PATTY SMYTH ENOUGH IS ENOUGH

PATTY SMYTH ENOUGH IS ENOUGH

There’s a firetruck parked outside the building containing the office of Patty Smyth’s management. The lobby is filled with firemen trying to determine whether the building is indeed on fire. For the sake of a story, I’ve dodged the usual bottles and knives, cherry bombs in my ears and vomit at my feet. I’ve braved storms and tornados. I’ve ridden in cars driven by Motley Crue. There are artists for whom I will go through flames. For the moment, Patty Smyth is not one of them. It’s only a false alarm.

Up on the 11th floor, Smyth—frecklefaced and tomboyish without make-up, dressed in what looks like black woolen biker’s tights, black sweater and white Tshirt—bears little resemblance to the pouty video vixen who helped former band Scandal successfully ride the first wave of MTV. She’s unrecognizable enough to have ridden the subway to this meeting. The people at CBS are putting mucho effort into ensuring that her Scandal-less debut, Never Enough will change that. Smyth has long been a personal favorite of CBS treasurer, Al Teller, the man who signs the checks that run the big machine. Finishing off a brownie and swigging from a bottle of Evian, she considers the rumors that have surrounded her career.

“They’ve said every woman that I’ve ever heard of has screwed their way to the top.” The difference between herself and the others is, “I can sing. I’m good at what I do. You might have one record, but if you can’t sing, no matter who you’re screwing, you’re doomed,” she adds, neatly sidestepping the specifics of the issue—perhaps even confusing it. What she wants to make clear is that where there’s a couch, she does the casting.

“Nobody ever hit on me, ever,” she continues. “Because I’m not the kind of person that’s approachable in that way. I mean, I don’t think anybody could stand the rejection. Nobody ever made a slime move on me. I’m from New York, man. You don’t get a whole lot of slime moves when you’re from New York.”

Smyth became a slime-buster early. Her father, a construction worker, split when Patty and her older sister were kids—and subsequently died, leaving two half-sisters. Her mother ran Greenwich Vilage nightclubs and managed Link Wray, who lived in their apartment for awhile. “It definitely

wasn’t Ozzie and Harriet,” Patty remembers.

The family moved to what she describes as a “hard neighborhood” in Brooklyn when she was 11, which “definitely made it so I wasn’t going to turn out to be a wimp. It gave me a harder edge. I was just waiting to get out of there from the day we moved. The overall theme was, like, you don’t have black friends, you don’t talk to black kids, in school, you don’t listen to black music, you don’t go to museums, you don’t read, you just hang out on the corner and beat the shit out of people.”

Deborah Frost

Returning to Manhattan four years later, Smyth went to Washington Irving High School. “That was a tough school. That was an all-girl school I didn’t realize was an all-girl school ’til I was there for a week.” Always a poor student, Patty managed to make the honor roll at Washington Irving. But before she finished, her mother moved to Pittsburgh. Patty got her own place, a job selling sheets and towels on the Lower East Side, and a high school equivalency diploma.

“I was just surviving, I didn’t really have any major plans,” she says. She did spend a lot of time alone with her guitar, singing “the Hank Williams songbook and all kinds of Motown. Because I had absolutely no musical training, I didn’t feel I could communicate to another musician. It took just taking the risk of actually calling someone up when I was 19 and saying I can sing.”

That someone was a friend of her boyfriend at the time, who had a band in Philadelphia. She joined them for a few local gigs of Meters, James Brown and Jimmy Cliff covers before heading back to New York. She waitressed to make ends meet and auditioned at Catch A Rising Star, a showcase club where another bigvoiced Pat got her start. Although she saw Benatar do her infamous evening-gowned version of “Stairway To Heaven,” by the time Smyth became a Catch regular, Benatar was en route to “Heartbreaker” heaven. Smyth got her first break when Ellie Greenwich caught her singing R&B tunes in a voice that reminded the legendary songwriter of Dusty Springfield (a quality yet to be exploited by anyone else) and attempted to get her a record deal. Smyth had never been in a studio before walking into the 24-track Record Plant to do demos of four Greenwich songs, a situation she found understandably overwhelming.

When no deal materialized, Smyth made her own two-track demo of her R&B set, and put together a trio that played the local clubs. It was the first time she’d ever done original material, much of it written by the guitarist’s sister. Like the band, she says, it was “pretty bad.” Guitar player Zack Smith, who’d heard her name through the grapevine, convinced her to sing on a demo of three songs, one of which was “Love’s Got A Line On You.” He also got her fired from her waitressing job in an East Side steakhouse by hanging around and playing tapes for her at the bar. Patty took unemployment in stride, though, telling her then-boyfriend to “pay me for staying home.” Smith and Smyth made a video in a friend’s living room of “Love’s Got A Line,” and put together a band including the pre-Letterman Paul Schaffer and ex-David Johansen drummer Frankie LaRocka, wrote a set’s worth of material and began playing the Ritz (where their first manager was the lawyer) on Monday nights. According to Patty, the living room video got them signed to Columbia, who “were kind of looking for a female rock ’n’ roller.”

But no sooner did Scandal record what’s always hyped as the best-selling EP in Columbia history (how many EPs are there in Columbia history?) they began suffering the personnel changes and ego clashes that plagued them throughout their brief career. Schaffer left for the Letterman show, LaRocka for John Waite. Zack had a falling out with the other guitarist, Ray Gomez. Although they are friends now, Smyth chafed at Smith’s wanting to “control the situation and creating this illusion he had found me somewhere and stuck me in the middle of this band and I just stood there and sang. It just wasn’t true. Because the two of us met, it was the right combination and why things happened for us.”

More crucial, “We were thrust out on the road for nine months. I’d never been on the road before. It really took its toll on us.”

But as a woman, Smyth didn’t feel left out of the traditional rites of the road or that touring was necessarily tougher for her than anyone else. “Being on the road is just playing, it’s not getting laid. I think even guys get tired of that. And we’re all gonna be cheated equal out there now. There’s gonna be a lot of repercussions because of this AIDS thing.” And, she adds, “If you get lonely on the road, if you’re a guy and you’re screwing everything that moves, you’re still lonely. There’s a lot of women that screw everything that moves also. That’s more personal than gender.” She did miss female companionship and hired a friend to do her wardrobe. “I needed some title for her so I could have a friend.” But, she insists, “I wasn’t lonely. I was in shock. Is there room service and tell me quick, what town are we in, before I go onstage. That’s all I wanted to know.”

Still, there’s at least one ex-member of Scandal who, it’s rumored, helped keep her from being too lonely and for all his efforts, found himself kicked out of the band when the music was over. The group continued to unravel while recording The Warrior. The tour that supported the album featured a completely new line-up. Even Zack Smith, Scandal’s founder and writer, was out of the picture.

“It’s like the black widow,’’ she cackles. “She mates and she kills. They’re just dropping like flies all around me. But a lot of it was an act of God.” (That’s how she describes Billy Idol’s offer to Scandal drummer Thommy Price?). In any case, she eventually found it pointless to continue paying for the use of the Scandal name when there wasn’t any Scandal. “I’m so tired trying to explain,” she yawns. She begins to fumble with a little black pouch attached to a thong around her neck. She extracts what she says is an uncut amethyst and holds it in her outstretched palm toward the window. “I like to give it some sunlight,” she says.

Obviously Smyth must have thought a lot about the direction she wanted to go as a solo artist, right? The very idea makes her crack, if not wake, up. “No,” she shakes her head, giggling. So is it any revelation that despite the heavy company push and richer, more mature material than Scandal’s one-dimensional pop-rock, Never Enough leaves much to be desired in terms of major artist-dom? Smyth doesn’t even sound as bold, bright or upfront as the voice who sold Scandal’s driving hit singles. Never neither shows off a unique personality, rare instrument or particularly skilled interpreter. She steamrolls Tom Waits’s “Downtown Train” into an express to nowhere, making one almost wish Linda Ronstadt, stiff and clumsy as she often was, would put away her prom dress and come back to show people how to sing this stuff. Interesting that Smyth is most unconvincing on “The River Cried,” by Billy Steinberg, who’s contributed to both Ronstadt’s and Cyndi Lauper’s least distinguished moments... But although Smyth murmurs that this album is “more soulful” than previous efforts like The Warrior, she has little to offer about the songs picked, for the most part, by her producers, or how she relates to them. And why is a “Never Enough” and an “Isn’t It Enough” on the same album? “I don’t give a shit,” she answers.

Maybe she’s just eager to get home to her baby, who she mentions frequently and has made a profound difference in her life. Perhaps because of her child, she seems genuinely concerned about the state of the world and the ugliness of racism, although she doesn’t want to be “the Jane Fonda of rock ’n’ roll. I think it’s become a little bit too fashionable now, all this political stuff.” She doesn’t have much more to say than what she serves up in “Heartache Heard Round The World,” a song she wrote with a committee, where she shouts about wanting “to be a rock ’n’ roll girl” who wants to “sing like Bob-

by Blue Bland” without exhibiting any great understanding of either. Perhaps the one really personal moment on her record is an a capella coda to her child, Ruby, to whom the album is dedicated. Touching as it is, “Isn’t She Lovely” it isn’t, and one questions whether it’s not the supreme self-indulgence to assume that it’s anything her fans want to hear. “I’m not singing for the f—ing fans,” she answers. When asked why there are no love notes to husband Richard Hell, who she says has had no musical influence on her, she snaps “It’s none of your business.” So does she have any message for the readers of Creem? Yes. “I have to pee really bad. My ambition is to go take a leak.”