to wave out" And it is that will to communicate with whomever she pleases... that demands her writing be read.

From an interview with Rose Flowers in Boston's Gay Community News Patty says: "Six months ago I would have given you my beyond gender rap. But now I only talk about communication. It's the com'munication with people that matters. I lived with a man for four years and was totally faithful to him; but for two years of that time I spent more time with Judy Lynn. I was obsessed with her."

It is this transcendence of style more than sex roles that grants her poetry more credence than her songs, for I wasn't sure sitting there that night... that it wasn't just the back up that allowed Patti to "penetrate like a flood"....

(Smith's latest poetry anthology, Witt, is available at Coventry Books on Coventry Rd., in Cleve. Hts.)

Photos by David Holleb

HORSES?

Patti Smith is climactic after the fact.

Patti Smith is Jim Morrison's Doors

Wrapped around the Velvet Underground.

No lady rides this stud stallion. Woman! "See the possibility."

Patti Smith is Warholian avantgarde

Lying in sperm coffins of violasheets.

Patti pumps the pulse of Sappho poetry

To A-typical yen music. A special taste whips the night As her streets pound with savage guitars and drums.

Patti Smith is Brian Jones in drag.

Can she be male homosexual fe on Land?

Patti Smith is our sister: Judith Revisited:

"We could do it in the snow. washing your hair, bending over the tub. running my soapy forefinger down your spine, you on your knees bent over the tub, your breasts out of shape swaying like two golden bells.

I'm the gardener. You're lady chatterly."

Patti Smith is sort of that kind of gentle lacerating truth that makes us Fl-inch.

The music; a secondary orgasm Patti Smith is not for everyone Words, symantic syllables: they

Patti Smith

(Arista Records)

Page 5

slash the sounds. 67-76 Lick up the tricks.

Patti's Smith is worth their hype; She who splashes mental violence on canvasses of sexual cremes.

Patti says:

"Charms sweet angels. You have made me no longer afraid of death.

After Dark Cocktail Lounge

.3111 Broadway 662-6615

invites you to a

'Sweethearts Ball'

Sat. Feb. 14th, 1976 Time 9 p.m. 'til

Food and Fun

a gift for

everyone"