by Craig Brown
‘Little lady,’ says Cohen, making his voice gruffer, ‘you’re in luck. I am Kris Kristofferson.’
‘I thought he was bigger.’
‘I used to be bigger, but I’ve been sick.’
By the time the lift reaches the fourth floor, it is clear to both of them that they will be spending the night together. In fact, it is not uncommon for women to offer themselves to Cohen as he rides in the lift: this is, after all, the Chelsea Hotel,49 and, as he observes some decades later, ‘Those were generous times.’
Three years later, Cohen hears that Janis Joplin has died from a heroin overdose in the Landmark Hotel in Los Angeles.50 The following year, he is sitting in a bar in a Polynesian restaurant in Miami Beach, sipping a ‘particularly lethal and sinister’ coconut drink, and thinking of their encounter. He feels inspired, so he picks up a napkin and writes down the words, ‘I remember you well at the Chelsea Hotel’; they are to become the first line of one of his most famous songs.
‘We spent a little time together,’ Cohen reminisces, coyly, nearly thirty years later, to a packed concert hall in Prague. He then sings ‘Chelsea Hotel’ for the umpteenth time:
I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel,
you were talking so brave and so sweet;
giving me head on the unmade bed,
while the limousines wait in the street.[...]
For some years now, the song has had a new verse, which Cohen added just before he came to record it:
I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel,
you were famous, your heart was a legend.
You told me again you preferred handsome men,
but for me you would make an exception.
And clenching your fist for the ones like us
who are oppressed by the figures of beauty,
you fixed yourself, you said: ‘Well, never mind,
we are ugly, but we have the music.’[...]
His introduction to the song varies slightly from concert to concert, according to whim. In Tel Aviv in 1972, he says only that ‘It’s for a brave woman who put an end to it all.’ But as time passes, he grows more candid, more loquacious. ‘One evening, about three in the morning, I met a young woman in that hotel. I didn’t know who she was. Turned out she was a very great singer. It was a very dismal evening in New York City. I’d been to the Bronco Burger; I had a cheeseburger; it didn’t help at all. Went to the White Horse Tavern, looking for Dylan Thomas, but Dylan Thomas was dead ... I got back in the elevator, and there she was. She wasn’t looking for me either. She was looking for Kris Kristofferson. “Lay your head upon the pillow.” I wasn’t looking for her, I was looking for Lili Marlene. Forgive me for these circumlocutions. I later found out she was Janis Joplin and we fell into each other’s arms through some divine process of elimination which makes a compassion out of indifference, and after she died, I wrote this song for her. It’s called the “Chelsea Hotel”.’ In the sleeve notes to his 1975 Greatest Hits, he is more discreet, writing only that ‘I wrote this for an American singer who died a while ago. She used to stay at the Chelsea too.’ But in 1976 he is publicly admitting, or boasting, that the singer in question was Janis Joplin. ‘It was very indiscreet of me to let that news out. I don’t know when I did. Looking back, I’m sorry I did because there are some lines in it that are extremely intimate.’
He repeats the apology to the late singer almost as often as he delivers his introduction to the song. ‘I’m very sorry, and if there is some way of apologising to the ghost, I want to apologise now, for having committed that indiscretion,’ he is still telling BBC viewers in 1994.
JANIS JOPLIN
BEFRIENDS
PATTI SMITH
The Chelsea Hotel, 222 West 23rd Street, New York
August 1970
Three years on, Janis Joplin is hanging out with her band in El Quixote, the bar attached to the Chelsea Hotel. She is the toast of hippy America. She doesn’t seem to notice the young girl who has just strolled in.
Patti and her friend Robert Mapplethorpe have recently moved into Room 1017, the smallest bedroom in the hotel. Aged twenty-three, Patti is a bookstore assistant who yearns to be an artist of one kind or another. The Chelsea represents her aspirations. She enters it as a novice might enter a convent.
Dressed in a long rayon polkadot dress and straw hat, she puts her head round the door of the bar. The scene that greets her is almost absurdly characteristic of its era, scattered in roughly equal proportions with musicians and bottles of tequila. Jimi Hendrix is there in his big hat, slumped over a table at the far end; to the right of him, Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane are sitting around a table with Country Joe and the Fish; and to the left, Janis Joplin is hanging out with her band. They are all here for the Woodstock Festival.
Grace Slick brushes past her.
‘Hello,’ says Patti.
‘Hello yourself,’ replies Grace Slick. But Patti stubbornly persists in feeling at home. Returning to her room, she feels ‘an inexplicable sense of kinship with these people’.
Over the next few months, she walks around the hotel in awe, an autograph hunter too cool to hunt for autographs. ‘I wandered the halls seeking its spirits, dead or alive.’ She loiters outside Arthur C. Clarke’s rooms, but fails to catch a glimpse; she nudges Virgil Thompson’s door ajar, and spots his grand piano. The composer George Kleinsinger invites her into his suite; it is filled with ferns, palms, caged nightingales and a twelve-foot python. Someone points out the room in which Edie Sedgwick set herself on fire while glueing on false eyelashes by candlelight.
One night, the beat poet Gregory Corso drops by, and falls asleep while reading Patti’s poems. His cigarette makes a burn-mark on her chair, and she is thrilled. When he leaves, she runs her fingers lovingly over the burn-mark, ‘a fresh scar left by one of our greatest poets’.
Smith remains unsure of her particular vocation: is she a poet or a singer or a songwriter or a playwright? She can’t quite place herself, and no one else can either. ‘You don’t shoot up and you’re not a lesbian. What do you actually do?’ asks a fellow guest. But she continues to make inroads into bohemia. It is the golden age of the hanger-on: even the hangers-on’s hangers-on have hangers-on. Recently, Bobby Neuwirth became top dog after he popped up as a friend of Bob Dylan in Don’t Look Back.51 Now Neuwirth takes Patti under his wing, introducing her to Tom Paxton, Kris Kristofferson and Roger McGuinn. One day, he introduces her to Janis Joplin with the words, ‘This is the poet Patti Smith.’ From that moment, Joplin always calls her ‘the Poet’.
Over the coming year, Patti Smith is allowed to join those drifting in and out of Joplin’s suite. Joplin sits on an easy chair in the centre, ‘the queen of the radiating wheel’, brandishing a bottle of Southern Comfort, even in the afternoon. One day, Patti sits at the feet of Kris Kristofferson and Janis Joplin as Kristofferson sings his new song, ‘Me and Bobby McGee’.52 In her rasping, wailing voice, Janis Joplin joins in the chorus. This is later deemed a moment of rock history, but Patti’s mind is elsewhere, preoccupied with the poem she is trying to write. That is the way with these moments: at twenty-three, Patti is ‘so young and preoccupied with my own thoughts that I hardly recognised them as moments’.
In August 1970, when Janis Joplin plays in Central Park, Neuwirth finds Patti a place at the side of the stage. Patti is mesmerised by Joplin, but suddenly there is a downpour, then a thunderstorm, and Joplin is forced to leave the stage. As the roadies clear the equipment away, the crowd boos. Joplin is distraught. ‘They’re booing me, man,’ she tells Neuwirth. ‘No, they’re booing the rain,’ he assures her.
After another concert, Joplin’s vast entourage troops off to an after-show party at the Remington, near Lower Broadway. Among the guests are the girl in the red dress from the cover of Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home, and the actress Tuesday Weld. Patti notes that Janis – in magenta and pink, with a purple feather boa – spends most of the evening with a good-looking man to whom she is obviously attracted.
But just before closing time, the man leaves with someone else, someone prettier.
Joplin bursts into tears. ‘This always happens to me, man. Just another night alone.’
Neuwirth tells Patti to take Janis back to the Chelsea Hotel and keep an eye on her. Patti sits with Janis and listens while she talks about how unhappy she is. Patti has written a song for her, and, never backward in coming forward, seizes the opportunity to sing it. It is on the theme, not wholly original, of the star adored by the public but lonely offstage.
‘That’s me, man! That’s my song!’ says Joplin.
Before Patti sets off for her own room, Joplin adjusts her boa in the mirror. ‘How do I look, man?’ she asks.
‘Like a pearl. A pearl of a girl,’ replies Patti.
A few weeks later, on October 4th 1970, Patti is hanging out with the guitarist Johnny Winter when the news comes through that Janis Joplin has died of a heroin overdose in the Landmark Motel, Los Angeles, aged twenty-seven. Winter, who is highly superstitious, thinks of two other musicians who have recently died, Brian Jones and Jimi Hendrix, and starts fretting that he too has a ‘J’ in his name.53 Patti Smith offers to read his tarot cards, and predicts – accurately, as it turns out – that he is in no immediate danger.
PATTI SMITH
IS TREATED TO A SANDWICH BY
ALLEN GINSBERG
Horn and Hardart automat, West 23rd Street, New York
November 1969
Who can fathom the consequences that may hang on the raising of the price of a cheese roll by ten cents?
On November 1st, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe gather their belongings and move several flights downstairs in the Chelsea Hotel. Their new room, 204, is next to the one in which Dylan Thomas was resident when he died. Like the British upper classes, the bohemian inhabitants of the Chelsea Hotel thrive on these ghostly connections to grandees of the past.
Patti has always disliked using the lift, and feels a sense of release at being able to nip up and down the stairs. ‘Because it was only the second floor I could fly up and down the stairs ... It gave me a sense that the lobby was an extension of the room.’ Together in their slightly larger room she and Mapplethorpe work at making necklaces from ribbons, string and old rosary beads. Sometimes the beads get lost in the folds of the bedcovers, or slip through the cracks of the wooden floor. But these are early days. Within a few months, they will both have branched out from this comparatively traditional activity. Soon they will stage a ‘happening’ called ‘Robert Getting His Nipple Pierced’. It consists of Mapplethorpe having a gold ring inserted in a nipple while Patti intones a meandering monologue about her love life. This will be followed by ‘Patti Getting Her Knee Tattooed’, in which Patti has a small lightning flash tattooed on her knee by an Australian artist called Vali Meyers.
Their fellow residents express their approval. ‘We who were watching certainly suffered vicariously ... The result was wholly satisfactory in the idiom of the day,’ reports one of them. The ‘happening’ is filmed by another Chelsea resident and screened at the Museum of Modern Art, before an appreciative audience also formed largely of residents of the Chelsea Hotel.
But while they are still engaged in jewellery, Smith and Mapplethorpe develop a routine of picking up lobster claws (ideal for spray painting) from the El Quixote restaurant next door, then off to the Capitol Fishing Tackle Shop two doors down for feathered bait and lead weights for the necklaces, ending up at the Horn and Hardart automat down the street. At the automat, their usual procedure is to get a seat and a tray, go to the back wall, where there are rows of little windows, put a coin in a slot, open a glass hatch, and pick out a sandwich or a fresh apple pie. Patti’s favourite dish is cheese and mustard with lettuce on a poppyseed roll; Robert prefers macaroni cheese. Patti drinks coffee, Robert chocolate milk.
One wet afternoon, Patti is overcome by a craving for a cheese and lettuce sandwich. She searches their room high and low for the necessary fifty-five cents, puts on her grey trenchcoat and her Mayakovsky cap, rushes down to the automat, finds a seat, picks up a tray, goes to the back wall and puts her fifty-five cents in the slot.
The hatch won’t open, so she pulls it again. But still it won’t open; only now does she notice a sign that says the price has risen by ten cents, to sixty-five cents.
‘Can I help?’
She turns around. It is a portly man with a dark curly beard. She recognises him: ‘no mistaking the face of one of our great poets and activists’. It is Allen Ginsberg, the author of ‘Howl’, the man described in an FBI report, not altogether inaccurately, as ‘an entertainer with a fuzzy beard who chants unintelligible poems’. He is also a hobby nudist54 and a vociferous advocate of drugs.55
Ginsberg has just returned from the funeral of his old lover and fellow beat writer Jack Kerouac, who collapsed while watching The Galloping Gourmet on television, then died in hospital of cirrhosis of the liver. ‘So he drank himself to death, which is only another way of living, of handling the pain and foolishness that it’s all a dream, a great baffling silly emptiness, after all,’ Ginsberg concluded in a speech at Yale University the day before yesterday.
‘Can I help?’ he asks.
Patti nods her consent. Ginsberg adds the extra ten cents, and also treats her to a cup of coffee. She follows him to his table and starts eating her sandwich. Ginsberg introduces himself, and begins talking about Walt Whitman. In her deep voice, Patti mentions that she was brought up near Camden, New Jersey, where Whitman is buried. At this point, something strikes Ginsberg. He leans forward in his chair and looks at her quizzically.
‘Are you a girl?’ he asks.
‘Yeah. Is that a problem?’
Ginsberg laughs. ‘I’m sorry. I took you for a very pretty boy.’
Patti senses a misunderstanding.
‘Well, does this mean I return the sandwich?’
‘No, enjoy it. It was my mistake.’
Thus, on the strength of an unexpected hike in the price of a cheese roll, Ginsberg and Patti Smith meet and form a lifelong friendship. Keen self-mythologisers, as the years roll by they take to reminiscing about this chance encounter. Once, Ginsberg asks her, ‘How would you describe how we met?’
‘I would say you fed me when I was hungry,’ she replies.
In his latter years, Ginsberg is inspired by Patti to write rock lyrics, though with limited success: he is just too wordy. Always a generous man, he takes to introducing her concerts with lengthy preambles. ‘Patti Smith was one of the pioneers of spoken poetry music,’ he tells an audience in Michigan on April 5th 1996. ‘... She pioneered that combination of music and poetry which has caught fire among the younger generation to the point where a lot of older folks including myself learned from her how to put the two together.’
Exactly a year after this particular concert, Ginsberg dies. At his memorial service at St Mark’s church, Patti dresses in a white T-shirt with Rimbaud’s face on it and sings ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’.
ALLEN GINSBERG
PRESSES NUDE PHOTOGRAPHS OF HIMSELF ONTO
FRANCIS BACON
Room 9, The Villa Muniriya, 1, rue Magellan, Tangier
May 1957
For a gay Western man in the 1950s, there is nowhere quite like Tangier.56 In March 1957, Allen Ginsberg and his boyfriend Peter Orlovsky arrive there to stay with Ginsberg’s old lover, William Burroughs.
On the first night, Burroughs, still pining for Ginsberg, grows very drunk, and starts waving a machete around. But over the next few days, things settle down. They soon establish a nightly routine of chewing majoun, a sort of hashish candy heated into what Ginsberg describes, unappealingly, as ‘the consistency of sticky shit’, and arguing about the nature of art until the early hours. Sometimes they come to blows – one night Ginsberg rips open Burroughs’ shirt with a hunting knife – but, by and large, everything goes swimmingly. Early each morning, Ginsberg retreats to the patio to edit the rambling manuscript of Burroughs’ The Naked
Lunch.
If the English expatriates have a leader, it is David Herbert, who rules them with what someone calls ‘a whip of knotted floss silk’. They gather in the louche Dean’s Bar, described by Ian Fleming as ‘a sort of mixture between Wiltons and the porter’s lodge at White’s’. In a letter home, Fleming adds, ‘There’s nothing but pansies, and I have been fresh meat for them ... Francis Bacon is due next week to live with his pansy pianist friend.’
The pansy pianist in question is Peter Lacy, the former Battle of Britain pilot with whom Bacon is desperately in love. To settle a drinking debt, Lacy plays piano in Dean’s Bar, but drinks so much that the debt escalates nightly. In the early hours, he tends to snap and resorts to violence. One night, Bacon’s face is so damaged it must be repaired with stitches around the right eye, but at the end of it all, notes a friend, ‘Bacon loved Lacy even more.’
Some blame the repetitive violence on muggers. ‘Francis was always being beaten up,’ recalls Herbert. ‘Our consul general was very upset and got hold of the chief of police and told him he had to do something about it. He impressed on him that Francis was a very distinguished painter. A few days later, the chief of police returned, patently embarrassed. “Pardon, mais il n’y a rien à faire. Le peintre adore ça!”’
The sex and violence in Tangier also provide perverse tourist must-sees for Burroughs’ gloating prose: ‘The City is visited by epidemics of violence, and the untended dead are eaten by vultures in the streets. Albinos blink in the sun. Boys sit in trees, languidly masturbate. People eaten by unknown diseases watch the passer-by with evil, knowing eyes.’ During his annual visits, Bacon spends time with Burroughs, though he prefers alcohol to drugs: when Burroughs gives him kif, his face blows up like a balloon, so he never tries it again.
Burroughs introduces Bacon to his guests. For Ginsberg, Bacon is ‘an English schoolboy with the soul of a satyr, wearing sneakers & tight dungarees and black silk shirts & always looks like going to tennis ... who paints mad gorillas in grey hotel rooms dressed in evening dress with deathly black umbrellas’. Ginsberg thinks the Beat writers have much in common with Bacon, and that Bacon paints the way Burroughs writes, in ‘a sort of dangerous bullfight of the mind’. For him, Bacon is just like Burroughs, placing himself in psychic danger with his art, jeopardising the very foundations of his being, and so forth. But Bacon has no time for such claptrap. His own reputation is, he says, ‘a lot of chic shit’. His real love, he boasts, is gambling: he once won $4,000 at Monte Carlo, and was offered a larger stake for letting himself be whipped, plus a bonus for every stroke that drew blood.
