Dancing Barefoot
The Patti Smith Story
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- £8.99
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
Dancing Barefoot is the full and true story of Patti Smith, widely acknowledged as one of the most significant American artists of the rock 'n' roll era, a performer whose audience and appeal reach far beyond the parameters of rock.
An acclaimed poet, a respected artist, and a figurehead for many liberal political causes, Patti Smith soared from an ugly-duckling childhood in postwar New Jersey to become queen of the New York arts scene in the 1970s. This book traces the brilliant trajectory of her career, including the fifteen reclusive years she spent in Detroit in the 1980s and '90s, as well as her triumphant return to New York. But it is primarily the story of a performer growing up in New York City in the early and mid-1970s.
Dancing Barefoot is a measured, accurate, and enthusiastic account of Smith's career. Guided by interviews with those who have known her—including Ivan Kral, Tom Verlaine, Richard Lloyd, John Cale, and Jim Carroll—it relies most of all on Patti's own words. This is Patti's story, told as she might have seen it, had she been on the outside looking in.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this unfortunately timed biography, music critic Thompson (London's Burning) chronicles Smith's story from her childhood in New Jersey, growing up next to a pig farm, and her early days in New York with Robert Mapplethorpe, to her time at CBGB and up to her most recent album, Twelve. When Smith was nine, a neighbor invited her over to his house to listen to Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti"; from that moment, according to Thompson, she never let go of rock 'n' roll. Unfortunately, Thompson plods through these details, stitching together Smith's story based on interviews with her friends, from Tom Verlaine to John Cale; sadly, the book offers a disappointing and shallow portrait of this innovative poet and musician who still emerges from Thompson's book as an artist who is always changing, revising, and revisiting her own work and the work of others. Although this account of Smith provides few new insights into her life and music, Thompson's vivid re-creation of the music scene in New York City in the 1970s captures an exhilarating moment in music history.
