Back Beats #3: Picture these
Wherein articles from the archive in which music and the literary find common currency earn a fresh airing
Before they were rock stars, Patti Smith, Richard Meyers and Tom Miller were all would-be poets, riding that post-Beat wave and hoping they could be the new Rimbauds of the Bowery. The latter pair even chose pseudonyms to indicate a taste for the French Symbolists. Another poet of the lens was to capture the ascending curve of these New York arrivistes. The article below, originally published as ‘The Mapplethorpe effect: Patti, Polaroids and punk’, first appeared in Words of Warner on January 15th, 2010.
IT WOULD not be outrageous to propose that the two greatest albums of the punk tsunami featured cover images by arguably the most important post-war US photographer. Robert Mapplethorpe was the snapper who wrapped both Patti Smith’s Horses and Television’s Marquee Moon in their distinctive sleeves.
True also that Mapplethorpe was part of that extraordinary, early 1970s, American circle that gathered in Downtown Manhattan and whose members became such feted practitioners in a number of diverse artistic fields.
Smith emerged as the the most powerful rock’n’roll woman of all; Sam Shepard won his spurs as the dominating late-century playwright; Tom Verlaine’s guitar became a searing soundtrack within the blazing panoply of CBGBs; and Jim Carroll was regarded as the best of the poets to arise since the Beats of the Fifties.
The fact that Smith was a key romantic axle in this wheel of words, images and music makes the network all the more intriguing. Friend, flatmate, muse, lover or just leader of the pack? Whatever place Patti took in this tangled web of love, art and inspiration, this was hardly an example of a woman taking a ride to the top.
Rather, here was an artist who was going to find her métier in one medium or another – actor, painter, poet, singer, journalist – and her remarkable, neo-Renaissance diversity saw her brush shoulders, and sometimes more, with the crème de la crème of the gutter avant garde.
The great, and the maybe not always so good, clearly raised temperatures beyond the heated confines of the Bowery bar and the Lower East Side club, the SoHo gallery and the off-off-Broadway cabaret.
But those images: that skinny and severe androgyne staring from the monochrome canvas of 1975’s stunning Horses; those manic-eyed beanpoles locked into the camera lens on Marquee Moon, a masterpiece from 1977. Shorn of Mapplethorpe’s snapshots, maybe the history of the new wave would have been a very different one.
In fact – let’s go back and let’s go further. Without the input of Mapplethorpe it is conceivable, just conceivable, that punk may never have happened at all. Crazy claim? Who was it who funded the first awesome record that Patti Smith recorded in 1974? That very same chum, that very same cameraman.
It is hard to know where and how punk would have found its fire, its fury, its frisson of despair without Smith’s ‘Piss Factory’. Against it, the proto-punk anthems of London – Dr Feelgood’s and Eddie and the Hot Rods’ sparky pub rock work-outs – would sound fraught and frenetic, yes, but hardly ready to change music forever.
The title itself breaks taboos but the rolling urgency of the piece is compelling, its terse poetry shining a blinding light on a tale of teen, production-line enslavement, brightened briefly by fleeting references to her musical loves – Stax, James Brown – and then leading to the most exhilarating escape since Moses parted the waters. ‘I’m gonna to go to New York City…I’m gonna be a big star’. And she does.
Throw in the debut single’s other side, the re-working of Hendrix’s ‘Hey Joe’ with its manic mannerisms and references to Patty Hearst’s kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army and we enter a world of bizarre terror – the early days of global terrorism no less – in which the poor little rich girl, daughter of a gargantuan publishing empire, is wielding guns, and for real, on CCTV.
Mapplethorpe, beginning to climb the photography ladder, had a few hundred dollars to underwrite that recording session and, in so many ways, it pushed open a door. In New York, the Velvets were spent and the Dolls had imploded. But that funded 45 transformed Smith from a promising St Mark’s Poetry Project bard into a bonafide rock contender and ready to shake some serious action.
The Verlaine-driven Television debut was a rather different affair – longer tracks, extended solos and a gothic romanticism, thwacking the symbols when compared to Smith’s grittier street rap. With Richard Hell now departed, the band’s trash thrash had been modified, refined somewhat, and there was more virtuosity than you could shake a punk at.
But the eyes have it on the wrapper: four faces that have an alien gleam – shaggy, torn hair-cuts, lean, insect limbs, an unearthly light, suggest a night with the rocking dead rather than the new street corner gods. Louche, loud, jagged music then assaults you, yet played with the crisp attack, the competence and control of a Berklee jazz gang.
Charles Shaar Murray dug Horses like he loved the Stones at their best. Nick Kent praised Marquee Moon as if the Velvets had reformed and resurrected Jimi on axe patrol. Those glowing NME reviews that greeted these slivers of epoch-shaking magnitude woke us – and so many Americans, too – to the next phase in rock’s thrillingly erratic course.
But the Mapplethorpe portraits are as lasting as the musical contents: the amorphous and curious beauty of the woman who would prove that the intense poet and a monstrous backbeat were not mutually exclusive and a fierce quartet who would ensure that Television was literally on the radio, at least in the UK, for a thrilling year or two as the decade blazed towards its conclusion.
The man with the Polaroids would do more – plenty more. He would become the pictorial historian of Lower and Mid-Manhattan – capturing Burroughs, Warhol, Grace Jones and many others. Specialise in picture essays on the San Francisco S&M scene. Capture astonishing, no-holds-barred nudes: hunking black models framed in their homo-erotic immodesty. And then dead. Dead at 42. Of AIDS. In 1989.
For British followers of the justifiably mourned Mapplethorpe’s black and white odyssey, a fine selection of his work from several periods – including self-portraits and an alternative take of the Horses shot, too – can be enjoyed at Graves Gallery in Sheffield until March 27th, 2010. But for others: pick up the records once more, stare hard at those powerful images and devour the music all over again.