Book I—In which the author endures an unfortunate! omen. A brief tumult ensues which will surprise the reader. Also an architectural rendering containing grave matters and a short extract from the sublime.

CHICAGO “AAWWWWWWGGHHUUUGGHH...” Cutting through the opening act’s Fender din, wafting over the whining protest at the backstage door, slicing across the blue haze of kiddie-boy greetings and dealer’s quarrels (“So where are the papers, shithead!”), practically sizzling my bare eardrums is this awful noise—like a prop jet regurgitating an engine full of mutilated swallows. Even the frazzled bouncer who guards the entrance to Valhalla has momentarily loosened his vise-like grip on the tiny, moon-eyed urchin at my side to suss out this mutant blast.

Hove to hear boys screaming for me Just like I shouted for the Stones.

Againjt rears its ugly head—“AAAWWWUUUAAAGGHH”. Gravity tells me to look down. There is vomit all over my shoes. Tiny cheese frostedflakes are dribbling down some kid’s lumberjack shirt, oozing through his jeans; a puddle of slime forms on the already greasy tile floor.

If you’ve ever risked your short hairs on the North Side of Chicago’s concert circuit, this revolting scenario may provoke a shock of recognition. We’re at the Aragon Ballroom, raucous pitstop for weary, unwashed rock ’n’ roll animals, awaiting the Patti Smith Group’s local debut.

Illustration by Bao Miller

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Patti chose the venue personally after a recent reconnaissance mission with the Blue Oyster Cult, who are to the Aragon what the Red Sox are to Fenway Park—God could not have invented a more sympatico milieu. Even Cinnamon, Chicago’s leading lady of the night, has slunk out of hibernation—last visit she remained safely ensconced in the sagging balcony, getting in shape by pitching coke bottles on the huddled masses below.

On that last visit, Patti couldn’t keep her eyes off the upper deck. “Watching those kids hanging off the balcony was just like watching Children of Paradise fa mime film shot during the French Occupation],” she said before going on. “It got its name from the upper balconies of the 19th century Paris music halls where the poor had to sit. They called it paradise ’cause it was so far away from the stage and so close to God.”

Asa Second City native, Patti is particularly ecstatic about heading the Aragon. “I was practically conceived in this joint,” she says proudly. “My parents fell in love here dancing on the weekends. My ma knew lots of Mafia guys during the war. I think she was even a hat-check girl here.”

(The next day Patti—a letter freak who’s always hoarding stationery from radio stations and hotels—mailed a note from the local FM outlet. “Hi mommy,” it read, “I’m here working where you worked to have me—Love Patti”.)

Book II—The author himself makes his stage debut in which he apologizes for his insensitivity, recalling a trifling incident of years previous, but which had dire future consequences. Also the heroine appears, with bad omens.

.I

Before I get carried away, let me lay some cards on the table. Like Jimmy the Greek sez, if ya got a loaded hand, either bluff like shit or spill yer guts.

My confession: I didn’t make such a hot impression with the contessa. In faft, I think it’s safe to say that your favorite Keith Richard lookalike and mine hates my guts. Certain elder statesmen of the critical trade have warned me of this syndrome, but being such a likable, sober type (even my snotty freshman lit students applaud at the quarter’s end and dogs have been known to smile at me on the street), I never figured on sinking to this sort of impasse (Lou Reed did raise his voice once, but that hardly counts).

Deeply offended that her alma mater would assign such a lout to interview her, Patti periodically phoned Detroit, demanding that I be dismissed from the case, told me repeatedly that I “put her to sleep” and, adding insult to injury, asked if I were “a conservative”.

What provoked these fireworks were some brief backstage pleasantries exchanged over a year ago, in, of all places, Milwaukee. Your humble correspondent, trying to gain entrance to the star’s dressing room after a tumultuous concert, was brutally pinned to the wall by two hulking behemoths armed with padded-lead pipes.

A heated shouting match ensued, with near-fatal results, since both cossacks sported arms the size of a Cadillac bumper and brains to match. Just as they began to twist my neck into a pretzel, the lead reptile stopped dead in his tracks, a look of pure terror on his fat face.

“Hey, you’re my fucking professor!” he croaked. Temporarily having lost the use of my vocal chords, I managed a wobbly nod. “Aw, gee, I’m sorry sir, I didn’t know it was you. I’m one of your students.” His fellow lummox beat a hasty retreat. The Arista flack suddenly arrived, ushering me backstage. I turned and yelled back, “You’ve flunked kid, but you flunked in style.”

This brush with lifelong paralysis put me in a poor frame of mind for small talk. Patti was holding court, describing the lurid history of her sartorial props, while Lenny Kaye fiddled with his guitar in the corner. My left eye began to twitch. Having been rather baffled by Patti’s encore theatrics, particularly her (then) amateuristic Fender solo, I asked mischievously what she would label her guitar gyrations.

“Whaddya mean what was I doing?” she asked. “Well, uh,” I stuttered, trying to hide my newly acquired tick, “Were you rehearsing or something?” (This is a good query to drop from any writer’s repertoire.) She shook her head. “That was my solo,” she said petulantly, J fought off another twitch attack. “Oh, that’s what it was, I get it—a solo.” This effectively ended our audience. Patti scoured the room for a friendly face. I winked back.

Our cold war ended backstage at the Aragon. Surrounded by weary band members, numerous reporters and record company flacks, an obviously exhausted Patti began to badger a local critic whose feature piece had run that day. “What’d you mean by that stuff about me breaking that bottle?” she complained, referring to an incident at the Bottom Line where she’d abandoned the stage in mid-song, engaged in a heated argument with the bartender, and finally pried loose a drink, only to smash it once she regained the stage. “Was that supposed to symbolize me throwing my career away? You think I’m gonna go down the drain?”

The critic, painfully shy to begin with, was speechless. I volunteered from across the room that she sort of missed the point. She glared at me. “You know how spaced-out this guy is?” she said, gesturing towards the hapless critic. “When we went to the airport, he took me to the wrong terminal and I missed my plane.” The critic squirmed uncomfortably.

“We should have done the day the other way around,” Patti speculated, glancing cooly in my direction. “I should’ve started with the spaced-out guy and then, when I needed to catch my plane [here, mimicking Madame La Farge, she points a bony finger at me], the Nazi could’ve made sure I made it.”

A funereal hush swept the room—all eyes focusing on me. Will the battling Jewboy from Miami. Beach, who still remembers his grandmother’s warnings about errant Gestapo submarines surfacing off the Fountainbleau Hotel sun-deck, take offense at this peculiarly ironic denigration? Will there be a scene, mano a mano? A sudden explosion of holocaustal passion? Out the window, the frigid Chicago night beckoned. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. This was no place to fight.'The odds looked bad. I bowed out gracefully.

Book m-A very long chapter, containing great incidents. The author’s opinions on grave and deep matters, which none but the classical reader will understand. Including a whimsical adventure.

Forewarned now that objectivity may not be my strong suit, let’s abandon Patti’s gypsy spitfire temperament and attempt a few tentative judgments about her artistic vision. It would be fair to say that I fall into the school that favors her live performances over the pair of acetates.

Both albums offer their share of strengths (the metaphysical leap from “Horses” to “Land of 1000 Dances” never fails to provoke a passionate shudder, as do some of the more graceful figures on “Redondo Beach”) but neither record lives up to the promise of her best live sets. Even these can be grotesquely self-indulgent and downright erratic; her Bottom Line engagement bore this out.

But when the band hits its stride, as at the Aragon, one is struck by a blast of what Saul Bellow calls “the ecstasy of consciousness”. Kaye and Krai drench the hall with thick, sensual sonic booms, the rhythm section (special kudos here for Jay Dee, who is only rivaled by Moon when it comes to percussive bloodletting) slash at ,the beat like sharks maddened by the smell of raw meat, while Patti slinks in and out of the shifting spotlight, whirling like a dervish, blindly diving into a fetal “Hunchback of Notre Dame” crouch; frugging, jump-roping, arching her back like an alley-cat in heat, assaulting Lenny with jungle fervor; first knocking him down, then luring him erect, feigning a leap into the aroused mass of spectators; dangling, then suddenly recoiling an extended foot towards the crowd’s clammy, outstretched hands as if charming a snake...

This is no mere performance. As Patti crawls up the mike stand for “Time Is On My Side,” hocking wads of phlegm, her glazed, mystic eyes darting over the footlights, we gasp for air, shaken by the momentum of abrupt madness, possessed not by some obscure literary text but by a genuine Madwoman of Chaillot offering a fistful of debauchery, a lunatic harrangue of disconnected images, a spasm of halfconscious incantations.

Listen, we’re a garage band and we’re not ashamed of it.

“I don’t need that fucking shit!” Patti bellows, stretching her soul over the band’s traditional “My Generation” finale: “Hope I die because of it!” This is more than high theatre, this is the dream from which you cannot awake.

For Patti, the stage is the scene of sympathetic magic, a cardboard set for psychodrama, a lease on life beyond the reality of life itself. Her constant use of military imagery is by no means accidental. She’d like to drop not words, but bombs (complaining about Arista’s lack of support for her second album, she snapped: “You should back up artistic freedom with machine guns.”). As James Wolcott sagely noted, she resembles Jean-Luc Godard’s children of Marx and Coca-Cola, mixing a predeliction for dramatic intensity with a fondness for the ridiculous. “I’m sort of like Victor Borge,” she cracks, “I’m always lapsing into jokes,,monologs and pranks.”

TURN TO PAGE 67.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 45

Book IV—In which is seen more of the moving spectacle. Containing much matter to exercise the judgement and reflection of the reader. The tendency of the heroine towards tender affections for which none of her sex will blame her.

Patti’s oeuvre (more appropriately, perhaps, her moi) draws inspiration equally from the French Symbolists and more recent rock luminaries. (Let’s see how long we can go before dragging Monsieur Rimbaud into this treatise.)

As for specific derivations, I’d make a case for about three, parts Antonin Artaud, two parts Jim Morrison, with a hefty pinch of Gracie Allen. After a glance at Patti’s back-cover pantheon, one is tempted to suggest Anais Nin as well, not for her aesthetic qualities but for her ability to surround herself with one great artistic lay after another. Nin’s conquests included Henry Miller and Gore Vidal (well, sometimes one must share the spoils). So far Patti has only corralled Sam Shephard (briefly) and Alan Lanier (six years now) in the sack, but as a pantheon publicist, she’s been a veritable Irving Lazar.

Her album jackets are swelled by cult figures ranging from the predictable (Morrison and M. Rimbaud) to the exotic (Brancusi and Harry Crosby) to the sublime (Paul Getty III—nominated for his stellar Van Gogh impression perhaps?).

But back to influences. The Lizard King we know about. As for Artaud, he gets the nod as Patti’s main squeeze on spectacle alone. As Andre Breton noted, “He carried around'with him the landscape of a Gothic novel, rent by flashes of lightning”. Like Artaud,' Patti rarely uses language to reflect, but to provoke and excite.

“I’ve played symphony halls and Paris slaughterhouses with no heat a/nd mud floors and horse manure,” she boasts, “And, I tell ya, I prefer the slaughterhouses. The whole concept behind performing is to induce excitement and mania.” This is the talk of an agitator, not some wimpy intellectual. “Poetry’s all performance,” she continued, shifting into her favorite gear, the monolog. “Mayakovsky was a great showman—handsome, almost seven feet tall. He could give a poetry reading to 10,000 people and just use a megaphone.

“The only thing that compares to his readings is a Who concert. Fights breaking out, lots of punk energy and revolution. Rock’s that kind of poetry. You’re supposed to see poets in stadiums, not some moldy library/ In Rimbaud’s time a poet took the same risks as today’s rock stars. They both die young ’cause their awareness is compacted. I’ve always thought that Rimbaud’s great tragedy was that the Stratocaster wasn’t ready yet.

“The Europeans got the right idea,” she says, drifting off into a reverie of the band’s recent tour of the Continent. “People always reacted violently—ecstatically. You’d go to a Stravinsky concert and they’d riot and throw rocks and bottles. People committed suicide at surrealist happenings. I mean, violence and art came hand in hand.”

Also like Artaud, Patti’s poetry/performances are flooded with eroticism. Not the cliched bump-and-grind tease show we’ve come to expect from the Ronstadts and Rod Stewarts, but a primitive, almost perverse sexuality. After bouncing around several mental institutes, Artaud confessed: “When I -write or read, I want to feel my soul in an erection.” Patti’s union of eroticism and aestheticism differs only in its frame of reference.

“Why do ya have heroes?” she asks, brushing back her matted, raven-black locks. “To me, it seemed obvious. I’ve always picked the ones I wanted to fuck. I saw the Stones on TV in ’65 and instantly I wanted to fuck. It got to my glands. I’d spend hours fantacizing about meeting Mick Jagger at this party and taking him home... Listen, I love to hear boys screaming for me just like I shouted for the Stones. I was at Berkeley where these boys on acid all took their clothes off and yelled ‘Fuck me’.”

Book V—Containing a knotty problem for the reader. Also in which the heroine and elder statesmen offer two defiances to their critics. The author continues his history.

The Aragon’s sordid, but unfettered surroundings conform perfectly to Patti’s resolutely populist vision of rock ’n’ roll. To her, the “kids” are king. It’s as if she enjoyed a secret communion with their collective tee-shirted consciousness. They remain the final arbitrators of her performance. This is admittedly a pretty low common denominator, but then, Jerry Lewis’ biggest fans are the French.

This worship of the rock proletariat is not an uncommon ideological stance, particularly for a vanguard artist like Patti, who draws much of her sustenance from totem figures like Morrison, Dylan and Burroughs, all who have suffered from the capriciousness of high-brow stuff-shirts. Alas, Patti has not yet learned to ignore her tormentors. As we drove back from one of her radio/ engagements, she berated a fellov^ critic for his rock-weary cynicism.

“You gotta believe in rock,” she said excitedly, hands pumping like pompoms. “Lenny made more mon^y as a critic than he’ll ever make with me. When he got cynical about the music, I told him to quit. That’s what Bangs and Meltzer should do now if they’re so fed up with the stuff. They should get into something else—the way Sandy Pearlman did.”

Kaye, who apprenticed as a critic and rock historian before trading in his felt-tip ^or a Fender, put this more articulately. “The role of a critic is to put art in context,” he intoned softly. “A Bay City Rollers record can’t have the same critical standards that a Jimi Hendrix album has. The critics are dealing with us in a vacuum. We’ve been typed as a certain sort of group and any attempt to move out of .those boundaries is seen negatively.

“All we’ve done is expand—you can go track by track and see the similarities. ‘Radio Ethiopia’ is to me a real extension of ‘Birdland,’ ‘Poppies’ is like ‘Land,’ ‘Ain’t It Strange’ is from the same' strain as ‘Redondo Beach.’ Listen, we’re a garage band and we’re not ashamed of it. In fact, we celebrate it. I think rock is the highest art form of the last 20 years. As for the critics, they didn’t understand our first record and I’m not surprised that they weren’t any more illuminating about the second one.”

As if you hadn’t guessed, both Lenny and Patti harbor a healthy respect for the punk revolution of the mid-60’s as well as the current CBGB’s (and beyond) New York scene. Even so, there is such a thing as taking egalitarianism too far. These folks are rock ’n’ roll Jeffersonians. I prefer to consider myself a jaundiced Hamiltonian .

Book VI—A little chapter containing large incidents. In which the author provokes the Entrance of another great personage and containing the heroine’s Dialogues on Demeanor. Consequences ensue.

Patti’s suspicions about my punk loyalties were first aroused when your correspondent blundered into a less than enthusiastic dissertation on Patti’s behavior at a recent Bruce Springsteen concert. For those of you who skipped Rock ‘N’ Roll News’ brilliant elucidation of the event—Patti rushed the stage and sang along on “Rosalita”. Bruce returned the favor at her Bottom Line

gig-

“Hey, I’m a groupie!” She insisted. “I live with a fucking rock star. Let me Jtell ya what really happened.” She did. Her version credits Bruce with an assist. “He pulled me on stage ’cause the security guards were beating me up ’cause I was dancing.”

Patti scratched her cheek. “I didn’t even know any of his songs,” she admitted. “I^never listened to his records before. All I know is that Bruce needed some support. He’s had a big press backlash like me. The guy’s got a lot of warmth. He ain’t the future of rock ’n’ roll. He ain’t even a rock singer, but he’s a pretty good R&B performer and the way I support somebody is not by acting like some fucking hip intellectual. It’s dangerous to mix intellectuals with art.

“I remember jumping on stage with some group in England and dancing and then what do the critics say—that I’m a go-go dancer. Fuck them. I’m not fucking cool. Hey, I am cool. I AIN’T 30 years old for nothing. I’m right up there with Alain Delon when I wanna be cool, but the place to be cool isn’t in the middle of some rock concert.”

Book VII—Containing one of the most bloody battles ever recorded in domestic history. A word or two concerning heinous shemes and incidents that will draw tears from the reader’s eye.

If you have kept up with Patti’s press clips you’re probably familiar with most of her ^concert skirmishes; only the Seattle Seahawks quarterbacks can boast of more bruises. In recent years, Patti has been beaten up at a David Bowie concert, slugged at a Blue Oyster Cult show, dragged out of a Dylan tour date, manhandled at the aforementioned Springsteen affair and has weathered several wild donnybrooks at Rolling Stones fetes.

“I’ve been beat up all my life,” she exclaims, rolling up her pant leg to display an old wound. “I broke my right foot at a Stones show. It’s still got a little bone sticking out.

“They’re my battle scars. If I ever have kids that ask what I did in the war, I can show ’em total evidence.” According to Patti, rock is like warfare. “The people that need war should divvy up on big fields and get guitars of their choosing—cause Fenders look jUst like bayonets—and. have a big battle. At the end, the losers will have to bury their guitars, so that you see a million Fender necks on this massive battlefield.”

Wander by the band’s dressing room near gig-time and you can eavesdrop on their chant—it’s better than the Ohio State locker room at half-time. “Where do we work?” Patti shouts. “In the fields,” refrain the boys. “What do we use? Marshalls! WHAT DO WE GROW? WHEAT! (yeh, it gets louder) HOW DO WE GET IT? FREE! WHAT’S THIS? WAR! (plaster starts to flake off) WHAT’S THIS? ROCK ‘N ROLL! ROCK ‘N’ ROLL!”

The band has since developed certain heavy pre-show routines to emphasize the link between rock and war. (“Radio Ethiopia is a naked field of exploration,” Patti says, “and we use Marshall amps to explore it.”) Basically they have a close quarters drill a la Sgt. Bilko where Patti stomps in, re-enacting Phil Silver’s gruff, tdngue-in-cheek inspection tour. “Lemme see those guitars—this one has dirty spots, the strings are rusty here!” she barks, twirling an imaginary bayonet. “Looks like there’s a speaker blown in these JBL’s—wadda nightmare!”

Book VIII— In which the author humbles himself. Containing the moving spectacle of the heroine giving birth, a formal courtship in miniature. The Furies of Nature and an apology for heroes who have good stomachs.

As mentioned earlier, on stage Patti trades in her stars and bars for the robes of a mystic. Her glazed eyes flash like searchlights, receding through the depths of her skull, mimicking the stunned expressions of a ’50s sci-fi time traveler, deep-freezed on a time-Warp spacecraft.

“Sometimes I get so choked up I can’t even talk,” Patti explains hoarsely, leaning back on the motel bed. “I feel like a terrorist. Like the guy who smashed the Pieta. I understand what makes people do that—my eyes feel like burning coals, I talk in tongues. I just lose control. I hear myself screaming animal noises.”

She glances at me, making sure I’m getting it all down. I nod officiously at the tape recorder, as if to remind the machine what a lucky little cassette is revolving in its bowels. “It’s lots like childbirth,” Patti continues. “Women are especially capable of animal sounds ’cause we give birth in such a completely animal way. Ya howl like a wolf. You can’t stop it—the feeling comes from too far away.”

I say it reminds me of the expression on Pete Townshend’s face when he smashes his guitar. I once destroyed a Fender of my own, over the head of a noisy barroom geek who dragged me off a three-inch stage in Skokie when I tried to impress his date by dedicating “Stay With Me” to her mother. That blow, however, was struck not for self-revelation, but in selfdefense.

“Yeh, I smashed my guitar in England,” Patti recalls. “I’d bought this $35 Polish model ’cause it had a sway bar but since you can’t take ’em out of the country I figured I’d give it to some kid. But when I plugged it in for my ‘Generation’ solo it didn’t work. The kids all started yelling ‘smash it, smash it’...”

Patti’s eyes are like slits now, her head bobs from side to side. I’m rooting the tape recorder on.

“I’m kicking in the amp and smashing the bar,” even her words are beginning to slur now, “getting more crazy, telepathing and the kids are screeching and the atmosphere’s getting hazy—everybody’s standing on their chairs, chanting like a swarm of bees. Suddenly I’m walking out towards the stage ramp, feeling completely centered with gravity and I lift the guitar over my head in slow-motion like at the end of Zabriskie Point and as the drums get faster the guitar cuts through air like a knife—down in one fatal swoop. POW! POW! bursting into pieces like Jeff Beck in Blow-Up.

“There was a riot as everybody shoved against the cordon to grab a piece of it. This one little girl got hold of the bulk of it and kids were tearing at her and she’s yelling, ‘NO IT’S MINE’ —I was just praying she’d get out OK.”

Book IX—Concluding the author s black design, in which the heroine seeks refuge in Assembled Dialogue. Sage remarks, an invocation and an extraordinary confession by the heroine. The author employs his eloquence to an III purpose.

Several thousand hieroglyphics earlier your narrator related how his subject evoked Mssrs. Morrison and Artaud (both buried in the same Paris cemetery, only two shuffle-board lengths away). Also noted in that discourse was the legendary Grade Allen. Don’t chortle—there have been stranger bedmates.

As for Patti, like her mentor, she is a master comedienne of incomprehensibility. An avid fan of Johnny Carson (“He’s the most spaced out guy on TV”) her performance on another talk-fest, the Chicago based Kup’s Show, rivaled any concert antics as she regaled a gallery of opera divas with dead-pan, throw-away gags.

Robert Merrill revealed at one point that many opera stars travel with claques—people hired to applaud and bravo wildly from the cheap seats. “Oh yeh,” Patti drawled, “like professional mourners.” Also on the program was Sylvester “Rocky”' Stallone, who sported a huge skull ring and gaudy patent leather boots. Patti was unimpressed by the bicep-sized rock. “Once a dago,” she sniffed, “always a dago.” Could Gracie have done better? Perhaps a match-up with George Burns would be in order; the opium pipe meets the cigar.

ft may seem a bit odd to end this opus under the hot, suburban schlock lights of the Kup Show, but your scrivener is of the firm belief that the more his subjects are out of their element, the more they reveql of themselves (he is also convinced that if he types much longer he will drown in a sea of empty Yoo-Hoo bottles). Why Patti insisted on appearing in the first frlace says £*lot about her long-term aspirations. Kup appeals to the kind of . housewife that listens to Tommy Dorsey, not Tommy Bolin.

Nevertheless, Patti handled the affair with „ considerable elan. “They always say—gee, you’re so intelligent,” she winced afterwards. “What am I supposed to do, corfte on with spinach instead of a brain?” Wearing her de rigeur black ensemble, matched with high brown boots and red kerchief , she shared Stallone’s end of the couch, tucking her legs behind her, tapping a spoon across the bridge of her nose and occasionally flexing her muscles—the usual symphony of over-adrenalined talk-show gestures.

The host lobbed several innocuous spitballs her^way, but for me, the coup de grace happened during an uninspired fishing expedition along the lines of “Do you need the audience to love you?” Patti grinned, twirling her pencil in the air. “Yeh, I got a little Judy Garland in me.”

The way she said it, with the casual off-hand charm of one of Truffaut’s Small Change small-frys, rang my bell. All along I’d missed the point. Forget the sarcastic remarks, gutter tactics, cold stares—all that New York punkmodel Jewish princess crap. Behind the fancy cult influences and bizarre stage mannerisms lies rock ’n’ roll’s biggest fan.

, “I always wanted to know who inspired Dylan’s old stuff,” she said once, after I complained about the slag-heap of pop idols spread across the album’s liner notes. “I dug Jagger telling the press that ‘Lady Jane’ was about Chrissie Shrimpton. Maybe it’s cause I’m a girl, but I like to know all that stuff. I used to cut classes and run down to the Pittman News Agency to get all the rock rags—check out everybody’s outfits, see what John Lennon was wearing, win a date with Jim Morrison....”

Once a fan, folks, always a fan.

That’s why rock critics that dumped on her album are getting phone calls in the middle of the night, that’s why I earned the moniker of “Nazi”. Patti the performer can take the heat (who listens to us old codgers anyway) but her biggest fan can’t.

And if you’ve ever seen Patti tumble into the audience, slap a few hands and then stare longingly back towards that empty spotlight, you know who that is.